With a shortage of British foster homes, the Church launches a campaign

Douglas, Isle of Man, Jan 16, 2019 / 12:39 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Isle of Man’s Abortion Reform Bill 2018 gained royal assent Tuesday, meaning women in the territory will soon be able to procure elective abortion up to 14 weeks of pregnancy.

Abortion policy on the the Isle of Man, a crown dependency located between England and Northern Ireland, had been governed by the Termination of Pregnancy Act 1995, which allows abortion only in cases where the mother’s life is endangered or if the baby has a low survival rate.

Royal assent was given Jan. 15 by Richard Gozney, Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man.

Abortion rights supporters have urged the Department of Health and Social Care to enact the change as soon as possible.

The bill, which decriminalizes abortion, was passed unanimously by the Legislative Council Nov. 6, 2018. It allows elective abortion up to 14 weeks; up to 24 weeks if medical reasons or “serious social grounds” were presented; and, according to Isle of Man Today, “in certain emergency or serious situations after 24 weeks.”

Among amendments made to the bill were measures regarding counseling services and conscientious objection.

It will provide for buffer zones around medical centers to keep pro-life counselors and protesters at a distance from women procuring abortion, as well as measures to prevent sex-selective abortions.

The Anglican bishop of Sodor and Man, Peter Eagles, who is an ex officio member of the Legislative Council, had voted against the bill earlier in the year, but was in favor of it at the November vote.

“I see these amendments as being entirely within the spirit of the discussion held in this council earlier and as being instrumental in enhancing the bill’s effectiveness,” Eagles said, according to Isle of Man Today.

The bill has been opposed by the Catholic Church on the island and by Humanity and Equality in Abortion Reform.

It was expected to receive royal assent in 2018, but Manx Radio reported that the process was delayed by “the increased workload currently on the UK’s civil service” due to preparations for Brexit.

To gain royal assent, the British Ministry of Justice needed to examine the bill to ensure its compliance with human rights laws.

“There have been several recent cases where anti-abortion groups have tried to overturn laws made by democratically elected parliaments through employing barristers to present technical legal arguments,” Alex Allinson, a Member of the House of Keys, told Manx Radio last week.

The bill will be promulgated on Tynwald Day, July 5, 2019.

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Limburg, Germany, Sep 19, 2019 / 12:06 pm (CNA).- The ‘secret preacher of block 17’ who witnessed to Christ in a Nazi concentration camp was beatified this week in Limburg, Germany.

Blessed Father Richard Henkes was a German Pallottine priest denounced by the Nazis for his outspoken preaching. He died in Dachau concentration camp in 1945 while caring for prisoners sick with typhus.

“The real reformers of the Church are the blessed and the saints,” said Cardinal Kurt Koch at Henkes’ beatification on Sept. 19. “For we can only achieve the utmost externally, in structural terms, when we are also prepared to strive to achieve our utmost internally, in faith.”

“Love is not without sacrifice,” Koch said. “The Christian martyrdom is only real if it is realized as the supreme act of love for God and for one’s brothers and sisters.”

From the pulpit and the classroom, Fr. Henkes spoke out against the Nazi ideology and condemned the regime’s crimes against human dignity, focusing one homily on their killing of the disabled. Henkes was first denounced in 1937 for one of his homilies, for which he had to stand trial.

In the following years of World War II, Henkes was interrogated and threatened by the Gestapo again and again as he continued to work as a youth chaplain and retreat master.

“In the face of this neo-pagan ideology, Father Henkes surmised that wherever God is reduced to insignificance and pushed out of the public eye, man is also reduced to insignificance,” Koch said.

“Only when God is exalted through us human beings, when we do what Mary did in the Magnificat – Magnificat anima mea: Let God be exalted through my soul – wherever that takes place, there man is not reduced to insignificance, but is given a share in the greatness of God’s love,” the cardinal said.

Fr. Henkes was finally arrested by the Gestapo in May 1943 because of the content of one of his homilies in Branitz. He was then imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp, where he lived in the priests’ barracks, did compulsory labor, and secretly studied Czech with the future archbishop of Prague, Servant of God Cardinal Josef Beran.

Henkes had begun studying the Czech language before his imprisonment, and said that he hoped to continue serving the Czech people as a priest after the war. He secretly preached in block 17 of Dachau, where there were many Czech people.

In late 1944, a typhus epidemic overtook block 17. Fr. Henkes volunteered to be locked up with the sick prisoners, so that he could continue to minister to them and care for the dying.

He described the situation in Dachau in a letter smuggled out of the camp through a middleman: “People are dying in masses because they are completely starving. There are only skeletons. A gruesome picture. I have been vaccinated against typhus fever and I hope that the Lord God protects me … However, one thinks of how this will end up here. We can do nothing, we can only rely on the Lord God.”

After eight weeks in the quarantined barracks, Fr. Henkes became infected with typhus. He died within a week, on Feb. 22, 1945. Allied forces liberated Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945.

Shortly after the end of World War II, Catholics in the Czech Republic began calling for Henkes’ cause for sainthood to be opened.

Last Sunday, Henkes joined the ranks of the saints and beatified priests and religious who died witnessing to Christ amid the inhumanity and horror of the Nazi concentration camps. This includes not only St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who both were killed in Auschwitz, but also Henkes’ fellow prisoners in the priest barracks of Dachau, several of whom have already been beatified.

More than 2,500 Catholic priests and seminarians were imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp under the Nazi regime, of which 1,034 died in the camp.

