Sister Norma Pimentel of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley / Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley
Washington D.C., Aug 13, 2021 / 16:04 pm (CNA).
Catholic organizations claim a Texas public health order infringes on their religious mission of helping migrants.
Last month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed an executive order prohibiting anyone but law enforcement from transporting migrants, following their release from federal custody. He cited the pandemic as a reason for the order. The order has been halted from going into effect by a federal court until Aug. 27.
In response, the bishop of Brownsville in Texas – a border diocese – said that Catholics must be free to help migrants.
“We want to stop the spread of COVID-19 as much as the state does,” Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, said in a statement on Friday. “But for that to happen, we need the government to let us do what Christ called us to do: minister to the strangers among us in their time of distress.”
In a July 28 statement, Abbott said his order was in response to a “dramatic rise in unlawful border crossings” that “has also led to a dramatic rise in COVID-19 cases among unlawful migrants.”
The Biden administration sued to block the order from going into effect, and federal district court Judge Kathleen Cardone temporarily blocked its implementation. A hearing in the case was held on Friday morning, after which Judge Cardone continued the temporary restraining order until Aug. 27.
Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which runs a humanitarian respite center in the border town of McAllen, said the order would prevent it from carrying out its ministries, which include transporting COVID-positive migrants to quarantine locations.
A friend of the court brief filed by Becket on behalf of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley argued that Abbott’s order would actually increase local cases of COVID-19.
Catholic Charities said it tests each migrant who comes to its respite center for COVID, and only serves those who test negative onsite. Those who test positive are transported to hotels contracted by Catholic Charities or the city of McAllen, to quarantine for the duration of their illness.
Catholic Charities said that without its ministry, migrants would be dropped off at bus stations by federal border patrol agents without receiving a COVID test, thus increasing community spread of the virus.
Their brief further argued the state order “violates the religious liberty of Catholic Charities.”
According to the brief, state officials warned local Catholic leaders that law enforcement would be stationed by the entrance of the respite center to stop any car suspected of transporting migrants.
Eric Rassbach, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, said in a statement, “Caring for the stranger in need has always been at the core of the Catholic faith.”
“This order solves nothing and wrongfully endangers Catholic Charities’ religious mission to care for migrants,” Rassbach said.
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Washington D.C., Jan 6, 2021 / 12:25 am (CNA).- Los Angeles County has announced it is limiting non-COVID emergency care, due to hospitals having reached a “point of crisis” during the pandemic, promoting ethicists to discuss whether the act is justified.
On Monday, the Emergency Medical Services Agency for Los Angeles County issued two directives limiting emergency care during the pandemic, because of a spike in COVID hospitalizations.
One directive stated that emergency medical personnel should not transport patients who suffered cardiac arrest to the hospital, if they could not be revived in the field. The directive was given “due to the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on EMS and 9-1-1 receiving hospitals.”
Another directive stated that supplemental oxygen should only be given to patients with less than 90% oxygen saturation due to “the acute need to conserve oxygen.”
The actions were taken as the number of COVID hospitalizations is expected to spike after the Christmas holiday season, according to the Los Angeles Times.
One medical ethicist told CNA that the county had to make a difficult decision in extraordinary circumstances.
“I think they have gone about a very difficult decision in a reasonable way,” said Dr. Barbara Golder, staff member with the Catholic Medical Association, in an interview with CNA.
With the virus spreading around the country, many local health systems are seriously burdened or at capacity, Golder said. “I’m inclined to believe that this is, in fact, a very extraordinary circumstance,” she said in reference to Los Angeles.
The county’s director of health services, Dr. Christina Ghaly, stated on Monday that many area hospitals “have reached a point of crisis and are having to make very tough decisions about patient care,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
She added that the current numbers of COVID cases in the county are still reflective of the post-Thanksgiving surge with a post-Christmas surge yet to come—a point that Golder also made.
“It’s not going to get better,” she said of an anticipated post-Christmas surge of virus cases looming. “It’s really bad right now.”
Los Angeles county has seen an increase in COVID-19 cases since the end of October. More than 9,100 new COVID cases were reported on Monday, according to county health data. In some areas, ICU bed shortages have been a concern.
There have been a total of 10,850 deaths and more than 827,000 confirmed COVID cases overall in Los Angeles County, according to data provided by Johns Hopkins. While the number of reported cases is the highest by far among U.S. counties—Los Angeles is the most populous county in the U.S.—the rate of 8,189 infections per 100,000 residents is high, but is topped by many other counties around the country.
However, Charles Camosy—a theology professor at Fordham University—emphasized that care is being limited in Los Angeles due to an expectation of a further COVID surge, and not because hospitals are already overwhelmed.
