The demolition of the Chapelle Saint-Joseph in Lille, France. / Urgences patrimoine
Rome Newsroom, Mar 11, 2021 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- Bulldozers have torn into a 135-year-old church dedicated to St. Joseph in northern France — the first of several church demolitions that could take place in the country in the coming months.
The Chapelle Saint-Joseph, built by the Jesuits in Lille between 1880 and 1886, is being bulldozed by the Catholic University of Lille to make way for a new student building. But the nearby Rameau Palace — designed by the same architect, Auguste Mourcou — is being preserved and restored.
A group appealed to the French Ministry of Culture to reclassify the church building as historical. But the ministry rejected the appeal, stressing that “giving up the demolition of the chapel would lead to the abandonment of an important project for the development of higher education, which represents an investment of 120 million euros [around $144 million].”
— La Gazette du Patrimoine (@gazettepatrim) March 3, 2021
Urgences patrimoine, an organization that seeks to preserve French cultural heritage, collected 12,400 signatures on a petition to save the St. Joseph chapel. But the demolition process, captured on video, began in late February regardless.
Meanwhile, discussions have been held to replace the Church of Sainte-Germaine-Cousin in Calais, an early 20th-century building in the Art Deco style, with an apartment complex, according to CNA’s Italian language news partner, ACI Stampa.
The Diocese of Arras announced in August 2020 that the church would no longer be used due to maintenance costs. The church’s 28 stained-glass windows, created by master glassmaker Louis Barillet, have been registered as protected historic architecture with the French government since 1997.
Another church facing potential demolition is the Saint-Èloi du Poirier church, built in 1902 in Trith-Saint-Léger. Local authorities have said that tearing down the church would be less expensive than renovating it, which it estimates would cost around $958,000.
Members of the local community have written letters, made phone calls to authorities, and organized a town hall meeting in an attempt to save the church.
According to French law, local authorities have the final word as to whether to renovate or demolish churches after the French government appropriated all church property in 1907.
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Roger Foley enjoys taste-testing three different kinds of hummus, his favourite food, on the day of a video shoot with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project in Canada. The two spoke about Foley’s difficulty accessing quality care for his needs and being offered Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) “several times.” / Courtesy of Amanda Achtman
CNA Staff, Jun 23, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Amid ongoing efforts to expand euthanasia in Canada under the name of “medical aid in dying” (MAID), one Ottawa man says he has been offered euthanasia “multiple times” as he struggles with lifelong disabilities and chronic pain from a disease called cerebellar ataxia.
Roger Foley, 49, shared some of his story in a recent video interview with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project, which was created to “humanize our conversation on suffering, death, meaning, and hope.” The project seeks to “[restore] our cultural health when it comes to our experiences of death and dying” through speaking engagements and video campaigns.
Roger Foley, a Canadian man with disabilities, says he’s been offered euthanasia “multiple times.”
Listen to him speak out against being devalued as he fights for the support he needs to live. pic.twitter.com/yY8N4NILkS
In the video, the fourth of a series, Foley said he has struggled with subpar medical help in his own home, where he is supposed to be getting quality care. Canada has a nationalized health care system but Foley said that individuals with illnesses are “worked at … not worked with.” He spoke out against being devalued as he fights for the support he needs to live.
In one case, he said, a home worker helped him into his bathtub and then fell asleep in the other room; Foley was left to crawl out of the bathroom on his own. “I reported to the agency, and then he confessed, and the agency, they really didn’t care,” he said.
Asked by Achtman if he has ever been offered euthanasia, Foley said: “Yeah, multiple times.”
“One time, [a doctor] asked me, ‘Do you have any thoughts of self-harm?’ I’m honest with them and tell them I do think about ending my life because of what I’m going through, being prevented from the resources that I need to live safely back at home.”
“From out of nowhere, he just pulls out, ‘Well, if you don’t get self-directing funding, you can always apply for an assisted.’”
Foley said the offers from doctors to help end his life have “completely traumatized me.”
“Now it’s this overlying option where in my situation, when I say I’m suicidal, I’m met with, ‘Well, the hospital has a program to help you with that if you want to end your life.’”
“That didn’t exist before [MAID] was legalized, but now it’s there,” he said. “There is not going to be a second within the rest of my life that I’m not going to have flashbacks to [being offered suicide]. The devaluing of me and all that I am.”
Noting that he’s “not religious,” Foley said: “Saying that it’s just religious persons who oppose euthanasia in society is completely wrong.”
“These people who usually say it, they have an ableist mindset,” he said. “And they look at persons with disabilities and see us as just better off dead and a waste of resources.”
