Feb
08
2012
Did the Army Violate the Rights of Catholic Chaplains?
The Story: After the Obama administration's announced that health insurance coverage would require the inclusion of contraception, Timothy Broglio, the archbishop for the military services, sent a letter to all Catholic chaplains in the military objecting to the administration's new mandate, calling it "an alarming and serious matter."
Initially, the Army refused to allow the Catholic chaplains to read it during the service.
The Background: As CNN notes, Broglio, who oversees all Catholic chaplains in all branches of the service, also wrote: "We cannot - we will not - comply with this unjust law." He wanted Catholic chaplains to read the letter aloud during their sermons on Sunday, January 28.
Although neither the Navy or Air Force objected to the letter, the Army's Army chief of chaplains, himself a Catholic, expressed concern that the line about not complying with the law was close to a call for civil disobedience. He told the chaplains to not read it in Mass, but instead pass out copies after Mass was over.
Archbishop Broglio objected to this and after a meeting with the secretary of the Army, John McHugh, he agreed to remove the one sentence about complying. McHugh agreed to allow the letter to be read at Mass last Sunday.
Why It Matters: As religion journalist Terry Mattingly explains, a similar situation occurred in 1996 when the the Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services sent a letter to its chaplains instructing them to urge their flocks to back the "Project Life Postcard Campaign" in support of the Partial-Birth-Abortion Ban Act. But Pentagon officials had issued a gag order against chaplains preaching sermons that mentioned this anti-abortion effort.
The case eventually went to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where Judge Stanley Sporkin concluded:
What we have here is the government's attempt to override the Constitution and the laws of the land by a directive that clearly interferes with military chaplains' free-exercise and free-speech rights, as well as those of their congregants. On its face, this is a drastic act.
Despite Judge Sporkin's ruling a decade ago, the issue of what military chaplains can say from the pulpit is likely to continue to be a point of tension between Christians and the government.