Trump tweet latest twist in Archbishop Vigano saga

Washington D.C., Jul 17, 2017 / 04:31 am (CNA).- Travis Rieder and his wife Sadiye have one child.

She wanted a big family, but he’s a philosopher who studies climate change with the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. One child of their own was all the world could environmentally afford, they decided.

In his college classes, Rieder asks his students to consider how old their children will be by 2036, when he expects dangerous climate change to be a reality. Do they want to raise a family in the midst of that crisis?

Many scientists concur that the earth is currently in a warming phase – and that if the earth’s average temperatures rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius, the effects would be disastrous.

The 2015 Paris Agreement, signed by nearly 200 countries within the United Nations, aims to address just that. Signatory countries agreed to work to keep the global temperature from increasing by two degrees through lowering their greenhouse gas emissions, and to work together on adapting to the effects of climate change that are already a reality.

But reproductive solutions, such as the ones proposed by Rieder, are wildly controversial for the ethical and moral questions they raise.

Penalizing parents

In his book “Toward a Small Family Ethic,” Rieder and two of his peers advocate for limited family size because of what they believe is an impending climate change catastrophe.

They suggest a “carrots for the poor, sticks for the rich” population control policy, which they insist is not like China’s harsh one-child policy.

For poor developing nations, they suggest paying women to fill their birth control and widespread media campaigns about smaller families and family planning. For wealthier nations, they suggest a type of “child tax,” which would penalize new parents with a progressive tax based on income that would increase with each new child.

“(C)hildren, in a kind of cold way of looking at it, are an externality,” Rieder told NPR. “We as parents, we as family members, we get the good. And the world, the community, pays the cost.”

While it might sound strange, the idea that climate change and overpopulation morally necessitate couples to limit their family size (or to have no children at all) is not new.

Since the 1960s, some scientists have been advocating for smaller families for various reasons – overpopulation, climate cooling, the development of Africa – and now, global warming and climate change.

And while the idea isn’t new, neither are the moral and ethical concerns associated with asking parents to limit their family size for the sake of the planet.

Should Catholics limit their family size?

Ultimately, Catholics ethicists said, while environmental concerns can certainly factor into lifestyle choices, those who would ask people to completely forego children simply due to their carbon footprint are approaching the topic from the wrong perspective, not realizing the immeasurable worth and dignity of every human person.

“The proposals (on limited family size)…need to be assessed with a perspective as to the very nature of the human person, marital relationships, and society,” Dr. Marie T. Hilliard told CNA.

Hilliard serves as the director of bioethics and public policy at The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC), a center designed specifically to answer the moral bioethical dilemmas that Catholics face in the modern world.

What’s problematic about the policies proposed by Rieder and other scientists is that they ask married couples to frustrate one of the purposes of their sexuality, Hilliard said.

“(T)he procreative end of marriage must be respective. Couples cannot enter into a valid marriage with the intent of frustrating that critical end, and one of the purposes of marriage,” she said. If couples are not open to the possibility of a child, “it frustrates at least one of the two critical ends of marriage: procreation and the wellbeing of the spouses.”  

Dr. Christian Brugger is a Catholic moral theologian and professor with St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver. He clarified that while the Church asks couples to be open to life, it does not ask that they practice “unlimited procreation.”

“The Catholic Church has never held – and has many times denied – that responsible parenthood means ‘unlimited procreation’ or the encouragement of blind leaps into the grave responsibilities of child raising,” he said.

“It does mean respecting marriage, respecting the moral principles in the transmission of human life, respecting developing human life from conception to natural death, and promoting and defending a social order manifestly dedicated to the common good.”

Considering the common good can include considering the environment, as well as a host of other factors that pertain to the flourishing of the human person, when couples are considering parenting another child, Brugger said.

But he cautioned Catholics against the moral conclusions of scientists whose views on life and human sexuality differ greatly from Church teaching.

“Catholics should not make decisions about family size based upon the urgings of these activists,” he said.  

“Why? Because they hold radically different values about human life, marriage, sex, procreation, and family, and therefore their moral conclusions about the transmission of human life are untrustworthy.”  

“(P)opulation scare-mongering has been going on in a globally organized fashion for 70 years. The issues that population activists use to promote their anti-natalist agendas change over time…But the urgent conclusion is always the same: the world needs less people; couples should stop having children,” he said.

And many worry that legislated policies encouraging and rewarding smaller families could open up a host of ethical and moral problems.

Rebecca Kukla of Georgetown University told NPR that she worries about the stigma such policies would unleash on larger families. She also worried that while a “child tax” might not be high enough to be considered coercive, it would be unfair, and would favor the wealthy.

Hilliard agreed.

“(A) carte blanche imperative to limit family size can lead us to the dangers the (NPR article) cites, as discrimination and bias and government mandates can, and have, ensued,” Hilliard said.

Women in particular would bear the brunt of the resulting stigmas of such policies, Brugger noted.

