Catholics may be forced into civil disobedience by the US Government mandate requiring Catholic institutions to cover abortifacients, contraception and sterilisation in their health insurance plans, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has said.

In a bulletin, the USCCB say that “[s]ome laws impose such injustices on individuals and organisations that disobeying the laws may be justified. Every effort must be made to repeal them”.  

“When fundamental human goods, such as the right of conscience, are at stake, we may need to witness to the truth by resisting the law and incurring its penalties,” the Bishops state.

Referring to the Obama Adminstration mandate, the bishops say it would “force religious institutions to fund and facilitate coverage of a drug or procedure contrary to their moral teaching”.

They add: “This is a matter of whether religious people and institutions may be forced by the government to provide such coverage even when it violates our consciences.”

“What we ask is nothing more than the right to follow our consciences as we live out our teaching. This right is not only about our ability to go to Mass on Sunday or pray the Rosary at home.  

“It is about whether we can make our contribution to the common good of all Americans. Can we do the good works our faith calls us to do, without having to compromise that very same faith?”  

The bulletin states that, without religious liberty, “all Americans suffer, deprived of the essential contribution in education, health care, feeding the hungry, civil rights, and social services that religious Americans make every day”.

It continues: “What is at stake is whether America will continue to have a free, creative, and robust civil society—or whether the state alone will determine who gets to contribute to the common good, and how they get to do it.”

The bulletin also refers to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which it said “was an essentially religious movement, a call to awaken consciences”.

It says: “In his famous ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ in 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. boldly said, ‘The goal of America is freedom.’ As a Christian pastor, he argued that to call America to the full measure of that freedom was the specific contribution Christians are obliged to make.  

“He rooted his legal and constitutional arguments about justice in the long Christian tradition: ‘I would agree with Saint Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”… A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.’

“The church does not ask for special treatment, simply the rights of religious freedom for all citizens. Rev. King also explained that the church is neither the master nor the servant of the state, but its conscience, guide, and critic.”

The bulletin also tells Catholic parishioners that the bishops have called for “A Fortnight of Freedom”—which they have described as “a special period of prayer, study, catechesis, and public action”—to take place from June 21st to July 4th.

The mandate is set to go into effect for most health-care plans at the start of August, about four weeks after the bishops’ “Fortnight of Freedom.”