Sisterhood of Saint Mary with bishops from the Anglican Church of North America’s Diocese of the Living Word. / Courtesy of Becket.
Washington D.C., Nov 1, 2021 / 15:56 pm (CNA).
Foes of mandatory coverage of abortion in New York State insurance law will have another hearing after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a New York state court to reconsider their decision. The law’s narrow religious exemption wrongly disqualifies many religious groups which object to providing abortion, critics said.
A group of Anglican nuns is among the objectors.
“We believe that every person is made in the image of God,” said Mother Miriam of the Sisterhood of Saint Mary, an Anglican body. “That’s why we believe in the sanctity of human life, and why we seek to serve those of all faiths—or no faith at all—in our community. We’re grateful that the Supreme Court has taken action in our case and hopeful that, this time around, the New York Court of Appeals will preserve our ability to serve and encourage our neighbors.”
The Sisterhood of Saint Mary, also known as the Sisters of the Community of St. Mary, is aligned with the Anglican Church in North America. It was founded in 1865 and claims to be the oldest Anglican religious order in the United States.
The Anglican sisters are part of a coalition of religious groups challenging the New York State mandate requiring employers to cover abortions in their health plans. They are represented by attorneys from the religious freedom legal group Becket and the law firm Jones Day.
Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, alluded to the Little Sisters of the Poor who fought a years-long court battle to secure relief from a federal mandate to cover contraceptive drugs, including drugs that can cause abortions.
“New York clearly learned nothing from the federal government’s own attempts to force nuns to pay for contraceptives and is now needlessly threatening charities because they believe in the dignity and humanity of every human person,” Baxter said Nov. 1.
“Punishing faith groups for ministering to their local communities is cruel and counterproductive,” he said. “We are thankful that the Supreme Court won’t allow the New York Court of Appeals’ bad ruling to be the last word on the right of religious ministries to serve New Yorkers of all faiths.”
On Nov. 1, the Supreme Court vacated the state appellate court’s judgment in the case Diocese of Albany v. Lacewell. The lower court must now reconsider the decision in light of Fulton v. Philadelphia, a case in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the City of Philadelphia violated a Catholic foster care agency’s free exercise of religion by requiring it to certify same-sex couples as foster parents.
Becket said the religious exemption is “so narrow that Jesus himself would not qualify for it.” Only religious groups that primarily serve and employ people of their own religion are exempt.
The Anglican nuns’ sponsorship of a 4-H club and their agricultural outreach ministry program that allows local youth to lease their goats would disqualify them for the exemption, the legal group said.
The Sisters of the Community of St. Mary, Eastern Province have two houses: one in Greenwich, New York, and one in Luwinga, Malawi. They claim a Benedictine ethos, seeking to “draw near to Jesus Christ through a disciplined life of prayer set within a simple agrarian lifestyle and active ministry in their local communities,” their website says.
For over 150 years, the sisters’ province was linked to the Episcopal Church. In 2021 they affiliated with the Anglican Church in North America after controversies in the Episcopal Church, including the disciplining of an Episcopal Bishop of Albany who refused to bless same-sex couples.
The 2017 mandate from the superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services required that employers cover “medically necessary” abortions in their employee health insurance plans. The stated justification was that the state’s insurance law bars limits on or exclusion of coverage based on medical condition or treatment, the New York Times reports.
At minimum, medically necessary abortions would include abortions of pregnancies conceived in rape or incest or those in which the unborn child is malformed. However, the superintendent said that the determination of medical necessity is made by a patient’s health care provider, in consultation with the patient.
“The mandate thus appears to cover abortions of babies afflicted with Down Syndrome and other maladies,” said the petitioners’ brief.
The coalition of petitioners against the New York mandate also includes the Catholic dioceses of Albany and Ogdensburg; their Catholic Charities affiliates, as well as Catholic Charities, Diocese of Brooklyn; and the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm. The First Bible Baptist Church of Hilton, New York is also a petitioner.
If the groups do not comply with the mandate, they could face fines of millions of dollars per year. Their petition to the Supreme Court argues that the state is making religious organizations choose between violating their core beliefs, being financially crushed, or closing down services.
Attorneys for the state of New York argued that the mandate’s exception mirrors language used in other contexts. They argued that there is no evidence that health insurance plans that cover abortions cost more money.
“The record thus contains no evidence that by purchasing policies that include the subject coverage, a purchaser funds, even indirectly, medically necessary abortion services,” they argued, according to USA Today.
For his part, Roman Catholic Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger of Albany said he was “confident” that the regulation will be “completely overturned as incompatible with our country’s First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty.”
“We are gratified and grateful that the Supreme Court has recognized the serious constitutional concerns over New York State’s heavy-handed abortion mandate on religious employers,” he said.
