"a setback for people of faith"

Your Eminence:

Your November 15th column reminds us of our "duty to bring the values of faith to the political process" and rhetorically asks, "Did we, Tuesday a week ago?"  Though a well intentioned effort to take a broad look at all issues and to be conciliatory, your analysis can come across as weak and naive - at best:

"It gets touchy when we try to analyze the presidential election with the lens of faith. Some assume that the re-election of the president was a setback for people of faith. That may be an exaggeration. There is no denying that the president and his party are on record in promoting guidelines that gravely intrude upon religious freedom, and in their desire to expand unfettered access to abortion at all stages. These two issues are of towering import to people inspired by the principles of human dignity and the sanctity of life....

"Of course, through the eyes of faith, neither candidate was perfect, as no political leader ever can be [Your Eminence, the Obama/Biden ticket also took a vastly different position on marriage, than did Romney/Ryan!]."

Similar to 16th century England, we are faced with a ruler who is hostile to the Catholic Church and intent on its demise:

 "[King Henry VIII] inherited a country with a thriving Catholicism....All this, Henry would destroy....The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, prepared a stirring rejection of...suppression of Church authority, but he failed to deliver it in Parliament, prompting Bishop Fisher [i.e., Saint John Fisher] to tell More [i.e., Saint Thomas More] that the 'fort had been betrayed even by those who should have defended it' [emphasis added]....

"[In the end,] More than one thousand monasteries and convents were destroyed and monks and nuns turned out into the street....The suppression of the Church in England was the dress rehearsal for the French Revolution, the Italian Risorgimento, the Mexican Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War. Henry VIII's divorce is the reason America is a Protestant country" (Christopher Check, The Great Divorce: The Evil Fruits of Henry VIII's Adultery, This Rock, April 2007).

Responding to Governor Corbett's announcement that Pennsylvania will not set up a health exchange, the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference (12/13/12) reports: "In consultation with the USCCB and other pro-life groups..., it appears that a legislative remedy can be found to assure that the federally administered insurance exchange can exclude elective abortion coverage."  While neither the USCCB nor the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference should have been caught flat footed, there has subsequently been an eerie silence as to a "legislative remedy...to assure that the federally administered insurance exchange can exclude elective abortion coverage."  I will pray that I am wrong and for the conversion of our president, but I am dumbfounded as to what motivation the Obama Administration would now have to be conciliatory.

Your Eminence, we need absolutely clear leadership from the head of America's flagship archdiocese and the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Sincerely,