November 24, 2009
Commentary: Why the Catholic hierarchy pushes political buttons in Washington
by Konrad Yakabuski
The Globe and Mail
When the House of Representatives passed a health-care reform bill this month that included a watertight prohibition on federal funding for elective abortions, outraged American feminists wondered just how one of their own - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - could have countenanced such a concession.
The answer many came up with lay in a brief encounter between President Barack Obama and Cardinal Sean O'Malley, the Archbishop of Boston, at the funeral of the patriarch of America's first family of Catholics, Ted Kennedy - who, incidentally, was a strident crusader for abortion rights.
Beantown's Catholic primate boasted later on his blog that he warned Mr. Obama that "the bishops of the Catholic Church are anxious to support a plan for universal health care, but we will not support a plan that will include a provision for abortion or could open the way to abortions in the future."
For Mr. Obama, who needs all the allies he can get if he is to succeed where Bill Clinton and others failed, the cardinal's admonition was considered neither out of place nor dispensable. It was just another example of how religion looms large in the politics of a country that purportedly considers the separation of church and state sacrosanct.
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