“To be clear, they are *not* overwhelmed now. This directive is in *anticipation* of having traditional capacity (no hospital ships, no converted convention centers, no cooperating facilities in other counties) overwhelmed,” he tweeted.
Ghaly, explaining the county’s policy of not transporting cardiac arrest victims who had not been resuscitated in the field, said that the county was “emphasizing the fact that transporting these patients arrested leads to very poor outcomes.”
“We knew that already and we just don’t want to impact our hospitals,” Ghaly said.
Camosy noted that “[t]he phrase ‘poor outcomes’ is quite suggestive,” adding, “it is likely that [Ghaly] and others mean that patients who are likely to survive cardiac arrest for the during of an ambulance ride are likely to be disabled in ways which lead them to judge that a limited number of beds should be given to able-bodied patients.”
“If there are better explanations for this policy, I’d genuinely like to hear them,” Camosy added.
However, Golder said that it is not necessarily unethical to limit care for patients with a low expectation of survival—if the situation is one of true “triage” where demand for care is great and resources are limited, and as long as patients are not denied care on the basis of age or disability.
According to studies, patients suffering cardiac arrest who are taken quickly to a hospital still have around only a 5% chance to survive and eventual discharge, she said. During a pandemic, they would essentially be competing with COVID patients for limited health care resources.
While this population may be mostly elderly, she said, it could also include younger patients—and the county’s policy did not explicitly discriminate against the elderly.
“Nobody likes to see these things happen,” she said. “There’s always a limit on what we have available, and sometimes our demand exceeds it. And we’re just there, we’re there all over the country.”
In the spring of 2020, Camosy was one of three scholars to warn against health care triage plans that explicitly discriminated against the disabled.
As doctors in various jurisdictions were considering how to ration health care if hospitals were overwhelmed with an influx of COVID patients, Camosy was joined by Princeton law professor Robert George and Harvard sociology professor Jacqueline Rivers in demanding that care not be denied patients on the basis of their age or disability.
Camosy warned that many state health officials, hospital heads, and leading doctors lack ethics training and make decisions on a utilitarian “quality-adjusted life years” approach that favors younger, healthier patients and discriminates against elderly and disabled patients.
“As somebody who has studied bioethics, and who is a professor of bioethics, I know the overwhelming majority of them have virtually no ethics training,” Camosy told CNA.
Father Marko Rupnik, SJ. / Credit: Vatican News/Screenshot
ACI Prensa Staff, Jul 16, 2024 / 16:50 pm (CNA).
Father Marko Ivan Rupnik is a former Jesuit priest whose artwork decorates Catholic churches, chapels, and shrines around the world, inc… […]
Mother Elvira, the founder of the Comunità Cenacolo, based her efforts to help young people struggling with addiction around the concept of radical trust in God’s mercy and providence. / Courtesy of the Comunità Cenacolo
National Catholic Register, Aug 5, 2023 / 13:00 pm (CNA).
Mother Elvira Petrozzi, who founded Comunità Cenacolo in 1983 to provide hope and healing to those suffering from addiction, died on Aug. 3 in the formation house and residence of her congregation in Saluzzo, Italy. She was 86.
Her death, following a long illness, came just weeks after thousands of people gathered in Saluzzo, a hilltop town in Italy’s northwest Piedmont region about an hour’s drive south of Turin, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Cenacolo Community’s founding there in an abandoned home on July 16, 1983.
In the decades since, the community has grown to encompass 72 Cenacolo houses in 20 countries, including four in the United States.
Mother Elvira called the Cenacolo a “School of Life” because it took people off the streets and gave them a “rebirth” that was “based on a simple, family-oriented, orderly life” with the foundation of prayer, physical labor, discipline, and fraternal sharing.
“How could I invent a story like this? Everything happened without me even realizing it,” she once remarked.
“I dove into God’s mercy and I rolled up my sleeves to love, love, love … and serve!” she said. “I am the first to surprise myself with what has happened and what is happening in the life of the Cenacolo Community. It’s a work of God, the Holy Spirit, and of Mary.”
Bishop Robert Baker, bishop emeritus of Birmingham, Alabama, first met Mother Elvira in 1991. The two developed a close friendship and together they co-founded four Comunità Cenacolos in the U.S. Southwest, including one near Hanceville, Alabama.
Baker was among Mother Elvira’s many friends, supporters, and community members who were able to visit with her in her final days.
“I had the blessing of being invited to come to be at her bedside,” he told the National Catholic Register, CNA’s partner news outlet. “I was with her and I was able to give her a blessing.”
Humble beginnings
Born Rita Petrozzi, Mother Elvira was born in Sora, Italy, in 1937 and grew up in a poor family, taking the name Elvira upon entering the Sisters of Charity of St. Jeanne Antide Thouret as a teenager.
