What the Future Holds

 

If anyone had any doubt that the current fight for religious liberty over the HHS mandate is a fight to the death – that it poses an existential threat to Catholic universities and indeed every Catholic apostolate as such – then he or she need look no farther than the State of California where word comes that Loyola Marymount University has caved in to the demands of Governor Jerry Brown’s California Department of Managed Health Care to provide insurance coverage for elective abortions to its employees.

A story in the student newspaper, the Los Angeles Loyolan, reports: “The news was confirmed in an email sent to faculty and staff yesterday, Vice President for Human Resources Rebecca Chandler confirmed that LMU's insurance providers will now cover all procedures deemed medically necessary, including electives abortions” (here).

As others have pointed out, abortion has had a corrupting influence on our law and politics and even our language.  The report from Loyola Marymount provides yet another example: what is admittedly an “elective” abortion is now deemed medically “necessary.”

Briefly put, the background behind Loyola Marymount University’s recent decision is as follows.  In 2013, both Santa Clara University and Loyola Marymount decided to drop [sic] elective abortion from their insurance coverage for employees (here).  (To ask why they had provided this coverage in the first place is to peer under the dark rock that is religious identity at most Catholic universities today).  Loyola’s decision was not a joyful embrace of its Catholic identity.  The University’s president, David Burcham (a layman and a non-Catholic) vowed that the “pall of orthodoxy” would not “shackle” Loyola in its efforts to move forward as an institution of higher learning (here).

 After Loyola initially decided to drop the coverage, it then decided to make such coverage available to employees, at their own expense, through a plan administered by a third-party.  This “compromise” was offered in response to complaints from a number of faculty members protesting the absence of abortion coverage (here and here). 

In response to this move, the California Department of Managed Health Care chose to conduct “an in-depth analysis of the issues surrounding coverage for abortion services under California law” (here).  In August the agency decided that all insurance coverage must include abortion services. According to the department’s director, Michelle Rouillard, “All health plans must treat maternity services and legal abortion neutrally” (here). 

Although Loyola has given in to the State’s demands, the California Catholic Conference has challenged the action, filing a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services (here).

It takes very little imagination to think that in the very near future an unelected federal administrative agency, aided by a politicized though ostensibly neutral panel of experts like the Institute of Medicine, could determine that abortion is a “necessary” aspect of “health care” and require all employers – regardless of their objections based on religious conscience – to provide coverage for both surgical and chemical abortions.  Indeed, as Justice Alito noted in Hobby Lobby (slip op. at 45-46) the logic of HHS’s reading of RFRA in that case would allow the federal government to do precisely that.  Should there have been any doubt that the totalitarian instinct is alive and well in American society, the actions taken by the California Department of Managed Health Care and Governor Jerry Brown show that there are people in this country who have the political will to impose such a burden on religious objectors without apology.

Some Catholics who disagree with Humanae Vitae might have been willing to look the other way when it came to the HHS mandate.  It was only contraception, right? (or so the media said).  They may have even been supporters of the mandate, seeing it as a way of getting the Church to “get with the times” – to modernize and become “relevant” again.

Even those who harbored such a mistaken view should now see plainly where all of this is headed: State enforced “modernization” leads to abortion.  It leads to the Church paying for the use of a curette and a vacuum aspirator to snuff out the life of a developing human being.  It leads to the death of religious liberty.

What is most disappointing in all this is how Loyola Marymount University – a Jesuit university that seeks to advance “the service of faith and the promotion of justice,” a school whose “Catholic identity and religious heritage” purportedly “distinguish [it] from other universities” (see LMU Mission Statement here) – would so easily capitulate. 

Next month, Jesuit universities across the country will celebrate Ignatian Heritage Month (here), and part of these festivities will include a commemoration of the Six Jesuit Martyrs and their Companions in El Salvador who were brutally murdered on November 16, 1989 (here and here).

Certainly some will argue that Loyola Marymount’s decision to capitulate to the State was a prudential judgment made after much deliberation.  Really?  Wasn’t Judas similarly prudent?  Didn’t he exercise the same kind of deliberative judgment?

Prudence, the master virtue, often demands the exercise of courage.  Does Loyola Marymount’s decision embody the courage of the Jesuits of El Salvador or the heroic sacrifices of their brothers over the centuries?  Does it proclaim the Gospel with a prophetic voice?  Or is it a betrayal of Ignatian Heritage – of all that St. Ignatius held dear – and a cause of scandal? 

These are, I would suggest, questions that Archbishop Josè Gomez should ask and seek to answer in determining whether Loyola Marymount should still be allowed to promote itself as a “Catholic” institution.  These are questions that members of the Society of Jesus should ask themselves in reflecting on what is being done in their name.  Are they furthering the “throw away culture” that their brother, Pope Francis, has said (here), “calls for the elimination of human beings” who “bear the face of the Lord”?