The stormy petrils at Santa Clara University (SCU) once again are singing their Siren song, according to an article in Inside Higher Ed.
As The Motley Monk previously reported, SCU’s President, Rev. Michael Engh, SJ, informed SCU faculty and staff in October 2013 that SCU no longer would provide health insurance coverage for elective abortions. In the letter announcing his decision, Fr. Engh wrote:
Our commitments as a Catholic university are incompatible with the inclusion of elective abortion coverage in the university’s health care plans.
As was predictable, the stormy petrils protested mightily. They believe Fr. Engh’s decision was inherently flawed, potentially setting an unethical precedent. How so? The expected refrain: Engh “did not consult the faculty first.”
Those protests evidently had a bit of an impact, as Fr. Engh decided to delay the policy from taking effect for one year. In a November letter to faculty and staff, Engh stated that while the decision remains “final,” delaying its implementation until January 2015 would allow the Faculty Benefits Committee time to explore third-party coverage options for abortions. But, Engh was steadfast: SCU would not pay for that coverage.
Predictably, that wasn’t good enough.
SCU’s Faculty Senate voted to call the health insurance policy change “invalid.” About this vote, the Faculty Senate’s President, Juliana Chang, wrote in an email:
The term “invalid” refers to the process by which [Fr. Engh] made the decision. Faculty believe that our shared governance structure means that the president should consult the faculty prior to implementing major policy decisions.
Due to the absence of meaningful faculty input, the Faculty Senate later drafted a three-part resolution condemning the decision submitting it to the 627 eligible faculty members for a vote.
Well, voting ended last week. The results were that the policy section of the resolution to invalidate the new policy passed 215 to 89. That is:
- a total of 48.5% of eligible faculty voted;
- 32.4% of the eligible voters voted for the resolution; and,
- 14.2% voted against it.
Professor Chang called the vote and turnout “unprecedented.”
Indeed, it was! The silent majority didn’t participate, rendering any conclusion about the vote’s significance “invalid.”
A professor of law and former Faculty Senate President, Margaret Russell, disagrees. Professor Russell wrote in an email:
I have a deep respect and regard for Santa Clara as a collegial and diverse intellectual and social justice community–which is one of the reasons why I think the Faculty Senate vote is so significant. (italics added) The vote shows that there is enormous disagreement with both the insurance decision itself and the peremptory manner in which it was reached and announced.
32.4%. “Enormous disagreement”?
Not allowing the negative poll results to dampen the minority’s spirits, one of the stormiest of the petrils, Professor Nancy Unger, sang her Siren again song in a recent San Jose Mercury News op ed:
Santa Clara faculty and staff are not members of a Catholic parish. They are employees of a large corporation. Many fear that this denial of comprehensive abortion coverage is part of a wider effort to allow private employers to impose their religious beliefs on employees, denying a raft of health care services from abortion and contraception to vaccines.
“Father knows best” is not a compelling argument here, especially when one man denies hundreds of women access to a procedure that he could never need. It’s also no principle on which to run a university.
The Motley Monk has heard this refrain so many times, it has become an earworm! If a president of a Catholic university or college upholds Church teaching in institutional policy matters, it’s denying women working at the institution their inalienable “rights” and, in this case, to “a raft of [so-called] health care services….”
Yet, all of this folderol at SCU may be rendered meaningless by the State of California.
According to an associate professor of law, Stephen Diamond, the new policy will be impossible to enforce under state law. Professor Diamond noted in an email:
HMOs in California are regulated by a statute which includes a multi-factor test for whether abortion is legally necessary. That test has long been interpreted to include all pre-viability abortions and so it is not possible for the university to institute the change the president has proposed.
The issue is far from resolved, irrespective of what Fr. Engh might hope or what song the SCU stormy petrils might sing.
To read the Inside Higher Ed article, click on the following link:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/18/santa-clara-u-faculty-object-change-health-plans-deny-abortion-coverage#ixzz2nq6mZrzv
To read The Motley Monk’s previous post, click on the following link:
http://www.richard-jacobs-blog.com/5/category/Santa%20Clara%20University/1.html
To read The Motley Monk’s daily blog, Omnibus, click on the following link:
http://www.richard-jacobs-blog.com/omnibus.html
Professors at a purportedly Catholic university upset because their sacred rite to slay their offspring might not be covered by insurance. After the Vatican gets done mawling the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, perhaps they could turn their attention to this type of malignant scandal that is as commonplace as mortal sin.
Maybe someone can help me but wasn’t there a movement to have Catholic professors and teachers sign an agreement to uphold Catholic values and teachings as part of their employment? Wasn’t this done at the behest of the Holy See? I thought it happened in the early 1990s. When I went to Silver Lake College, I thought the Nuns showed me the agreement . . . maybe I am mistaken.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for that. We know what the Holy Father has said.
What has become of our Catholic colleges and universities is a sad thing indeed. The smoke of Satan did not just enter through the windows. Somebody ripped out the doors and used a leaf blower to blow it in.
Ex Corde Ecclisiae (I may have spelled it wrong) was promulgated in 1990. The purpose of it was to give the Catholic bishops the authority and responsibility to ensure that authentic Catholic theology was being taught in Catholic higher education in their dioceses.
It is a dead letter.
Thank you PF . . . what the bishops do with the power they are given, I do not control, but it is there for them to use if they so wish.
Remind the faculty of their academic freedom: if they do not like the boundaries of their insurance coverage, they are free to leave.
“After the Vatican gets done mawling the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, perhaps they could turn their attention to this type of malignant scandal that is as commonplace as mortal sin.”
But wouldn’t that be Self-Absorbed Neopelagianism(TM)? Or perhaps an over emphasis of the Church on doctrinal matters?
Really. Get with the 70’s.
A word of clarification: Ex Corde Ecclesiae ( From the Heart of the Church) was an authoritative document promulgated by Blessed Pope John Paul II to give mandates for teaching Catholic Theology to present and potential teachers of theology at Catholic colleges and universities. It does not effect any other professors or for tthat matter any other employee of those colleges or universities.
Given the present ” atmosphere” in which we live, these faculty members yelling and screaming about their rights to abortion being threatened do not have abortion as their real target but the Catholic identity of Santa Clara. They knew when they sought to teach there that Santa Clara was a Catholic college, so why the sudden shock? They know exactly what they want, and it is not just insurance coverage for abortion.