Bishop Warns Obama: You’ve Lost Catholics Because of Your HHS-Abortion Mandate

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Dec 2, 2013   |   12:43PM   |   Washington, DC

With the Supreme Court slated to take up the battle against the Obamcare HHS mandate early next year, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York said the Catholic Church has a warning for the president.

The former head of the nation’s Catholic bishops told President Barack Obama the Catholic Church will not stop opposing the HHS mandate and said he’s lost Catholic support because of it.

As the Christian Post reports:

“We’ve been asking for reform in healthcare for a long time,” Dolan, the former president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

“So we were kind of an early supporter in this,” he continued. “Where we started bristling and saying, ‘Uh-oh, first of all this isn’t comprehensive, because it’s excluding the undocumented immigrant and it’s excluding the unborn baby,’ so we began to bristle at that.”

Dolan said the Church supported health care “because of our religious conviction and because the dictates of our conscience… And now we’re being asked to violate some of those.”

“So that’s when we began to worry and draw back and say, ‘Mr. President, please, you’re really kind of pushing aside some of your greatest supporters here,” Dolan said. “We want to be with you, we want to be strong. And if you keep doing this, we’re not going to be able to be one of your cheerleaders.’ And that sadly is what happened.”

On the same day the Supreme Court announced it would take Hobby lobby’s case to dismantle the HHS mandate that forces religious companies and groups to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs, two pro-life organizations released a new poll showing 59 percent of Americans oppose the mandate.

Family Research Council (FRC) and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) released the results of a commissioned national survey showing that 59 percent of likely voters “oppose the mandate requiring the coverage of preventive care services for women which includes all FDA approved contraceptives, including drugs that can destroy a human embryo, and sterilization services without a direct cost to the patient.”

Polling data from December 2012 shows Americans support a religious exemption to the mandate.