Month: January 2020

Washington D.C., Jan 29, 2020 / 06:01 pm (CNA).- The US Department of State announced Wednesday the designation of 13 former Salvadoran military officials for their involvement in the November 1989 extrajudicial killing of six Jesuit priests and two others.

The 13 former soldiers will be ineligible for entry into the US.

“The United States supports the ongoing accountability, reconciliation, and peace efforts in El Salvador,” Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State, said Jan. 29. “We value our ongoing working relationship with the Salvadoran Armed Forces, but will continue to use all available tools and authorities, as appropriate, to address human rights violations and abuses around the world no matter when they occurred or who perpetrated them.”

“Today’s actions underscore our support for human rights and our commitment to promoting accountability for perpetrators and encouraging reconciliation and a just and lasting peace.”

The Salvadoran Civil War was fought from 1979 to 1992 between the country’s right-wing military government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, a left-wing revolutionary group.

The Jesuits in El Salvador were active proponents of peace talks and negotiation between the government and the FMLN.

On Nov. 16, 1989 a unit of the Salvadoran Army dragged from their beds six Jesuits at the Central American University in San Salvador and shot them. The priests’ cook-housekeeper and her daughter were also shot.

It is believed that the Jesuits were ordered to be executed for their apparent support of the FMLN, who had recently launched an offensive.

The priests killed were Ignacio Ellacuría, rector of UCA; Ignacio Martín-Baró; Segundo Montes; Amando López; Joaquín López y López; and Juan Ramón Moreno Pardo. All were Spaniards except for López y López, a Salvadoran.

The priest’s housekeeper Elba Ramos and her 15-year-old daughter Celina were also killed.

The soldiers left a message at the site of the killings meant to implicate the FMLN.

The extrajudicial killings garnered international attention, and increased pressure for a peace settlement.

Pompeo said Jan. 29 that the US “condemns all human rights abuses that took place on both sides of the brutal civil war in El Salvador, including those committed by governmental and non-governmental parties.”

The US was a supporter of the Salvadoran government during the war. The Atlacatl Battalion, which killed Fr. Ellacuría and his companions, was trained by American advisers.

The State Department said Jan. 29 it had credible information that the 13 former Salvadoran military personnel “were involved in the planning and execution of the extrajudicial killings” of November 1989.

It listed Juan Rafael Bustillo, Juan Orlando Zepeda, Inocente Orlando Montano Morales, Francisco Elena Fuentes, Guillermo Alfredo Benavides Moreno, Yusshy René Mendoza Vallecillos, José Ricardo Espinoza Guerra, Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos, Carlos Camilo Hernández Barahona, Oscar Mariano Amaya Grimaldi, Antonio Ramiro Avalos Vargas, Angel Pérez Vásquez, and José Alberto Sierra Ascencio, who it said ranged in rank from general to private.

The 13 were designated under the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act 2019, which bars them and their immediately family members from entering the US.

Montano was a colonel, and deputy minister for public security at the time of the killings. He was extradited from the US to Spain in 2017 to stand trial over the murders. He had been in US custody for six years, after being arrested for charges of immigration fraud.

In May 2019, Spanish prosecutors asked that Montano be given 150 years imprisonment for his role in the “terrorist assassinations”, saying he participated in the decision, design, and execution of the murders.

They believe that Montano was a witness when the head of the army’s joint chiefs of staff René Emilio Ponce (who died in 2011) ordered Colonel Benavides, the head of the Salvadoran military academy, to assassinate Fr. Ellacuría, leaving no witnesses.

Benavides and Lieutenant Mendoza were convicted of the killings by a Salvadoran court, but were released in 1993 after an amnesty law was passed covering all crimes committed during the civil war.

That amnesty law was struck down by the Salvadoran Supreme Court in 2016, and Benavides returned to prison, with the court declining to extradite him to Spain. The following year the Society of Jesus and the UCA asked that Benavides’ sentence be commuted.

Spanish prosecutors have also asked for five years imprisonment for Mendoza.

