Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Material Cooperation With Evil - How A Catholic Maintenance Man Refused

At The Catholic Thing, Prof. Randall Smith is associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, Houston has an excellent post up called No Cooperation with Evil .

Its just worth reading for the story of the Catholic Executive working for the Pharmaceutical company which really brings his point home.

The gist of this is no one really gets a total free pass just because we are just doing a "material" cooperation with evil rather than the a formal one. Also as the Maintenance man 's story shows one person well might be able to make an difference in not doing material cooperation with evil.

He ends :

But let’s remember that, during the Holocaust, one man ran the trains, another man opened the doors, and another man loaded the prisoners, so that none of them had to take responsibility for the evil being done. Those who want you to violate your conscience will first seek to misinform your conscience, and then try to deaden its voice.
We’d all better start giving some serious thought to what sort of sacrifices we might need to make in the coming years. Then we should probably double that estimate, and pray for the grace to be faithful when the time comes
.

6 comments:

APOV said...

It is a ridiculous idea for Catholics to say that they would be "paying for contraceptives". They would be paying employees to work for them. The concept seems to be that Catholics think they have ownership over employees, so that it is the moral duty of the Catholic employer to see that the compensation paid to employees is not used for birth control. Well, of course, every employer in the country can claim to have some moral objection to something upon which the employee spends his or her compensation. It would just be much better for Catholics and everyone else to recognize the freedom and dignity of their employees, and mind their own business regarding reproductive issues, and let the employees do the same.

James H said...

The issue is not what a person does with his paycheck. That goes way into a very very remote cooperation with evil

This is not a issue of telling what the employee must do with his paycheck. Its a issue of a SERVICE we must provide and in fact help fund through the policy as a whole

If they want to go out and use their paycheck to get birth control insurance or of course because its so cheap buy it themselves they can

APOV said...

If you Catholics are saying that contraception is so evil that you are comparing it to the Holocaust, as you do in this posting, but the federal health care policy is all that you are going to mess with in an effort to stop this great "evil", but it is just perfectly all right for your employees to take their paycheck which you pay them and spend it for this fantastic "evil", you are showing a distinct lack of intelligence or you are just flat out dishonest. I am sure the latter is the case. If you people thought that contraception is the great evil which you are pretending in order to press this issue against Obama, you would be really be doing something against such an evil than this little disingenuous dishonest political play.

Kurt said...

And here is the failure of our bishops. They have put much effort, time and money into preserving the right of private employers to not pay for contraception. Yet, from them, the rest of the clergy and even most of the conservative lay organizations, absolute silence on two companion issues:

1) the right of rank and file workers not to pay for contraception. The Blunt amendment, crafted with the input of the USCCB, let the bosses opt out but not the employees. If they have a pro-contracept boss, their premiums go to contraception. Not a word about this, as if workers are dirt.

2) And while fighting for the right of bosses not to have contraception, has any of the criticism leveled against politicans been extended to bosses that elect to pay for contraception and even abortion? Lots of talk about certain politicans not being allowed communion but not a word against rich and powerful businessmen, even those honored at Catholic events, etc.

I think it can be said that the bishops' principles stop when it offends the big boys with money.

APOV said...

Kurt, you seem to be more honest than most Catholics, and certainly more honest than the priest, bishops, etc. Certainly if they were really against contraception, they would be against contraception rather than against universal access to healthcare. It is just as you say, they have completely ignored the fact that medical insurance is payment for the labor of employees, and the Catholics where I work have been working for it and paying for it for many years, right along beside myself, and yet not one Catholic priest or bishop has ever raised his voice about it, until the hypocrites decided to make politcal hay out of it during this election year. They vast majority of the lying hypocrites use birth control themselves.

APOV said...

As far as this denying communion to politicians, they give communion to all of the mafia bosses and murderers, but they think they can gain control of the government of the United States by threatening to deny communion to politicians who do not act as puppets of the Vatican? How can anybody take these people seriously?