Monday, July 6, 2015

Why am I asking our bishops to remove Sr Carol Keehan from leadership of the CHAUSA or the title "Catholic" from its name?

By Father Kevin M. Cusick
With all due respect, it is time the bishops acted.

Sister Carol Keehan’s latest outrage of scandalous disobedience was to invite President Obama to address the national gathering of the US Catholic Health Association where he proceeded to thank the organization and credit them with the role of those without whose help he could not have passed Obamacare.

The increasingly confusing Catholic landscape is making the truth of Catholic faith and morals ever more difficult for the average Catholic to grasp in the context of what Benedict XVI called a “catechetical emergency”. Where the bishops can act to remove that fog of war in the battle for winning souls they should act. The math is simple: either remove Sister Carol Keehan from leadership of the CHAUSA or act publicly to remove the title “Catholic” from the organization.

We must support our bishops by prayer and obedience. We must act in tandem with them to spread and nurture the Catholic faith for the salvation of souls. But at the same time we are all of us, bishops and people, alike subject to the faith and morals of the Church of Christ, and must help and correct each other whenever that becomes necessary in order to do the same. There are many things the Catholic bishops have no earthly power to do anything about except to pray. At the same time there are always situations where no one has the power to act except the bishops together on the national level or an individual bishop in his own diocese.

Abortion is not healthcare; it is murder. Sister Carol Keehan has openly defied Jesus Christ by her encouraging and enabling behavior at every step of the process to introduce the HHS mandate as part of the “Affordable” Healthcare Plan. Even the title of the plan itself has turned out to be a specious lie as so many people are now bankrupted by the program or turned away from any source of health insurance altogether. Above every other consideration, however, the plan is not about health care as long as it approves or pays for any form of abortifacients.

Those issues aside, and considering all she has failed to refuse moral cooperation in the HHS mandate, her latest escapade of inviting President Obama to address the organization in a national high-profile gathering is a purely gratuitous and simply unnecessary scandal of complete and utter disobedience.

For the bishops to, at the same time, allow her to continue lobbying on the national stage for abortifacients like contraception while the bishops themselves are attempting to rightly teach the opposite, in accord with Humanae Vitae, that every use of artificial contraception is a moral evil confuses and divides Catholics who are already struggling to do what is right or need constant support of right teaching in order to reject what is sinful with the help of grace.

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