Tossing a pinch of incense to the statue of the emperor.

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal says "welcome to 3rd Century Rome":

Suddenly amid this hallowed tradition, we get Barack Obama and Kathleen Sebelius (Trinity College, '70) claiming with the zeal of secular fanatics that these priests, nuns, their hospitals and the people who work in them will find a way to pay for and permit sterilizations and abortifacients. Catholics can believe what they want inside their churches, but in public they too must show belief in reproductive rights as defined in law by the state. Welcome to 3rd-century Rome.

The resisting Catholic bishops, say the administration and its factions, are "out of step" with the current American consensus on women's reproductive rights. Possibly so, but official Catholic doctrine and the HHS mandate are in opposition.

The Obama administration is effectively saying that all the practices and beliefs embedded in the Obama health-care law are established in America and consent is required, no matter what some religion purports to believe. It is this attempt to displace religious belief with an alternative belief system that goes against the American grain and has Catholics up in arms.

Perhaps the Catholic-myth people are right that most Catholics are OK now with abortifacients. And maybe the pundits dripping ridicule and bile on New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan have got the modern American Catholic pegged right. I doubt it. Not yet.

Exactly.