On Monday, May 21, 2012, forty three Catholic dioceses and organizations across the country--including the archdioceses of New York and Washington, D.C. and the University of Notre Dame and Catholic University of America—filed 12 different lawsuits against the Obama administration arguing that because the sterilization-contraception-abortifacient mandate would force Catholics to act against the teachings of their faith it violates the First Amendment right to freedom of religion.
The Catholic teachings on sterilization, contraception and abortion that Obama’s mandate would force Catholics to violate are based in part on the premise that man has no right to veto God’s decision to bring a new life into the world.
“It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching,” Pope Paul VI said in the 1968 Encyclical Letter Humanae Vitae. “There is too much clamorous outcry against the voice of the Church, and this is intensified by modern means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a ‘sign of contradiction.’ She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.
“Since the Church did not make either of these laws, she cannot be their arbiter—only their guardian and interpreter,” said the pope. “It could never be right for her to declare lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its very nature, is always opposed to the true good of man. In preserving intact the whole moral law of marriage, the Church is convinced that she is contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization.”
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