Title
“Religious Freedom,” The Individual Mandate, and Gifts: On Why the Church Is Not a Bomb Shelter
Abstract
The Health and Human Services' regulatory requirement that all but a narrow set of "religious" employers provide contraceptives to employees is an example of what Robert Post and Nancy Rosenblum refer to as a growing "congruence" between civil society's values and the state's legally enacted policy. Catholics and many others have resisted the HHS requirement on the ground that it violates "religious freedom." They ask (in the words of Cardinal Dolan) to be "left alone" by the state. But the argument to be "left alone" overlooks or suppresses the fact that the Catholic Church understands that it is its role to correct and transform society, not merely to be left alone in a gilded cage. This paper uses the HHS mandate as a vehicle by which to clarify the Catholic understanding of the ideal -- but currently mostly unachievable -- relationship between Church and state: the state should receive its principles from the Church, not the Church from the state. Social justice and subsidiarity disallow a state that reduces the Church to the status of a bomb shelter. Leviathan is happy to have the Church out of sight and out of mind.
Disciplines
Comparative and Foreign Law | Courts | Health Law | Human Rights Law | Jurisprudence | Law | Religion Law
Date of this Version
Summer 2013
Recommended Citation
Patrick McKinley Brennan, "“Religious Freedom,” The Individual Mandate, and Gifts: On Why the Church Is Not a Bomb Shelter" (July 2013). Villanova University School of Law Working Paper Series. Working Paper 172.
http://law.bepress.com/villanovalwps/art172
Included in
Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, Courts Commons, Health Law Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Religion Law Commons
Comments
The paper is forthcoming in the Villanova Law Review as part of the Seventh Annual John F. Scarpa Symposium.