Lawmakers to re-introduce discrimination abortion ban

Indianapolis, Ind., Jul 1, 2019 / 05:22 pm (CNA).- An Indiana ban on dilation and evacuation abortion has been blocked by a federal judge’s preliminary injunction, continuing the legal fight over abortion in a time when the legal and political future of legal abortion is still in flux.

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill has said he will likely appeal the ruling.

“I continue to believe that Indiana has a compelling interest in protecting the value and dignity of fetal life by banning a particularly brutal and inhumane procedure,” Hill said June 28.

The Indiana Senate passed H.B. 1211 by a vote of 38-10, while the House of Representatives backed it by a vote of 71-25. Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb signed it into law earlier this year.

The law banning the second-trimester procedure was set to take effect July 1. Doctors who violate the law could be charged with a felony and a possible six-year prison sentence, the Associated Press reports.

U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker granted the preliminary injunction.

She said the law “prohibits physicians from utilizing the most common, safest, often most cost effective, and best understood method of second trimester abortion.” It makes doctors who perform abortions “resort to alternatives that are medically riskier, more costly, less reliable, and in some instances simply unavailable, while accomplishing little more than expressing hostility towards the constitutionally fundamental right of women to control their own reproductive lives.”

During a June hearing on the law, Barker had questioned why the state would push women towards “highly risky” alternatives such as prematurely inducing labor or injecting fatal drugs into the unborn baby.

The law bars doctors from removing a fetus from the womb using medical instruments such as clamps, forceps, and scissors. It makes exceptions to save a pregnant woman’s life or to prevent serious health risk.

Attorneys supporting the law said they have support from a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding a federal ban on partial-birth abortion.

Mike Fichter, president and CEO of Indiana Right to Life, urged Barker’s decision to be appealed.

“Dismemberment abortions are painful and barbaric,” he said. “No baby deserves this horrific death sentence.”

“It’s disgusting that the abortion industry can simply overturn a law they dislike by filing a lawsuit,” he added.

There were 27 dilation and evacuation abortions performed in Indiana in 2017, state health department figures said. There were 7,778 abortions that year, meaning dilation and evacuation abortions made up 0.35 percent.

Most of these abortions followed prenatal testing that indicated serious health risks for either the unborn baby or the mother, the Northwest Indiana Times reported in April.

Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law on behalf of two doctors who perform such abortions. The attorneys said the law would put a “substantial and unwarranted burden on women’s ability to obtain second-trimester, pre-viability abortions.”

Barker, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, recently allowed an abortion clinic to open in South Bend, Indiana after the Indiana State Department of Health denied a license to the clinic operator on the grounds it had not provided required safety documentation.

The same day as the federal injunction against the law, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from backers of Alabama’s anti-dismemberment law in Harris v. West Alabama Women’s Center.

Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the decision not to hear the Alabama law, but he said the legal challenge to it “serves as a stark reminder that our abortion jurisprudence has spiraled out of control.”

“The notion that anything in the Constitution prevents States from passing laws prohibiting the dismembering of a living child is implausible,” wrote Thomas.

He said the court’s conception of “undue burden” is “demonstrably erroneous.” An “undue burden” standard currently renders unconstitutional any law that is a “substantial obstacle” to a pregnant woman seeking an abortion before fetal viability.

At the same time, he said the Alabama law does not present the right pattern of facts to challenge American abortion precedent and the case was “too risky” for the high court to consider.

Other Indiana abortion laws have been heard in the federal courts.

In May the U.S. Supreme Court upheld part of a 2016 Indiana law requiring aborted babies to be cremated or buried. However, it declined to consider another part of the law that banned abortions based solely on the sex, race, or disability of the baby, on the grounds that the law raises issues that have not been adequately considered by appellate courts.

The legal status quo on abortion is in doubt given the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Pro-life advocates have hoped that strong abortion restrictions will soon pass Supreme Court muster again, if precedents such as the 1973 Roe v. Wade case are changed or overturned.

Some states have passed bans on abortion based on when an unborn child’s heartbeat is detectable, as early as six weeks into pregnancy, while other states have passed laws that secure legal abortion even if the U.S. Supreme Court modifies or overturns precedent requiring legal abortion nationwide.

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Adult and young people hold signs protesting abortion. / Murloc / Shutterstock

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 22, 2021 / 14:13 pm (CNA).
Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians recently united for a day of prayer in anticipation for an up… […]

Cambridge, Massachusetts, Apr 16, 2022 / 09:03 am (CNA).

One convert’s journey to Catholicism began with an invitation to an ice-cream social. 

Another says he instantly believed in the Real Presence the moment someone explained what the round object was that everyone was staring at during eucharistic adoration.

For a third, the poems of T.S. Eliot — and a seemingly random encounter with a priest on a public street — led to deeper questions about truth and faith.

Their paths differed but led them to the same destination: St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they are among 31 people set to be fully initiated into the Catholic Church during the Easter vigil Mass on Saturday, April 16.

