Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
May our Lord give you peace! I hope that each of you is enjoying these long and humid summer days, enjoying the fruits of the garden, and looking forward to the full harvest of our agricultural bounty. Let us offer God our gratitude for His generosity in making all these good things grow for our use.
SOLEMNITY OF THE ASSUMPTION
This past Saturday, August 15, we celebrated the solemn feast of the Assumption of Mary. Just as the Blessed Virgin is the mother of our faith and of our Church, so also she goes before us in the resurrection of her own human body. Remade in perfection in the image of her perfect Son, Mary’s body in Heaven now shares the same gift of incorruption as God gave her soul in her Immaculate Conception. So she lives now in eternal, blessed union with God, forever praising and glorifying Him with body and soul, mind and heart, in union with the choirs of angels. Just as in her life, Mary was a model to all Christians of loving submission to the will and mission of her Son, so also in Heaven, Mary remains the model and promise to us all of our true end.
This coming Saturday, August 22, we celebrate the memorial of Mary as Queen of Heaven and Earth. This feast reminds us that not only Mary, but we, too, are destined to this same salvation. The same eternal life and perfection God has already given to His own mother, He promises also to us, her spiritual children. This is God’s generous and unmerited gift of salvation to us sinners, I hope we do not reject it! We should always show our gratitude for His mercy and love, and constantly seek to live only in union with Him and His Church. We must turn away from sin, reject the false happiness of the world, and embrace the true joy of the Cross of our Savior. Do not be afraid to love Jesus Christ above all things. Seek His peace, in the transforming sacraments of Confession and Holy Eucharist. In these ways, may we who venerate the glorious Mother of God, come to share with her the infinite happiness of eternal life in His presence! May we come to love her Son as powerfully as she did; and loving Him, may we also grow in love for each other, and all God’s children.
IOWA SEMINARIANS
Each year the seminarians from all four dioceses in our state gather for fellowship and support. This year the Diocese of Sioux City hosted them. Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers from Portland, Oregon spoke to them about Catholic Evangelization and Public Moral Issues and Archbishop Hanus from Dubuque shared his thoughts on immigration issues and how the affect the church and our ministry to the Spanish speaking among us. The Archbishop celebrated the Mass for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary at our Cathedral and I celebrated a Sunday Mass at the Carmelite Monastery for them on Sunday morning. God willing these seminarians will one day serve our state as priests. Please continue to keep them in prayer as they grow in wisdom, age, and grace. In particular, please pray for our seminarians: Patrick Behm, David Esquiliano, Justin McCarty, Aaron Pohlen, Mauro Sanchez, Chris Ciaffa, Ken Hiveley, and Michael Cronin.
YEAR FOR PRIESTS
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, whose feast is August 20, also knew and loved Mary, our mother. He promoted veneration for her to strengthen our faith, and especially for priests and deacons to follow her example and obey her words, “Do whatever Jesus tells you.” As we continue to honor and pray for all our priests in this, their special year in the Church, please pray to Mary to intercede for them in a special way. I encourage all the faithful to pray the Rosary with renewed vigor, or at least to offer a daily “Hail Mary,” for the intentions and needs of our devoted priests. Let your priest know of your gratitude and love for his gift of fidelity to Christ and His Church. I too am so very grateful for the faithful example and dedication of my brother priests in this diocese. Together, may we accomplish all that God has given us to do, for the salvation of His holy people.
BACK TO SCHOOL
This week also sees the first day of school for our children, in most of the diocese. I was very pleased to learn recently that our Catholic school students performed significantly above national averages in all categories of a standardized test to assess Catholic education, called “ACRE.” We are justly proud and supportive of our Catholic schools. As a diocese we congratulate the hard work of our schools, but continue to raise our expectations for student’s knowledge of and participation in their faith. In particular, I encourage parents and teachers and pastors to continue to give our children solid teaching and lead them in the ways of our Catholic faith. We do this best by our own devout example, by modeling how to live the faith intentionally in every aspect of our lives, not just on Sunday. We also do this in devotional prayer, such as Adoration of the Blessed Eucharist, which is always most beneficial. I also hope that we can keep our school tuitions low and scholarship assistance high, so that all those who would choose Catholic schools for their children can do so. In addition, we need to support our parish religious education programs, even by volunteering to serve as a catechist or just as a parental presence. Finally, we must never exclude or fail in hospitality to those families who choose home schooling as best for their children.
FORMATION INSTITUTE
“Back to school” also applies to adults. We must never stop growing in faith! This year, I am enacting a new initiative of adult formation for the Diocese, which will be called the Diocesan Institute of Formation and Ministry, or “Formation Institute” for short. This Institute will reinvigorate our previous efforts at adult formation which were called “Church Ministries Program.” This year, there are five “classes” being offered, open to all parishioners. In the future, as this initiative grows, additional classes and workshops on prayer and discernment and spiritual formation will be offered at several locations throughout the Diocese. Please see the Globe for information and pray for the success of this new effort!