“(W)omen will and already do suffer the greatest burden from this type of social coercion. Women have always been the guardians of the transmission of human life. They share both the godlike privilege of bearing life within them and the most weighty burdens of that privilege. Anti-natalist demagoguery is always anti-woman, always,” Brugger said.

All things considered, the Catholic Church would never take away the right and responsibility of parents to determine their family size by supporting a policy that would ask families to limit their size because of climate change, he said.  

It’s not people, it’s your lifestyle

William Patenaude is a Catholic ecologist, engineer and longtime employee with Rhode Island’s Department of Environmental Management. He frequently blogs about ecology from a Catholic perspective at catholicecology.net.

The idea that we must choose between the planet or people, he told CNA, is a “false choice.” The problem isn’t numbers of people – it’s the amount each person is consuming.

“The US Environmental Protection Agency reports that in 1960 the United States produced some 88 million tons of municipal waste. In 2010 that number climbed to just under 250 million tons—and it may have been higher had a recession not slowed consumption. This jump reflects an almost 184 percent increase in what Americans throw out even though our population increased by only 60 percent,” he wrote in a blog post about the topic.

There is a similar trend in carbon emissions, which increase at a faster rate than the population.

“We can infer from this that individuals (especially in places like the USA) are consuming and wasting more today than we ever have, which gets to what Pope Francis has been telling us about lifestyles, which is consistent with his predecessors,” Patenaude told CNA.

Climate change has been one of the primary concerns of Pope Francis’ pontificate. While not the first Pope to address such issues, his persistence in addressing the environment has brought a new awareness of the urgency of the issue to other Church leaders.

In May 2015, Pope Francis published “Laudato Si,” the first encyclical devoted primarily to care for creation.

In it, the Holy Father wrote that the earth “now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.”

But never does the Pope ask families to have fewer children. Instead, he urges Catholics to address pollution and climate change, to make simple lifestyle changes that better care for “our common home” and to work toward a better human ecology.  

“It seems that voices that urge fewer children aren’t interested in new and temperate lifestyles. In fact, they are implicitly demanding that modern consumption levels be allowed to stay as they are – or even to rise. This seems selfish and gluttonous, and not at all grounded in a concern for life, nature, or the common good,” Patenaude said.

Furthermore, the good of any individual person outweighs the damage of their potential carbon footprint, he said.

“The good and dignity and worth of every human person is superseded by nothing else on this planet. If we don’t affirm that first, we can never hope to be good stewards of creation, because we will never really be able to appreciate all life,” he said.

“On the other hand, one way to affirm the dignity of human life – collectively and individually – is to care for creation. Because as I noted earlier, creation is our physical life-support system, and so to authentically care for it is to care for human life.”

Dan Misleh is the executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant, which was formed in 2006 by the United States Catholic Bishops in order to help implement Church social teaching regarding climate change.

Misleh agreed that while reducing the consumption of fossil fuels is “imperative” to reducing negative effects of climate change like droughts and rising sea levels, that does not mean mandated population engineering and smaller families.

“As for population, places like the U.S., Japan and many European countries have both high carbon emissions and relatively low population growth and birth rates. So there is not a direct correlation between low-birth rates and fewer emissions. In fact, the opposite often seems to be true: countries with the highest birthrates are often the poorest countries with very low per-capita emissions,” he told CNA.

What is needed is a true “ecological conversion,” like Pope Francis called for in Laudato Si, Misleh said.  

“(P)erhaps we Catholics need to view a commitment to a simple lifestyle not as a sacrifice but as an opportunity to live more in keeping with the biblical mandate to both care for and cultivate the earth, to spend more time on relationships than accumulating things, and to step back to appreciate the good things we have rather than all the things we desire.”

This article was originally published on CNA Oct. 27, 2016.

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Washington D.C., Jan 22, 2020 / 04:05 pm (CNA).- States should not deny tax credit programs to families who choose religious private schools, said members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case addressing the issue of school choice.

“The case before the Supreme Court today concerns whether the Constitution offers states a license to discriminate against religion,” said Bishop George Murry of Youngstown, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty, and Bishop Michael Barber of Oakland, head of the Committee on Catholic Education.

“Our country’s tradition of non-establishment of religion does not mean that governments can deny otherwise available benefits on the basis of religious status,” they said in a Jan. 22 statement.

“Indeed, religious persons and organizations should, like everyone else, be allowed to participate in government programs that are open to all. This is an issue of justice for people of all faith communities.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. Kendra Espinoza, a mother of two daughters attending a Christian school in Kalispell, Montana, is the lead plaintiff in the case.

An 1889 amendment to the Montana state constitution, known as a Blaine Amendment, prohibits both direct and indirect state aid to religious institutions. The amendment was passed a second time when the state constitution was revised and rewritten in 1972.

The Montana Supreme Court originally decided the case 5-2 during late 2018.

