Washington D.C., May 4, 2017 / 01:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Religious freedom advocates credited President Donald Trump with taking a “first step” toward protecting religious freedom with an executive order he signed on Thursday, but stressed that there is still more work to be done.
“I thought the executive order was a great step forward,” Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C. told CNA. “[Trump] himself says this is the first step. But it’s the beginning, and we’ve waited a long time for it.”
President Donald Trump signed a religious freedom executive order on Thursday in the White House Rose Garden, on the National Day of Prayer, with religious leaders – including Cardinal Wuerl – standing around him.
The executive order instructs government agencies to consider issuing new regulations to address conscience-based objections to federal HHS mandate, which requires employers to offer health insurance plans that fund contraception, sterilizations and some drugs that can cause early abortions.
It also calls for a loosening of IRS enforcement of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits religious ministers from making endorsements of political candidates from the pulpit to retain the tax-exempt status of churches.
Congressional action is required to formally repeal the law, but the executive order is an important move in ensuring that religious entities can weigh in on political issues without losing their tax-exempt status.
Attending the signing of the executive order were the Little Sisters of the Poor, plaintiffs in one of the HHS mandates case against the federal government. Trump honored two of the sisters who were present in the Rose Garden, calling them “incredible nuns who care for the sick, the elderly, and the forgotten.”
“I want you to know that your long ordeal will soon be over,” he told the sisters of their years-long HHS mandate case, and saying that his order would protect them and other religious organizations from the mandate.
“We are grateful for the president’s order and look forward to the agencies giving us an exemption so that we can continue caring for the elderly poor and dying as if they were Christ himself without the fear of government punishment,” said Mother Loraine, Mother Provincial of the Little Sisters of the Poor.
For years, the HHS mandate has been the subject of heated legal debates. It originated in the Affordable Care Act’s rule that health plans include “preventive services,” which was interpreted by President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to include mandatory cost-free coverage for contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortion-causing drugs in health plans.
After a wave of criticism, the government offered an “accommodation” to religious non-profits who conscientiously objected to complying with the mandate – they would have to notify the government of their objection, and the government would directly order their insurer to provide the coverage in question.
However, dozens of religious charities, schools, and dioceses still sued, saying that even with the “accommodation,” they would still be required to cooperate with – and possibly even to pay for, indirectly – the objectionable coverage. EWTN is among the organizations that have filed lawsuits. CNA is part of the EWTN family.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has defended a number of the groups suing the government over the HHS mandate, explained that the order will empower federal agencies to ensure protections for religious organizations in mandate cases.
“The agencies have everything they need to review these rules and make sure groups like the Little Sisters are protected,” Lori Windham, senior counsel with the Becket Fund, told reporters.
“We will engage with the Administration to ensure that adequate relief is provided to those with deeply held religious beliefs about some of the drugs, devices, and surgical procedures that HHS has sought to require people of faith to facilitate over the last several years,” Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston-Galveston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, stated on Thursday.
“We welcome a decision to provide a broad religious exemption to the HHS mandate, but will have to review the details of any regulatory proposals,” he added.
The new order also declared that “It shall be the policy of the executive branch to vigorously enforce Federal law’s robust protections for religious freedom” and instructed the Attorney General to “issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in Federal law.”
Still, many religious freedom advocates felt that the order did not go far enough. For example, it does not offer protections for health care workers and facilities that decline to perform abortions, or adoption agencies that place children only in homes with both a mother and a father.
“Today’s executive order is woefully inadequate,” Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation stated in The Daily Signal, saying it “does not address the major threats to religious liberty in the United States today.”
It is narrower than the previous draft of a religious freedom executive order that had earlier been leaked to The Nation, but was ultimately scrapped in February. That draft had outlined religious freedom exemptions for not only religious organizations, but also closely-held for-profit businesses in many different areas, like education, health care, and employment.
Religious freedom advocates – including over 50 members of Congress, in an April 5 letter to President Trump – had hoped for broader religious protections in a new executive order.
