The students of Catholic University of America led this year’s March for Life in Washington, D.C. Marching alongside them was their president, John Garvey. This is the same president who, in keeping with a tradition carried over from his days at the helm of Boston College Law School, teaches a freshman class every semester. At CUA, he leads incoming students through an introduction to “The Virtues.”
So when it became clear that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act was attempting to coerce Catholic institutions into providing contraception and abortion-inducing drugs to employees and students, President Garvey knew he could not comply.
“I may have been the first one to complain,” he said. “I was in Rome in 2011 and I read an article that said the Department of Health and Human Services had received recommendations from the Institute of Medicine about things that should be covered under the act. I immediately wrote
a piece for the Washington Post, and they published it.”
He wrote: "The regulations that HHS unveiled in August will require Catholic University to offer its students sterilization procedures and prescription contraceptives, including pills that act after fertilization to induce abortions. If we comply, as the law requires, we will be helping our students do things that we teach them, in our classes and in our sacraments, are sinful — sometimes gravely so. It seems to us that a proper respect for religious liberty would warrant an exemption for our university and other institutions like it."
President Garvey is a Harvard Law grad who has written or co-authored books on the Church and sexuality, the First Amendment and religion and the Constitution. He and his wife have been married for 40 years and have five children and 18 grandchildren. His objections to the mandate clearly come from a deep theological and personal understanding of exactly what’s at stake in this assault on religious liberty.
Those objections did not change after the Obama administration offered an “accommodation” for religious non-profits like Priests for Life and Catholic University.
“The accommodation was a grudging concession to the original proposal to make it look like the administration was engaging in give and take and we were not,” he said. “But the accommodation doesn’t really change the problem. The Affordable Care Act sets up a system requiring us to get insurance that covers contraception so we would be providing it one way or another. It doesn’t seem like much of an accommodation.”
CUA’s challenge to the mandate is part of the Archdiocese of Washington’s case. Last year, in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, this case was consolidated with that of Priests for Life. Now, the Supreme Court has joined five other cases to these two, with oral arguments to be heard March 23. The fate of the combined cases is hard to predict, particularly in light of the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia on Feb. 13.
President Garvey said Justice Scalia’s death was “a sad thing for the country. He was a great influence for the courts and a great influence for the country.” And while there was no guarantee that Justice Scalia would have sided with the HHS challengers “it looked as though he would be likely to rule in favor of the plaintiffs.”
If the eight-member Court rules on the challenges, a 4-4 split seems likely. But President Garvey noted that “one of the advantages” of having so many plaintiffs representing so many different religious non-profits is that appeals court rulings “have gone in different directions.” That could lead to the case getting a second hearing after a ninth justice has been seated.
But the bottom line at this moment, he said, is that “we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Asked to comment on why the Obama administration seems so insistent on preventing Americans from having children, President Garvey said “there’s a very profound question in all that. It’s very curious why we are having such difficult, contentious arguments about our sexual practice. Why has this become the issue that everyone has to proclaim on?
“Maybe the whole point of this is to make Catholics do what we don’t want to do,” he continued, “but the threat to the nation is very important to understand. This threatens to undermine the family structure that supports the Church and society.”
His comments echoed those he published in the Washington Post more than four years ago:
“It should not be the business of the federal government to force Catholic schools and other Catholic institutions into such a collective violation of our own conscientious beliefs.”
Priests for Life is proud to be in the Supreme Court along with Catholic University of America, and its president, John Garvey.