In its effort to oppose Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin wants human dignity without a moral context to uphold it. The organization seeks exemption from state unemployment taxes in favor of its own unemployment system. As the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against Catholic Charities on this matter last year, the case has reached the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court heard oral arguments in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin on Monday of this week.
Wisconsin’s initial ruling stripped Catholic Charities of its status as a religious organization, deeming Catholic Charities a secular group since it neither proselytizes nor exclusively serves Catholics. In the opinion of Wisconsin law, Catholic Charities is “not operated primarily for religious purposes.”
This opinion is patently incorrect. CCB, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and aided by dissenting Wisconsin judges, argues as much. For one, “the Constitution bars civil courts from such intrusions into spiritual affairs” as ones that would determine whether Catholic Charities’ programs are “inherently religious.” Beyond grounds of Constitutional interpretation, the Wisconsin ruling is plainly ignorant of the obligatory role of charity in the Catholic faith and twists religious substance towards its biased ends.
This is just another example of anti-Christian sentiment in the U.S., and it is based in present-day cultural trends: Religion has no bearing on the value of basic, natural goods, goes the idea — their values are givens. These basic goods then come under attack by the same regime that purported to affirm them.
In order for this structure to hold, the real secular establishment — such as Wisconsin — has “to acknowledge the priority of a certain more concrete existential consideration,” in the expression of Pope John Paul II. Namely, circumstances triumph over moral truths. John Paul II described various philosophical camps this way in Veritatis splendor, and his words hold today. He writes in the same encyclical that “treating the human body as raw datum,” as a palette for absolute freedom, means that “human nature and the body appear as presuppositions or preambles.”
SUPREME COURT APPEARS TO LEAN TOWARD CATHOLIC CHARITIES IN RELIGIOUS LIBERTY CASE
Our major cultural debates are living proof: Life is so good as to be the center of every civil concern. At the same time, abortion sits paramount to it. Or take the homeless and mentally ill: First the anti-institutionalists advocated for their full rights, and now, they have almost none. Supposedly humanitarian governmental organizations prioritize educating poor Africans on contraception and homosexuality. Man and woman exist and were even at odds at one feminist turn. But for a time recently, one could easily take the official position to be that they do not exist.
America itself has already proven inconsistent the case that Wisconsin is arguing. Secular organizations grasp human dignity, but can’t refrain from exploiting it. This clear failure is one that Catholic Charities has avoided, and its religious means are the obvious reason.