Washington, D.C. Newsroom, May 12, 2023 / 08:25 am (CNA).
On Thursday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law legislation that ensures medical professionals and institutions that provide health care cannot be forced to violate their moral, ethical, or religious convictions.
The new law forbids employers from taking adverse actions against employees who refuse to provide services based on a conscience-based objection. This means the employee cannot be fired, suspended, or disciplined. A medical practitioner must provide his or her employer with written notice of any conscience-based objection.
Institutions that provide medical services — as well as institutions and individuals who provide payments for health care services for others, such as employers — will also receive the same legal protections.
“It is the intent of the Legislature to provide the right of medical conscience for health care providers and payors to ensure they can care for patients in a manner consistent with their moral, ethical, and religious convictions,” the legislation states. “Further, it is the intent of the Legislature that licensed health care providers and payors be free from threat of discrimination for providing conscience-based health care.”
Such objections could include abortions and sex changes but are not limited to that. The law broadly defines a conscience-based objection as an objection “based on a sincerely held religious, moral, or ethical belief.”
The legislation further provides free speech protections to medical practitioners. The law forbids the Department of Health and licensing boards from taking disciplinary action against a practitioner for speaking or writing publicly about a health care service or public policy.
Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Stephanie Nichols spoke in favor of the legislation.
“Americans shouldn’t be forced to violate their ethical and religious beliefs, and this certainly includes doctors, nurses, and other medical providers,” Nichols said in a statement. “Thankfully, [this bill] is a strong step in outlining comprehensive protections in Florida law for medical conscience and freedom of speech for medical providers.”
The new law will be enforced by the attorney general’s office. If a person believes his or her rights have been violated under the law, they can file a complaint with the attorney general and are eligible for civil damages.
Laws that require a practitioner to provide emergency medical treatment will still apply.
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Denver Newsroom, Jul 18, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- When the coronavirus pandemic necessitated widespread shutdowns, Catholic parishes were among those to feel the financial pinch almost immediately. No people in the pews meant no money in the collection basket. Mass after Mass, weekend after weekend, that loss added up.
To keep paying his small staff, Fr. Joseph Lajoie applied for a Payment Protection Program (PPP) loan through the Small Business Administration. The loans were meant to support the essential needs of small businesses and nonprofits affected by coronavirus shutdowns.
An article from the Associated Press published last week criticized the “U.S. Roman Catholic Church” for reportedly accepting between $1.4-$3.5 billion work of PPP loans. In fact, there is no single entity that is the U.S. Roman Catholic Church. Rather, each parish operates as its own small nonprofit, and weekly donations help to employ the priest, along with the employees who maintain the parish and its ministries.
Sacred Heart Parish has three part-time employees, and a three-ring binder in which it keeps track of its 500-some registered families.
“In some ways our parish is very archaic,” Fr. Jajoie told CNA.
He dreams of someday hiring a maintenance manager.
“I have a 100 year-old church without a maintenance guy,” he noted.
Though it is located in Denver’s gentrifying, “hipster” neighborhood of RiNo (River North), Lajoie said Sacred Heart is a small, poor parish with no online donation portal and has been “limping along” through the pandemic.
When Lajoie applied for the loans, the priest had no grand visions for what he would do with the money.
The needs of the parish are pretty “bare bones,” and Lajoie said he used the loan to keep paying the salaries of his employees – a secretary, a bookkeeper, and a director of religious education – whose incomes help support their families.
Masses are back at the parish now, but at a lower capacity to accommodate social distancing.
“Right now, because of the reduced Mass schedule that we have, we’re just under about 50% of our normal parish income. So we’re limping along, but it could be a lot worse,” Lajoie said.
Fr. Lajoie said by applying for the federal loan, he was not trying to pad his bottom line. He was simply trying to keep his employees, well, employed.
“I wanted to do my best to support these employees, and I would have done it even without the loan, even to the detriment of the parish, because I feel at least we showed them some gratitude” for their work, Lajoie said. “Because being here as a pastor for a year and dealing with the shutdown, I don’t know what I would do (without them). They’re definitely quite essential to the needs of this parish.”
Lajoie said he hoped people understand that parishes are small businesses with employees who pay taxes and need to keep their jobs, and that they are not part of huge corporations.
“Parishes have employees, who are working, who need jobs. As far as my parish is concerned, we are using this money to help some people who are part of families. We are using this money the same way that a for-profit business is using money, which also helps their bottom line. As far as I’m concerned, what we’re doing…it’s to benefit working people, who themselves pay taxes,” he said. “We’re using this to help people the same way that a for-profit helps their employees,” he said.