Zepeda, the deputy defense minister, had claimed the priests were complicit in the murder of the Salvadoran attorney general, saying that “the enemy is among us. They must be identified and denounced. Therefore, therefore, we will make the final decision to resolve this situation.”

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Washington D.C., Jan 29, 2020 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have spoken out against a Supreme Court decision permitting a new “public charge” rule to go into effect. A statement released Wednesday said … […]

Los Angeles, Calif., Jan 29, 2020 / 04:00 pm (CNA).- Bishop Robert Barron has said the bishops should consider an official designation for Catholic teachers on social media. Bishop Barron is himself well known for his work promoting Catholic teaching o… […]

Richmond, Va., Jan 29, 2020 / 03:43 pm (CNA).- Virginia’s legislature has voted to repeal restrictions on abortions in the state. The state’s governor is expected to sign the repeal into law soon. 

The state’s House of Delegates… […]

Milwaukee, Wis., Jan 29, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- A Wisconsin Catholic women’s college has just announced plans to build housing welcoming both single mothers and retired nuns living in a residential community.

The project is a collaboration between Mount Mary University, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, who founded the college over a hundred years ago, and Milwaukee Catholic Home.

Mount Mary President Christine Pharr told CNA that the project will be a “big win-win” for students, single mothers, religious sisters, and campus life. She said the project will empower women of all ages.

Founded in 1913, Mount Mary University is a small, private Catholic college with about 1,200 undergraduates, all of whom are women, and 500 postgraduates, including both men and women.

The school will break ground on the project this summer and plans to complete the initiative by November 2021. The $45 million dollar project will consist of four buildings.

Within three of the buildings, there will be 90 apartments for sisters and other senior citizens, 24 dorm rooms for enrolled single mothers, and 52 assisted living units.

Those buildings will surround a “town center” that features a small clinic, dining services, a hair and nail salon, exercise facilities, and a chapel.

“It’ll have a beautiful two-story chapel in it, and many of the artifacts and the stained glass windows from the current convent will be brought over to this new venture to make sure that the heritage of the sisters is preserved as we go forward,” Pharr said.

One of the dorms will also offer on-site child care with space for 120 children. Pharr said about 10 percent of students at the college are single mothers.

While Pharr was vice-president of College of St Mary in Omaha, Nebraska, she witnessed the success of the college’s single mother dorm. Although she did not supervise the program, she said, she was able to become familiar with its operations and engage closely with the students.

Pharr emphasized the importance of providing mothers with the proper resources to overcome the barriers that prevent them from pursuing higher education. She pointed to statistics that show a growing trend of single mothers in higher education, but with much lower graduation rates than women without children.

“If you’re looking at data over maybe the last 15, 20 years, the number of single mothers returning to college has increased significantly nationally. About 11% of college students are single mothers in the state,” she said.

“There’s about 32,000 single mothers who are college students, and yet their graduation rates are less than half of women without children. The obstacles that they face are rather significant: affordable housing, quality childcare, transportation, [and] just plain financing that can allow them the resources to go to a university and get an education.”

Pharr said that through grant programs, the university has been able to provide academic tutoring, counseling, advising, emergency loans, and food assistance to single mothers.

“This is important because it provides a place for single mothers to get an education in a safe environment. As a small Catholic institution, we provide tremendous resources to our students,” she said.

“I think at this institution, the potential to provide an environment where these women can be successful when they might not be living out in the community commuting, trying to address all of those other issues.”

Pharr said the housing project has been in the development over the past couple years as a response to the order’s declining number of nuns and an increase in retired sisters. When the project was initially under development, she said the order was looking at opening the space to non-religious elderly people.

Pharr had the idea to include single mothers.

Many of the nuns who will live on campus now live in convents elsewhere. Since many sisters had been involved with the school, Pharr said they are excited to come back to campus. She noted the importance the nuns’ presence will have on student life, bringing a light to the mothers, students, and to the sisters themselves.

“I think having the sisters in proximity to students and children will allow them to really stay young and be excited about the kinds of things they see happening on campus. It’ll be a short walk over to seminars. They can take classes; they can participate in events on campus much easier,” Pharr said.

