Boston City Hall / andrewjsan via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Washington D.C., Jan 19, 2022 / 16:40 pm (CNA).
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case involving the city of Boston’s refusal to raise a flag with Christian imagery in front of its City Hall.
The North Carolina-based organization Camp Constitution applied in June 2017 to raise a flag featuring a Latin cross in front of City Hall. The display of the flag reportedly would have coincided with an event involving speeches by local clergy.
Boston has a long-standing flag program through which private organizations can apply to raise a flag related to their cause on one of three flag poles in front of City Hall. Previous flags have represented causes including Boston Pride. Some flags have included religious imagery, but this seems to be the first application for a flag with an explicitly religious description.
The city of Boston rejected Camp Constitution’s application, after approving all 284 previous applications in the flag program’s history.
The city argued that displaying a flag with a Christian symbol would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Camp Constitution sued, arguing the city’s decision violated its free speech.
The case of Shurtleff v. City of Boston considers whether the city of Boston’s flag program is properly considered a public forum for private speech or a reflection of government endorsement of messages promoted by the flags.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the city in January 2021, arguing the government is entitled to choose the messages it endorses.
The Supreme Court agreed in September 2021 to hear the case. The court is expected to issue a decision in June.
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Mother Teresa and John Paul II, May 25, 1983. / Credit: L’Osservatore Romano
CNA Staff, Sep 4, 2024 / 16:46 pm (CNA).
Today is the eighth anniversary of Mother Teresa’s canonization. Pope Francis declared her a saint on Sept. 4, 2016 — just over a dozen years after she was beatified by her friend and fellow saint, Pope John Paul II.
St. Teresa of Calcutta, who was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, gained fame around the world for caring for the poorest of the poor and sharing Christ’s love with them. She founded the Missionaries of Charity, the religious order that carries on her work today around the world.
St. John Paul II and Mother Teresa, two of the most famous and consequential Catholic saints of the 20th century, weren’t just friends. As followers of Christ, they complemented each other in profound ways, with Mother Teresa putting into practice so many of the Catholic teachings that John Paul eloquently taught.
“Where John Paul provided the theological and intellectual foundation for understanding human dignity in the face of the great darkness of the 20th century — abortion, euthanasia, atheism, communism, and materialism — Mother Teresa was a living witness to what the pope was teaching,” the editors of the National Catholic Register noted in 2016.
Though Mother Teresa was a decade older than John Paul, they both experienced significant milestones in their faith lives in 1946 — he was ordained a priest that year and Sister Teresa heard a “call within a call” to serve the poor on the streets of Calcutta. Throughout both of their lives, they were deeply devoted to the Virgin Mary and to the rosary.
In 1986, the pope visited Mother Teresa’s hospice center, Nirmal Hriday, which she had founded in 1952 in the heart of the slums in Calcutta. Tens of thousands of sick and forgotten people, who would otherwise have perished on the streets, died a dignified death at the center over the decades.
According to news reports, Pope John Paul was “visibly moved” and even disturbed by what he saw at the hospice, such that he was rendered speechless. He called Nirmal Hriday “a place that bears witness to the primacy of love.”
“Our human dignity comes from God … in whose image we are all made. No amount of privation or suffering can ever remove this dignity, for we are always precious in the eyes of God,” he said in a speech given outside the center.
In Nirmal Hriday, “the mystery of human suffering meets the mystery of faith and love,” the pope continued; there, people ask every day why God would allow such death and suffering.
“And the answer that comes, often in unspoken ways of kindness and compassion, is filled with honesty and faith: ‘I cannot fully answer all your questions; I cannot take away all your pain. But of this I am sure: God loves you with an everlasting love. You are precious in his sight. In him I love you too. For in God we are truly brothers and sisters,’” the pope said.
Mother Teresa later described the day of the pope’s visit as “the happiest day of my life.”
At that meeting and whenever they met afterward, John Paul would kiss the top of the diminutive nun’s head and offer her a blessing, while she fervently kissed his papal ring.
Mother Teresa died in 1997. At her beatification in 2003, an aging John Paul said: “I am personally grateful to this courageous woman, whom I have always felt beside me. Mother Teresa, an icon of the Good Samaritan, went everywhere to serve Christ in the poorest of the poor.”
“Let us praise the Lord for this diminutive woman in love with God, a humble Gospel messenger and a tireless benefactor of humanity. In her we honor one of the most important figures of our time. Let us welcome her message and follow her example,” the pope said of his friend.
“Virgin Mary, queen of all the saints, help us to be gentle and humble of heart like this fearless messenger of love. Help us to serve every person we meet with joy and a smile. Help us to be missionaries of Christ, our peace and our hope. Amen!”
Nebraska Capitol. / Credit: Steven Frame/Shutterstock
CNA Staff, Nov 1, 2024 / 14:55 pm (CNA).
Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has released an advisory clarifying that the state’s preborn protection law does not prohibit miscarriage care or lifesaving care amid a pro-abortion advertisement campaign that told the public otherwise.
