CNA Staff, Mar 16, 2021 / 04:30 pm (CNA).- A 17-year-old girl is dead following a stabbing at a Catholic high school near Edmonton Monday morning.
According to local officials, police were summoned to Christ the King Catholic School in Leduc, Alberta shortly before 10 a.m. on March 15.
They said the girl had been stabbed in a classroom. She was transported to a local hospital, where she died of her wounds.
A 19-year-old male student was arrested later that day and is currently in custody, the Edmonton Journal reports.
The identities of the suspect and victim have not been made public, and it is unclear whether they knew each other.
Charlie Bouchard, superintendent of the Saint Thomas Aquinas Roman (STAR) Catholic School Division, which includes Christ the King, said the school community will feel the loss greatly.
“We cannot express deeply enough the sorrow we feel for the family members, friends, and staff members who have lost a loved one today, and whose lives will be forever changed,” Bouchard said in a statement.
Michelle Lamer, chair of the STAR Catholic Board of Trustees, voiced prayers and condolences.
“As one connected faith community, we ask that God grant strength to all those who are suffering, and pray they find solace and healing through Christ.”
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A Catholic pregnancy center called “Aid for Women” in north Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood was vandalized with red paint and the words “fake clinic” and “the dead babies are in Gaza” at 3 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 23, just hours after the closing of the Democratic National Convention. Mary FioRito, a spokesperson for the center, said that vandals also cemented the doors shut, forcing the nonprofit to cancel appointments for around 12 women. / Credit: Photo courtesy of Aid for Women.
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 23, 2024 / 18:37 pm (CNA).
A Catholic pregnancy center in Chicago called “Aid for Women” was vandalized in the early morning hours after the closing of the Democratic National Convention.
No one was present at the center at the time of the incident. Police have been contacted and are investigating the incident as a violation of the Freedom of Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, according to Mary FioRito, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a spokesperson for Aid for Women.
Aid for Women is a non-profit which according to its website was “founded on the faith and teachings of the Catholic Church.”
The nonprofit operates five pregnancy centers and two maternity homes in the Chicago area. The group partners with the Archdiocese of Chicago and offers a range of services including ultrasounds, abortion pill reversal medications, counseling, and material aid.
FioRito, who has been a regular volunteer at Aid for Women for over two decades, told CNA that the incident occurred in north Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood at 3 a.m. Friday morning, hours after the DNC’s final closing.
The act of vandalism was caught on the center’s security camera. The footage has now been turned over to police.
According to FioRito, four vandals splattered red paint and painted the words “fake clinic” and “the dead babies are in Gaza” on the center’s entrance. FioRito said that the vandals also cemented the center’s doors shut, forcing staff to cancel all appointments on Friday — which she said were with about a dozen women.
The doors at “Aid for Women,” a Catholic pregnancy center in north Chicago, were cemented shut by vandals at 3 a.m. on Aug. 23, 2024, hours after the closing of the Democratic National Convention. Credit: Photo courtesy of Aid for Women.
As of Friday afternoon, the center’s doors were still cemented shut and there is no timeline on when it will be able to reopen. FioRito said that this means the Aid for Women pregnancy center may have to cancel its appointments or ask women to visit another location on Saturday, which FioRito said is their busiest day.
FioRito said that when she saw the pictures of the damage to the center she was “horrified.”
Addressing the vandals she said: “You’re not hurting us; you’re hurting these women.”
“These are working-class women. A lot of stuff for them is a struggle. Why would you do this to women who already are facing so many obstacles? It baffles me,” she said.
The act of vandalism was caught on the center’s security camera. The footage has now been turned over to police.
According to FioRito, there was an unusually low police presence in the neighborhood at the time of the incident due to the DNC which took place in another part of town.
FioRito lamented that pregnancy centers have borne the brunt of anti-abortion anger since the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“It’s so strange to me that pregnancy centers are somehow the collateral damage of all this anger over Roe being overturned because the pregnancy centers didn’t have anything to do with it,” she said. “Pregnancy centers are largely apolitical … they are not political advocates, they are not legal advocates, they simply help women.”
