One thing we can be sure of: the Catholic Church will shut down before it violates its faith. We saw that recently when Catholic adoption and foster-care services closed in Massachusetts and Illinois rather than comply with state mandates that they place children with gay parents. Who lost? Parentless children.

The administration has to know this, so why would it force the hand of Catholic institutions that have traditionally filled in the gaps in social services that the government failed to provide? The people who will suffer if they close their doors are the poor, refugees, the homeless, orphans, and the elderly…

Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Catholic libertarian Fox Business News host, tells me, “Most Catholic families do not follow the teachings on the church on contraceptives. It is their most unpopular and privately disregarded of the teachings in the modern era. However, what the government is doing is utterly reprehensible from a constitutional perspective. It’s a core teaching of the church, whether it is accepted by the public or not. This is interfering with the free exercise of religion.”