Cardinal Dolan's Contraception Fight With Obama - The Daily Beast

 

In a sense, the fight over the contraception mandate has its roots in the old divide within the church that began with Vatican II, the ecumenical council convened by Rome in 1962 in the hope of reinvigorating the church. By the time the council concluded in 1965, the agenda had become full-scale reform, and the prevailing reformers imagined a thoroughgoing remaking of the church, informed by the contemporary culture. The progressive ideal, with its strong emphasis on social justice, dominated the American episcopacy for decades, largely shaped by the hand of Joseph Bernardin, the first head of the American bishops conference. Bernardin urged the church to follow “a consistent ethic of life,” by which he meant that Catholics should devote as much concern to such matters as tending to the poor and advocating for peace as they did to protecting the fetus in the womb. One expression of Bernardin’s vision came to life in his own archdiocese of Chicago, in the form of the Developing Communities Project, on the city’s impoverished South Side. In 1984, one of the project’s founders, a Saul Alinsky–trained organizer, traveled to New York and hired a young Columbia University graduate to run the operation. That is how Barack Obama, operating out of an office at the Holy Rosary Church on the South Side, began his career as a community organizer.

By then, among those in the church who believed that the reforms had gone off track was the charismatic Polish pope, John Paul II, and his right-hand man (and eventual successor), Joseph Ratzinger. They began a program of reinterpreting Vatican II, with an emphasis on evangelization, derived from a strongly held orthodoxy. A new generation of churchmen arose, deeply attached to the person, and the theology, of John Paul II, and began to assert itself inside the American church. One of them was Timothy Dolan, whose 1950s upbringing in the Holy Infant parish in Ballwin, Missouri, with its Irish nuns in the classrooms, and its robust community life, instilled in him a lasting vision of the faith as a joyous and liberating thing. “The church is about a yes,” he says. “And the only time she says no is when she detects something negating human dignity.”

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