Religion and Politics

Church Controversy Is in Georgetown’s DNA

Peter Manseau writes at Religion Dispatches about Georgetown University’s latest squabble with its own church’s officials. This time, Catholic leaders in Washington, D.C. are upset with the Jesuit university’s decision to invite U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to serve as this year’s commencement speaker. Sebelius helped establish the Obama administration’s guidelines on institutional exemptions for mandated coverage of contraception, guidelines that the Archdiocese of Washington called “the most direct challenge to religious liberty in recent history.” Manseau writes that the “religious liberty Georgetown represents, however, is not simply a matter of the right of each religious group to have its way. It is instead, like both the church and the nation of which the university is a part, a product of practical pluralism and ongoing compromise.”

Read at Religion Dispatches

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