An open letter to Archbishop Samuel Aquila from Richard Detsch of Lafayette:
Your letter (ad) in Sunday’s Denver Post, ostensibly in support of religious freedom, is disingenuous in at least two respects:
First, your purpose in writing this letter is to enforce your ban on contraception, not to defend religious freedom. In fact, nobody’s religious freedom is being violated by the Health and Human Services mandate to make contraceptive means accessible. Catholics are free to refuse this access, just as Catholics for whom your contraception ban violates their consciences are free to avail themselves of this access.
Catholic businesses and institutions that employ non-Catholics do not, of course, have the right to force their religious beliefs on their non-Catholic employees, which would be a violation of the very religious freedom your letter professes to uphold.
Second, in pleading your case for religious freedom, you neglect to refer to the fact that our own church in the not-too-distant past has magisterially taken the exact opposite position. In 1864, Pope Pius IX, in his Syllabus of Errors, specifically condemned the concept of religious freedom in Propositions 15 and 78. Six years later, this same pope, who had been the sovereign ruler of the Papal States, had himself proclaimed infallible in matters of faith and morals by the first Vatican Council, thus lending additional weight to his Syllabus of Errors. Catholic countries, such as the Papal States and Spain, had no religious freedom.
There is a more serious consideration in this matter. It is known that people in this country are dying because of lack of access to health care, a situation the Affordable Care Act is intended to remedy. In your not-so-subtle encouragement to vote for the man and party pledged to overturn the Affordable Care Act, you would bear some responsibility for the deaths of these people.
Does your goal of upholding the church ban on contraception really justify these deaths?
Richard Detsch
Lafayette