The campus is planning for both serendipitous and planned interactions among the students, families, and nuns, Pharr said. The sisters, besides running into students on campus more, will be able to share meals in the dining room with both students and children. She also said the clinic and day-care center will become a learning opportunity.

“We also have what we call planned interactions. So in other words, intergenerational learning opportunities. We hope that the early childhood education center [will] be a lab school, which will allow for our education majors to actually learn and participate in early childhood education.”

“In addition, we have programs in occupational therapy and nursing and social work and numerous others where we will have onsite clinical opportunities and internships so that the students can learn and be in direct connection with the sisters and the seniors.”

Pharr emphasized the value of the project – which will help mothers, campus life, and the nuns – noting that the project is deeply tied to the beliefs of the sisters.

“This is a great mission fit. The School Sisters of Notre Dame, part of their charism has always been to care for the needs of women and children. Mount Mary, in a similar manner, our vision statement says that we educate women to transform the world,” Pharr told CNA.

“To me, this is just one more way in which we can continue to empower women at all ages, whether they’re sisters, whether they’re seniors, whether they’re children or students.”

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Washington D.C., Jan 29, 2020 / 12:01 pm (CNA).- In the wake of basketball star and father-of-four-daughters Kobe Bryant’s death, #GirlDad has gone viral on social media with fathers sharing the unique joy of raising daughters. However, in many parts of the world, fewer girls are born than boys today because of sex-selective abortion.

Demographics experts say that “large-scale female feticide” has also occurred in the U.S. in the last decade, in a new analysis published Jan. 27.

“These new data are worrisome, if not alarming—for they demonstrate that large-scale female feticide has been taking place among certain U.S. sub-populations over the past decade,” researchers Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky found when they looked at U.S. birth statistics.

“The ‘global war against baby girls’ has opened a front in the United States of America,” they said.

The phenomenon of mass female feticide in Asia over the last 40 years has been driven by easily available or unconditional abortion access, cultural preferences for boys, and inexpensive prenatal gender determination technology, Eberstadt explains.

While the natural biological sex ratio at birth hovers around 103-105 boys born for every 100 baby girls, in China and India the ratios hit 115 and 111 respectively in 2017.

With the sex ratio skewed in the two most populous countries in the world, sex-selective abortion accounts for millions of “missing baby girls” each year.

Eberstadt and Abramsky’s 2020 analysis also found unnatural imbalances in sex ratios at birth in the U.S. among foreign-born mothers from China and India.

Among foreign-born Chinese mothers, more than 110 boys were born for every 100 girls in the U.S. between 2014-2018. For the third child born, this figure jumps to 122.8 for Chinese foreign-born mothers and 115.3 for Indian foreign-born mothers.

The researchers conclude this can be understood as approximately 8,400 “missing” births of newborn girls in the U.S. from Chinese and Indian mothers between 2014-2018, while the exact number of sex-selective abortions that occurred among those sub-population groups is unclear.

Eberstadt and Abramsky said that they found “some measure of reassurance” in that there was  no conclusive evidence that the same sex ratio at birth (SRB) exists among Asian-Americans born in the U.S.

The abnormal trend only applies to foreign-born mothers from China and India, countries with “mass female feticide.”

This week over 100,000 people have posted photos of fathers and daughters on Instagram with #girldad in tribute to Kobe Bryant, who was the father of four girls. Bryant and his eldest daughter, Gianna, died in a helicopter accident Jan. 26, along with seven others.

The trend was sparked by ESPN analyst Elle Duncan, who shared a memory of a conversation with Bryant.

She said that she had asked Kobe Bryant if he wanted more children, even if there was a chance of having another girl, and said Bryant replied, without hesitation, “I would have 5 more girls if I could. I’m a girl dad.”

“I would have 5 more girls if I could. I’m a girl dad.”@elleduncanESPN‘s story about how much Kobe loved his daughters is something special. pic.twitter.com/1KJx17QRjY

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) January 28, 2020

Following the episode of Sports Center, professional athletes posted photos of themselves and their daughters online with #GirlDad, fathers across the globe followed suit.