That number of initiates is a record high for St. Paul’s, a nearly century-old Romanesque-style brick church whose bell tower looms over Harvard Square.

A scheduling backlog caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is partly responsible for the size of this year’s group of catechumens (non-baptized) and candidates (baptized non-Catholics.) But Father Patrick J. Fiorillo, the parochial vicar at St. Paul’s, believes there’s more to it than that.

“There’s definitely a significant segment of people who started thinking more deeply about their lives and faith during COVID-19,” Fiorillo said. “So, coming out of Covid has given them the occasion to take the next step and move forward.”

Fiorillo is the undergraduate chaplain for the Harvard Catholic Center, a chaplaincy based at St. Paul’s for undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard University and other academic institutions in the area. This year, 17 of the 31 initiates are Harvard students.

“Everybody assumes that, because this is the Harvard Catholic Center, that everybody here is very smart and therefore has a very highly intellectual orientation towards their faith,” Fiorillo told CNA.

“That is definitely true of some people. But I would say the majority are not here because of intellectually thinking their way into the faith. Some are. But the majority are just kind of ordinary life circumstances, just seeking, questioning the ways of the world, and just trying to get in touch with this desire on their heart for something more,” he said. 

Fiorillo says welcoming converts into the Church at the Easter vigil is one of the highlights of his ministry.

“It’s an honor. It gives me hope just seeing all this new life and new faith here. So much in one place,” he said.

“When I tell other people about it, it gives them hope to hear that many young people are still converting to Catholicism, and they’re doing it in a place as secular as Cambridge.”

Prior to the Easter vigil, CNA spoke with five of St. Paul’s newest converts. Here are their stories:

‘This is what I’ve been looking for’ 

Katie Cabrera, a 19-year-old Harvard freshman, told CNA that she was excited to experience the “transformative power of Christ through his body and blood” at Mass for the first time at the Easter vigil. 

A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, she said she was baptized as a child and comes from a family of Dominican immigrants. Her father, who grew up in an extremely impoverished area, lacked a formal education, but always kept the traditions of the Catholic faith close to him in order to persevere in difficult times. 

Her father’s love for her and his Catholic faith deeply inspired Cabrera, and served as an anchor for her faith throughout her life. 

Growing up, however, Cabrera attended a non-denominational church with her mother. Because she felt the church’s teachings lacked an emphasis on God’s love and mercy, Cabrera eventually left.

“Even though I Ieft, I always knew that I believed in God,” Cabrera said. “So, I was at a place where I felt kind of lost, because I always had that faith, but I didn’t know what to do with it.”

After she arrived at Harvard, she accepted a friend’s invitation to attend an ice-cream social at the Harvard Catholic Center — “and that was like, sort of, how it all started,” she told CNA.

Once she was added to the email list for the center’s events, she felt a “calling” that she “really wanted to officially become Catholic” after many difficult years without a faith community. 

Catholic doctrine about the sacraments was no hurdle for Cabrera, as she credits Fiorillo with explaining the faith well. 

“There was a void that existed in my heart,” she said. “As soon as Father Patrick started teaching about marriage and family, theology of the body, and the sacraments, I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for my whole life.’”

‘What’s the Eucharist?’

“What is that thing on the thing?”

Kent Shi laughs when he recalls how perplexed he was the first time he attended eucharistic adoration at St. Mary’s of the Assumption in Cambridge.

Someone helpfully explained that what Shi was looking at was the Eucharist displayed inside a monstrance.

“What’s the Eucharist?” he wanted to know.

For many non-Catholics considering entering the Catholic Church, the Real Presence can be a major obstacle.

Not Shi. He says that once the Eucharist was explained to him that day, he instantly believed.

Shi, 25, told CNA that he considered himself an agnostic for most of his life, meaning he neither believed nor disbelieved in God.

Between his first and second years as a graduate student in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, however, he accepted Christ and started attending services at a Presbyterian church.

One day in the summer of 2021, a crucifix outside St. Paul’s that Shi says he “must have passed multiple times a week for months and never noticed” caught his eye, and deeply moved him.

Shortly after, he accepted a friend’s invitation to attend eucharistic adoration at St. Mary’s even though he “didn’t know what adoration meant.” Unaware of what he was about to walk into, Shi asked a friend what the dress code was for adoration. His friend replied, “Respectful.”

And so, respectfully dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks, Shi sat in the front row with his friend, only a few feet from the monstrance. That’s when the questions began.

It wasn’t long after that encounter that Shi began attending Mass at St. Paul’s and the parish’s RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) program. Shi asked CNA readers to pray for him and his fellow RCIA classmates.

“There’s a lot of prodigal sons and daughters here, so we would very much appreciate that,” he said, “especially me.”

Poetry and art opened the door

For Loren Brown, choosing to attend a secular university like Harvard proved to be “providential.”

The 25-year-old junior from La Center, Washington, said he comes from a “lapsed” Catholic family and wasn’t baptized.

