Priest pleads guilty to federal child sex exploitation charges

Pope Francis at the Synod on Synodality’s closing Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on Oct. 29, 2023. / Credit: Daniel Ibanez/CNA

Vatican City, Oct 30, 2023 / 13:45 pm (CNA).
Now that the Synod on Synodality has drawn to a close, all eyes are on&nbs… […]

CNA Staff, Jul 24, 2020 / 12:25 pm (CNA).- Two statues of Christopher Columbus in Chicago parks were removed Friday following demonstrations and attempts to pull down one of the monuments.

The office of Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot announced July 24 that the city had “temporarily removed the Christopher Columbus statues in Grant Park and Arrigo Park until further notice. This action was taken after consultation with various stakeholders. It comes in response to demonstrations that became unsafe for both protesters and police, as well as efforts by individuals to independently pull the Grant Park statue down in an extremely dangerous manner.”

It said the move “is about an effort to protect public safety and to preserve a safe space for an inclusive and democratic public dialogue about our city’s symbols. In addition, our public safety resources must be concentrated where they are most needed throughout the city, and particularly in our South and West Side communities.”

The city will be assessing each of its “monuments, memorials, and murals” and will “develop a framework for creating a public dialogue to determine how we elevate our city’s history and diversity.”

The mayor’s office emphasized that “this is not about a single statue or mural, but how we create a platform to channel our city’s dynamic civic energy to collaboratively, purposefully and peacefully reflect our values as Chicagoans and uplift the stories of all of our diverse city’s residents, particularly when it comes to the permanent memorialization of our shared heritage.”

The statues were removed in the early morning, between 3:00 and 5:30 am, the AP reported.

Both the statues had been vandalized recently, protesters had violently clashed with police in Grant Park.

There has been a spate of vandal attacks on statues of historic figures and a wave of critical commentary on American monuments. Vandals particularly targeted statues of Confederate leaders, but also moved against statues of Ulysses S. Grant and St. Junipero Serra. Catholic churches and statues have also come under attack.

The protests were originally launched in response to the death of Minnesotan George Floyd, a black man, while he was being detained by Minneapolis police

Columbus has long been an American Catholic and Italian-American folk hero. They have seen his pioneering voyage from Europe as a way of validating their presence in a sometimes hostile majority-Protestant country and as the means by which Christianity reached the New World.

He was depicted as a symbol of exploration and discovery, critical for launching the encounter between Europe and the Americas. He was also a symbol of immigrants, and honors for Columbus drew opposition from nativist and anti-Catholic groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

While Columbus never set foot in North America, the District of Columbia bears his name and he is the namesake of the Knights of Columbus, now the largest Catholic men’s fraternal organization in the world.

In recent decades, Columbus has drawn critical coverage. Some blame him for the launch of the transatlantic slave trade, and fault him for the enslavement and other mistreatment of some Native Americans under his command. Some critics blame him for the subsequent sufferings of Native Americans under Spanish rule, or under the rule of European colonists generally.

A statue of Columbus in Philadelphia’s Marconi Plaza has also been targeted for removal by activists. That monument has been surrounded by a makeshift wooden box since June to protect it from being defaced.

In June a Columbus statue in Boston’s historically Italian North End was beheaded, and one in St. Paul was toppled.

The Worcester city council voted July 21 to shelve a proposal that would have ordered the removal of a Columbus statue located outside the city’s Union Station, citing the need to respect the local Italian community.

And in June, a Catholic high school in Wisconsin said it not change its name from “Columbus Catholic High School” after a petition from alumni and other members of the community requested the change. The school was named for the Knights of Columbus, who funded its construction.

Carol Delaney, an emerita professor of anthropology at Stanford University and author of “Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem,” told CNA in 2017 that a popular current narrative around Columbus is tarred by bad history.

“They’re blaming Columbus for the things he didn’t do. It was mostly the people who came after, the settlers,” Delaney said. “He’s been terribly maligned.”

She said Columbus initially had a favorable impression of many of the Native Americans he met and instructed the men under his command not to abuse them but to trade with them; he also punished some of his own men who committed crimes against the natives.

Delaney acknowledged that some Native Americans were sent to Spain as slaves or conscripted into hard labor at the time Columbus had responsibility for the region, but she attributed this mistreatment to his substitutes acting in his absence.

The explorer had good relations with a Native American leader on Hispaniola. There, a Taino chief named Guacanagari aided Columbus after the wreck of his main ship the Santa Maria. Columbus adopted one of his sons, who took the name of Columbus’ natural son, Diego, and accompanied Columbus on his final three voyages.

The Knights of Columbus have said that their namesake “has frequently been falsely blamed for the actions of those who came after him and is the victim of horrific slanders concerning his conduct.”

Leo XIII wrote an encylical marking the Columban quadricentennial in 1892, reflecting on Columbus’ desire to spread the faith. In Quarto abeunte saeculo, the pope wrote that Columbus “resolved to go before and prepare the ways for the Gospel” by his exploration.

