Via the Anchoress:

The Little Sisters of the Poor are heroic social servants: they serve the indigent poor and go begging on their behalf. They are tremendous women offering companionship, love and hospitality to people who often have no one else in their lives willing to see and affirm their dignity and worth, and they don’t ask “are you a Catholic” before they make that offer: it is for all.

Likewise, in their many facilities across the nation, the Little Sisters employ nurses, and aides and helpers, and they do not ask, “are you a Catholic” before they hire them.

And because the Sisters do not discriminate in their service or their hiring, they, and their ministry, and the aged population they serve, are all begin imperiled by the United States Government, specifically by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Obama Administration.

How can that be? How can these religious Sisters, living in a country where the first amendment to its constitution insists upon a free expression of religion and the exercise thereof be in peril? Because the HHS and the Obama Administration say that if the Sisters do not deny their own consciences and offer insurance policies to their employees that include free coverage for sterilization procedures, artificial contraceptives and abortifacients, these vowed-to-poverty women will have to pay approximately a million dollars in IRS fines, effectively making their work near-to-impossible.

Yes, they’ll be punished and perhaps driven from serving the poor in America — the poor of every race and creed — for the sin of not prostrating themselves before a secularist culture that has made an idol of preventing the conception and growth of human life — a strange god endowed with so much power that the government believes it can and must stomp on fundamental human freedoms of conscience in order to serve it.

She has additional information on the lawsuit on their behalf by the The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty that the Little Sisters did not want to have to pursue.

Really, what is the Obama Administration thinking? What is the HHS thinking? Do they really want these optics: the government forcing dedicated sisters to abandon their work with the elderly and the poor?

This could be a real head-scratcher if you don’t consider just how ideologically bound the Obama administration is. It would have been so easy for them to make the standard exemptions, but that doesn’t advance the agenda as much as they wanted. You will be assimilated by this borg-like administration and dissenters will be punished. Elitists do our thinking for us, conscience-exemptions be damned.

On the other hand partly I am glad they went this route since this at leaves gives a chance for secular businesses to also have a chance to also have a religious exemption. If the Obama administration had gone the normal path with exemptions than likely businesses like Hobby Lobby and others would have had a much tougher battle. It is no surprised that what is happening Little Sisters of the Poor is making headlines all the way up to the Drudge Report. It is so ridiculous on every level they don’t qualify under a religious conscience clause.

Under the Obama administration getting a religious exemption the way is narrow and I am just surprised that the qualification for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle was not part of the HHS regulation.

When the media covers what the Pope says they are expected to get it totally wrong. They have a specific narrative more informed by a political ideology than a concern to get coverage of the Catholic Church right. So no surprise here in this regard.

Maybe this is not all that surprising, but it seems to me more and more Catholics are doing the same thing and while their narrative is different, it still comes to a jumping to conclusions. There is a hermeneutic of suspicion when to comes to the words of Pope Francis and a look for evidence that in some way he is departing from Catholic teaching.

The latest example is the letter Pope Francis wrote to Dr Eugenio Scalfari, Italian journalist of La Repubblica. The Vatican just released the English translation of this “Letter to Non-Believers.”

A typical headline was something like “Pope Francis assures atheists: You don’t have to believe in God …” or "“Pope Francis assures atheists: You don’t have to believe in God to go to heaven.”

The media’s dumb reaction was echoed in some Catholic sites and blogs which made much more out of what the Pope wrote than he actually did.

Jimmy Akin once again does a fine analysis in Did Pope Francis say atheists don’t need to believe in God to be saved? (9 things to know).

I now wish to address the three questions from your article of 7 August. I believe that in the first two questions, what interests you is to understand the attitude of the Church towards those who do not share faith in Jesus. Above all, you ask if the God of Christians forgives those who do not believe and who do not seek faith. Given the premise, and this is fundamental, that the mercy of God is limitless for those who turn to him with a sincere and contrite heart, the issue for the unbeliever lies in obeying his or her conscience. There is sin, even for those who have no faith, when conscience is not followed. Listening to and obeying conscience means deciding in the face of what is understood to be good or evil. It is on the basis of this choice that the goodness or evil of our actions is determined.

The Pope here is not speaking specifically about salvation or equating following your conscience as the only condition for salvation.

While the Catechism classes Atheism and Agnosticism as sins against religion it also says is the following section:

IV. ERRONEOUS JUDGMENT

1790 A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself. Yet it can happen that moral conscience remains in ignorance and makes erroneous judgments about acts to be performed or already committed.

1791 This ignorance can often be imputed to personal responsibility. This is the case when a man “takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin.”59 In such cases, the person is culpable for the evil he commits.

1792 Ignorance of Christ and his Gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one’s passions, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the Church’s authority and her teaching, lack of conversion and of charity: these can be at the source of errors of judgment in moral conduct.

1793 If – on the contrary – the ignorance is invincible, or the moral subject is not responsible for his erroneous judgment, the evil committed by the person cannot be imputed to him. It remains no less an evil, a privation, a disorder. One must therefore work to correct the errors of moral conscience.

1794 A good and pure conscience is enlightened by true faith, for charity proceeds at the same time “from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith.”

So I in no way think the Pope was speaking at all contrary to the faith. Still I think there is a little bit of a problem at times. I have had no problem with what the Pope has had to say, more often it is what he doesn’t say that can add to confusion in understanding him. I believe he is making certain pastoral emphasis fully in accord with Church teaching, but that these emphasis can leave out a more fully articulated view of Church teaching. This in part causes a confusion among Catholics when only a pierce of doctrine is illuminated. This pastoral language sometimes lacks the theological precision that might be desired. No doubt this is always a difficult balance especially within the context of how some of these pastoral messages are presented.

The caveat being that I might be fully off-base here. It just seems to me that there seems to have been more effort to try to explain what the Pope said regarding the faithful. We expect a continuous apologetic effort with the media, but when we have to do the same with Catholics something might be wrong here in how this is being presented.

Although there are other things that enter into this problem. For example the delay between the publishing of the text in what the Pope said and the translation into English and other languages. The story can be generating headlines for a week before we see an official translation.

Some 20,000 tribal people in Jharkhand state in eastern India have marched on a village church, accusing local Christians of trying to convert them by dressing up a Virgin Mary statue in tribal clothing.

Members of the animist Sarna faith have been complaining since the statue was inaugurated in the Singpur village church in May.

But the standoff escalated on Sunday when the marchers took a normal statue of Mary to the church, aiming to replace the offending item, which depicts the Virgin Mary wearing a sari with traditional red borders, holding the infant Jesus.

Police blocked the protesters 25 meters from the church. Local head of police Jagannath Oraon said that they were seeking to avoid a confrontation and peace was quickly restored.

Bandham Tigga, head priest of the Sarna tribals, said the sari-clad statue marks the latest effort to deliberately confuse and convert tribal people in the area.

This story was reported back on August 27, 2013.

Strangely what it reminded me was of the so-called new atheists. There seems to be an odd parallel in thinking. If you can consider that a statue dressed in a sari is a forcible attempt at conversion you just might need something to thicken your skin.

The new atheists seems to have the same thinness of skin in that just seeing religious symbols especially on government land is outrageous and must be stamped out. That a nativity scene is akin to proselytizing in the most negative sense of the term. Good thing lawsuits are a tool of reason.