Month: October 2020

Hartford, Conn., Oct 31, 2020 / 12:30 pm (CNA).-  

Fr. Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus, was beatified October 31, at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Hartford, Connecticut. He will now be known as “Blessed Michael McGivne… […]

CNA Staff, Oct 30, 2020 / 04:43 pm (CNA).- The Diocese of Brooklyn announced Friday the retirement of Octavio Cisneros from the office of auxiliary bishop. The Cuban-born bishop will remain in ministry as pastor at a local parish.

Cisneros had turned 75 in July. Diocesan bishops are required by canon law to submit their resignation to the pope upon reaching age 75. Pope Francis accepted Cisneros’ resignation Friday.

Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn voiced gratitude for Cisneros.

“I am grateful to Bishop Cisneros for his willingness to serve and was honored to ordain him and consecrate him as an auxiliary Bishop on June 6, 2006,” said DiMarzio in a statement.

“He will remain as pastor at the Church of the Holy Child Jesus & St. Benedict Joseph Labre in Richmond Hill, Queens, and will continue to serve as Vicar for Hispanic Concerns. We thank Bishop Cisneros for his years of Diocesan leadership and are grateful he will continue to serve the Diocese in Brooklyn and Queens.”

In an Oct. 30 statement, Cisneros expressed his appreciation for the opportunity to serve as a bishop and for the dedication of Pope Francis to the clergy.

“I am most grateful to Pope Benedict and Bishop DiMarzio for giving me the fullness of the priesthood in 2006 so that I can help minister as auxiliary bishop, which has been rewarding and fulfilling for me,” he said.

“I am thankful to Pope Francis for his continued support of our bishops. He is an inspiration for all of us. I have lived a very happy priesthood in the Diocese of Brooklyn for 49 years and look forward to continuing my priestly ministry.”

Cisneros was born in 1945 in Las Villas, Cuba. During high school in 1961, he moved to the United States as part of Operation Peter Pan, an undercover Catholic program that brought 14,000 unaccompanied minors to the U.S. from Cuba as political refugees during the rise of Fidel Castro.

In 1971, he was ordained a priest in the Diocese of Brooklyn. He served at several local parishes before being appointed as the rector of Cathedral Seminary Residence in Douglaston and the Episcopal Vicar in the Brooklyn East Vicariate. Pope John Paul II named Cisneros a Prelate of Honor in 1988.

Cisneros worked with the Bishop’s Committee on the Liturgy and the Pastors’ Advisory Committee, the Northeast Catholic Center for Hispanics, and the “Instituto Nacional Hispano de Liturgia.” He has served as the president of the Conference of Diocesan Directors for the Spanish Apostolate and on the board of governors for the Immaculate Conception Seminary.

On October 30, Cisneros celebrated a special Mass with the Cuban-American community at Our Lady of Sorrows parish. There, he presented a statue of Our Lady of Charity to Pastor Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez.

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CNA Staff, Oct 30, 2020 / 04:21 pm (CNA).- A strong majority of New Zealand voters approved the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia for the terminally ill Oct. 30. Foes of legalization said many voters appeared confused about the measure’s far-reaching effects and warned that the move will have consequences for the vulnerable.

The nationwide referendum passed with support from 65% of voters on Friday. It allows terminally ill persons who are believed to have six months or fewer to live to be euthanized or to take a lethal dose of prescribed drugs themselves, on the condition that two doctors agree the person is well-informed. Patients are eligible if they show significant, ongoing decline in physical ability and experience “unbearable suffering that cannot be eased.” The law will take effect Nov. 6, 2021.

Legalization opponent Euthanasia-Free NZ said some 80% of adult New Zealanders appeared to misunderstand the referendum. Only 20% knew the act would not make it legal to turn off life support machines. Such a practice is not illegal under current law.

“It seems that most New Zealanders voted for an end-of-life choice that is in fact already legal,” Renée Joubert, executive officer of Euthanasia-Free NZ, said Oct. 30.

Surveys indicated similar confusion about eligibility criteria. Only 29% knew that terminally ill people who have depression or another mental illness would be allowed to seek euthanasia. Only 13% of adults knew that the act does not require an independent witness.

The New Zealand law does not require a waiting period before a lethal dose is prescribed, nor does it require a competency test.