“I think that more parishes can be trusted to actually care about people in all of this, than some companies out there who are willing to…cut jobs, because they’re not making a profit anymore. I mean, the church will still exist if they’re not making a profit. If the church isn’t making a profit at a certain point, the buildings themselves will have to close because they can’t keep the lights on.”
The parish of Christ the King in Oklahoma City is more than three times the size of Sacred Heart. The parish has 1,800 families, and a school that educates 520 children. Between full-time and part-time employees, Fr. Rick Stansberry said the parish and school employ 78 people.
When the pandemic shut down Masses at the parish, Stansberry said one of the members of his finance committee encouraged him to apply for the PPP loan so that the parish wouldn’t have to fire anyone.
“Once everything was shut down, our collection dropped pretty quick, since people weren’t coming to church,” Stansberry told CNA.
“In our parish, a lot of people are tied into the oil and gas industry, and lots of people were losing jobs. And so all of a sudden they found themselves without jobs, having to feed their families. Some were not able to pay tuition. Obviously they weren’t able to tithe to the church,” he said.
“I didn’t want to have to lay people off and contribute to the problem. And some of our part-time (employees) are more vulnerable in the sense that they really depended on the jobs that they had to eat. I didn’t want to lay people off,” Stansberry said.
The part-time employees “were the ones that were the most grateful that we got the loan.”
The loans granted to parishes as well as other nonprofits and small businesses through the PPP loan could be used for salaries, utilities, rent and other necessities. Stansberry said his parish loan was used “100% for salaries.”
With the recent phased reopenings of Masses, Stansberry said that donations have “kind of stabilized” again, but that the financial situation of the parish and its school is a “moving target” right now, especially with all of the uncertainty surrounding the quickly approaching school year.
The school is working on a 40-page document detailing reopening plans with social distancing and masks and frequent disinfection of the school, which itself “has added thousands of dollars to our janitorial bill.”
But if something changes and reopening becomes impossible, it puts the future of many Catholic schools – and their employees – in jeopardy, Stansberry noted.
“If we can’t reopen in person, I think we’re going to lose a lot of Catholic schools, because parents are saying, ‘Well, why am I going to pay tuition to do virtual (Catholic) school when I can do the public one for free?’”
Stansberry said his parish also has some important ministries, such as those that feed the homeless, or help needy families with food assistance, that would have been cut had the parish not qualified for the PPP loan.
And the priest said he wanted to keep his employees paid and his ministries operational.
“By having this money to pay salaries, we did not have to cut back on the mobile meals program or helping to provide food for a needy family. That would have all had to have been cut too. The people that I think that are being critical (about parishes receiving loans) don’t really know how a church works.”
St. Peter’s Basilica / Simone Savoldi / Unsplash (CC0)
Rome Newsroom, Oct 2, 2022 / 03:00 am (CNA).
The world’s newest bishops gathered in Rome last month to learn more about what it means to be a Catholic bishop.
While the week’s presentations spanned a range of topics, three U.S. bishops who attended told CNA that synodality emerged as a key theme.
The Vatican’s annual formation course, sometimes known by the nickname “baby bishop school,” was canceled for two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic — making the 2022 edition the largest yet, with approximately 330 participating bishops across two sessions.
“People kind of picture baby bishop school as nuts and bolts, like ‘how to be a bishop.’ It’s not that at all,” Bishop Erik Pohlmeier of the Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida, told CNA at the end of the course.
“It’s kind of whatever the Church is talking about at that time, bringing that to the bishops that are coming on board,” he said. “The synodal process has been … a hallmark of conversation for the last couple of years, so now as we’re new bishops … the reflections revolved around that.”
The seminar’s first session was primarily attended by bishops consecrated in 2019 and 2020, while the second session was mostly those who joined the ranks in 2021 and the first part of 2022.
Thirty-nine U.S. bishops and auxiliary bishops attended, divided between the two weeks.
Pohlmeier was the freshest U.S. bishop to join. He was ordained a bishop on July 22 — just two days after his 51st birthday and seven weeks before arriving in Rome for the Sept. 12–19 course.
Speaking to CNA in Rome on Sept. 19, Pohlmeier said that as a new bishop, there are many things you do not know, but that’s where one’s fellow bishops come in.
