Dolan: Catholic Church could have been Obamacare 'cheerleaders'
Cardinal Timothy Dolan says the Catholic Church could have been one of Obamacare’s “cheerleaders” — but some of the mandates, such as the contraception requirements, meant Catholics were “being asked to violate” their beliefs.
“You have voiced your displeasure with certain aspects of it in terms of mandates for hospitals and so forth,” NBC's "Meet the Press" host David Gregory said in an interview aired Sunday. “What about the overall goal of it? Do you think it will ultimately prevail? Would you like it? Do you think it's important for the country that universal healthcare insurance is available?”
“Yup. And I'm glad you allow me to make that distinction, David,” the Archbishop of New York. “We bishops have been really kind of in a tough place because we're for universal, comprehensive, life-affirming healthcare. We, the bishops of the United States, can you believe it, in 1919 came out for more affordable, more comprehensive, more universal healthcare. That's how far back we go in this battle, okay?”
“So we're not Johnny-come-latelies,” Dolan added. “We've been asking for reform in healthcare for a long time. So, we were kind of an early supporter in this. Where we started bristling and saying, ‘Uh-oh, first of all this isn't comprehensive, because it's excluding the undocumented immigrant and it's excluding the unborn baby,’ so we began to bristle at that.”
Secondly, “we said, ‘And wait a minute, we Catholics who are kind of among the pros when it comes to providing healthcare, do it because of our religious conviction, and because of the dictates of our conscience. And now we're being asked to violate some of those.’”
That’s when “we began to worry and draw back and say, ‘Mr. President, please, you're really kind of pushing aside some of your greatest supporters here. We want to be with you, we want to be strong. And if you keep doing this, we're not going to be able to be one of your cheerleaders.’”
And that, he said, “sadly is what happened.”
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