"The President's Nun"

That's the title of a recent article in the American Spectator. I suppose that it's only fitting that the Vatican II president should have his own nun.

Let me try to summarize the background here as much as possible. Some Catholic hospitals in Scranton, PA are going to be sold to some non-Catholic health systems. The CEO of Mercy Health Systems (Catholic group) initially said that the passage of the Obama health care legislation played a role in the decision to make the sale.

Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, immediately attacked this and every other report that tried to tie Obamacare to the hospital sales.

Why such a reaction, the Spectator asks. The answers are kind of depressing.

Let's go back to that presidential signing of the health care reform law. There were 21 very powerful people in that little group who received signing pens from the President. As mentioned that included the Vice President, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy's widow Victoria Reggie Kennedy. And someone else.

That would be Sister Carol Keehan.

Impressive, no? The Catholic News Agency thought so, and prominently noted the story here. It also noted that Sister Carol was receiving her presidential pen from the President himself because she had been "supporting health care despite bishops' objections." The story even pictured the pen itself alongside the presidential seal on the box in which it came, with "Barack Obama" clearly visible scrawled along the side. Meaning, Sister Carol had enough clout to take on the Catholic Bishops on the President's behalf -- and win.

Does the name Bart Stupak ring a bell? The much ballyhooed pro-life Democrat Congressman from Michigan? The Catholic Congressman Bart Stupak who was said to be such a sturdy obstacle to passage of ObamaCare because it would allow abortions? In the aftermath of the ObamaCare passage, Slate came forward to note that a letter signed by "representatives" of Catholic nuns finally swayed Stupak to break his staunch anti-abortion pledge and sign on for ObamaCare with a simple promise of an executive order on abortion, executive orders being overturned by successor presidents with the rapidity of rabbits doing the breeding thing. Wait! Stupak was persuaded by Catholic nuns? Isn't Sister Carol a …nun? How about that? What a coincidence? Yes indeed, the letter in question was signed -- solo -- by Sister Carol.

In other words, pay no attention to the dead babies.

I wonder what Bishop Martino would say if he was still around. Something profoundly and necessarily harsh, I think. One would hope something like this:



Combine all this with election-year jockeying by pro-Obamacare Democrats in a Catholic district who now have to deal with the issue of Catholic hospitals being delivered into the hands of facilities with no moral qualms about the slaughter of innocents, and it all turns into a horrible example of the disasterous downstream consequences of not punishing dissidents. I know all about the wheat and tares. I also know that, historically speaking, it seems like the anathema has a much better track record of fixing things than dialogue or just ignoring stuff.