Washington D.C., Apr 27, 2017 / 05:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A leading U.S. bishop expressed grave concerns Thursday about a revised health care bill which the House may vote on within days.
The bill is an effort replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obam… […]
Denver, Colo., Apr 27, 2017 / 04:07 pm (CNA).- “The recent pledge by the Democratic National Committee chair to support only candidates who embrace the radical unrestricted abortion license is very disturbing. The Democratic Party platform already endorses abortion throughout the nine months of pregnancy, even forcing taxpayers to fund it; and now the DNC says that to be a Democrat–indeed to be an American–requires supporting that extreme agenda.
True solidarity with pregnant women and their children transcends all party lines. Abortion doesn’t empower women. Indeed, women deserve better than abortion.
In the name of diversity and inclusion, pro-life and pro-‘choice’ Democrats, alike, should challenge their leadership to recant this intolerant position.”
–Cardinal Timothy Dolan, chair
U.S. bishops’ Pro-Life Activities Committee, April 26
We mark two forgotten anniversaries in 2017. Here’s the first.
Exactly 50 years ago this Easter season, Pope Paul VI (now Blessed Paul VI) issued his great encyclical Populorum Progressio (“On the Development of Peoples”). The text focuses powerfully on global issues of social and economic justice and the need for rich nations to share generously with the poor. It includes the line – worth remembering today – that we “cannot insist too much on the duty of giving foreigners a hospitable reception. It is a duty imposed by human solidarity and by Christian charity” (67).
But Paul’s idea of “development” was much larger than simply providing more and better material goods for the poor, vital though that task is. As he makes clear in Populorum Progressio, there’s no real progress without a right understanding of man’s spiritual identity. There’s no real development without a respect for the wholehuman person as a creature of moral purpose.
Real development, for Paul VI, demands a reverence for human life from conception to natural death. This is why he reminded the U.N. General Assembly (1965) that “Your task is to ensure that there is enough bread on the tables of mankind, and not . . . to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.” It’s why he forcefully rejected abortion – echoing the words of the Second Vatican Council — in his other great encyclical, Humanae Vitae, just a year after Populorum Progressio.
To put it another way: There’s something irrational, something deeply contradictory, in (admirably) arguing for the rights of our nation’s foreign newcomers while (wrongly) allowing – and even sacralizing — the systematic killing of a different kind of foreigner, the child in the womb, the newcomer to life itself. Both the immigrant or refugee and the unborn child are human beings, both have inviolable dignity, and both demand our protection. The difference today is, we don’t recognize and applaud anyone’s right to kill an immigrant.
As of mid-April though, that kind of logic is apparently absent from the national leadership of the Democratic Party. The Huffington Post noted on April 21 that Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez “[has become] the first head of the party to demand ideological purity on abortion rights, promising . . . to support only Democratic candidates who back a woman’s right to choose.”
Which leads us to a second anniversary.
In 1992, exactly 25 years ago this July, Pennsylvania’s Governor Bob Casey, a prolife Democrat, was refused an opportunity to address the Democratic National Convention that nominated Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Casey claimed he was barred because of his opposition to abortion. The Clinton camp claimed otherwise. But the history of the party in the decades since speaks for itself.
It’s now less and less possible for any genuinely prolife candidate to hope for national office as a Democrat. Cardinal Dolan’s articulate concerns, noted above and voiced earlier this week, will be repeated and amplified by many others in 2018, an election year. Party leaders chose this course freely, and they’ve earned whatever bad consequences result in the voting booth. They have no one to blame but themselves. In the meantime, they’ve placed state and local Democratic elected officials – many of whom are good and effective public servants – in needlessly difficult circumstances.
None of this absolves the current White House of its own ugly views, or the Republican Party of its own callous policies, or us as Christians of our duty to help women facing the pressures of an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy. But a key to simple human decency is this: Don’t intentionally kill the innocent. One of our national parties is now fully and forcefully committed to tolerating, and even celebrating, the “right” to exactly that kind of killing.
And no amount of dissembling can excuse it. None.
Reprinted with permission from CatholicPhilly.com
Washington D.C., Apr 27, 2017 / 03:43 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The U.S. government needs to be continually equipped to fight the scourge of human trafficking in new and effective ways, said members of Congress introducing an anti-trafficking bill on Thursd… […]
Philadelphia, Pa., Apr 27, 2017 / 03:22 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Philosopher Alvin Plantinga has won the prestigious Templeton Award for once again making belief in God “a serious option within academic philosophy,” the Templeton Foundation has said.
“The field of philosophy has transformed over the course of my career,” Plantinga said in response to the honor. “If my work played a role in this transformation, I would be very pleased.”
“I hope the news of the Prize will encourage young philosophers, especially those who bring Christian and theistic perspectives to bear on their work, towards greater creativity, integrity, and boldness,” he said April 25.
The Pennsylvania-based John Templeton Foundation awards the prize to a living individual who has made “an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery or practical works.”
“Alvin Plantinga recognized that not only did religious belief not conflict with serious philosophical work, but that it could make crucial contributions to addressing perennial problems in philosophy,” said the foundation’s president Heather Templeton Dill.
Plantinga’s 1974 work “God, Freedom and Evil” is now widely regarded as having provided a definitive counter to the logical challenge that the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of God. His argument rested on the nature of freedom and God’s ability to determine behavior.
His 1984 essay, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” argued that Christian philosophers should let their religious beliefs influence their academic research and serve the needs of their religious communities.
His other work has considered the basis of knowledge, the nature of justified belief, religious belief as a basis for human reasoning, and arguments for the existence of God.
While some philosophers have argued that evolution is incompatible with belief in God, Plantinga has argued that evolution is incompatible with belief in philosophical naturalism that denies the existence of spiritual reality.