“Every bishop knows other bishops,” he explained, like the bishop of the diocese where they served as a priest. “And they’re always, I mean to a person, helpful.”
Bishop Gregory Gordon, the first-ever auxiliary bishop of Las Vegas, Nevada, told CNA on Sept. 19 that the U.S. bishops’ conference also organizes meetings between bishops of the same ordination year, or “class,” as a way to build fraternity and create a network of support.
Bishop Gregory Gordon greets Pope Francis at the end of the course Sept. 19, 2022. Vatican Media
While the formal theme of this year’s seminar was how to announce the Gospel in changing times, Pohlmeier, Gordon, and Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria, Illinois, said the unofficial topic of the week was synodality.
What they talked about
“We’re in the midst of the synod,” Tylka, who attended the seminar Sept. 1–8, told CNA by phone from his diocese. So the course, he added, focused on questions such as: “What does it mean to be a synodal Church? What is the ministry of the bishop in relation to that?”
Care for the planet and one’s neighbor, themes important to Pope Francis’ pontificate, were also a major part of the seminar, Tylka said.
The week’s presentations also covered child protection and the sexual abuse crisis.
“That’s one of those things that I think we will take home, saying we will be very, very careful not to neglect,” Gordon said.
Some talks, Pohlmeier noted, were directly about synodality and what it means. At the same time, those of a more practical nature, such as canon law for bishops, “would always include some comment on the synodal approach.”
“You’re going to get different articulations of what that means depending on who you talk to, but in general, my understanding is that it is more of a listening posture,” the St. Augustine bishop said.
A bishop takes a photo of Pope Francis during their encounter on Sept. 19, 2022. Vatican Media
Bishop Gordon said Pope Francis himself modeled this listening attitude in their meeting with him on the final day of formation.
In the nearly two-hour meeting, he said most of the time was spent with the pope answering the bishops’ questions. “So you finished the course, [the pope] said. You’ve heard a lot already… Now I want to hear from you.”
This was Gordon’s big takeaway from the week: “It has to go back to the Holy Father’s words to us as he was answering our own questions, you know, asking us to exercise that episcopal closeness.”
The week also included time for communal prayer, Mass, adoration, and confession.
Bishop Tylka of Peoria said his personal opinion is that “a big part of synodality is the willingness and openness to create space for people to share their stories, to share their own encounters with Christ, to share their own experiences of how life is going.”
“So I think the role of the bishop clearly is to model that openness and that willingness to engage in dialogue,” he said.
This was my small group for discussion on Synodality! What an amazing group of bishops from around the world. Such a rich discussion on the Church! pic.twitter.com/fIOPLXwnfo
But there is also a lighter side to being a new bishop, as Pohlmeier evidenced with an amusing scene from the end of the week.
“Here we are, brand new and so … we got instructions on what we’re supposed to wear to meet the pope,” Pohlmeier said.
He explained that bishops in the Latin Church have two main styles of a full-length garment called a cassock. The new bishops were told to meet the pope. They should wear a black cassock with red trim, a purple fascia, and a purple zucchetto. (There is also a purple cassock with red trim for special liturgical events.)
Pohlmeier said it was funny to watch the bishops get ready for Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica and, afterward, the meeting with Pope Francis. Many of them were helping each other figure out where each piece of the complicated attire went — including the tall headpiece, called a mitre, which bishops wear to denote their office.
Today I joined the celebration in St Peter’s for the beatification of Blessed John Paul I. The rain did not dampen the joy of lifting up the ‘Smiling Pope.’ Humbled to be with the universal Church for such a celebration. pic.twitter.com/08AtzMUlMd
“Guys are literally opening up bags that haven’t been opened with miters from right there, from Euroclero,” Pohlmeier said, pointing over his shoulder in the direction of a clerical supply store next to St. Peter’s Square.
“You could see everybody that bought one this morning because they all matched,” he chuckled. “There were several people that were literally opening it up and pulling it out of the package and trying to get it on straight, and get things attached right, and not sure what clips go where and what’s right.”
“Those kinds of things are funny,” Pohlmeier said, “but nobody just tells you, ‘OK, buy this stuff, here’s what you need.’”
The Governor signed into law legislation that “ensures medical professionals and institutions that provide health care cannot be forced to violate their moral, ethical, or religious convictions.”
The Governor signed into law legislation that “ensures medical professionals and institutions that provide health care cannot be forced to violate their moral, ethical, or religious convictions.”
You can’t get any clearer than that.
We await their response.