Edgewater is an urban neighborhood as culturally diverse and “not a wealthy neighborhood.”
“Many of the women we serve are not women of means,” she said. “Pregnancy is hard enough. You don’t need something like this layered on top of it, making your life even harder.”
“If the people who did this were intending to hurt the pro-life movement or get back at the pro-life movement for Dobbs, all they’re really hurting is poor women when they do something like this,” said FioRito.
The DNC took place at Chicago’s United Center this week, Aug. 19-22. Several of the Democratic speakers, including Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, highlighted abortion as a central issue in the 2024 election and condemned pro-life attempts to restrict abortion.
A local Planned Parenthood operated a free mobile abortion clinic just outside the convention. Planned Parenthood Great Rivers reported on Thursday that the mobile clinic had provided nine vasectomies and eight chemical abortions.
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone meets with people experiencing homeless at St. Anthony’s Dining Hall in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood on November 6, 2021. / Dennis Callahan
Boston, Mass., Dec 15, 2021 / 09:29 am (CNA).
After disclosing that he has not had a COVID-19 vaccination, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco has agreed to reschedule a parish visit at the pastor’s request, due to parishioners’ health concerns.
Cordileone, who shared his vaccination status on a Dec. 1 podcast, was scheduled to visit St. Agnes Catholic Church in San Francisco on Dec. 19. According to the parish’s policy, however, only priests who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 may celebrate Mass there.
For that reason, and because parishioners shared their uneasiness about Cordileone not being vaccinated, Father George Williams, S.J., the pastor, called the archbishop and asked him to postpone his visit.
“These are stressful times enough and I felt his pastoral visit to us would be overshadowed by concerns about the pandemic,” Williams wrote in the parish’s Dec. 5 bulletin.
“When I explained this to his Excellency, he graciously understood,” Williams later told ABC7 news. “We look forward to his visit when the circumstances permit.”
Williams said in the bulletin that he feels it is important that “everyone feels safe,” adding that “we all” must “do our part” in preventing the spread of the virus, especially in light of the new Omicron variant.
CNA asked Williams in an email if the archdiocese gives pastors the option to require vaccination, but received no response. That same question was posed to the archdiocese, to which they responded: “health care decisions are a very personal matter.”
“Archbishop Cordileone has every confidence in Father Williams’ ability to know his people well, and respond to their sensitivities with compassion,” the archdiocese added.
Cordileone, 65, first revealed he had not received the vaccine on the San Francisco Chronicle’s “It’s All Political Podcast,” when he responded “Not yet, no,” to the hosts inquiry of his vaccination against COVID-19.
There were “a number of reasons” Cordileone listed for not being vaccinated on the podcast. He said that because of his particular health situation, noting his “good immune system,” his primary care physician told him “it’s probably not necessary” to get vaccinated.
“He didn’t dissuade me from being vaccinated,” Cordileone said. “But he said he was fine if I decided not to be because of my own particular health situation.”
In the interview, which was mostly about abortion, Cordileone talked about equitable distribution of the vaccines, immunity versus protection, vaccine mandates, and his own encounters with an infected person and crowds.
In March, 2021, Cordileone encouraged parishioners of the archdiocese to get vaccinated “in consultation with their physician.”
Both the Vatican and the U.S. bishops’ conference have said that reception of the vaccines is morally permissible when recipients have no other ethical option due to the gravity of the pandemic. Pope Francis has encouraged COVID-19 vaccination, calling it an “act of love.” In December 2020, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a note stating that reception of the vaccines is morally permissible but “must be voluntary.” The note recognized “reasons of conscience” for refusing vaccines.
ACI Prensa Staff, Feb 22, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Young people around the world can now find answers to the most common questions about Catholic doctrine in the “Youth” program, a new initiative from Opus Dei… […]
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