Achtman told CNA there is a need for euthanasia-free health care spaces, not only for protecting the integrity of Catholic institutions but also because many patients — including nonreligious patients like Foley — want to be treated in facilities that do not raise euthanasia with patients.
“Having euthanasia suggested, in a sense, already kills the person. It deflates a person’s sense of confidence that doctors and nurses are going to truly fight for them,” Achtman told CNA. “When euthanasia is suggested ostensibly as one ‘treatment’ option among others, there are all-too-frequently no other real options provided.
She continued: “This is why I always say that a request for euthanasia is not so much an expression of a desire to die as it is an expression of disappointment. Responding to such disappointment with real interventions that are adequate to the person is demanding, but that’s what people deserve. It is wrong to concede or capitulate to a person’s suicidal ideation — instead, every person deserves suicide prevention rather than suicide assistance.”
Roger Foley enjoys taste-testing three different kinds of hummus, his favorite food, on the day of a video shoot with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project. The two spoke about Foley’s difficulty accessing quality care for his needs and being offered Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) “several times.”. Courtesy of Amanda Achtman
Canada has become one of the most permissive countries in the world when it comes to euthanasia. The country first began allowing doctors to help kill terminally ill patients nearing death in 2016; the law was then expanded in 2021 to include patients whose death is not imminent.
In February the country paused a proposal to allow mentally ill individuals access to MAID, with the proposal set to be reconsidered in 2027. Earlier this year, Canadian health researchers alleged that MAID will “save” the Canadian health care system between $34.7 and $136.8 million per year.
A couple in British Columbia is currently suing the provincial government, as well as a Catholic health care provider, after their daughter was denied euthanasia while suffering from a terminal illness. The suit demands that the government remove the religious exemption from the Catholic hospital that protects them from having to offer MAID.
A judge in March, meanwhile, ruled that a woman with autism could be granted her request to die by MAID, overruling efforts by the woman’s father to halt the deadly procedure.
Asked what gives him hope, Foley told Achtman that he aspires one day to “be able to break through [the health care system] and get access to the resources that I need and to live at home with workers who want to work with me and I want to work with them and that we can work as a team.”
“I have a passion to live,” he said. “I don’t want to give up my life.”
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 15, 2021 / 17:30 pm (CNA).
Today, August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, is also the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Eternal Word Television Network–EWTN. From… […]
Rome, Italy, May 29, 2018 / 10:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Cardinal Gerhard Müller reflected recently on the rise of gender ideology, saying it flourished in the vacuum left by the collapse of fascism and Soviet communism as a “new religion”.
“Marxism and fascism, anti-Christian ideology, fell. Capitalism is in crisis. There was room for true philosophy, for theology, for Christian religion. But people preferred to invent a new religion, which believes in the human being rather than God,” the prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith told CNA May 25.
The cardinal spoke before the presentation of the Italian edition of Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay, by Daniel Mattson.
“People cannot be classified according to their sexual orientation,” Cardinal Müller said. “We do not have human beings who are more special than others. Man must be described according to his persona and the fact that he is created in the image and likeness to God and his vocation to eternal life.”
This character fits “every human being.”
Speaking about pastoral care for homosexuals, the cardinal noted that “the Church has always had respect toward every human person, beyond any categorization.”
He also emphasized that “in gender ideology you can count dozens of genders, while human being is created as man and woman: this is our nature, and the God cretor’s will is expressed in this nature.”
Cardinal Müller underscored that people “must resist those who organize as an ideological group and want to change all the society, imposing their thought on every people.”
That is “an imposition of a unique thought,” as ideological groups “attack all those who do not think their way, they insult, they even destroy the human dignity of people who think differently from them.”
He said these people “are a lobby, an organization with their own interests.”
Cardinal Müller praised Mattson for not labeling himself as gay, but as “Son of God.”
“We can talk about anything in the secret of confession and with pastoral care, but no man can identify himself with a category that does not exist in reality,” Cardinal Müller said.
He also stressed that this construction comes from Marxist thought, because “the Marxist rationale claims that mind does not recognize reality, but it builds reality: when the communist party says that 2+2 is 5, everybody must believe it.”
Gender ideology and pastoral care for homosexual people are among the most discussed topics in the Catholic Church.
“No authentic pastoral programme will include organizations in which homosexual persons associate with each other without clearly stating that homosexual activity is immoral. A truly pastoral approach will appreciate the need for homosexual persons to avoid the near occasions of sin,” it added.
In the speech, he said that “the profound falsehood of (gender) theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”
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