Cardinal DiNardo noted that “in areas as diverse as adoption, education, healthcare, and other social services, widely held moral and religious beliefs, especially regarding the protection of human life as well as preserving marriage and family, have been maligned in recent years as bigotry or hostility – and penalized accordingly.”
“We will continue to advocate for permanent relief from Congress on issues of critical importance to people of faith,” he added.
Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote.org, told CNA that the order was “an important first step” toward protecting religious freedom, but more must be done.
“The substance of the order is certainly a win for groups like EWTN, Notre Dame, the Little Sisters of the Poor, but it is not everything that we hoped for,” he told CNA. “And therefore I describe it as a work in progress, in terms of the fight for religious liberty. We didn’t get into this mess in one fell swoop, and we’re not going to get out of it in one clean solution.”
He stressed the need for “protections for faith-based groups on the issue of marriage, on gender, the right of the Catholic Church to carry out its social services when they receive federal grants.”
Burch also pushed for legislative action, like the First Amendment Defense Act and the Conscience Protection Act.
The administration also needs to be staffed with the right people in federal agencies who will be friendly to religious freedom, Professor Robert Destro of Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law told CNA.
“Personnel is policy,” he said, and Trump still needs to make hundreds of hires in these regulatory agencies that interpret existing law, including the agencies that will be dealing with HHS mandate protections for religious organizations.
Trump signed the executive order on the National Day of Prayer, and after he met with Cardinal Wuerl and Cardinal DiNardo.
“We had an opportunity to thank him first of all, for this executive order on religious liberty which is so important,” Cardinal Wuerl said of the meeting.
He also hoped the conversation was a starting point for further dialogue on many other topics. “One of the things that we need, I think, just to continue to talk about, the whole range of human value issues,” Cardinal Wuerl said. “He is certainly supportive of the life issues, supportive of religious liberty. And so we have to continue now to talk about other areas where we might find a place to work together.”
The White House also announced Thursday that Trump would be traveling to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican. Cardinal Wuerl said that the president “was also very, very, I thought, focused on this trip he’s going to take that will include a visit to the Vatican. So it was a very good meeting.”
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First, they came for the Orthodox…
Simplistic. If an outfit calls itself a “church” but is advocating war against you, are you going to channel your inner Voltaire with “I disagree with what you say but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it?” Because, thanks to that “church,” you may sooner find yourself in that latter position than you think.
Religious freedom, like all other rights, is not absolute. Many countries ban Salafist Mosques from operating on their soil because their Jihadist ideology is at odds with their country’s values and national security. The same applies to Putin’s waterboy Kirill. You can’t compare the Ukrainian nation to Satan and claim that the war crimes being committed by Putin are “God’s Will”, then act surprised when Ukraine prohibits your sect from operating on it’s soil.
This comes across to me as more of a political statement by the Archbishop in support of Ukraine and the Ukrainian government than anything else. Certainly not much spiritual content or thought about the Kingdom of Heaven in what he said. I suppose it’s not surprising when your country is at war, and when those countries have had such a long, sometimes tortured history. But a government taking this kind of action against a legitimate religion practiced by its citizens in order to punish some of its members is wrong, period. Regardless of which government does it, and why.
So no, Archbishop Shevchuk. The law is unjust. I pray that you reconsider this.
If you have spoken with many Ukrainian priests, religious, and faithful over the years – as I have – you know that the bishop speaks correctly. The UOC has been a puppet of militaristic Russian expansionism for decades.
I have listened to Archbishop Shevchuk before. As the leader of a small Catholic minority in a majority Orthodox country, he is between a rock and a hard place. Whether I think he is right or wrong is besides the point here.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the church that was just banned by the Ukrainian government, is peppered with Russian sympathizers hiding out in the clergy and laity who are actively working against Ukraine, l think that is unlikely, and is particularly unlikely after several years of war and active security investigations, because by now, they would realize that they are going to be caught and would have left the country. UOC laymen, as Ukrainian citizens, have served in the army fighting against the Russian army. Many laypeople have lost family members in the war, so it seems even more unlikely that they are secretly Russian sympathizers.