“The Department of Health and Human Services has received several inquiries, from physicians and health care providers, expressing concern regarding recent radio and television ads that included incorrect and misleading information regarding the Preborn Child Protection Act,” the Oct. 28 advisory reads.
The health advisory came amid an advertising campaign by advocates of Nebraska’s Right to Abortion Initiative 439, which advocates for a right to abortion up to fetal viability in the state constitution. The campaign featured multiple ads that stated that women couldn’t receive miscarriage care and necessary health care because of Nebraska’s current law.
“Any time misleading information causes confusion among health care professionals, it could cause harm to the health and well-being of their patients,” stated the advisory by Dr. Timothy Tesmer, the chief medical officer of the DHHS in Nebraska.
In the health advisory, Tesmer didn’t name which ads the department was responding to, but he clarified that the current law, which protects unborn children after 12 weeks’ gestational age from abortion, provides exceptions for medical emergencies and for cases of rape or incest.
But an advertisement campaign by pro-abortion group Protect Our Rights: Nebraska for 439 told the public otherwise. In one advertisement, advocates said that in Nebraska, there is “an abortion ban that threatens women’s lives” and that “doctors can’t help them even if the pregnancy won’t survive. It puts their lives in danger.” Other advertisements by the same group state that doctors “can’t properly care for patients” and claim that women get sent home “because of the confusing abortion ban” when they have miscarriages.
Allie Berry, the campaign manager for Protect Our Rights, told NBC News that she believed the advisory referred to her group’s ads but said the advisory was designed to “confuse voters.”
The advisory noted that a medical emergency is legally defined as either a threat to the pregnant woman’s life or a “serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”
“The act does not require a medical emergency to be immediate,” Tesmer noted in the advisory. “Physicians understand that it is difficult to predict with certainty whether a situation will cause a patient to become seriously ill or die, but physicians do know what situations could lead to serious outcomes.”
Nebraska also has a competing pro-life amendment, Initiative 434, which would prohibit abortions after the first trimester, with exceptions for medical emergencies and cases of rape or incest. Another advertisement by Protect Our Rights claimed that Initiative 434 would make Nebraska’s current law permanent and “opens the door” to banning miscarriage care and IVF.
The health advisory clarified that a variety of medical treatments are not prohibited by the Preborn Child Protection Act, including the removal of a child’s remains after pregnancy loss and the termination of a preborn child produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF) but not implanted in the mother’s womb. The advisory noted that any act intended to save the child’s life, as well as treatment for ectopic pregnancies, is not prohibited under the current law.
“Physicians should exercise their best clinical judgment, and the law allows intervention consistent with prevailing standards of care,” the advisory continued. “The law is deferential to a physician’s judgment in these circumstances.”
Political context
With two contradicting abortion-related measures on the 2024 ballot, Nebraskans will decide Nov. 5 on protection for unborn children in the nation’s only competing abortion ballots.
Marion Miner, the associate director of Pro-life and Family Policy for the Nebraska Catholic Conference, told CNA that “these lies … are abortion activists’ attempt to terrify voters into approving a radical pro-abortion constitutional amendment they would never otherwise support.”
“Abortion activists are putting women’s lives at risk in a gambit to advance a pro-abortion political agenda,” Miner added. “There are real potential human costs, including lost lives.”
She noted that “misinformation by abortion activists …is putting women’s lives at risk.”
“These lies have become so rampant in the weeks leading up to this election that public health officials felt the need to correct the record to prevent this misinformation from provoking a public health crisis,” Miner said.
Kelsey Pritchard, director of state public affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, pointed out that this pro-abortion rhetoric is not isolated to Nebraska.
“This falsity that has been parroted by [Vice President] Kamala Harris and unchecked by most of the media leads women to delay seeking care and gives doctors pause when they need to act immediately,” Pritchard said in a statement shared with CNA.
“This falsity that has been parroted by Kamala Harris and unchecked by most of the media leads women to delay seeking care and gives doctors pause when they need to act immediately,” said Kelsey Pritchard, director of state public affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Credit: EWTN News/Screenshot
“Every state with a pro-life law, including Nebraska, protects women who experience a miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, or any other medical emergency in pregnancy,” Pritchard emphasized. “This care continues to be available under ‘life of the mother’ exceptions, which allow physicians to rely upon their reasonable medical judgment.”
Recently, Harris amplified claims by several news outlets that two women died as the result of Georgia’s pro-life laws. But doctors say one woman, Amber Thurman, died because of the abortion pill and medical malpractice, while the other woman, Candi Miller, died of side effects from the abortion pill after she didn’t seek medical help.
“Women who need medical care should not be made to believe, because of ads they have seen on TV or in political mailers, that they have no option but to stay home instead of seeking treatment,” Miner said.
The European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. / Credit: JLogan via Wikimedia/ Public Domain
Rome Newsroom, Mar 22, 2024 / 10:45 am (CNA).
European bishops this week called on the institutions of the European Union to embrace greater state-chur… […]
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