Blessed Michal Kozal — a Polish bishop killed by lethal injection in Dachau in 1943 — was beatified by St. John Paul II in Warsaw in 1987.

Blessed Karl Leisner was secretly ordained a priest while imprisoned in Dachau in 1944 by a French bishop also held within the concentration camp. (Bishop Gabriel Piguet was able to obtain clandestine authorization from Leisner’s bishop before the ordination.) Leisner died of tuberculosis shortly after celebrating his first Mass.

Fr. Leisner was beatified, along with Fr. Provost Lichtenberg, by St. John Paul II during his visit to Berlin in 1996.

Blessed Fr. Engelmar Unzeitig, who also died in Dachau while caring for sick prisoners infected with typhus in 1945, was beatified in Germany in 2016. Fr. Unzeitig wrote in a letter from the concentration camp: “God’s almighty grace helps us overcome obstacles … love doubles our strength, makes us inventive, makes us feel content and inwardly free. If people would only realize what God has in store for those who love him!”

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Alcalá de Henares, Spain, Mar 30, 2017 / 01:58 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A Spanish bishop last week published criteria for the accompaniment of the divorced-and-remarried, inviting them to a “catechumenal itinerary” by which they come to live according to Christ’s words.

“The Church has only one goal to propose to man: the way of life that Jesus taught us and to which he introduces us in the sacraments,” Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Pla of Alcalá de Henares wrote March 20 in Accompanying the baptized who have divorced and live in another union, a set of provisions for his diocese.

The bishop began by noting the interest in and debate over pastoral care for the divorced-and-remarried  which has increased since the publication of Pope Francis’ 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia.

He first recommended the indications found in a vademecum produced by Fr. José Granados, Dr. Stephan Kampowski, and Fr. Juan José Pérez-Soba, of the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. The guide had been presented at a family congress in Alcalá de Henares March 10-12.

“The Church in her beginnings, when she saw that many asked for the sacrament of baptism while living a life far removed from Christian demands, proposed a catechumenal itinerary which included an important change in their mode of living which had to be verified in order to access the sacraments,” Bishop Reig then said.

“She did so with the conviction that the approach to the Christian community and to her way of life was the necessary support so that the person could respond to the grace of God and convert to the live proper to a Christian.”

He also explained that “penitential itineraries” were also developed “which permitted to be received again fully into the Christian community the baptized who, having moved away from life according to the Gospel, repented of their sins.”

The bishop stated that “in this sense and as a principle to avoid any gradualness of the law which the Synod of Bishops rejected and which Pope Francis disqualified in his apostolic exhortation, I encourage all our divorced brethren in irregular situations to draw near to the Christian community in order to participate in her life and accompaniment.”

By doing so they can “thus set out on a path which, step by step, brings them closer to Christ, going deeper into the Gospel of marriage, instituted by God in the beginning as an indissoluble union of man and woman and transformed by Christ into a living and efficacious sign of his love for the Church.”

“The goal of this path will be for these baptized persons to be able to live in accord with the words of Jesus,” Bishop Reig wrote. “Only when they are disposed to take this step will they be able to receive sacramental absolution and the Holy Eucharist.”

He emphasized that “the objective conditions required by the Magisterium of the Church in order to be able to be admitted to the reception of the sacraments remain in force. These objective conditions were expressed by Pope St. John Paul II in the exhortation Familiaris consortio 84, ratified by Benedict XVI (Sacramentum caritatis 29) and contained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1650. Moreover, in 2000 the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts published its Declaration Concerning the Admission to Holy Communion of Faithful Who are Divorced and Remarried.”

“It is by following these principles that we are to receive the magisterium of Pope Francis expressed in chapter eight of the exortation Amoris laetitia. That is, in continuity with the preceding magisterium (cf. Amoris laetitia chapter 3).”

Bishop Reig said that Pope Francis’ proposal “consists in promoting a greater outreach” to the divorced-and-remarried and “in promoting an itinerary that permits those who are in irregular situations to return to a life in conformity with the words of Jesus.”

“The discernment which the Pope asks of us refers to the path which we are called to travel, and not to the goal we must reach.”

He added, quoting from Familiaris consortio, that it is necessary to remember particularly that on the basis of Sacred Scripture and Tradition, the Church does not admit the divorced-and-remarried to Communion, because “their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist … Reconciliation in the sacrament of Penance which would open the way to the Eucharist, can only be granted to those who, repenting of having broken the sign of the Covenant and of fidelity to Christ, are sincerely ready to undertake a way of life that is no longer in contradiction to the indissolubility of marriage. This means, in practice, that when, for serious reasons, such as for example the children’s upbringing, a man and a woman cannot satisfy the obligation to separate, they ‘take on themselves the duty to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.’”

“That is an objective requirement which does not admit of exception and whose fulfillment must be the object of careful discernment in the internal forum; no priest may be considered to have the authority to dispense with this requirement,” Bishop Reig taught.

He noted that the diocesan office for family counseling and its tribunal are both available as an aid to priests and families dealing with irregular situations.

Amoris laetitia “encourages us, as was already affirmed in Familiaris consortio 84, to open paths of accompaniment which will help these persons to take steps to have the capacity to live the sacramental truth of their situation,” the bishop concluded.

“This is the concrete way to live mercy toward these brethren, offering them a Love which heals their wounds and permits them to live the plenitude of Communion with God and with the Church.”

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