Catholic World Report
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Special Report After disbanding the President’s Council on Bioethics, what kind of advisory body will Obama put together? By Elenor K. Schoen  Under the auspices of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the President’s Council on Bioethics quietly went about its work, as it had done, under various titles and different mandates, for over 30 years. However, during the week of June 8, 2009, council members received letters from President Obama letting them know their services were no longer required. The present council will be shutting its doors.
The present council was established by President George W. Bush’s executive order in November 2001. The 18 members were chosen by Bush from among a group of leading scientists, doctors, ethicists, social scientists, lawyers, and theologians. The council was chaired by Dr. Leon Kass, MD, PhD for its first four years, and by Edmund Pellegrino, MD during Bush’s second term. With a new president in office now, the present bioethics council’s term was set to expire on September 30, 2009. The abrupt early disbanding of the council led to the cancelation of a meeting planned for late June, which was to include, among other things, reflections from council members on “The Future of National Bioethics Commissions.” According to Bush’s executive order, the President’s Council was created to “advise the president on bioethical issues that may emerge as a consequence of advances in biomedical science and technology.” The New York Times reported that White House press officer Reid Cherlin said President Obama will appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a “new mandate” which “offers practical policy options.” Judging from Obama’s preliminary policies, the future reincarnation of the bioethics council will no doubt be decidedly different. Whether the new bioethics commission will function mainly as a mouthpiece for the president, or as an independent advisory board, will be made more apparent in Obama’s choices in picking a chair and members, and in creating its mandate for serving under him during his first presidential term.
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Editorial The disgraceful autobiography of Rembert Weakland By George Neumayr | July 2009 issue  It sounds like an over-the-top Tom Wolfe novel: a successor to the apostles conducts an affair with a male graduate student, is accused of “date rape” and emotional harm by said student, and raids the collection basket of the faithful to hush the student up, then, as the bishop settles into a cushy retirement, he pens a “coming out” memoir in praise of homosexual behavior, all the while retaining the canonical rights and privileges of a retired archbishop and receiving pats on the back from fellow clergy.
Alas, this is no racy and risible fiction; it is the real story of Archbishop Rembert Weakland. The retired archbishop of Milwaukee released June 15 his autobiography, A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop. In it he admits to several affairs with men, crowns himself the first voluntarily “out” bishop, and argues that the Church should endorse the “physical, genital expression” of homosexuality, as he put it to the New York Times in May.
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Analysis The Archdiocese of Boston’s health care agency refuses to answer that question.By Philip F. Lawler | June 2009 issue  In February, the Boston Globe revealed that Caritas Christi, the health care arm of the Boston archdiocese, was a leading contender to win a lucrative contract from the Massachusetts state government. Under the terms of the contract, Caritas Christi and a secular partner in the bid, the Centene Corporation, would provide medical coverage for low-income Massachusetts residents. The terms of the contract explicitly stipulated that coverage must include provisions for abortion, contraception, and sterilization.
The involvement of Caritas Christi in the bidding for this government contract drew careful scrutiny from both the pro-life movement and the abortion industry. Pro-lifers in Massachusetts asked for assurances from Church leaders that the Catholic health care system, which operates six hospitals and enlists the services of 2,000 physicians in the Boston area, would not perform abortions or make abortion referrals. Abortion advocates, on the other hand, demanded assurances from state regulators that the Catholic agency would not interfere with women’s unrestricted access to abortion. The abortion advocates soon received the guarantees they wanted. Pro-lifers did not.
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Editorial Now will it be implemented?By George Neumayr | May 2009 issue Will Notre Dame’s decision to honor the most pro-abortion American president ever occasion a serious and widespread implementation of Ex Corde Ecclesiae? If not, the outrage over it is idle. Pope John Paul II’s apostolic constitution on Catholic universities and colleges has gathered dust since its 1990 release. These schools, with exceptions here and there, remain either indifferent or hostile to it. Notre Dame’s conferral of honors on Barack Obama is merely the latest and most graphic symptom of a larger disease that has coursed through Catholic colleges for decades. What’s needed now is not more feckless and stalling discussions about “Catholic identity” but unapologetic and comprehensive episcopal application of Ex Corde. Notre Dame’s decision to honor Barack Obama was not surprising but utterly predictable. Where a college’s faculty, student body, and curriculum are, there its heart will be also.
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BOOKS It is on display in Kerry Kennedy’s compilation of essays by current and former Catholics. By Francis J. Beckwith | June 2009 issue 
What does it mean to be Catholic in early 21st century America? In order to answer this question, Kerry Kennedy—the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy—has compiled in this volume 37 essays authored by a variety of public figures and ordinary people who are or were practicing Catholics. Included among the contributors are Anna Quindlen, Andrew Sullivan, E.J. Dionne, Jr., Nancy Pelosi, James Carroll, Bill Maher, Bill O’Reilly, Tom Monaghan, Peggy Noonan, Robert Drinan, Douglas Brinkley, Dan Aykroyd, Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, and Martin Sheen. As one would suspect, the range of opinion, not to mention the style and depth of writing, differ widely. Nevertheless, even if you find yourself disagreeing with some of them (as I did on more than one occasion), all the writers have undoubtedly made a sincere effort to present how they believe the Catholic Church has shaped their lives and how they would like to shape the Catholic Church. I must confess, however, that many of these essays are painful to read, for they reveal how little Catholics have been taught about their own theology and their own Church. For example, some of the authors—such as Quindlen, Sullivan, and Carroll—correctly claim that the Church has changed over time. They are, of course, making this observation in order to ground their own call for change on matters having to do with the Church’s views on homosexuality, women’s ordination, artificial birth control, and priestly celibacy. But you get the impression from these writers that the Church’s positions are merely the result of an authoritarian regime seeking to exercise power, that there are in fact no real reasons for these views. So all the Pope has to do, these writers seem to be suggesting, is assemble the Church’s most clever theologians and come up with a rationale for these acceptable changes that will bring the Church up to speed and allow all the dissidents to feel welcome again.
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Editorial Notre Dame chooses Obama’s over its namesake’s.By George Neumayr | June 2009 issue  Last September, Pope Benedict XVI visited the original Grotto in Lourdes where Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette. During his visit, Pope Benedict spoke about the West’s need to recover the Marian model of hope: that salvation comes not through obedience to man’s will but through humble obedience to God’s.
The modern world has largely chosen the man-centered model of hope over Mary’s, and this choice, as the grim and unfolding chapters of recent history illustrate, has delivered not salvation but despair. The ideology that promises man’s perfection through the domination of relativized science, technology, and politics—what one might call the false self-sufficiency of secularism—has led once-Christian countries into dystopias of one kind or another, nations so bereft of real hope that they abort thousands upon thousands of their own children. On May 17, in a sports arena not far from a replica of that original Grotto in Lourdes, Barack Obama received an honorary degree from Notre Dame—a moment of hollow good cheer in which a university founded in Our Lady’s honor extolled an American president not for habitually hoping in God’s promises but in his own. Father John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, hailed Obama’s “audacious hope for a brighter tomorrow.”
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Web Exclusive By canonizing Nuno Alvares Pereira last month, Benedict XVI has given the Church a compelling new saint with a colorful history. By Sandra Miesel  Nuno Alvares Pereira is not a household name in America. His canonization on April 26 is unlikely to change that. But in Portugal, Nuno is a beloved national hero whose feats of valor in the 14th century insured his country’s survival.
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