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Catholics intensify outcry over mandate

By Tim Townsend, St. Louis Post-Dispatch –

ST. LOUIS — On Thursday, Catholics across the country will amplify what is an already loud outcry over the federal government’s so-called contraception mandate.

With rallies, marches, lectures and special publications, the U.S. Catholic Bishop’s Fortnight for Freedom campaign will seek to galvanize formal Catholic opposition to a rule announced in January by President Barack Obama’s administration that says religiously affiliated institutions, such as universities and hospitals, must soon include free birth control coverage in their employee health insurance.

But while Catholic leaders frame the events as a fight for religious liberty, critics see signs of political partisanship and electioneering.

And questions over the financing of the bishops’ campaign have caused those suspicions to multiply.

“The activities around the Fortnight for Freedom cost money,” said Steve Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington. “What groups are paying for this, and what’s the accountability for that money?”

Those kinds of questions were asked of key Catholic leaders like Baltimore Archbishop William Lori last week as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Atlanta.

Lori, who heads the bishops’ committee on religious liberty, told reporters that gifts “from Catholic groups and foundations” would help sustain the campaign.

“The generosity we’ve experienced has been heartening,” he said.

The campaign, Lori said, “is not in any way partisan, either in its spirit or in its funding.”

But he has not been specific about all the outside groups providing financial resources, or how much they’ve contributed.

The Fortnight for Freedom campaign launches Thursday with a Mass celebrated by Lori at the nation’s first cathedral, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore.

The public information campaign comes as the church is also engaged in a legal battle over what Obama’s administration considers a women’s health issue.

In March, more than 40 Catholic institutions, including the Archdiocese of St. Louis, filed federal lawsuits seeking to block the contraception mandate.

Lori told reporters in Atlanta last week that lawyers were offering pro bono assistance to the Catholic legal effort. And St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson confirmed in an interview last week that Cleveland-based law firm Jones Day was donating its services.

Carlson has not only embraced the Fortnight for Freedom campaign in St. Louis, he has gone beyond it.

In recent weeks, the archbishop has rolled out an ambitious six-month “Campaign for Religious Liberty” in the archdiocese which began in May and will continue through Nov. 25.

Katie Pesha, executive director of communications and planning for the archdiocese, said staff had begun planning the campaign as soon as the mandate was issued in January.

“Everything we’re doing utilizes internal resources, including printing, mailings and creating logos and graphics for the archdiocese’s website,” Pesha said. “There’s no outlying cost that we’ve incurred to this point.” She said all the help the archdiocese is getting from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is “informational.”

Critics like Schneck say many of the questions regarding the funding of the Fortnight for Freedom campaign center on private Catholic groups.

“The Knights of Columbus are clearly one of the major sources of funding (against the mandate), as well as other fraternal organizations,” Schneck said.

The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic charitable group based in New Haven, Conn., says it’s the world’s largest lay Catholic organization.

Knights of Columbus life insurance sales neared $8 billion in 2010, and last year, it contributed $158 million to charity, including nearly $4 million to the Special Olympics. Its largesse extends to other causes, too, such as Coats for Kids and Project Medishare which provides prosthetics to Haitian children who lost limbs during the 2010 earthquake. In the last decade, the Knights have donated more than $1 billion to charity.

Andrew Walther, the Knights of Columbus vice president for media, said the group’s 2010 tax forms show that the Knights gave more than $3 million to the Vatican that year, nearly $2 million to the U.S. bishops conference and $25,000 to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has guided much of the legal action against the contraception mandate.

The group must disclose more recent donations in its 2011 tax forms. But Walther said the group has asked for an extension in filing the documents, making them unavailable until the fall.

In 2010, the Knights also were generous with their contributions to individual bishops, doling out nearly $350,000 for a variety of programs in various dioceses. Of that, $248,700, or 71 percent, went to Lori’s Diocese of Bridgeport.

Lori — who is the man most directly in charge of the Fortnight for Freedom campaign — has been the Supreme Chaplain of the Knights of Columbus since 2005.

The Knights did not respond to requests for an interview about the organization’s involvement with the bishops’ campaign, but the organization has dedicated recent issues of its monthly magazine to the topic of religious liberty.

In the April issue, Carl Anderson, the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, wrote that the contraception mandate will force his organization “to use membership dues and money generated through insurance sales to fund health care that provides drugs and procedures that violate the moral teaching of the Catholic Church on the transmission and sanctity of human life.”

Anderson started out in politics, working as a legislative aid to Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., in the 1970s and 1980s. He later worked in President Ronald Reagan’s White House. He’s also taken fellow Catholic Joe Biden to task for comments the vice president made while still a senator from Delaware that Anderson said “cast doubt on the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church on abortion.”

John Gehring, Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a liberal advocacy group in Washington, said while the Knights’ charitable works was “commendable … its leadership has steered a fraternal organization into political waters in ways that should raise questions.”

Asked by reporters in Atlanta last week if the Knights’ involvement in the religious liberty campaign introduces at least the perception of partisanship, Lori said no.

“Think of what the Knights of Columbus does for the Catholic Church and for many other humanitarian causes,” he said. “To try to say that is in some way partisan is €¦ an injustice.”

Other groups have contributed to the campaign, he said, mentioning Our Sunday Visitor and the Order of Malta.

Jack Pohrer, president of the American Association of the Order of Malta, said in an interview with the Post-Dispatch in Atlanta that his organization “supports the poor and the sick, and defends the faith, and in this, we’re defending the faith,” by giving $50,000 to the bishops to help fund the religious liberty campaign.

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