"If the church is not the church . . . ."

When I read an or so ago that the Obama Administration this morning announced that it's done "negotiating" the terms of the HHS mandate, the following passage in D. Stephen Long's book "The Goodness of God: Theology, the Church, and Social Order" (Eerdmans, 2001), seemed to speak to the issue: "Beginning with the flesh of Jesus and its presence in the church, theology alone can give due order to the other social formations -- family, market, and state. The goodness of God is discovered not in abstract speculation, but in a life oriented toward God that creates particular practices that require the privileging of certain social institutions abover others. The goodness of God can be disocvered only when the church is the social institution rendering intelligible our lives . . . . For a Christian account of the good, the church is the social formation that orders all others. If the church is not the church, the state, the family, and the market will not know their own true nature." When the *unanimous* U.S. Senate declared in 1797(in Article XI of the Treaty of Tripoli) that "the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion," that was a pretty good sign (not that another one was needed even then) that here in America the Church was not going to be allowed to be the Church. Just how little the Church would be allowed to be the Church in America has taken a little while to come completely to light, but now that it has, we Catholics and other Christians should not allow ourselves to be too surprised. Sad, demoralized, outraged at the particular lies that were launched from Notre Dame (and elsewhere), and, of course, rudderless except for the impressive recent showing on the part of the U.S. Bishops and some others, but by no means surprised. Even J.C. Murray worried over the future of this problem.