My dear brothers and sisters in Christ:

It is important to understand clearly and accurately the issues and implications of the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case announced at the end of its term on June 30.

First, the fight for religious liberty protection in our country is not just a Catholic issue. The owners of Hobby Lobby are evangelical Christians; the owners of Conestoga Wood Specialties in Pennsylvania, the other plaintiffs in this case, are Mennonite. The administration’s persistent attacks on religious liberty have brought together people of diverse faiths to oppose these encroachments on their God-given rights. After our recent Prayer Rally for Religious Freedom at the Lincoln Statue outside our state Capitol on July 1 as part of our Fortnight for Freedom observance, a Baptist and a Mormon came up to me to say that they shared our concerns about religious liberty and appreciated the efforts of the Catholic Church in this regard.

Second, contrary to what administration officials and many of the secular media are saying, the Hobby Lobby case was not about contraception. The plaintiffs said that their religious beliefs did not oppose contraceptives, but they did object to the provision of drugs that induce abortion. This is significant because there is no legal difference between chemical abortion and surgical abortion. If the government could have forced people to pay for chemical abortions, they would have been able to force people to pay for surgical abortions as well. Thank God the Supreme Court said no to this.

Third, the real issue is the right to practice religion free from government coercion. In testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Archbishop William Lori, Chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told Congress in 2012 that the HHS mandate is a matter of the government “forcing religious people and groups to do something that violates their consciences.”

Fourth, as pointed out in the National Review by James C. Capretta, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the “HHS mandate was always a politically contrived issue without real legitimacy. Prior to 2011, there was no mention by President Obama or anyone else of a real crisis of inadequate access to contraceptives. That’s because contraceptives in the United States have long been very inexpensive, readily available from all manner of outlets, and quickly prescribed and dispensed by physician offices, including physicians working at publicly subsidized clinics. Among other things, the Medicaid program pays for these products for millions of lower-income Americans. Anyone who sincerely sought access to contraceptives could secure them with minimal effort and expense.”

Fifth, in the words of Yuval Levin, a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the editor of National Affairs, “American progressivism has always wanted to clear out the space between the individual and the state and to confer rights only on individuals, rather than encouraging people to form complex layers of interacting institutions with diverse views of the good that each pursues with vigor and conviction. The HHS mandate, like so much of the administration’s domestic agenda, is intended to turn the institutions in that space, including private corporations, into arms of the government, carrying out the agenda of those in power ... The Court’s affirmation of the rights of people who organize to act as corporations is therefore important, as it reinforces the traditional American approach to this contested question and pushes back against the administration’s aggressive assertion of authority over the private sphere.”

Finally, our struggle for the freedom to serve the poor and vulnerable is not over. The administration still insists that religious organizations provide their insurers with a form that will authorize the provision of morally objectionable services. This so-called “accommodation” is the equivalent of signing a permission slip directing someone else to do something unethical that you cannot morally do yourself. So the lawsuits continue involving not-for-profit religious organizations, since they were not decided by the Hobby Lobby decision, which only addressed for-profit, closely-held private companies. The Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), founded in 1981 by Mother Angelica and the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, recently won an injunction from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, pending appeal. But the University of Notre Dame was denied a similar injunction by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. The lawsuits and appeals involving the Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious organizations will most likely not be decided until next year. We must continue to be vigilant, speak out and pray for religious liberty and respect in the legal sphere for the moral integrity of our religious institutions.

May God give us this grace. Amen.