CNA Staff, Sep 18, 2020 / 01:00 am (CNA).- Paschal Uche woke up early on the morning of Sept. 18, 2010, a day that would change his life. He needed to set off in good time in order to pass through security at the event he was attending in central Londo… […]
CNA Staff, Sep 18, 2020 / 12:00 am (CNA).- The Archbishop of Valencia said Sunday that if Spain’s euthanasia and assisted suicide bill is passed, it would be a “major and historic defeat for all of Spain, for Spanish society.”
“It is a defeat also for humanity, for man himself, for the legislature to take up the bill on euthanasia, assisted suicide, and to reject other proposals on palliative care that improved the current legislation,” Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera wrote Sept. 13.
The prelate also called the proposed euthanasia law “monstrous” and an “injustice.”
Directly addressing the country’s president, government officials, department heads, and legislators, Cañizares challenged: “Realize that you as a government or as parliamentarians should defend, protect, and guard the common good, based on fundamental rights and duties of the society you represent, the first of which is the right to life.”
But in reality “you have become enemies, who oppose society, ready to defeat that society you represent and must protect, by advocating such a bill, which spreads and expands a culture of death,” he said.
The Archbishop of Valencia pointed to the fact that the bill is being advanced through the legislative process amid the Covid-19 pandemic, so “what credibility can you hold on to in the face of that pandemic? With what moral authority can you address this people and ask us what is being asked of us? Aren’t you seen as a sign of contradiction?”
The cardinal said there’s still time left, and appealed to the authorities to make corrections to the bill, “as is so often done in government management or in parliamentary tasks and responsibilities.”
Cañizares stressed that he’s not “interfering in politics” but that his “responsibility as bishop and as a citizen doesn’t allow me to remain silent.”
The Archbishop of Valencia faulted the media for concentrating on unrelated side issues and giving scant attention to the euthanasia bill.
“Euthanasia, which does not constitute an historical defeat of a government, but a defeat of an entire state, and which is an infinitely greater and serious problem, even if you don’t see it that way, and I respect you,” he pointed out.
“Legislation like that doesn’t make for a true fraternity of authentic brothers of a new civilization of love that builds peace and is capable of facing the pandemic,” the cardinal concluded his exhortation.
The Spanish bishops’ conference issued a statement Sept. 14 calling instead for a palliative care law because “there are no patients who cannot be cared for, even if they are incurable.”
A version of this story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
CNA Staff, Sep 17, 2020 / 07:25 pm (CNA).- According to L’Avvenire, the official newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, those who have criticized the controversial French movie “Cuties,” released by Netflix last week “have not seen it or have really limited themselves to the poster. Otherwise they have not understood it or have looked at it with the wrong eyes.”
A review of the film, entitled “The boycott: Cuties is a hard, but educational movie,” and written by the newspaper’s TV critic Andrea Fagioli, claims that the film “does not revolve around a ‘scandalous sexualization of adolescents’ nor does it obviously ‘simulate pedophilia,’ as some of the more than 600,000 signatories of a petition against (Netflix) have claimed.”
In his review, Fagioli describes the story of Amy, the film’s main character, her struggles to integrate into Western culture and her eventual introduction to a provocative dance troupe, at age 11.
In Fagioli’s words, “Amy will become the leader, pushing the group towards an ever more daring dance. And here lies the controversial point, because the director absolutely does not force her hand on the sensual aspect. On the contrary: she tries to highlight, albeit in a contradictory picture, their innocence.”
“The problem, therefore, is not these kids who grow up too fast for certain things without having sufficient maturity or the necessary immune defenses. The problem is the world we have created around it,” with absent parents and too much social media, he argues.
“All this the director makes clear, even if the film cannot be presented to everyone. But when read correctly and presented well, ‘Mignonnes’ (‘Cuties’) can become an educational film,” Fagioli wrote.
The L’Avvenire review does not contain criticism of elements that have been lambasted across in the United States and Latin America, including long scenes of provocative dances, scantily clad 11-year-old girls performing in front of adults, camera movements deliberately focusing on private parts, or the inclusion of the naked breasts of a teenager.
Criticism of those aspects of the film have come not only from conservatives or religious groups, but also from moderates and liberals, among the U.S. Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard wrote on Twitter: “child porn ‘Cuties’ will certainly whet the appetite of pedophiles & help fuel the child sex trafficking trade. 1 in 4 victims of trafficking are children. It happened to my friend’s 13 year old daughter. Netflix, you are now complicit.”
