President Joe Biden gleefully quotes the Pope, who called him as a “good Catholic,” but the Chief Executive’s obsessive support of abortion-on-demand up to (and quite possibly after) the moment of birth has long cast doubt among many of the faithful in the denomination.
And those doubts are growing significantly more intense and widespread, thanks to the latest move of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (SecDef) against the Department of Defense’s (DOD) recognition of its constitutional obligation to uphold service members’ First Amendment right to religious freedom of expression and practice.
This new manifestation of the Biden administration’s assault on constitutionally protected religious liberty in the military became during Easter Holy Week when it was announced Walter Reed Army Hospital ended its contract with a group of Catholic priests who for years have provided religious services and counseling to wounded service members there.
Instead of the priests, Walter Reed is retaining Mack Global, LLC, a Virginia-based secular, for-profit defense contractor — also known as a Beltway Bandit — that just happens to include in its offerings “religious staffing.”
This is a non-starter for service members who are traditional Catholics and who recognize the unique role served by priests for Rome’s parishioners. And DOD’s own data makes clear that there are many such service members, according to the First Liberty Institute’s Mike Berry and The Right Reverend Derek LS Jones, Executive Director of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty.
In an April 12 letter to Austin, Berry, who is FLI’s vice president for external affairs and director of military affairs, and Jones pointed out that:
The Department publicly proclaims that “spiritual fitness is critical to overall wellness.” In fact, the Department’s Religious Identification and Practices Survey reveals that a substantial majority of service members claim that religion is either “important” or “very important” in their lives. The Survey also reveals that Catholics comprise the single largest religious demographic, accounting for more than one in five service members.
It is hard to see how a for-profit defense contractor can provide Catholic service members with basic elements of their faith practices, like communion and confession, as only particular clergy may provide these sacraments. Thus, if the Department truly believes spiritual fitness is important, it must make sincere efforts to provide for the spiritual needs of its largest demographic instead of excluding them.
Berry and Jones further noted that federal courts have said that DOD is required by the Constitution to provide access to religious services regardless of an individual service member’s denominational preferences anywhere in the world.
This requirement is recognized in DOD regulation Joint Publication 1-05, Religious Affairs in Joint Operations, which provides that “Uniformed chaplaincies are essential in fulfilling the U.S. Government’s, and specifically the Department of Defense’s, responsibilities to all members of the Armed Forces of the United States and authorized civilians.”
And there is also the 1993 Restoration of Religious Freedom Act (RRFA), Berry and Jones reminded the SecDef, noting that:
The RFRA codifies longstanding religious freedom principles enshrined in our Constitution. It forbids the federal government, including the Department, from substantially burdening a person’s religious exercise, absent a demonstrated compelling government interest that is achieved by the least restrictive means.
In other words, RFRA creates a high hurdle for the government to clear when it seeks to censor or prohibit religious expression. Clearly, depriving service members access to Catholic priests is a substantial burden on their religious exercise that is unlikely to withstand strict scrutiny.
Finally, it should be remembered that hypocrisy reigns when the government insists on recognition of multiple gender identities but refuses to do so for multiple religious denominations. Berry and Jones put it this way:
Finally, the government cannot provide for chaplains of other faith groups while excluding Catholics. This kind of preferential treatment and discrimination is abhorrent to the Constitution and violates the Establishment Clause.
The Department of Defense must provide for chaplains in a manner that reflects the relative populations of the groups they serve within the military. Thus, if 1 in 5 service members identify as Catholic, we should expect to see a relatively commensurate proportion of Catholic chaplains.
That the professed loyalty of Biden and the SecDef to the Constitution is little more than lip service became clear in 2021 when Austin refused to honor the requests of thousands of members of the U.S Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Navy, Marines, and Space Force for religious exemptions from the Coronavirus vaccination.
As a result, thousands of hours and millions of tax dollars that should have been devoted to national security have instead been wasted on the utterly predictable resulting litigation as DOD lawyers and military officials have stubbornly defended Austin’s vaccination intransigence in multiple federal courts.
Officially, the DOD vaccine mandate has been rescinded, but thousands of patriotic service members who were separated from the U.S. military as a result of their insistence on a religious exemption are neither being returned to uniform nor otherwise compensated by the government for its violation of their constitutional liberties.
Defense officials who insist on extending the woke ideological extremism that is the proximate source of actions like the Catholic priests being kicked out of Walter Reed will learn, quite possibly sooner than later, that woke won’t win wars.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member