It wasn’t until 27 years later that she felt inspired to help young addicts and other youth to change their lives. Rooted in her Catholic faith and God’s love for every person, her methods were so effective that they led to others wanting a Comunità Cenacolo established in their region.
Prior to meeting her, Baker founded a drug addiction center called Our Lady of Hope Community in St. Augustine, Florida. Then visiting Rome when he was rector of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, he learned of Mother Elvira, spoke with her, and at his invitation agreed to establish a Cenacolo community with her entire program at Our Lady of Hope in 1992. The two friends went on to co-found two other houses in the St. Augustine area and a fourth house in Alabama.
Baker celebrated one of the Masses for the thousands of people attending the 40th anniversary celebration in Saluzzo. In his homily, he reflected on the time when he arranged to use an ornamental nursery to raise funds for the Cenacolo program in Florida, but when community members arrived from Italy they explained that Mother Elvira had instructed them to rely instead on divine providence.
“It was the result of her own closeness to the Lord in the Eucharist, which enabled her to see the immensity of God’s love. And if God loves us so immensely, he will provide for us,” he said.
After 30 years, no one has gone hungry in that Florida house or any of the community’s houses. “The point being, she was right,” Baker said.
Mother Elvira, who died on Aug. 3, 2023, at age 86, was beloved for her infectious trust in God’s providence, her devotion to the Eucharist, and her burning desire to share God’s boundless love with those struggling in life. Courtesy of the Comunità Cenacolo
The daily schedule at these houses includes Mass, eucharistic adoration, Marian devotion with three rosaries minimum a day, and devotion to St. Joseph. Every day members pray simply: “St. Joseph, provide for us.”
“The heart of it is, of course, the Eucharist,” Baker explained.
“Part of Elvira’s training is to divest to get rid of the stuff you don’t need,” he said. “So, the divesting, the trust in divine providence, and then … the Eucharist, praying before the Lord. That’s where her greatest strength was — the Eucharist, where she had all these insights. [You] have to have the sense of God’s immense love, which she had from praying before the Eucharist. And then because you know God loves you immensely, he will provide for you.”
When Baker visited Mother Elvira shortly before her death, he noted upon entering the house a mosaic on the floor that spells out the words “Dio Provvede” (God Provides).
‘Consumed with God’s love’
Florida residents Sean and Elaine Corrigan, who met Mother Elvira in 2000, lived in her community for some time and served in its missions in Brazil.
The couple credits her for saving their marriage.
“She had an extraordinary impact on our lives and on our marriage,” Elaine Corrigan told the Register. “Mother Elvira was a person fully in love with her Savior. She knew, she accepted, and she believed completely in his merciful love, and her great desire was to share him with others.
“I wanted to run after her and soak up all that she had,” she continued. “When we met Mother Elvira, we knew we had encountered a woman completely consumed with the love of God. She knew in the core of her being that he could and would heal people. She shared this hope and mercy with everyone she met.”
Albino Aragno, who started with the Cenacolo more than 30 years ago and today is the director of Comunità Cenacolo America, said Mother Elvira taught him many valuable lessons.
“Mother Elvira always encouraged me. She reminded me that life is precious and that life needs to be lived fully … to never be afraid to do God’s will, and always trust in him,” he said.
“Because of this, I can say that in all these years I can see that our community has kept on going even through so many difficulties, because good always prevails!”
Albino’s wife, Joyce, said Mother Elvira had a profound effect on her from the very beginning.
“Mother Elvira said, ‘Lord, let me know your will in the moment you want me to do it.’ This pierced my heart the first time I heard it and moved me to try to live every moment of my life in surrender and abandonment to his will, as Jesus reveals it at that moment,” she explained.
“It’s so radically opposed to control and trusting ‘in my own understanding,’ as the Psalmist says — my own intellect, perception, and analysis. Jesus calls me to live totally in the moment, not depending on myself.”
Pope Francis paid tribute to the Comunità Cenacolo on its 40th anniversary following his July 16 Angelus reflection.
“I send my heartfelt greeting to the Cenacolo Community, which has been a place of hospitality and human promotion for 40 years,” the pope said. “I bless Mother Elvira, the bishop of Saluzzo, and all the fraternity and friends. What you do is good, and it is good that you exist! Thank you!”
Baker said he observed during a recent Mass how “in periods of the Church there are great saints that get us through the eras in which we live.”
He pointed to St. Benedict in the fourth century, the Dominicans and Franciscans in the 13th century during the Albigensian heresy, and St. Ignatius and the Jesuits in the 16th century at the time of the Reformation.
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