But eveb if the UOC has members who support the Russian Federation through a connection to the Russian Orthodox Church, and they present a danger to the Ukrainian government because they have been actively working to undermine it, by rule of law, the Ukrainian government has to bring charges against them in court, try them and find them guilty before punishing them. The government shouldn’t take the easy way out by declaring them to be guilty simply through belonging to a particular church or through a perceived affinity to a Russian identity, and then punish them.
However, I believe that concerns about Russian influence is only part of the motivation for the ban. The UOC was the primary Orthodox church in Ukraine until the previous president encouraged the formation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine as a rival “native Ukrainian” church that would supplant the UOC. That turnover was envisioned to be well underway by now. Only it hasn’t been successful and the majority of the UOC’s priest, monks, bishops and laity have not shown interest in the OCU. So the ban is supposed to put pressure on them–force them really–to move to the OCU so that it can become Ukraine’s primary church.
I am surprised to hear that Catholics, especially American Catholics, support the ban on a long-established Christian church like the UOC, especially an Orthodox church (the “second lung,” etc.). I always understood that when a government tried to restrict religious observance or ban it altogether, we would oppose that by principle. Similarly, I though we would be against situations where government agencies investigate foundational church documents and declare them to be illicit, or where a government goes after the clergy and members of a church and arrests them, simply for belonging to that church. At least I seem to recall Catholics declaring it was wrong when other countries did those things. I must have misunderstood. Maybe all of this is conditional on whether or not someone or something is considered to be an “enemy.” Once it is considered to be an enemy, then you can go after them as hard as you want.
I guess religious freedom is not so important to all Catholics after all. Apparently there is quite a bit about “real Catholicism” that I still don’t understand.
I am surprised to hear that Catholics, especially American Catholics,
American Catholics are an odd bunch in many cases believe that voting Democrat is the eighth sacrament; one that obviates the need for the seven; and can excuse supporting abortion, using contraception and the need to attend Mass on days other that Christmas or Easter.
The article is incorrect. There is no “Russian Orthodox Church” in Ukraine. There is a Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the jurisdiction of Moscow Patriarchate but it has autonomy. Its leader is Metropolitan Onufry. Relatively recently he made a statement, a quote:
“Meanwhile, according to the sign given to us by the Lord Himself, indicating that a tree is known by its fruit, the whole world knows that the Patriarchate of Moscow has been deeply poisoned by the pseudo-religious teachings of the ‘russian world’, the poisonous and deadly fruit of which has become Russia’s current terrible war against Ukraine. The war is devilish and godless, which the Patriarch of Moscow called sacred and blessed the Russian ruler and army for all the crimes they have committed and continue to commit on our land.
Hence, having already learnt in a clear and undeniable way that both the root and the fruit of the ‘russian world’ are evil, it should be clear to anyone who truly wishes to preserve the purity of Orthodoxy and who cares about the good of the Church that one should distance himself from this evil and have no connection with this darkness.”
https://orthodoxtimes.com/metropolitan-of-kyiv-appeals-for-dialogue-with-metropolitan-onufry/
So, this Church is apparently being prohibited.
This war is literally a brother going against a brother because so many (probably the majority) Russians have Ukrainian relatives and vice versa. Before the war many in Eastern Ukraine sympathized with Russia. My acquaintance, a Ukrainian woman who lives in Europe, told me that her mother, an ethnic Ukrainian, is madly pro-Russian while her Russian father is more critical of Russia. The woman herself is totally pro-Ukrainian. So, if one can find those who are pro-Russian even on the Ukrainian territory, even during the war, no wonder that they can be found in the Ukrainian Church of Moscow Patriarchate – just like many others who are anti-Russians.
With all this Ukrainian Catholic severity against potentially Russia-sympathetic orthodox (including the still persecuted religious of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra), I wonder: has the Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy ever taken the time to criticize the gay pride parades held in Kiev? The new world order religion of LGBTQ? Or the sort of “humor” in which the current Ukrainian president specializes? Why are they going against the Russian orthodox–who are our natural allies against the sort of religion that was on display at the recent Olympics?