“When [Columbus] learned from the lessons of astronomy and the record of the ancients, that there were great tracts of land lying towards the West … he saw in spirit a mighty multitude, cloaked in miserable darkness, given over to evil rites, and the superstitious worship of vain gods. Miserable it is to live in a barbarous state and with savage manners: but more miserable to lack the knowledge of that which is highest, and to dwell in ignorance of the one true God. Considering these things, therefore, in his mind, he sought first of all to extend the Christian name and the benefits of Christian charity to the West,” Leo declared.

Regarding the recent controversy over Columbus, Delaney told CNA that Columbus is being blamed “for things he did not do,” including the history of slavery in the U.S.

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Denver, Colo., Aug 1, 2017 / 03:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After the US Department of Justice did not drop its appeal of a contraceptive mandate lawsuit by the Catholic Benefits Association on Monday, the group expressed its disappointment.

“It is disappointing that that process hasn’t moved forward. It does seem to be stalled currently,” Douglas Wilson, CEO of the Catholic Benefits Association, told CNA Tuesday.

Catholic Benefits Association is comprised of over 700 Catholic employers, including dioceses, schools, hospitals, and social service agencies. The group helps the employers provide quality Catholic health care in accordance with Church teaching.

The association had previously asked the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice to drop the government’s appeal of their lawsuit against the HHS contraceptive mandate. The Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the government until July 31 to reply to CBA’s request.

In a July 27 statement, Wilson said that “President Trump took an important first step by instructing these agencies to change their mandate and to protect religious liberty.”

“HHS and DOJ need to follow President Trump’s lead by dropping their appeal by July 31,” he said.

CBA had filed a motion in court asking either for “summary affirmance” of its claim that the HHS contraceptive mandate was illegal, or for the administration to drop its appeal of the case.

The Department of Justice was given until July 31 by the Tenth Circuit Court to reply, and said on Monday that it was still working on a final rule on exemptions from the contraceptive mandate.

Wilson said on Tuesday that the CBA wants the administration “to get those interim regulations filed and promulgated as soon as possible.”

The Catholic Benefits Association is one of dozens of non-profit organizations which sued the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration over the contraceptive mandate and its “accommodation” offered to objecting entities.

While the mandate ordered employers to provide cost-free coverage in their employee health plans for contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortion-inducing drugs, the government offered an “accommodation” to non-profits that conscientiously objected to complying with the mandate. They would notify the government or the third party administrator of their plan of their objection, and their administrator would then provide the coverage to the employees.

Many non-profits, including the Archdiocese of Washington and the Little Sisters of the Poor, claimed that this “accommodation” still forced them to cooperate with morally-objectionable practices of providing access to contraceptives.

Last year, in the middle of the contraceptive mandate case Zubik v. Burwell, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts and directed both parties to come to an agreement where the interests of the government – providing coverage for contraceptives and the other drugs and procedures – were respected, while the religious liberty of objecting parties was also respected.

However, even under the Trump administration the Department of Justice had not stopped its appeals of the HHS mandate cases. On May 4, however, President Donald Trump announced that, as part of his religious freedom executive order, the objecting religious non-profits would receive relief from the mandate.

He told the non-profits and the nuns present from the Little Sisters of the Poor that “your long ordeal will soon be over” and that “we are ending the attacks on your religious freedom.”

HHS Secretary Tom Price said the agency “will be taking action in short order to follow the President’s instruction to safeguard the deeply held religious beliefs of Americans who provide health insurance to their employees.”

A draft interim final rule from the HHS was leaked in May, which reportedly carved out religious exemptions from the mandate for the objecting non-profits that were more broad than the narrow exemptions determined by the Obama administration, which applied to churches and very few other religious groups.

Becket, a religious freedom law firm defending many of the objectors to the HHS mandate, said the language in the draft would offer sufficient protections from the mandate for the religious groups.

In the draft, the government also admitted in the draft that the contraceptive mandate did not advance a compelling governmental interest, which is one of the necessary qualifications for a law that infringes upon someone’s sincere religious beliefs to succeed the test, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

However, the administration’s rule has not yet been released. The Catholic Benefits Association finally filed a motion in court asking the government to drop its appeal of the HHS mandate case, and citing the government’s admission in the draft rule that the mandate did not further a “compelling governmental interest.”

The court gave the government a July 31 deadline to reply to the motion. On Monday, the Department of Justice replied that the administration was still in the process of crafting the final rule for religious non-profits and the contraceptive mandate, and asked the court to suspend the motion until the process was finished.

“As we explained in our status report of July 14, 2017, the new Administration has initiated the rulemaking process to amend the regulations at issue here,” the agency said on Monday. “That process has not, however, reached conclusion. This Court has properly maintained abeyances in related cases while the rulemaking process proceeds, and it should do the same here.”

In response, Wilson said that “the Tenth Circuit made clear that it wanted the government’s response to address ‘with specificity’ the arguments in our motion, which of course they have not done to date.”

The agency had initially requested from CBA an extension to reply to the motion, which CBA would have opposed, Wilson said. However, later on Monday, the agency instead filed a short brief in response to the motion.

“We’re disappointed in that all of the facts come to our side of the equation, they favor our argument,” Wilson said. He said that “we’re very heartened that the response that they filed is in our opinion lacking in substance, and we feel hopeful that the court’s going to see it the same way.”

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