He didn’t think much about the faith until the spring semester of his freshman year, when, he says, Catholic friends of his “began to question my lack of commitment to faith.”

Later, when students were sent home to take classes virtually due to the pandemic, he had time to reflect and began to read some of the books they’d recommended to him. The poetry of T.S. Eliot (his favorite set of poems being “Four Quartets”) and the “Confessions” by St. Augustine, in particular, “pulled me towards the faith,” he said.

Brown describes his conversion as a “gradual process” which backed him into a “logical corner.” But a chance meeting with a priest also played a pivotal role.

One day in the summer of 2021 while walking back to his dormitory he encountered a man wearing a priestly collar outside St. Paul’s Church on busy Mount Auburn Street.

It was Father George Salzmann, O.S.F.S., graduate chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Center.

“He asked me how I was doing, what I was studying, and we immediately found a common interest in St. Augustine,” Brown told CNA. 

“You know, there’s this great window of St. Augustine inside St. Paul’s and you should come see it,” Brown remembers the gregarious priest telling him. Salzmann wound up giving Brown a brief tour of the church, which was completed in 1923.

The next week, Brown found himself sitting in a pew for his first Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s. He hasn’t missed a Sunday since, a routine that ultimately led him to join the RCIA program that fall.

Brown says he now realizes that coming to Harvard was about more than majoring in education.

“What I wanted out of Harvard has completely changed,” he said. “Instead of an education that prepares me for a job or a career, I want one that forms me as a moral being and a human.”

‘I can’t do this alone. Please help me.’

Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, 42, is a German immigrant who came to the U.S. 10 years ago with her husband to do her post-doctoral research in biomedical image processing at Harvard’s engineering school.

The couple settled in Cambridge, where they had their first child. Two subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage, however. That second loss was overwhelming for Kaynig-Fittkau, who says she was raised as a “secular Lutheran” without any strong faith.

“It broke me and a lot of my pride and made me realize that I can’t do things by myself,” she told CNA.

She found herself on knees one Thanksgiving, pleading with God. “I can’t do this alone,” she said. “Please help me.” 

She says God answered her prayer by introducing her to another mother, who she met at a playground. She was a Christian who later invited Kaynig-Fittkau to attend services at a Presbyterian church in Somerville, Massachusetts.

In that church, there was a lot of emphasis on “faith alone,” she said. But Kaynig-Fittkau, who now works for Adobe and is the mother of two girls, kept questioning if her faith was deep enough. 

Then one day she stumbled upon a YouTube video titled “The hour that will change your life,” in which Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest from the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota, known for his “Bible in a Year” podcast, speaks about the Eucharist.

Intrigued, she began watching similar videos by other Catholic speakers, including Father Casey Cole, O.F.M., Bishop Robert Barron, Matt Fradd, and Scott Hahn, each of whom drew her closer and closer to the Catholic faith.

Familiar with St. Paul’s from her days as a Harvard researcher and lecturer, she decided to attend Mass there one day, and made an appointment before she left to meet with Fiorillo.

When they met, Fiorillo answered all of her questions from what she calls “a list of Protestant problems with Catholicism.” She entered the RCIA program three weeks later.

Recalling her first experience attending eucharistic adoration, she said it felt “utterly weird” to be worshiping what she describes as “this golden sun.”

A conversation with a local Jesuit priest helped her better understand the Eucharist, however. Now she finds that spending time before the Blessed Sacrament is “amazing.”

“I am really, really, really excited for the Easter vigil,” Kaynig-Fittkau said. “I can’t wait, I have a big smile on my face just thinking about it.”

The rosary brought him peace

Another catechumen at St. Paul’s this year is Kyle Richard, 37, who lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston and works in a technology startup company downtown. 

Although he grew up in a culturally Catholic hub in Louisiana, his parents left the Catholic faith and joined a Full Gospel church. Richard said he found the church “intimidating,” which led him eventually to leave Christianity altogether.

When Richard was in his mid-twenties, his father battled pancreatic cancer. Before he died, he expressed a wish to rejoin the Catholic Church. He never did confess his sins to a priest or receive the Anointing of the Sick, Richard recalls sadly. But years later, his non-believing son would remember his father’s yearning to return to the Church.

“I kind of filed that away for a while, but I never really let it go,” he said.

Initially, Richard moved even farther away from the Church. He said he became an atheist who thought that Christianity was simply “something that people used to just soothe themselves.”

Years later, while going through a divorce, he had a change of heart.

Feeling he ought to give Christianity “a fair shot,” he began saying the rosary in hopes of settling his anxiety. The prayer brought him peace, and became a gateway to the Catholic faith.

Before long, he was reading the Bible on the Vatican’s website, downloading prayer apps, and meditating on scripture.

A Google search brought him to St. Paul’s. Joining the RCIA program, he feels, was a continuation of his father’s expressed desire on his deathbed more than a decade ago.

“I think he would be proud, especially because he was born on April 16th and that is the date of the Easter vigil,” he said.

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