That ruling found that the state’s tax credit program, which began in 2015 and provided for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for a person’s donation to nonprofit student scholarship organizations, was allowing the Montana legislature to “indirectly pay tuition at private, religiously-affiliated schools” in violation of state law.

The Supreme Court granted cert to the case June 28, 2019.

Montana is just one of 38 states with similar “no-aid” provisions in its constitution, NPR reports.

So-called Blaine Amendments have their roots in anti-Catholic sentiment of the late 19th century, according to historians and religious liberty advocates.

In the years following the Civil War, there was widespread suspicion and even open hostility toward Catholics in the U.S., especially toward immigrant Catholic populations from Europe.

Public schools at the time were largely Protestant, with no single Christian denomination in charge, and many Catholics attended parochial schools which were seen as “sectarian” by prominent public figures, historian John T. McGreevy explained in his book “Catholicism and American Freedom.”

Public figures, he notes, including one current and one future U.S. president at the time, pushed against taxpayer funding of Catholic schools and even advocated for an increase in the taxation of Catholic Church property in the U.S.

President Ulysses S. Grant pushed for a 1875 federal amendment by Sen. James Blaine of Maine that prohibited taxpayer funding of “sectarian” schools – the original “Blaine Amendment.” It failed in the Senate, but the federal amendment took form at the state level and many states eventually passed versions of the bill barring state funding of Catholic schools.

In the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision Mitchell v. Helms, a four-justice plurality insisted that the Blaine Amendment’s motive to deny public funding of “sectarian” institutions was bigoted, particularly against Catholics. The court ruled that a religious school could receive a federal grant under certain conditions.

In 2017, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer that a church property couldn’t be barred from a state renovation program simply on account of its religious affiliation.

“This case [Espinoza] is not only about constitutional law. It is about whether our nation will continue to tolerate this strain of anti-Catholic bigotry,” the bishops continued.

“Blaine Amendments…were never meant to ensure government neutrality towards religion, but were expressions of hostility toward the Catholic Church. We hope that the Supreme Court will take this opportunity to bring an end to this shameful legacy.”

The Second Vatican Council’s 1965 declaration on Christian education, Gravissimum educationis, said that parents “must enjoy true liberty in their choice of schools.”

“Consequently, the public power, which has the obligation to protect and defend the rights of citizens, must see to it, in its concern for distributive justice, that public subsidies are paid out in such a way that parents are truly free to choose according to their conscience the schools they want for their children,” the document states.

President Donald Trump on Jan. 16 issued new rules for nine federal agencies. The rules seek to ensure that federal government social service programs are administered in line with the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, so that religious groups are not barred simply on account of their religious status.

The National Catholic Educational Association, which includes more than 150,000 educators serving 1.9 million Catholic school students across the U.S., is supportive of a proposed plan to create a federal tax credit-based scholarship program that could provide a boost for parents who want to send their children to Catholic school. The proposed scheme, which the U.S. Department of Education calls Education Freedom Scholarships, would be funded through taxpayers’ voluntary contributions to state-identified Scholarship Granting Organizations.

Should the proposal become law, donors will receive a federal tax credit equal to their contribution.

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Washington D.C., Nov 27, 2018 / 08:00 am (CNA).- Pope Francis has chosen Bishop Daniel Elias Garcia as the new Bishop of Monterey, California. The diocese of Monterey has been without a bishop since the death of Bishop Richard Garcia in July.

The announcement was made Tuesday, Nov. 27, and released by both the Vatican press office and the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, D.C.

Bishop Daniel Garcia has served as auxiliary bishop in the Diocese of Austin since his consecration on March 3, 2015. He was the first auxiliary bishop in the history of the diocese.

A native of Texas, Garcia was born in the city of Cameron in 1960. After earning his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Divinity degrees from St. Mary’s Seminary at the University of St. Thomas, he was ordained to the priesthood for the diocese of Austin in 1988. He received a Master of Arts in Liturgical Studies from the Saint John’s School of Theology in 2007.

Garcia spent several years in parochial ministry in Austin, serving in the parishes of St. Catherine of Siena, Cristo Rey, St. Louis, and St. Vincent de Paul. He also spent three years in the parish of St. Mary Magdalene, in Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.

In the Diocese of Austin, Garcia has held numerous administrative assignments including serving as a member of the Priests’ Personnel Board, the College of Consultors, and the Diocesan Liturgical Commission. He has also been both a member and later chairman of the Presbyteral Council.

Garcia is a current member of the U.S. bishops’ conference’s committees on communications and divine worship, and is the chairman of the subcommittee on Spanish language worship. He is also a consultant to the USCCB’s subcommittee on Hispanic affairs.

The Diocese of Monterey covers an area of 21,916 square miles and is home to more than 200,000 Catholics, some 20 percent of the total population. Upon his installation, Garcia will become the fifth bishop of Monterey.  

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