Study finds U.S. abortion rates at all time low

Washington D.C., Apr 13, 2018 / 04:38 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholic leaders have said that the dramatic decrease in the number of Syrian refugees accepted by the United States is of great humanitarian concern.

While the United States government is in the midst of condemning and investigating recent suspected chemical warfare attacks reportedly carried out by the Syrian government, the number of Syrian refugees accepted by the United States has declined dramatically this year.

According to the State Department, the United States has accepted only 11 Syrian refugees so far this year, compared with 790 over the same period in 2016.

More than 10 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes over the course of a civil war that has been ongoing for the past seven years. Many of these refugees have overwhelmingly flooded neighboring countries such as Jordan and Lebanon.

“The precipitous decline in the number of Syrians the United States is resettling is extremely concerning,” Bill O’Keefe, vice president for government relations and advocacy for Catholic Relief Services, told CNA.

“…millions of Syrians remain displaced, caught in a web of violence and proxy wars,” he added. “The United States has traditionally taken the most vulnerable refugees, including Syrians, who have suffered terrible trauma or would be unable to go home. These refugees are the neighbors Jesus told us to love in the Gospel. We can safely welcome thousands of these women, men, and children to our country.”

In 2016, the United States resettled more than 15,000 Syrian refugees, and just over 3,000 in 2017. If the current rate is maintained, fewer than 50 Syrian refugees will be resettled in the United States in 2018.

For 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump set the total number of refugees that would be accepted by the United States at 45,000, and travel bans and other obstacles have slowed immigration even further.

Edward Clancy, director of outreach for Aid to the Church in Need, USA, told CNA that U.S. immigration policies have also been particularly unfair to Christian refugees in previous years.

“The number of Christian refugees has been very low compared to their representation in the population, so we’re speaking out on behalf of Christians with no voice in the Middle East…we’ve made it part of our mandate to support the Christian community in the Middle East in these areas of refugees, food shelter, pastoral care, whatever is needed,” Clancy told CNA.

Clancy noted that many churches in the United States have been very generous at the local level in supporting and welcoming new refugees, but he urged Catholics and Christians to get in touch with their representatives to voice their concerns about policies affecting Syrian and other refugees.

“If they feel that something needs to be done, then they should contact their congressman or senator to say that we have to make sure that these people have every opportunity for life, because that’s what it comes down to,” Clancy said.

“They’re leaving…mainly just to stay alive. Almost all of them want to stay home, they want to stay where they come from, they don’t want to move, they’re being forced to do so, so we should be understanding of that,” he said.

Bill Canny, executive director for Migration and Refugee Services for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), told CNA that the number of refugees the United States was accepting from Syria in past years was already small in comparison to the millions who were forced to flee their homes.

The U.S. Bishops had advocated for an annual refugee cap of at least 75,000 for the United States for 2018, before the Trump administration announced it would be 45,000, Canny added.

“We were already only able to help a few, and not being able to do that is very disconcerting,” Canny told CNA.

The USCCB’s Migration and Refugee Service is one of nine national resettlement programs, working with the Catholic Charities network throughout the country to help resettle refugees, including Syrians. Most refugees arrive in the United States simply wanting a dignified life and are eager to be contributing citizens, Canny noted.

“They want good education for their children, they jump on work opportunities, I think that in a matter of a few months at least 75 percent of refugees get a job and start working,” he said. “These are people who have suffered badly, languishing in either refugee camps or urban slums oftentimes, who deserve another chance.”

He added that refugees who enter the United States were already subjected to the strictest vetting, and that additional security measures were not necessary.

“While we respect safety concerns and we know it’s the government’s right to keep us safe, we don’t think the refugee program is an avenue of danger to our citizens, due to the extensive security checks that have been done for a number of years,” Canny said.

Furthermore, the issue of refugee resettlement should be of particular concern to Christians because the Gospel compels them to care for the poor and the needy, Canny noted.

“Certainly it’s a core responsibility of our faith, from exhortations in the Old Testament to welcome the stranger, to make sure that one cares for newcomers, and of course from the New Testament and the teachings of Christ,” he said. “Matthew 25 compels us to help the neediest, and certainly refugees are really the neediest.”

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CNA Staff, Jul 14, 2020 / 04:01 pm (CNA).- The chief judge of a federal district court in Indiana denied Tuesday a motion to delay the execution of Dustin Honken, which is scheduled to take place Friday, until a treatment or vaccine for coronavirus is widely available.

Fr. Mark O’Keefe, OSB, filed the motion for an injunction, asking that the execution be delayed so he could fulfill his “sacred religious duty to minister Mr. Honken at his execution” while not risking his own “life and health.”

Jane Magnus-Stinson, chief judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, denied the motion July 14, saying it was unlikely that O’Keefe could successfully argue that the execution would violate his religious freedom rights, as well as procedural rights.