Plantinga’s religious background is the Calvinist Dutch Reformed tradition. He currently teaches at Calvin College. He taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1982-2010.
He and his wife, Kathleen, live in Grand Rapids, Mich.
There are now 47 winners of the Templeton Prize, including Mother Teresa, Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, philosopher Charles Taylor, and Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.
Other winners include Czech priest and philosopher Tomas Halik, South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama.
The prize was established in 1972 by global investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton. The current prize includes a cash award of about $1.4 million.
Sacramento, Calif., Apr 27, 2017 / 12:33 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A lawsuit has been filed against a Catholic hospital in California for refusing an elective hysterectomy to a female who identifies as a man and who sought the procedure as part of their sex reassignment.
The suit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Evan Minton, who had a hysterectomy scheduled for August 2016 with the Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, Calif., in the Sacramento metro area.
Minton claims the procedure was cancelled once the hospital learned that Minton was transgender, and asked to be referred to as “he”. The hospital offered to send Minton to a different medical center.
“We feel very clearly that they discriminated against me because I’m transgender – and that is against the law,” Minton told local media.
The ACLU alleges in the suit that the hospital’s actions amount to “sex discrimination in violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act” which prohibits businesses from discriminating against patrons on the basis of one’s gender. The group is seeking a court order that would force the hospital to perform elective hysterectomies in the future.
Dignity Health, the group that owns Mercy San Juan, was able to transfer Minton to one of its Methodist hospitals a few days after the initial procedure was denied.
Following Catholic teaching, Mercy San Juan does not perform elective sterilization procedures on anyone.
Dignity Health said in a statement that it cannot reply to the allegations because they have not yet been served with the complaint.
“What we can share is that at Dignity Health Mercy San Juan Medical Center, the services we provide are available to all members of the communities we serve without discrimination. We understand how important this surgery is for transgender individuals, and were happy to provide Mr. Minton and his surgeon the use of another Dignity Health hospital for his surgery within a few days.”
“We do not provide elective sterilizations at Dignity Health’s Catholic facilities in accordance with the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs) and the medical staff bylaws.”
The ACLU has long opposed Catholic hospitals operating according to Catholic teaching.
The ACLU and the group the MergerWatch Project co-authored a 2013 report that claimed the growth of Catholic hospitals was a “miscarriage of medicine.”
In 2015, the ACLU sued the Detroit area’s Trinity Health Corporations, one of the largest Catholic health care operations in the United States, for their refusal to perform abortions and tubal ligations. The lawsuit was dismissed.
In 2016, an ACLU report alleged that Catholic hospitals put women at risk for following Catholic teaching regarding abortion and reproductive health.
Also in 2016, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against a Catholic hospital in Chicago, claiming it had denied IUD removal to Melanie Jones. However, a representative from Mercy Hospital told CNA that the doctors at Mercy Hospital had offered to remove the woman’s IUD — the removal is an entirely ethical procedure from the Catholic moral standpoint — but Jones declined.
All Catholic hospitals in the United States operate under the U.S. Bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which ban abortion, sterilization, emergency contraception, and tubal ligations.
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Vatican City, Apr 27, 2017 / 07:25 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Thursday Pope Francis met with members of the U.S.-based Papal Foundation, telling them that in a world full of desperation, their charitable assistance helps the Church spread a message of hop… […]
Regina, Canada, Apr 27, 2017 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Non-Catholic students at Catholic schools in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan will not receive taxpayer funding, a judge ruled last week.
The Saskatchewan Catholic School Boards Association criticized the April 20 ruling, saying Catholic school divisions have “the right to decide to admit non-Catholic students” and to determine the extent to which their admission allows them to have “a truly authentic faith-based Catholic school system.”
“Our faith is a journey that includes inquiry of non-Catholics and growth of existing members. This requires inclusion and a welcoming spirit,” the school boards association said in a letter responding to the decision.
The association charged that the complaint threatens parents’ choices and limits the choices of non-Catholic parents.
Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Donald Layh ruled that any provincial government funding would violate Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the state’s duty of religious neutrality, and equality rights.
The ruling will take effect in July 2018.
The decision concerned a lawsuit between the Good Spirit School Division and the Christ the Teacher Catholic Separate School Division, the Canadian site Global News reports.
The lawsuit challenged the creation of a separate school division in 2003 in the village of Theodore, 130 miles northeast of Regina, before the village’s public school closed.
Some parents of non-Catholic students decided to send their children to the local Catholic school instead of busing them to a public school in another town.
A local public school division filed a legal complaint against the Catholic school division and the provincial government in 2005. The complaint charged that the funding was unconstitutional and wrongly put the Catholic school in the role of a public school. Funding of non-Catholic students at the Catholic school constituted discrimination against public schools, the complaint said.
The complaint also charged that the creation of the new school division was not qualified. It charged that the division was created to prevent the public school from closing.
Tom Fortosky, the Saskatchewan Catholic School Boards Association president, said the association was “obviously disappointed” by the decision and was evaluating its response.
“This has already been a 12-year journey instigated by the public boards, and we don’t have much of an appetite to spend more on legal defense,” he said April 20. “However, we have an obligation to stand up for the constitutional rights of separate school divisions, so we are giving serious consideration to an appeal.”
Saskatchewan’s head of government, Premier Brad Wall, has said the ruling “is not good news” for the province’s students. “Consider the implications here … you could have massively overpopulated public schools and empty or near-empty separate schools. You could actually risk the viability of community schools because there’s a number of people who will choose to send their students to the school closest to them.”
“We want to give parents as much choice as possible,” Wall said April 24. “That’s where we will stand on this issue and we’re going to work to be able to preserve that stance.”
© Catholic World Report