The attempt by President Obama to try to force Catholic hospitals and Catholic universities to supply birth control and abortifacients to their employees has caused a great deal of alarm—both on the part of Catholics and Protestants.

Obama's response to this alarm was to issue a "compromise" that was merely a repackaging of his original aim. "OK, you don't have to pay for this stuff, but your insurance companies do."

This accounting maneuver is not a compromise. Instead of having Catholic hospitals and universities pay directly for having Church moral doctrine violated, they will be allowed the honor of paying indirectly. As critics of the compromise quickly pointed out, insurance companies obviously won't absorb the cost. They'll simply pass it on to the buyers of their insurance, i.e., the Catholic hospitals and universities.

Catholic bishops should be more alarmed now than before. Obama's attempt to get exactly what he wants shows that he is both disingenuous and completely determined to get his way. His hand offered in peace is a sleight of hand.

Perhaps it would help to more fully wake up those upset by Obama's actions to realize what is really at stake. Opponents are crying out that the actions of Obama's Health and Human Services violate religious liberty, as if that were the only thing at stake. That is a gross underestimation. He doesn't want to override a particular religious doctrine; he wants to remake the Church, as he wants to remake America. We're now finding out just exactly what that means.

"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America."

How does political change come about?  Political thinkers from Aristotle to Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt have warned us that some leaders hate "intermediate institutions," those mid-level organizations that arise locally and blossom as alternative sources of friendship, community, and the common good—the family, the village or township, clubs based upon common interests, and of course, churches.

These intermediate institutions are a thorn in the side of any leader who attempts to draw all power into himself and make every individual directly dependent upon him so as to serve his will and his interests. Intermediate institutions provide both a haven from the ambitions of all such statism, and even more, a locus of organized resistance and rebellion.

In the case of the HHS's attempt to compel Catholic Universities and Hospitals to supply sterilization, birth control, and abortifacients, Obama has chosen to attack two of the largest intermediate institutions in America. The strategy is not so much to wipe them completely out as to render them entirely innocuous and impotent by forcing them to act directly against their deeply-held moral principles. If they buckle, they cease to be Catholic, and in fact become just two more indistinct "service" arms of the Secular State—mere extensions of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.

In great part, the United States Catholic bishops are to blame. (Please see the article by Paul Rahe below.) For too long the bishops have acted as if the evangelical call to charity meant lobbying for universal health care by the State, when they should have been actively working for universal health care provided by the Church itself. That's how all those Catholic hospitals in America got there to begin with—as personal and ecclesiastical manifestations of charity, the greatest theological virtue.

In fact, that is where hospitals themselves came from—as well as universities. Both were literally invented during the Catholic Middle Ages. Neither hospitals nor universities existed before this time. They were invented out of the Christian devotion to real, personal, active universal charity for the sick, and out of the Christian devotion to universal truth. There was medicine in antiquity, just as there was learning, but it was Christianity that created the institutions that made healing and learning available on a hitherto unimaginable scale.

These two intermediate institutions, the Catholic hospital and the Catholic university, are the bearers of the Catholic Church's moral doctrines as well. That is why they are, today, the great thorns in the side of the Secular State. They represent, all too clearly, that the Church cannot and will not be absorbed into the State. And that is why the State so passionately wants to absorb them.

Alas, one cannot say "are" but only "should be." The truth is that Catholics hospitals and universities have largely bought into secularism, and hence, all too many such hospitals happily provide contraception and abortion, and all too many such universities preach and teach the secular sexual revolution and all its accouterments.

Here, too, the bishops are to blame. If they would have been confronting the Catholic hospitals and universities for their moral deviance, then Obama would never have dared trying to impose his mandate. But the President realized, all too well, that he had many secularized Catholic friends within the walls of hospitals and the halls of academe who were clamoring for just what Obama wanted to impose.

So, the bishops must deal with the harvest they've sown. And it is not too much to suggest that Obama actually understands that. Since not a small number of Catholic hospitals and universities side with him, he realizes that it is really the bishops that he is confronting—and hoping to defeat. Sink the authority of the bishops in the mire of their own timidity, and Catholic hospitals and Catholic universities just become hospitals and universities, ultimately controlled by secular bureaucracies. They will not be intermediate institutions which stand against the hubristic powers of the Secular State, but mere instruments of it.