"The dishwasher’s morning-after pill"

Father de Souza, once again, sets the world straight:

According to U.S. President Barack Obama, if a Catholic soup kitchen serves a meal to a non-Catholic poor person, it ceases to be a Catholic agency, and so must pay for the dishwasher’s morning-after pill.

The larger issue is not contraception or even abortion, but whether "religion" can be legally defined as only what you do in church on Sunday. Which increases the ever-present danger of its turning into just a time-consuming weekend game, and eventually being quietly dropped by everyone but the most zealous.

Another point: These have only recently -- in world history terms -- been defined as Catholic issues. (I remember someone in my college newspaper's answering the Church's objection to abortion with: "But what about Protestants and Jews?" as if this were an article of faith with them.)

[Rev. Debra W. Haffner]explains: “The mainstream religious voice has supported contraception for decades, at least for the last 40 years.” A theological opinion which stretches back to 1972? Goodness, that was even before Apple was founded. The mainstream religious voice is not quite as venerable as say, Calvin or Luther or the teaching of the apostles found in the Didache, but if the world began in 1968 and discovered sex soon thereafter, 40 years is as traditional as it gets.

But who knows, maybe the world did begin in 1968, and the Six-Day War, the Apollo 1 fire, and Petula Clark singing "Downtown" are all products of my overheated Catholic imagination.