About a year ago, I wrote a blog entitled “Why Barack Obama has to be seen as an enemy of the Catholic Church”. This was picked up by quite a few American Catholic blogs, for example this one, which reproduced the piece in full; and it attracted much favourable attention: but some of the reactions, also from American Catholics – who presumably were from that shameful 54 per cent of Catholics who voted for Obama – were not favourable. Well, if ever there was any doubt about whether or not I was right, it has now been removed – that is for Catholics who understand, unlike the late Cardinal Bernardin, with his “seamless garment” theology (according to which abortion, say, was just one of a whole raft of other issues like war and peace, opposition to the death penalty, welfare reform and civil liberties), that actually “life issues” are not like others, negotiable or – like the morality of war, for instance – subject to context and circumstance: who understand, in other words, that abortion and euthanasia are always and under all circumstances, just wrong. Obama’s health secretary has now issued a ruling: that under his administration’s Health Care Act not only must any provider of health care be prepared to supply artificial contraception (including drugs which, though labelled contraceptive, are in fact abortifacient) but that that definitely includes Catholics (for the CNS story, see here):