University of Notre Dame decides to take Obama administration to court rather than allow their female employees to access birth control.

Courtesy of News Channel 3: 

The University of Notre Dame and “a diverse group of plaintiffs” filed lawsuits Monday challenging the federal mandate that religious employers offer health insurance that includes coverage of contraceptives and birth control services, Notre Dame spokeswoman Shannon Chapla said. 

The Notre Dame suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Northern Indiana, is one of a dozen filed Monday by 43 separate Catholic institutions in different federal courts around the United States, Chapla said. 

The lawsuits are efforts to “vindicate the country’s constitutional and traditional commitments to religious freedom and pluralism,” Notre Dame law professor Richard W. Garnett said in a university statement. 

The Catholic Church teaches that use of contraception is morally wrong.

Are you kidding me? It is 2012 and the Catholic church is still acting like its stuck in the 1800's.

Have you ever wondered WHY the Catholic church is stuck in the stone age when it comes to contraception? After all there is NO mention of contraception anywhere either the Old Testament, or the New Testament.

So with no Biblical anchor to hold back an evolving point of view on this topic just what, or who, is holding the church back from moving into the twentieth century?

As it turns out that would be the Pope.

No, not that Pope.

This one.

Pope Pius IX

Confused? Here let the folks over at Church and State drop a little history on you:


“THE ONLY way to solve the problem of contraception is to solve the problem of infallibility.”

Hans Küng 
Catholic theologian 1979

There is wide agreement that the world population problem cannot be successfully dealt with unless we solve the contraception problem. However, there is a nearly total lack of awareness that the problem of contraception is related to the problem of papal infallibility, as noted by Hans Küng above. 

There is a time warp involved here—a decisive action, or event, that occurred more than a century ago. It had a direct bearing on the mushrooming of population that didn’t really get up to speed until the 1930s. The event was the action of Pope Pius IX and Vatican Council I in 1870. Understanding the principle of infallibility and how it came to pass is essential to understanding the world population problem.

For decades, Americans have been subjected to pseudodiscussion of the population problem as American writers and speakers have gone about deflecting attention from the only population issue that really matters—that the Papacy is threatened with annihilation as civil authorities make contraception and abortion legally available to their constituents.

Essentially, in a nutshell, what happened was that in order to unify the church, and protect it from what Pope Pius IX believed was imminent extinction, he decided that from now on the Pope would have direct jurisdiction over ALL of the Catholic churches and that from that day forward the Pope himself (Which conveniently was him at the time) would be considered "infallible."

Makes sense right? After all God is infallible, and since the Pope supposedly has a direct line to God, ipso facto he is also infallible.

However, as most intelligent people realize, the Pope is just a man, and CERTAINLY not infallible. But the Catholic church is unwilling to make any such admission. Which is also why they refuse to even consider admitting that they were wrong about calling contraception a sin all of these years.

Besides it actually goes much deeper than that, as this paragraph from the minority report of Pope Paul VI’s Commission on Population and Birth authored in 1966 by the man who latter became Pope John Paul II, clearly identifies:

“If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti connubii was promulgated), in 1951 (Pius XII’s address to the midwives), and in 1958 (the address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved.”

So do you get it now? Not only would admitting that contraception is NOT a sin, destroy the Pope's claim to infallibility, and force the church to concede they had "condemned thousands of innocent human acts," it would also be an admission that the Protestants were right, and that the Catholic church was wrong.

So just to sum up, the entire reason that certain Roman Catholic leaders are now suing the Obama administration is simply to protect the church's reputation, and keep the Catholic masses from learning that the Pope is nothing more, and nothing less, than a fallible human being.

So please, could you tell me again HOW religion is not standing in the way of progress?