new world
story of a flyer

Pushing Back the Boundaries
For the population of Catholics and other Christians in the USA, the recent health insurance mandate has caused a wide variety of reactions. A group of four young people found the discourse surrounding the issue lacking. They wrote a flyer to test themselves: “Do we really have anything new to say?”

by Suzanne Tanzi

The initiative was born with Amy Sapenoff, a graduate in Political Theory who teaches history and American government in a high school in Washington, DC. While many Catholics had been anticipating this clash for months (negotiations for a religious exemption to the mandate had been going on for over a year), the decision still took Amy by surprise. She immediately recognized that the autonomy of Catholic institutions had been somehow compromised and was gravely disappointed. She wrote to a few friends about how she saw this as a call for change in herself, first: “My political views are the one thing that I still really wanted to keep for myself. I wanted to maintain whatever misguided idealism I had without having to defend it with reason.” But she decided to end this insularity and look at what was really happening, for her own sense of freedom and responsibility toward the truth. She suggested writing a flyer together in an attempt to judge the situation with those she knew would be personally engaged in the drama as she was. It all began with a Skype conference call between DC, NY, and Boston.
It is a sign of the times that most of the information about the mandate situation came from opinion columns–in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, as well as blog posts and shorter pieces in various Catholic periodicals. But opinions are not enough and they instinctively reminded themselves that less discussion, and more observation, is required to get to the heart of the matter. Santiago explains their way of observing as “looking carefully at what the mandate really said, and considering its possible implications. But it also meant looking at ourselves and our experience as Catholics. It is obvious that one of the reasons why this mandate has stirred such passion among Catholics is because it challenges something fundamental: the way we are able to live our faith in the world. What Catholic healthcare providers want is to be able to be themselves, in the world, for the world.”
It was clear to all that Catholic institutions do not neglect to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees merely because of a medieval prohibition or a lust for power. However indirectly, the employer makes the point that Catholics believe in a different sort of life and that their freedom to do this must be safeguarded. But as the authors came to these realizations, they also understood that freedom is for something. And Amy, Everett, Santiago, and Tim did not see this as idealistic at all. They insisted, “There is no other ‘bottom line’ in this debate: we want freedom in the public square in order to be Catholic in the public square–that is, to witness to a different understanding of life and love, and, as a consequence, of healthcare and contraception.”
They noticed that the discourse surrounding the debate, gleaned from op-eds and YouTube clips, was skewed toward religious liberty and conscience protection–in their minds, only part of the story. They decided to write a flyer emphasizing what exactly is at stake: not merely the right to withhold coverage for contraceptives, but the freedom to propose to the world “a different type of love,” as Everett put it. They realized that if the Catholic prohibition of contraception doesn’t make sense to most Americans, it is in part because “we have not done a good job explaining how such a prohibition fits into the Catholic proposal of life.” Santiago explains, “The impoverished discourse surrounding this debate was not capable of talking about that proposal in an understandable way. We only heard talk of rights. In our flyer, we would speak about love and happiness as the things that this debate was ultimately about.”

More than an end product. The challenge was to see if they really could make a judgment that would contribute something new to the debate. Santiago continues, “In our time, most of the leading Catholic voices on the American scene are either law professors or politicians. I am thankful for these necessary voices, but I think we also need a voice that is able to articulate those things about which we can’t talk in our culture without sliding into wishy-washiness and sentimentality. Things like happiness and love. Our faith is a life, after all, and it is a life that encompasses those things.”
They knew from the start that they were not trying to come to a judgment for the sake of having the flyer as an end product. There was a deeper desire to engage more intensely with politics–not with political ideas but with politics as concrete situations which demand responses. Tim says, “Not only did I learn about myself and mature in my relationship with Christ, I learned about these friends and how much I need them! But it should be clear that this was about more than making a judgment on a particular situation, although one of the gifts of this work was to take responsibility–we became very well-versed in the law and the issues at hand, as well as deeper angles of approach. This was for all of us a first step in entering into a political problem and asking ourselves, ‘What are we being placed before right now?’” Their hope was that this flyer be useful for anyone who is trying to come to terms with the situation, as a starting point for more discussions in the future. All of them see it not as a point of contention added to the mix but as an affirmation that the Movement, which generated this work, is truly a friendship. “We realized, maybe for the first time, that the judgment and the companionship are one thing.”
While it has only been a few days since they began to share the flyer, Amy marvels at the newness it has brought. For example, in her own government class, in talking about how the federal court system works, a student, Kara, asked what happens when the government tries to make a law that violates someone’s rights. Her classmate, who had just read the flyer, reminded her that this is really the question currently at stake, in light of the HHS mandate. Kara responded with great sincerity by asking what the source of rights is, since it cannot be the government. “It was the first time one of my students got to the point of asking such an essential question without me posing it first. I’m incredibly grateful that in some way the flyer has caused a serious question to arise in the students without me having to ‘force it.’”

What people truly desire. Although it was only sent to good friends, the flyer has made its way around the country and is being read at Schools of Community, contributing to the dialogue. A woman from the Southeast who does not know any of the writers sent a message: “With your flyer, you reminded me of why I’m passionate about this issue in a way that surprised me.”
In addition, these friends have been asked to organize forums to provide space for further discussion. Some have read the flyer in their own meetings and volunteered to help organize something. There has arisen a particular challenge to more clearly define this “new way of living” that they propose. “That is precisely what we want as the content of a new dialogue. The most striking fruit is that people truly desire to share the experience of reaching this judgment and this new life with us.”