MaryAnne, You're probably not going to like any of this.
Re: "Moderate Catholics" The Roman Catholic Church doesn't have sects that way. You either believe what the Church teaches or you don't. We have a term known as "Cafeteria Catholic", which means that some people pick and choose among which Church teaching they will accept and which they won't, the way you pick among things offered in a cafeteria.
Basically, Dionne's piece that you linked is a BS article wherein the author attempts to use the fact that a fraction of the dioceses will sue indicates dissention among bishops over the Church's opinion of Obama's mandate. It seems like the one bishop they cited* said he was concerned about how to keep faithful to the Gospel without allowing this fight to be construed as a political effort from the Church. He said 'some people" were trying to do just that and spin it into an "anti-Obama campaign" and the author chose to imply that "some people" meant "some bishops". The reality is that "some people" are the right leaning politicians and pundits. Dionne also obviously successfully implied (if you're top post is any indication) that there was dissention among Catholic bishops about contraceptive use and providing of contraceptives to employees of Catholic run ministries. That was false, too.
If the NYTimes can teach anyone anything, it's that it pays to investigate because some "journalists" don't bother anymore. particularly when it comes to the Catholic Church. The minute a journalist is writiing about what a clergyman said TO SOMEONE ELSE, the red flags go up. The journalist did not contact the source he or she bases "facts" on.
This is what I found.
The author of your article, Dionne, cites Bishop Clarke's remarks from an article in America Magazine. Sure enough, when I checked at America Magazine I found this.....a
clarification by the bishop that Dionne cited BECAUSE authors like Dionne and others deliberately misrepresented his remarks. Dionne's "interpretation" of Clarke's remarks is mentioned specifically as part of the need the Bishop felt this clarification he asked America Magazine to print.
This is from the May 25 article....
"Bishop Blaire has issued a clarification of "some misunderstandings" based on his remarks to me on Tuesday (full text of the statement follows below). I've asked his press secretary if he wishes to speak specifically to comments or points made in the interview published here and will update if I hear back.
Reading his statement, however, I don't see much essentially changed from his remarks to me Tuesday morning. His comments generated a heavy speculative buzz in both the Catholic and secular media, and I presume his "clarification" is intended more toward how far columnists such as E.J. Dionne and Lisa Miller at the Washington Post and Michael Sean Winters at National Catholic Reporter carried his comments from the text that was published here.
As he told me, Blaire reiterates in his clarification that he supports the religious liberty campaign in general. He expands slightly on points made on Tuesday: "It is totally unacceptable to have the federal government decide that our religious ministries are not 'religious.' The continuing effort of the government to intrude itself by re-defining Catholic ministries as somehow less religious or less Catholic because they employ or serve those without regard to their creed is unjust and a violation of religious liberty. The government should not intrude itself in forcing the Church and her institutions to violate her long standing teaching to provide essential health care to her employees."
He adds: "I am convinced we need to continue to seek to persuade others to join us in this just cause through reasoned, civil and respectful discussion. Our defense of religious liberty is advanced when there is open discussion about the best strategies to promote our common goal." Again, pretty much what he told me, though he advocated a "wider consultation" among the bishops at the June meeting."
http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=5148
And this is the link to the original article that Dionne mutilated and twisted the living daylights out of. I think you may be disappointed.
http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=5138
