Everything you need to know about the Holy Crusade being waged by the Catholic bishops against President Obama over health insurance coverage for birth control can be found in this single fact: One of the loudest voices attacking the President for his "War" on Catholicism is the same guy -- Newt Gingrich -- let into the Catholic Church in the first place by bishops who overlooked the two wives he abandoned, as well as his admitted fondness for infidelity, and in spite of the Church's frowning on divorce if not creepiness in general.

"The Obama administration has just launched an attack on Christianity so severe that every single church had a letter read from the bishops all across the country," the shameless Gingrich thundered. "Freedom of religion in America is now being attacked by Obama."

Maybe it's just me, but to my way of thinking leaving a sick wife who suffers from cancer in order to shack up with a sweet young thing on my staff is a far more grievous example of the self indulgence and selfishness which the bishops hope to stamp out than is the Church's present American Inquisition against condoms.

The stink of hypocrisy here is so thick it is overpowering. And that is because power is what this dispute has been about from the start. This controversy isn't about theology and never was. And if it's a "war on religion" conservatives are whining about it's a war the bishops lost decades ago, and with their own Church followers, who sensibly concluded that Catholic hostility towards birth control was both esoteric and antique.

The bishops have tried to re-frame the issue as one of conscience and the Church's right to be free from government interference. But as the liberal-leaning National Catholic Reporter editorializes: "The clash of rights in this case is not so neatly defined by those outside and inside the Church."

It is abundantly clear that in the United States, says the Reporter, "Catholics themselves do not feel conscience-bound by the Church's teaching prohibiting the use of contraceptives," especially where Church teaching "has been consistently rejected" for more than 50 years.

So, wonders this prominent Catholic newspaper, is government then duty-bound to enforce a religious group's moral teaching if that religion's own leaders "have failed to persuade the group of its importance?"

In that case, asks the paper, just whose convictions would be upheld by rejection of the President's mandate? The Church's? Or just the Church leader's?

One suspects that this controversy was manufactured from the start by Catholic bishops anxious to provoke a fight with the President of the United States in order to regain lost control over their own flocks by showing who was boss when it came to which elites - the Church's or the state's -- held more sway over tens of millions of American Catholics.

The bishops irritation here seems less with how coverage for birth control undermines Church teaching than with what Obama's order means for the political authority the bishops like to throw around as inheritors of Apostolic Succession.

Among the numerous privileges which religious conservatives feel themselves entitled to under the First Amendment is the right to shape their surroundings to fit their most deeply held religious beliefs. And if other people, or non-believers, happen to get in the way, then so be it and too bad for them.

It's all so transparently cynical, like a play we've seen many times before whose storyline never seems to get better despite the retelling.

Religious militants, as we know, routinely redefine in their own heads the hostility their bigotries against gays and non-believers provoke as being the righteous oppression martyrs for the faith are forced to endure whenever they stand up for "traditional Judeo-Christian values."

And when Catholic bishops threaten to derail at the 11th hour a health care bill that would provide coverage to 50 million uninsured Americans just so the bishops can insert further unnecessary restrictions against non-existent public funding of abortion, why this is seen as an expression of "religious liberty."

But when a liberal president determines that the health care needs and wants of the overwhelming percentage of American women, both Catholic and non-Catholic, will take precedence over the presumed prerogatives of an all-male Catholic hierarchy to impose antiquated theological beliefs that even the Church's own congregation rejects as absurd, then that President is somehow accused of instigating a "feed them to the lions!" persecution of Christians that is worthy of a Nero.

With the passage of health care reform, being female is no longer a pre-existing condition. And so, in making her decision to require the Catholic Church to provide insurance for workers at Catholic schools, hospitals and other charitable organizations that covered birth control, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said: "Scientists have abundant evidence that birth control has significant health benefits for women and their families."

Meeting the religious objections head on, Sebelius said: "This decision was made after very careful consideration, including the important concerns some have raised about religious liberty. I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services."

Nevertheless, the ruling sparked outrage among the Catholic hierarchy and, as CBS reports, "Catholics around the country were read a blistering letter assailing the Obama administration for an 'assault on religious liberty.'"

Typical of the unctuous tone whenever religious leaders try to disguise their blunt-edged political objectives behind the fine tapestry of religious imagery was the letter that Bishop Glennon P. Flavin ordered read in churches throughout the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Bishop Flavin might have saved the congregants of Lincoln a lot of time and trouble  had he come right out and said simply: "This is what I say. You will do as I say. And you will like it, or God help you."

But instead he confounded them with an all too familiar syllogism: "Christ, Who cannot be deceived and cannot deceive us because He is God, is still in the world today as He promised, teaching us through His Church what we must believe and how we must live. And the voice of His Church is the successor of Peter, now Pope John Paul II. This is our Catholic faith: We believe that when Pope John Paul II teaches in matters of faith and morals, the Church teaches; and when the Church teaches, Christ the God-man teaches."

And therefore, says Bishop Flavin: "We who have been blessed by God with the gift of the Catholic faith can have no doubt about the immorality of contraception.  Contraception is wrong, not because the Church says it is wrong (it was wrong before Christ established the Church); it is wrong because God Himself, through the revelation of His Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, has declared it to be wrong. Because contraception is intrinsically evil, it may never be practiced for any reason, no matter how good and urgent. A good end never justifies the use of an evil means."

That is the sound of hierarchy, clinging to fondly remembered power and deference, but unable to originate any genuine moral authority on its own since that authority has already been squandered by a hierarchy that chose to protect itself rather than the children under its care, rationalizing that the fate of entire civilizations hinged on the power of Church leaders to issue commands and to have those commands obeyed.

There is nothing to my mind more unattractive than men of the cloth clambering to seat themselves upon some throne who engage in the pathetic spectacle of demanding obedience at precisely that moment when their authority is least credible.

And that is why this contest with President Obama over birth control is so tragic and unnecessary. 

Not only are rank-and-file Catholics against the bishops on this issue, as they have been for half a century. But if the Catholic bishops were ever able to put their egos aside and use their imaginations as moral educators, instead of insisting on their presumed prerogatives as the enforcers of stale Church doctrine, they might see there are far better ways to promote the spiritual over the primitive within us than to insist upon exotic and archaic dogmas that can only serve to over-populate the planet or make loving couples feel guilty when enjoying the company of one another's embrace.

As the editors of the National Catholic Reporter sensibly conclude in the spirit of Church-State accommodation: "Institutions change. The standing of bishops and other religious leaders is not what it once was. The demands of pluralism and the possibilities of medical science push through what once were comfortably kept boundaries. It is futile to wish for a simpler time. The challenge on both sides is to figure out, given the increasing complexities, how the Church can continue to act with integrity and how the state can provide for the greatest good."