“This is trending nationwide because there’s no greater or more significant relationship than that of a dad and his daughter(s),” Duncan wrote on Twitter Jan. 28 with a post that linked to the thousands of family photos shared with her in the past few days.

Please if you’re feeling any kind of way, scroll through this feed and look at all these PROUD #girldad ‘s .. this is trending nationwide because there’s no greater or more significant relationship than that of a dad and his daughter(s) .. i hope it eases your blues. ?? pic.twitter.com/DbUQVbVO22

— Elle Duncan (@elleduncanESPN) January 28, 2020

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Denver, Colo., Jan 29, 2020 / 10:57 am (CNA).- A Colorado web designer is challenging a state law she says could be enforced against her if she doesn’t create material that promotes same-sex weddings.

“The government shouldn’t threaten a web designer with fines to force her to publish websites that violate her beliefs,” Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Jonathan Scruggs said Jan. 22.

“As Colorado itself admits, Lorie works with all people; she just doesn’t promote all messages. The state must protect, not threaten, the freedom of online speakers and other artists to choose which messages to express through their own projects.”

The religious freedom legal group in September 2016 filed the lawsuit on behalf of Lorie Smith, a web designer who operates the design studio 303 Creative. In September 2019 a federal district court order finalized a ruling dismissing the lawsuit, but the attorneys are appealing.

The case is not a response to government action. Rather, it is a pre-enforcement challenge intended to prevent the use of the law that Smith’s attorneys say affects creative professionals who have religious or moral concerns about creating content that violates their beliefs.

Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act bars creative professionals from expressing views about marriage that suggest someone is “unwelcome, objectionable, unacceptable, or undesirable.” They may not express views that suggest the designer won’t create particular works because of those beliefs, Alliance Defending Freedom said.

Smith’s attorneys say the law violates the U.S. Constitution, including the free speech and free press provisions of the First Amendment. They say courts have questioned the constitutionality of similar laws in Minnesota and Arizona.

On Jan. 22 they filed their brief to appeal to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Failure to secure a court ruling against the law, they say, would force Smith to live under threat of prosecution if she declines to design and publish websites that promote messages or causes that conflict with her beliefs.

“The district court shouldn’t have ‘assumed’ Lorie’s decision to act consistently with her conscience was illegal without any analysis of that question, especially when other courts have upheld free speech rights in similar contexts,” said Scruggs.

The legal brief says Smith “gladly serves everyone no matter who they are” but “she cannot create all content requested—including content that demeans, incites violence, or promotes any conception of marriage other than between one man and one woman.”

The brief says that Colorado officials concede that Smith serves people regardless of status, does not discriminate against LGBT persons, and only refers customers to other businesses on the basis of a requested message.

The brief charges that the state anti-discrimination law would “force Lorie to create websites celebrating same-sex weddings” and to “ban Lorie from posting a statement explaining the content she can create.”

“This attack on Lorie’s faith and editorial freedom targets ‘the fundamental First Amendment rule’—that ‘a speaker has the autonomy to choose the content of (her) own message’,” the brief continued.

At issue is the same law that brought Lakewood, Colo. baker Jack Philips and his business Masterpiece Cakeshop to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2012, Philips declined to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, on the grounds that doing so would violate his religious beliefs. His prospective customers filed a complaint, and Philips went before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

The civil rights commission ordered Phillips and his staff to undergo anti-discrimination training and to submit quarterly reports on how he is changing company policies. He had to cease making wedding cakes to continue operating his business according to his conscience while not running afoul of the law.

In June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Colorado commission had violated Phillips’ rights.

The 7-2 opinion said the commission “showed elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection.”

The high court also cited inconsistent treatment of complaints by Colorado authorities. When a man complained that other bakeries refused to create cakes with an anti-gay marriage message, religious imagery and loosely paraphrased Bible passages, state authorities rejected the complaints.

Phillips was then caught up in a controversy when a prospective customer asked him to make a cake to celebrate a gender transition, and he declined citing his religious beliefs. The customer complained to state officials that this constituted discrimination on the basis of gender identity, but this was rejected.

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