Nothing that is of the keenest concern for the bishops’ conference has been “put on the table” by the administration, in any forum. The HHS mandate has been published in the Federal Register, without changes. The administration-controlled Senate rejected efforts to amend the law to accommodate the bishops’ criticisms. Bishops’-conference negotiators asked White House officials whether the bishops’ religious-freedom concerns — which extend both to Catholic institutions and to employers of conscience of any creed — were off the table; yes, replied the White House negotiators. Well, then, what about the administration’s ridiculously stringent four-part test for who qualifies as a “religious employer” able to claim exemption from the HHS mandate? The day Gibson’s story ran on the Religion News Service wire, the bishops’ conference was informed that any discussion of the four-part test was also off the table.

Which leaves one wondering precisely what is on the table, beyond a tacit agreement by the administration to stop acting as if leftist America magazine and the HHS-dependents at the Catholic Health Association are the Catholic Church in the United States, in exchange for the bishops’ conference rolling over and asking to have its belly scratched.

Read it all (emphasis his).

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1. St. Jimbob of the Apokalypse wrote: For months I’ve had the suspicion that the Obama administration is ordaining CHA’s Sr. Keenan and dissident Jesuits as the American Catholic Magisterium. It doesn’t help that staffers at the USCCB are issuing a business-as-usual stream of pontifications on a myriad of other, more secondary, topics.   I have watched your struggles in TEC over the last decade, and know that that’s exactly what the American Catholic Church will look like once it arrives. March 9, 4:22 pm | [comment link]

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