HEALTH CARE REFORM
The current national debate about health care reform should concern all of us. There is much at stake in this political struggle, and also much confusion and inaccurate information being thrown around. My brother bishops have described some clear “goal-posts” to mark out what is acceptable reform, and what must be rejected. First and most important, the Church will not accept any legislation that mandates coverage, public or private, for abortion, euthanasia, or embryonic stem-cell research. We refuse to be made complicit in these evils, which frankly contradict what “health care” should mean. We refuse to allow our own parish, school, and diocesan health insurance plans to be forced to include these evils. As a corollary of this, we insist equally on adequate protection of individual rights of conscience for patients and health care providers not to be made complicit in these evils. A so-called reform that imposes these evils on us would be far worse than keeping the health care system we now have.
Second, the Catholic Church does not teach that “health care” as such, without distinction, is a natural right. The “natural right” of health care is the divine bounty of food, water, and air without which all of us quickly die. This bounty comes from God directly. None of us own it, and none of us can morally withhold it from others. The remainder of health care is a political, not a natural, right, because it comes from our human efforts, creativity, and compassion. As a political right, health care should be apportioned according to need, not ability to pay or to benefit from the care. We reject the rationing of care. Those who are sickest should get the most care, regardless of age, status, or wealth. But how to do this is not self-evident. The decisions that we must collectively make about how to administer health care therefore fall under “prudential judgment.”
Third, in that category of prudential judgment, the Catholic Church does not teach that government should directly provide health care. Unlike a prudential concern like national defense, for which government monopolization is objectively good – it both limits violence overall and prevents the obvious abuses to which private armies are susceptible – health care should not be subject to federal monopolization. Preserving patient choice (through a flourishing private sector) is the only way to prevent a health care monopoly from denying care arbitrarily, as we learned from HMOs in the recent past. While a government monopoly would not be motivated by profit, it would be motivated by such bureaucratic standards as quotas and defined “best procedures,” which are equally beyond the influence of most citizens. The proper role of the government is to regulate the private sector, in order to foster healthy competition and to curtail abuses. Therefore any legislation that undermines the viability of the private sector is suspect. Private, religious hospitals and nursing homes, in particular, should be protected, because these are the ones most vigorously offering actual health care to the poorest of the poor.
The best way in practice to approach this balance of public and private roles is to spread the risks and costs of health care over the largest number of people. This is the principle underlying Medicaid and Medicare taxes, for example. But this principle assumes that the pool of taxable workers is sufficiently large, compared to those who draw the benefits, to be reasonably inexpensive and just. This assumption is at root a pro-life assumption! Indeed, we were a culture of life when such programs began. Only if we again foster a culture of life can we perpetuate the economic justice of taxing workers to pay health care for the poor. Without a growing population of youth, our growing population of retirees is outstripping our distribution systems. In a culture of death such as we have now, taxation to redistribute costs of medical care becomes both unjust and unsustainable.
Fourth, preventative care is a moral obligation of the individual to God and to his or her family and loved ones, not a right to be demanded from society. The gift of life comes only from God; to spurn that gift by seriously mistreating our own health is morally wrong. The most effective preventative care for most people is essentially free – good diet, moderate exercise, and sufficient sleep. But pre-natal and neo-natal care are examples of preventative care requiring medical expertise, and therefore cost; and this sort of care should be made available to all as far as possible.
Within these limits, the Church has been advocating for decades that health care be made more accessible to all, especially to the poor. Will the current health care reform proposals achieve these goals?
The current House reform bill, HR 3200, does not meet the first or the fourth standard. As Cardinal Justin Rigali has written for the USCCB Secretariat of Pro-life Activities, this bill circumvents the Hyde amendment (which prohibits federal funds from being used to pay for abortions) by drawing funding from new sources not covered by the Hyde amendment, and by creatively manipulating how federal funds covered by the Hyde amendment are accounted. It also provides a “public insurance option” without adequate limits, so that smaller employers especially will have a financial incentive to push all their employees into this public insurance. This will effectively prevent those employees from choosing any private insurance plans. This will saddle the working classes with additional taxes for inefficient and immoral entitlements. The Senate bill, HELP, is better than the House bill, as I understand it. It subsidizes care for the poor, rather than tending to monopolize care. But, it designates the limit of four times federal poverty level for the public insurance option, which still includes more than half of all workers. This would impinge on the vitality of the private sector. It also does not meet the first standard of explicitly excluding mandatory abortion coverage.
I encourage all of you to make you voice heard to our representatives in Congress. Tell them what they need to hear from us: no health care reform is better than the wrong sort of health care reform. Insist that they not permit themselves to be railroaded into the current too-costly and pro-abortion health care proposals. Insist on their support for proposals that respect the life and dignity of every human person, especially the unborn. And above all, pray for them, and for our country. (Please see the website for the Iowa Catholic Conference at www.iowacatholicconference.org and www.usccb.org/healthcare for more information)
ST. JOSEPH CHURCH, WALL LAKE
Once again one of our parish churches has been damaged significantly by a huge storm that passed through as Sunday Mass was about to begin. Please keep Father John McGuirk and the people of St. Joseph in your prayers.
May the intercession of Mary, our holy mother, bring you joy and peace, and increase your faith and hope in the salvation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Please continue to pray for me, and for our priests and seminarians.
Your brother in Christ,
Most Reverend R. Walker Nickless
Bishop of Sioux City