According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, KulturKampf is

The name given to the political struggle for the rights and self-government of the Catholic Church, carried out chiefly in Prussia and afterwards in Baden, Hesse, and Bavaria. The contest was waged with great vigour from 1871 to 1877; from 1878 to 1891 it gradually calmed down. On one side stood the government, the Liberals, and the majority of the Conservatives; on the other, the bishops, the priests, and the bulk of the Catholic people.

The word is, in essence, culture war and it is well demonstrated in the latest gantlet thrown down by the apparatchiks in the Obama Administration.  (Read Kathleen Sebelius, former Kansas Governor.)

I speak of the recent announcement that the government of the glorious Father/Motherland, the federal power represented by the war eagle, will require its harem of private insurers to extend contraceptive services to all Americans – and thus require all Americans to pay for those same contraceptive services.

The plan is brilliant, and crassly calculated to blitzkrieg the ideological foes of the ruling elite by dividing and conquering their enemies.

The Bishops, you see, must stand up for the ancient teaching handed down from the early Church on contraception.   At least I think they must.

This is tricky ground.

Most Protestants view chemical sterility as their freedom in Christ and the practice of contraception as merely good stewardship over the family.  Indeed, when I was a student at Fort Wayne Bible College it was said that all pastoral and missions majors were told, in their last year of study, that they had a duty to practice contraception so as to not constitute a burden upon their “sending church” by birthing too many children.

Natural law is not taught in such Bible Colleges.  Neither is the theology of the body.  That explains more than some of the ongoing fracturing of the Church.

Not that Catholics are all that good on either of the above, statistically speaking.

It is no secret that many rank and file Catholics contracept rather than obey the teaching of Humana Vitae.

And so see how brilliant this move to mandate contraception is?  It will divide the Protestants from the Catholics and separate rank and file Catholics from their clergy.  The Catholic Bishops are asked to either stand up now and defend the ancient teachings — maybe all alone — or shrink back from the battle in the interest of a false unity that will only lead to more compromises and less Christian living down the road.

With most pro-life groups focusing on surgical abortion (a dying technology) while ignoring contraception (or even teaching it is acceptable), the Bishops cannot count on much solidarity from that zealous quarter.

Sun Tzu (a great Chinese military strategist of ancient times) advised generals to carefully choose their battlefields.   Evangelical Protestants and Catholic Bishops have been making much progress the past twenty years on a unity born of necessity, a unity mandated by the belief that we just might, someday soon, share the same civil disobedience foxhole.  The time of civil disobedience is fast approaching, and the cultural elites see it coming on the horizon.   Thus they have run ahead to claim the ground upon which the first skirmishes will take place.  They have chosen a battle  over the forced funding of contraception – with the hope, on the part of such coalitions as Democrat leadership, Planned Parenthood, RINOs and other assorted enemies of the Church – that upon this unholy ground the Evangelical/Catholic coalition will fracture and the hope that upon this unholy ground most Catholic Bishops will lose the rank and file.

I fear that their nepharious strategy is sound (that is, will prove effective toward the goal), as nepharious strategies usually are.  (Consider the source.)

And so I must ask:  Are America’s Catholic Bishops prepared to pay the price that all pagan governments have demanded of the Church?  (Or rather abandon Humana Vitae, as the “progressives” have urged for the past 43 years.)

More posts on this subject:

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/christian-civil-disobedience-time-to-think-about-it/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/archbishop-charles-chaput-sees-a-bad-moon-on-the-rise-initial-post/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/how-do-we-preach-jesus-in-this-post-modern-world-creeds-post-29/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/gathering-storm-clouds-on-the-horizon/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/happy-postmodern-mothers-day-the-pill-turns-50/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/thanks-be-to-god-the-catholic-hierarchy-is-not-silent/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/pro-life-is-not-enough-post-1-klusendorf-does-colombo/

USA Today, an official organ of political correctness in North America, recently “celebrated” Mother’s Day with a front page puff piece celebrating the 5oth anniversary of the birth control pill and its progeny, the sexual revolution.  Here is the link to that article.

To be fair to the secular progressives at USA Today, they did try to separate the advent of oral contraceptives from sexual license, but fell short as they described all of the benefits that derived from, in the words of the Magisterium, the separating of the unitive from the procreative.  Here is the link to a prophetic document warning the world of the harms that can arise out of the post-modern lust for sexual license.

Here is the abbreviated take on the USA Today celebration: (more…)