Some Supreme Court justices appeared more favorable towards giving the case a national platform. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch would have granted the petition for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
While religious freedom was for decades an unquestioned American principle, various controversies over health care mandates and LGBT rights claims have made it an area of dispute.
As CNA has previously reported, multiple wealthy donors have poured millions of dollars into a patronage network that aims to limit religious freedom protections that conflict with their vision of LGBT rights and abortion access. Some of these donors, such as the Arcus Foundation, have also backed religious groups that reject Christian teaching on abortion and sexual ethics.
The Covid-19 pandemic has also resulted in religious freedom debates and legal challenges about congregations and individuals who refuse to comply with pandemic mitigation measures and vaccine mandates.
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The article on the Canadian Truckers Convoy – suggesting they are strictly a peaceful protest against so called totalitarian measures by our government to bring the pandemic under control is so biased it is in my view false news. Yes people are tired of the measures taken to control the spread of this pandemic whether it be social distancing, mask wearing or the like. But the majority of Canadians are law abiding and accept the gifts of vaccines against these diseases and have been vaccinated. It will be because of those who have been vaccinated that we will our lives resume to pre COVID freedoms and in spite of those who would prefer to block bridges, intersections, highways to further bring our economy under pressure and risk the lives of their fellow citizens. True freedom comes from caring about the lives of everyone and this truckers convoy (which thank heavens is not supported by the major trucking companies) is doing to end this pandemic. I also found it typical that the author chose to attack the Black Lives Matter movement. Not a word against the white supremicists or neo nazi’s marching. Shame shame for a Catholic publication. I can get this kind of stuff from FOX I don’t expect to see it also in a Catholic publication.E
A little history lesson: This started out in March 2020 as “2 weeks to slow the spread/curve” to “If you don’t get this experimental shot, you may lose your job, etc” to “if you financially support those who are being told they lose their job if they don’t get the shots, we may close all of your accounts”.
Or, in other words, frog meet quickly heating water.
“Shame shame for a Catholic publication.”
Oh, please. Spare the empty emotional tactics for the politicians. (Also, I haven’t watched FOX News in years, so try an actual argument.)
Whether you agree with the law is not a factor in whether you should obey it. Render unto Caesars the things that are Caesar’s. Both right and left these days seem to resort to the same tactic and the same line of argument. I don’t want to therefore I shouldn’t have to. Not that either the right nor the left supports the other when it is their turn to make the argument.
No government acts with perfect information or with perfect charity, but that does not give anyone, left of right, the right to opt out of any law they disagree with, and still less the right to paralyse society until they get their way.
And pointing out, and exaggerating, the limits of the information that the government is working with is essentially vacuous. Of course the information they are working with is imperfect. It always is. But in this case they are responding to an emergency that requires a time-sensitive response and broad public co-operation. And while the information is incomplete, the weight of evidence rests overwhelmingly on the side of the efficacy and safety of vaccines, and quite conclusively on the side of the terrible effects of COVID-19. There could be few cases in which the balance of probabilities aligns more squarely with the policy of the government.
You can, of course, criticise the details. Exactly which mandates, when and where. But no such disagreement justifies civil disobedience or insurrection.
The essence of democracy is that we accept and obey those laws we disagree with and work to change them by trying to persuade others to vote for our policy and our party. Yes, this sometime involves us obeying laws we don’t like, even laws that we believe are evil. But if we base the legitimacy of government solely on whether we agree with it (as do those who call every policy they disagree with “undemocratic”) that is a recipe for mere anarchy.
In short, the legitimacy of the government and your obligation to obey its laws does not rest on whether you agree with its policies or the information they are based on. Arguing about the science, therefore, is irrelevant to the question.
A number of problems here, but I’ll just focus on one. No, we do not have to obey laws that are evil or unjust; in fact, we have a duty to reject such laws. As the Catechism notes, unjust laws cannot be binding on one’s conscience:
And from the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church:
This would be a recipe for anarchy if in fact we were not able to ascertain what laws are just or unjust. But the Church has provided a wealth of means by which we can analyze and judge laws. Furthermore, raising questions and challenging the logic behind laws in private and public debate is an essential part of an authentic democracy. But it appears, more and more, that many people deny such a freedom, or even sophistically claim it is somehow contrary to freedom, democracy, and the moral order. Just another example of upside down claiming to be right side up.
Your attitude is so hopelessly biased that I hardly know where to begin. Neither you nor I know the long term implications of this vaccine. If the worst case scenario proves right, what will your reaction be? The BLM movement destroyed businesses, gave rise to wide spread looting, where is the good in that? As for your appraisal of CWR that is pure and utter rubbish. It has been a consistent beacon of truth and reliability. Go back to CNN it sounds more up your street.
i would say that the protest was more peaceful than any of the blm riots. and maybe you should read the blackout on fetal tissue article, you might consider never receiving another vaccine again.