The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg, in a mostly positive review of the movie, acknowledged that “I can see how viewers might be turned off by the way Doucouré shoots the dance routines, using close-ups of her young actors’ bodies both to show us their abilities as dancers and to make us deliberately queasy.”
British journalist Izzy Schifano is another non-conservative critic. At UK website The Tab, Schifano wrote that the dancing throughout the film is about “biting their lips, twerking, squatting down and bouncing on their knees…Some of the dancing was so graphic I genuinely couldn’t watch.”
Schifano, who has positvely reviewed several risqué movies for The Tab, complained that in “Cuties,” “the camera panned up and down the girls’ bodies multiple times in the film, at points literally just zooming in” on the posteriors of children.
The analytics firm YipitData told Variety Magazine that on Saturday, Sept. 12, Netflix’s cancellation rate in the U.S. “jumped to nearly eight times higher than the average daily levels recorded in August 2020,” reaching a multiyear high, most likely as a consequence of the #CancelNetflix hashtag campaign.
The defense of the dubious by the ill-informed can lead to the preposterous – and that is precisely the slippery slope down which Villanova’s Massimo Faggioli careens in his critique of my recent Washington Post […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 17, 2020 / 12:45 pm (CNA).- Officials in Rome and Beijing are now confidently predicting an extension to the 2018 Vatican-China deal, despite continued persecution of Catholics in the country and […]
MADISON, Wisconsin — Students returned to the classrooms of St. Ambrose Academy this week under a Wisconsin Supreme Court temporary injunction that prevents the Dane County health agency from enforcing a COVID-19 school-closure order, just […]
CNA Staff, Sep 17, 2020 / 05:15 pm (CNA).- The Diocese of Amarillo has spoken out about election-related comments from Fr. Frank Pavone, the national director of the pro-life group Priests for Life, and asked prayers for the priest.
In a Sept. 16 stat… […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 17, 2020 / 05:00 pm (CNA).-
In an interview Wednesday, the chairman of the Federal Election Commission accused Catholic bishops of “hiding” behind the Church’s tax exempt status instead of backing political candidates, and insisted that priests and lay Catholics have a “right” to conduct political activity on parish premises.
The Catholic Church has had long-standing policies against endorsing particular candidates for political office. Experts in civil and canon law explained to CNA why Catholic clerics do not endorse political candidates, and why that issue touches on the religious liberty of the Church.
James E. Trainor, a Catholic, was appointed to the bipartisan commission by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate earlier this year. He spoke Wednesday in an interview with the website Church Militant.
In his interview, Trainor questioned the legal and moral authority of bishops to limit the endorsement of candidates from the pulpit and in the pews.
“I don’t think a bishop has the right to tell a priest that he can’t come out and speak… When the priest takes the vow [sic] of obedience to the bishop, it is in the area of faith and morals, but they have a higher duty to our Lord, and if the bishop is putting something out there that is not right then the priest has an obligation to the faithful to correct it,” he said.
Fr. Pius Pietrzyk, OP, is a civil and canon lawyer who was nominated by President Barack Obama and unanimously confirmed by the Senate to the Board of Directors of the Congressionally-funded Legal Services Corporation, which provides funding for legal aid programs.
The priest, who serves as a professor of canon law at St. Patrick’s University and Seminary in California, told CNA it is not the function of clergy to instruct the laity on who they should choose in the voting booth.
“The primary end of the Church is not the ordering of civil society,” he told CNA. “The primary end of the Church is the sanctification of humanity,” he said. “While the Church is concerned that secular society be just and moral, the prudential decisions on carrying that out is properly the role of lay people in the world.”
“While it is true, as the Second Vatican Council said in Gaudium et Spes, ‘the Church and the political community in their own fields are autonomous and independent from each other,’ that autonomy of the secular world does not mean an autonomy from natural and divine law. The Church must grant to the secular government its legitimate autonomy, and the legitimate freedom of Catholics within a particular country to participate in that governance.”
“Nonetheless,” he said, “the Church has a right and duty to elucidate the moral precepts that guide a society in properly fostering the common good.”
Trainor also said bishops are too cautious about their ability to engage directly in partisan politics under civil law.
“The bishops are using their nonprofit status as a shield to hide behind,” he said, “from having to make a decision about who to support [in the elections].”
He charged that bishops choose to be silent on political matters out of concern they might lose grants received by Catholic institutions for refugee resettlement and other federal programs.
Eric Kniffin, an attorney specializing in First Amendment and religious freedom cases, told CNA that, in practice, bishops have little reason to be concerned about government ramifications from political speech.
