Of Government Paperwork, Guns, Bishops and the Devil

By Earl Bohn · Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Dwight Eisenhower is credited with observing that "at the bottom of every stack of government paperwork lies a gun."

This leaped to mind last Sunday when my pastor -- a former U.S. Marine Corps chaplain -- pledged during his homily to "go to jail or resign" rather than obey the Obama administration's immoral order to provide parish teachers and staff members with employer-funded contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs.

After the Mass, I admitted to my pastor that as the lector at the previous Sunday's 7:30 a.m. service, I deleted without approval a passage from the prayers of the faithful: that God lead civil authorities to use their power to "feed the hungry and house the homeless."

Patient, loving servant of God that he is, my pastor gently instructed me that the Catholic Church believes government should provide such things, including universal health care.

Indeed, Catholic bishops in the United States have long advocated that the federal government -- which is thoroughly secular, aspiring to Godlessness -- appropriate ever larger sums of the citizens' money to fund health care and medical insurance for the poor and everybody else in America.

The bishops have sought this from the same legal system that in 1973 peered into the shadows of the U.S. Constitution and discerned in the dim light a God-given right -- the only kind recognized by the Constitution -- for a woman to kill the human life that began growing inside her womb when she voluntarily participated in the one and only act designed exclusively for the purpose of creating human life in her womb.

In their desire that secular governments take up the work of Christian charity, the bishops have brought the Holy Roman Catholic Church into the service of politicians and government administrators who cheered that Supreme Court decision in 1973. The bishops have brought the Catholic Church into the service of politicians and administrators who, according to authoritative Constitutional scholars, have violated the Founders' intentions and unleashed the federal government from the confines of the Constitution's enumerated powers in order to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and pay doctor bills for the sick and injured at public expense.

Having gone that far, the bishops squeal and fume because Leviathan, the Godless administrative state that they persuaded to enact the 2,700-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the 10,000 pages of administrative regulations expected to follow, now reaches to the bottom of that stack of paperwork and orders the Catholic Church and Catholic agencies to dutifully take their place among all the other employers who must obey this law and these incoming waves of regulations.

Paul A. Rahe's compelling article American Catholicism's Pact with the Devil reminds us of the age when Roman Catholicism defended not only its own liberty and freedom of conscience but that of others in society and thereby helped to seed principles of limited government that sprouted in Europe during the Middle Ages and later blossomed in Philadelphia between 1776 and 1789.

Professor Rahe thereby exposes the root of the church's very big Obamacare problem, which back in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, we would describe this way: when you sleep with the Devil, don't complain that he won't stay on his side of the bed.

We laymen who want to abide by both the U.S. Constitution and the instruction in the Catechism of the Catholic Church to fulfill our duty as citizens in the political arena want to get Leviathan back in its impoundment and the Catholic Church out of that bed.

Earl Bohn is a speech writer and recently confirmed Catholic living in Ben Avon, Pennsylvania.

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