In November 2019 the New Zealand Parliament approved the bill, officially called “The End of Life Choice Bill,” by a vote of 69-51. The bill had the backing of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of the ruling New Zealand Labour Party and her main rival, Judith Collins of the center-right National Party, the New York Times reports. Voters had to approve the act in referendum in order for it to become law.

An earlier version of the bill would have allowed those with severe or incurable conditions who were not terminally ill to seek euthanasia or assisted suicide as well.

Joubert objected that parliament voted down more than 100 amendments that “could have made this law safer” and said the law lacks safeguards that have been standard in U.S. law.

“It’s disappointing that the New Zealand public were generally uninformed about the details of the End of Life Choice Act,” she said.

When New Zealand’s National Party was governing the country, a parliamentary study on assisted suicide and euthanasia proposals concluded that “the public would be endangered” by legalization of the practices.

In 2017, the National Party-controlled Parliament’s health committee said submissions on the proposal “cited concern for vulnerable people, such as the elderly and the disabled, those with mental illnesses, and those susceptible to coercion.”

“Others argued that life has an innate value and that introducing assisted dying and euthanasia would explicitly undermine that idea. To do so would suggest that some lives are worth more than others. There were also concerns that, once introduced, eligibility for assisted dying would rapidly expand well beyond what was first intended,” the committee said.

In 2018 the Catholic bishops of New Zealand published resources against assisted suicide legislation and encouraged Catholics to oppose legalization. The Nathaniel Centre, the New Zealand bishops-founded Catholic bioethics center, posted resources on Church teaching on euthanasia and assisted suicide to their website and social media pages ahead of the referendum.

Ahead of the election, the Nathaniel Centre said the act is “badly drafted and seriously flawed.”

“It will expose many New Zealanders to the risk of a premature death at a time when they are most vulnerable. Whatever one’s views about the idea of euthanasia, it is not compassion to vote for a dangerous law,” the center said. “The group most at risk if we legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide are those vulnerable to the suggestion they would be ‘better off dead’ – our elders, disabled people, and people with depression and mental illness who find themselves fitting the eligibility criteria.”

The center cited the Lawyers for Vulnerable New Zealanders, a group of over 200 lawyers, including some supporters of euthanasia, opposed the act on the grounds it is too broadly drafted, “dangerous,” and “broader in its scope and riskier than comparable laws overseas.”

Other opponents of the act included the New Zealand Medical Association, Hospice New Zealand, Palliative Care Nurses and Palliative Medicine Doctors.

David Seymour, the lawmaker who sponsored the act, praised its passage as “a great day,” the New York Times reports. In his view, the vote made New Zealand “a kinder, more compassionate, more humane society.”

Pope Francis has on multiple occasions spoken out against assisted suicide and euthanasia, both of which are “morally unacceptable” according to Church teaching. In 2016, Pope Francis told medical professionals that assisted suicide and euthanasia are part of the “throwaway culture” that offers people “false compassion” and treats human persons like a problem.

Euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada and Colombia. Doctor-assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland. Some U.S. states have legalized assisted suicide.

Also on New Zealand’s ballot was a proposal to legalize recreational marijuana use, allow adults age 20 and over to buy cannabis from licensed outlets, and allow adults to grow the plant at home. Advertising and smoking the drug in public would be banned. That proposal failed by a vote of 53% to 46%, according to preliminary results.

The country already has legalized medical marijuana.

Critics of the recreational use legalization warned that it would make the drug more accessible to children, Bloomberg News reports. They said cannabis is a serious drug harmful to mental health, especially among adolescents.

For their part, advocates said legalization would weaken the power of drug trafficking gangs, regulate quality and raise awareness of health risk through the use of warning labels. They said indigenous Maori people are disproportionately arrested and convicted for the drug.

Some figures suggest that New Zealanders are among the biggest users of marijuana in the world, with 80% having tried the drug by age 20 and 12% reporting use of the drug in the past year.

Pope Francis criticized drug use and legalization in a 2014 address to the International Drug Enforcement Conference in Rome.

“Let me state this in the clearest terms possible: the problem of drug use is not solved with drugs! Drug addiction is an evil, and with evil there can be no yielding or compromise,” the pope said. “To think that harm can be reduced by permitting drug addicts to use narcotics in no way resolves the problem. Attempts, however limited, to legalize so-called ‘recreational drugs’, are not only highly questionable from a legislative standpoint, but they fail to produce the desired effects.”

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