Do Catholic hospitals have a right not to perform abortions?

Actually, the Catholic Church has always held that abortion -- understood as deliberately ending the life of an ensouled human being in the womb -- is gravely immoral. The changed view to which Andrew refers is the result of changed understanding of when ensoulment occurs. Remember that relative to the history of Christianity, biology has only recently revealed what happens in conception and gestation; Thomas Aquinas, for example, thought that life began at "quickening," or the mother's awareness of fetal movement -- typically after (what we now know is) 15-20 weeks of life and growth! As for your question, I'd refer again to Aquinas: everyone has a moral right to refuse to act against his or her conscience. To deliberately do what your conscience forbids would be morally wrong, always. (The converse doesn't hold, by the way: it is not always morally right to do what your conscience permits. Your conscience could be in error. But on the negative side, even if it is in error, if you do what it...

Are the concepts of omnipotence and omniscience mutually exclusive? God is generally considered to be both omnipotent and omniscient. Let’s say he created the universe. At the time of creation he knows how everything is going to play out. Doesn’t that limit his options to intervene in the future? In order to maintain his omniscience, he can’t intervene in a way that he didn’t know he was going to do beforehand. And if his actions are limited by this constraint, can he be omnipotent?

I think the difficulty here lies primarily in understanding God's knowledge and power as sort of "supersized" versions of our own knowledge and power. God's attributes are analogical at best. But the key to breaking through this kind of puzzle has to do more with the concept of time than of either omniscience or omnipotence. It's a commonplace of theology and phil of religion that God is "outside time." In other words, God's experience is not sequential, like ours is, but is eternally and universally present. So it makes no sense to talk about what God may or may not do "in the future" and what he knew "beforehand." Of course, what it means to be outside time is just as much, if not more, of a puzzle than the one you originally set out, but it seems to be closer to the target of inquiry than concerns about whether God's knowing or acting "comes first."

I accept that one does not need a religious belief to be 'moral'. But is there any good reason, in the absence of religious belief, why one should want, need or have to be 'moral' as opposed to being immoral? In case this should lead to a debate about the meaning of the word 'moral' or a diversion into the law, neither of which are behind my question, may I arbitrarily focus on morality being confined to the single simple example of not stealing and that the being (or the fear of being) caught be ignored.

In Mere Christianity (don't let the title prejudice you), C.S. Lewis has some insightful things to say about why one should be moral. Without morality, which he characterizes as "rules for operating the human machine," we tend to do damage to others, damage to ourselves, and fail to realize our purpose. He uses (among others) the analogy of a fleet of ships. In order for the fleet to sail well, three things have to happen: (1) Each individual vessel must be seaworthy; (2) The vessels have to avoid colliding with one another (and Lewis notes that these conditions are mutually necessary: if the ships are not seaworthy, they will probably collide, and if they collide, they will probably not remain seaworthy for long); and (3) it must arrive at the port it was intended to reach. Where religious belief serves morality best is by providing the "port." In Lewis' case, of course, the port was fixed by Christian religious belief. But others have fixed it in other ways: Kant used the principles of...

Re: Mitt Romney. Is it ever appropriate for a politician to justify policy on the basis of religious belief? Presumably, most people would answer this question with a vociferous "NO!". There's something strange about the way we ask politicians to compartmentalize their beliefs and motives, however. If a politician tells me that he has religious belief X but that he's able to separate this from his work in office, it seems to me that he doesn't really believe in X at all.

I'm inclined to agree that there's something strange in asking politicians to recuse themselves from personal integrity (which is how such compartmentalization might be characterized). One interpetation of the politician's statement that he's able to separate his religious belief from his work in office is that his policy justification for X will not rely on his religious beliefs, even though his religious beliefs happen to endorse X; he will offer justification that a democratic majority is able to accept, one that doesn't violate any constitutional principles. I don't think this poses any threat to personal integrity. There may certainly be more than one reason for believing X, not all of them religious. A different case occurs when the politician endorses something incompatible with X. Then I'm inclined to agree with your last statement...although a single belief system may entail X but also the belief that itis wrong to force someone to act against his/her conscience, which the politician...