Edward Wallace, an attorney for Fr. O’Keefe, responded that “The First Amendment bars the federal government from burdening an individual’s exercise of his religion unless there is a compelling government interest. Today’s ruling ignores the fact that there is no legitimate government interest in forcing a priest to choose between fulfilling his sacred duties and protecting his own and others’ lives and health.”

Wallace added that the executions of Honken and another inmate, Wesley Purkey, should not be carried out “in the midst of a global pandemic and a burgeoning outbreak in the federal prison population.”

Honken was convicted of the murder of five people, including a single mother and her two daughters aged ten and six years old, in 2004. His execution is scheduled July 17.

The motion to delay the executions were filed by Fr. O’Keefe and by Dale Hartkemeyer, who is the Buddhist minister to Purkey. They asserted that the scheduled executions put them at “serious personal risk due to potential exposure to the coronavirus,” and thus violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Department of Justice argued that while the ministers’ “sincerely held religious beliefs require them to attend to the spiritual needs” of the inmates as they face execution, it “has imposed no substantial burden on the plaintiffs’ free exercise of those beliefs because the plaintiffs are ‘not themselves the subject of government regulation.’” It added that the supposed impediment to the scheduled execution, the pandemic, “is not one of the Government’s making.”

Magnus-Stinson wrote that “to show a government-created substantial burden” under RFRA, “a plaintiff must identify some government action with a ‘tendency to coerce individuals into acting contrary to their religious beliefs.’ The mere scheduling of an execution imposes no obligation or restriction on the religious advisor whom the condemned prisoner has selected to attend. And the plaintiffs’ claims as stated in their complaint rest entirely on the setting of Mr. Purkey’s and Mr. Honken’s execution dates during the pandemic. Accordingly, the plaintiffs have not shown more than a negligible likelihood of demonstrating a substantial burden on their religious beliefs, as required to prevail on their RFRA claims.”

The schedule executions of Honken and Purkey are pursuant to the Justice Department’s 2019 announcement that the federal bureau of prisons would resume executions for the first time since 2003.

Five executions were scheduled between July 13 and Aug. 28. The first was carried out July 14. Challenges against the other three executions have failed, but the fifth inmate, Wesley Ira Purkey, had his execution temporarily halted July 2 by the Seventh Circuit appeals court.

Fr. O’Keefe, 64, is a Benedictine monk of St. Meinrad Archabbey and professor of moral theology at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology. He also ministers to the incarcerated and to cloistered nuns.

He has ministered to Honken for a decade, and has been approved to administer him last rites shortly before his execution.

Earlier this month Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark had asked President Donald Trump to commute Honken’s death sentence. The cardinal had frequently visited Honken while he was Archbishop of Indianapolis, and he testified that Fr. O’Keefe “confirms that the spiritual growth in faith and compassion, which I had witnessed in our meetings some years ago, continues to this day.”

While acknowledging Honken’s crimes as “heinous”, Cardinal Tobin asserted that his execution “will do nothing to restore justice or heal those still burdened by these crimes.”

“His execution will reduce the government of the United States to the level of a murderer and serve to perpetuate a climate of violence which brutalizes our society in so many ways,” Tobin claimed, noting that the use of the death penalty makes the United States an “outlier” in the world.

While the Church teaches that capital punishment is not intrinsically evil, both Pope Francis and his immediate predecessors have condemned the practice in the West.

Regarding the execution of criminals, the Catechism of the Council of Trent taught that by its “legal and judicious exercise”, civil authorities “punish the guilty and protect the innocent.”

St. John Paul II called on Christians to be “unconditionally pro-life” and said that “the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil.” He also spoke of his desire for a consensus to end the death penalty, which he called “cruel and unnecessary.”

And Benedict XVI exhorted world leaders to make “every effort to eliminate the death penalty” and told Catholics that ending capital punishment was an essential part of “conforming penal law both to the human dignity of prisoners and the effective maintenance of public order.”

In August 2018, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a new draft of the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s paragraph regarding capital punishment.

Quoting Pope Francis’ words in a speech of Oct. 11, 2017, the new paragraph states, in part, that “the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”

Reasons for that teaching, the paragraph says, include: the increasing effectiveness of detention systems, growing understanding of the unchanging dignity of the person, and leaving open the possibility of conversion.

Fr. Thomas Petri, O.P., a moral theologian at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., told CNA at the time that he thinks this change “further absolutizes the pastoral conclusion made by John Paul II.”

“Nothing in the new wording of paragraph 2267 suggests the death penalty is intrinsically evil. Indeed, nothing could suggest that because it would contradict the firm teaching of the Church,” Fr. Petri continued.

[…]

Daniel Rudd, ca. 1915. / Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. Central Arkansas Library System (public domain)

Denver Newsroom, Feb 25, 2022 / 16:00 pm (CNA).
In the wake of the American Civil War, the former slave Daniel Rudd launched a newspape… […]