“The Internal Revenue Code, on its face, bars tax-exempt organizations—including churches and other religious organizations—from saying anything ‘on behalf of’ or ‘in opposition to’ a political candidate,” Kniffen said. “This restriction, often referred to as the ‘Johnson Amendment,’ is still on the books, even though President Trump has directed the IRS to be lenient in its enforcement of the law.
“At a practical level, the federal government has not had much appetite to enforce this rule,” Kniffin, who has worked for the Department of Justice and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told CNA.
During the interview, Trainor also said that in his view, civil law prevents bishops from prohibiting their priests from endorsing candidates.
“If you look at it just from a legal perspective, the priest to bishop is still an employer-employee relationship and that’s the employer telling the employee what they can and cannot do.”
“We don’t tolerate that anywhere else, in fact there has been this huge uproar over NFL owners not allowing players on the field to be able to protest.”
But Kniffin told CNA that the comparison to NFL franchises was inapt, and that the legal ability of churches to regulate the actions of clergy is well established.
“The Supreme Court recently affirmed that the First Amendment’s church autonomy doctrine guarantees churches ‘independence in matters of faith and doctrine and in closely linked matters of internal government,’” he told CNA. “This doctrine prevents government from interfering with the relationship between churches and their members and between churches and their ‘ministerial’ employees.”
Fr. Pietrzyk explained that in the mind and law of the Church, the relationship between a bishop and priest is much more than employer-employee.
“It is completely inappropriate, and a violation of the Church’s legitimate autonomy, an autonomy recognized in the First Amendment to the Constitution, for a federal official to opine, under the cloak of that office, on the duty of obedience owed by a priest to his bishop,” he said.
“There is a tendency among U.S. government officials – whether federal bureaucracies or local judges – to try to fit the Church into a secular category,” he told CNA.
“Certainly there are aspects of the bishop-priest relationship that look like employment. The diocese usually pays the priest’s salary, provides him health insurance, etc. But it is an ongoing mistake on the part of secular authority, and indeed a violation of the freedom of religion, to force the employer-employee model as the primary or only way of understanding that relationship,” the priest added.
“The document Christus Dominus, a decree from the Second Vatican Council on the Pastoral Office of the Bishop, said that, ‘[Bishops] should regard the priests as sons and friends.’”
“At the same time,” Pietrzyk told CNA, “the bishop is the head of the diocese, as a father in a family. The ministry of the priest depends on his submission to the legitimate authority of his bishop. Thus, as Pope St. John Paul II wrote, ‘there can be no genuine priestly ministry except in communion with the one’s own Bishop, who deserves that filial respect and obedience.’”
“Every Catholic, and even more so a priest, has a duty to submit to the legitimate governance of their bishop,” he said.
George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told CNA that in his view Trainer’s comments reflected a serious misunderstanding of the relationship between priests and bishops in the Church.
“Mr. Trainor seems woefully ill-informed about the relationship between the bishop and priests of a diocese,” Weigel said.
“He also seems to think of his fellow-Catholics as dolts who require specific instructions on voting from their religious leaders.”
Weigel reflected on a longstanding American anti-Catholic stereotype that bishops and priests direct Catholics about how to cast their votes.
Trainor’s view “mirrors the false charge laid against Catholic immigrants for decades by anti-Catholic bigots, which suggests that Mr. Trainor is also not very well versed in U.S. Catholic history,” Weigel said.
Fr. Pietrzyk told CNA that as chairman of the FEC, Trainer “is certainly free to opine on the freedom, in American law, he is not competent, however, to evaluate the provisions of ecclesiastical law.”
“The ministry of a priest in a sacred place, like a church, may be legitimately directed by a bishop,” Pietrzyk said.
“In addition, preaching within a sacred place, even a parish church, may be regulated by the diocesan bishop. Absent that guidance, a pastor does exercise that authority within his own parish. However, simply because he is the pastor does not give him the right to act contrary to the directives of his own pastor, the bishop.”
“As Pope St. John Paul II emphasized, the ministry of the pastor is not genuine when it runs contrary to the legitimate direction of his local bishop.”
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 17, 2020 / 04:01 pm (CNA).- A man has been charged after he decapitated a statue of Christ in El Paso, while the NYPD is looking for a man who threw a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe into the sidewalk outside a church in … […]
CNA Staff, Sep 17, 2020 / 03:25 pm (CNA).- The archbishop of San Francisco penned an op-ed in the Washington Post this week citing the First Amendment as he called for city officials to relax the current restrictions on public worship, which are some o… […]
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