I’m all for small Catholic colleges brewing their own beer, but Spring Hill College in Mobile is Catholic in the same way that, say, Georgetown University is Catholic. In other words, not in the slightest.
Hollerich is a fraud and, therefore (?) is named as the relator-general for the Synod on Synodality scheduled for 2023.
WHAT WILL BE his words in the carefully-crafted “synthesis” of all the comments offered by participants in the 3,000 diocesan synods worldwide? Perhaps the other bookend to Cardinal Kasper’s two-hour grooming address that kicked off Amoris Laetitia? The “harmonized” full barrel predictably will include carefully nuanced bad apples…(in the same way, also, that packaged banking investment packages in 2008 concealed non-viable loans among the good—triggering a global financial collapse).
The QUESTION is whether, at the next conclave—the new mix of voting cardinals—will stay in line as so-called Francis-cardinals, or whether they will perceive the colossal disaster—the theological Germany-virus going pandemic like the biological China virus?
Will Hollerich and his ilk be quarantined, or not?
The hand-puppet cardinal doesn’t even show up on the list of 19 most likely papabili examined thoroughly and fairly in “THE NEXT POPE: The Leading Cardinal Candidates,” edited by Edward Pentin (Sophia Institute Press, 2020).
Are the cardinals attentive, or not? OR, JUST AS the Synod on Youth (2018) found itself as the water carrier for an attached surprise message about, what, “synodality,” will Hollerich’s “synthesis” and final report include another surprise addendum, to the effect that—regardless of contradictory contents—because so many folks took part in the synodal process, this participation itself IS a “consensus”! AND, constitutes the unanimity of sensus fidelium!!! A throwback to Marshall McLuhan’s “medium IS the message” of the 1960s.
And, therefore, the NEXT CONCLAVE will have to be, what’s that new word, oh yes, “confirmed” in some way, by synodality, perhaps by delegates from each of the seven continental synods. Germany with some sort of procedural veto? Just a bad dream?
But, let’s just do the “endless journey” of “communion” (with Eucharistic coherence?), “mission” (more than generic Christianity?) and “participation” (the bishop successors-of-the-apostles [!] more than “primarily as facilitators”? [the Vademecum]).
DEMOGRAPHICALLY, by mid-century, three-fourths (!) of Catholics will live OUTSIDE of the West (already 20 percent of the total are in Africa). LET US PRAY that the new mix of conclave cardinals votes with informed heads, docile to the promptings of indwelling of the Holy Spirit. AND that Germany’s and the derailing West’s sinkhole theologies (or some kind of hole?) will not penetrate the papal selection process.
Upon reflection, an apology here to Cardinal Hollerich and the CWR readers. In my opening remark I use the word “fraud” and this is not at all accurate, instead probably slanderous or at least unwarranted hyperbole. I was looking for a word indicating at least that there are uncounted other better candidates for the papacy, and more trust-inspiring for relator-general of the Synod on Synodality. His positions on so many matters, unnecessarily repeated in the broad public forum, are simply disqualifying and scandalous, even if coming from a layman or a backwoods priest, and much more so from a bishop or cardinal. What can one say?
Austen Ivereigh, in response to my [Hollis’ America] article, suggests that I [Hollis] suffer from naïveté when it comes to traditionalists—that I view them merely as “people with harmless if peculiar liturgical tastes.” What’s more, he argues that I don’t comprehend the sheer scale of corruption in the traditionalist movement, corruption that is so pervasive that dialogue should be abandoned: “Rather than dialogue, which would only serve to feed the corrupt person’s self-justification, the proper response is to put such a person in crisis.”
Pot calls kettle black, which [yawn] one has learned to expect from sloganeers, profiteers, and worse. Calling Cardinal Cormac for backup. Calling CM’s internet attack dogs as security.
Thinking Francis can further Church unity is hoping that Satan shine his light on sin.
Forgot to reference the article: What other can it possibly be but ‘UNITY’ through ‘REDUCTION.’
Reading some of Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich’s opinions in interviews he had given, I find them contrary to the Bible and two-thousand years of the Church’s teachings and traditions. In my opinion he has too many fanciful and worldly viewpoints, and not grasping the reality of sinful man in this world.
Why the black-out regarding fetal tissue researchers by prolife activists/community? Same reason there is a black out regarding contraception and IVF.
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Convenience, possibly a need to be “ecumenical.” By the way, nearly all required vaccines (and many medicines) are made and/or tested utilizing HEK or some such cell line, and this has been given the de facto approval of by the Catholic Church hierarchy