Wyoming bishop cleared of abuse by the Vatican dies at 91

Paralympics Games 2016, basketball, USA vs. Turkey / A.RICARDO/Shutterstock

Washington D.C., Aug 30, 2021 / 10:01 am (CNA).
A Catholic disability advocate praised an increase of television and media coverage for this year’s Paralympic Games, say… […]

St. Louis, Mo., May 24, 2017 / 06:18 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A St. Louis city ordinance that could force Catholic schools and pro-life pregnancy centers to hire employees who support abortion has drawn legal opposition from the Archbishop of St. Louis and several pro-life organizations.

“As Catholics, we know that all life is a gift from God and our parents, and must be protected at any cost,” St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson said May 22. “Sadly, legal protection for those members of the human family waiting to be born in this country was removed by the Supreme Court in 1973.”

“Now, some of our St. Louis politicians have made a protected ‘class’ out of ‘reproductive health,’ which is merely a politically correct euphemism for abortion,” the archbishop said at a press conference on the steps of the federal courthouse in downtown St. Louis.

He said the archdiocese will not comply with the “vile bill.”

Archbishop Carlson was joined by Peggy Forrest of Our Lady’s Inn, which promotes abortion alternatives for pregnant women, archdiocesan newspaper the St. Louis Review reports. Also present was Sarah Pitlyk, special counsel for the Thomas More Society, which has filed the lawsuit seeking judicial review.

The Archdiocesan Elementary Schools of St. Louis, Our Lady’s Inn, and the private company O’Brien Industrial Holdings, LLC are parties to the lawsuit concerning St. Louis Ordinance 70459, also called Board Bill 203 Committee Substitute. The ordinance, enacted in February, creates a protected status for anyone who has “made a decision related to abortion,” even in cases where the abortion was not their own. The protections apply to corporations and all businesses, not only individuals.

Opponents said the bill would bar any individual or entity, including Christian organizations, from refusing to sell or rent property to individuals or businesses that promote or provide abortions. It could require Catholic schools to hire abortion supporters or potentially be sued.

The lawsuit notes the archdiocesan schools require teachers and employees to sign a statement saying they will not publicly support abortion and will otherwise live in harmony with Catholic teachings in their professional and personal lives. Organizations that require such a statement face criminal fines under the city bill, while individuals who enforce it face a fine and even jail time.

“The passage of this bill is not a milestone of our city’s success. It is, rather, a marker of our city’s embrace of the culture of death,” said Archbishop Carlson.

Pitlyk of the Thomas More Society further criticized the ordinance.

“The City of St. Louis, by pushing an abortion agenda, is clearly out of step with the rest of the state,” she charged. “The city has taken the protections typically granted to prevent discrimination for ‘race, age, religion, sex or disability’ and applied them to those who have made or expect to make ‘reproductive health decisions’,” she said.

Forrest said that the ordinance would bar Our Lady’s Inn from hiring only individuals who support its mission to provide abortion alternatives.

She said that since the ordinance was passed, her organization has received several suspicious calls that seemed like possible legal traps. She said there is a great possibility “that women either pretending to need services or knowing full well they don’t want the services that we provide will engage us just to see if they can catch us in violating the ordinance.”

“It’s insincere and takes up time for women who really are interested in our services,” Forrest added. “We support women who have already made a choice for life. And if that’s not the choice they’ve made then our services don’t match them.”  

The ordinance would also require businesses to include abortion coverage in employee health care plans, even if owners object. The Thomas More Society said this requirement is unlawful under the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving Hobby Lobby’s challenge to a federal rule mandating coverage of contraceptive drugs, including drugs that can cause abortion.

The Catholic-owned O’Brien Industrial Holdings, LLC, was also part of the Hobby Lobby case.

The St. Louis legal complaint said the ordinance violates other constitutional protections involving free speech, free association, the religion clauses of the First Amendment, due process rights, and equal protection, as well as several state laws.

Pitlyk also faulted the ordinance’s “extremely limited” religious exemptions for housing and employment, and its lack of exemptions for individuals who have “sincere religious, moral or ethical objections to abortion.”

“That is unconstitutional, and directly violates both federal and state law,” she said.

St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson defended the law in a statement, saying, “We don’t believe the ordinance infringes on the rights of the Archdiocese,” according to the Associated Press.

While backers of the ordinance said it aimed to address discrimination against individuals who have had, or were planning to have abortions, they could not find examples of such.

Pitlyk said the ordinance was “a remedy in search of a problem.”

[…]

CNA Staff, Oct 5, 2020 / 12:01 pm (CNA).- Fr. Salvatore DiStefano, a former boys’ prep school chaplain in New Jersey, was charged Thursday with use of children to commit a crime, and child endangerment.

“I want to recognize Attorney General Grewal’s Clergy Abuse Task Force and our Special Victims Unit for exhaustively and professionally investigating this case. The conduct unearthed by our investigative team represents an egregious and total betrayal of trust by a person who was supposed to be helping young men, not hurting them; conduct that might have gone unchecked but for their efforts,” acting Union County prosecutor Lyndsay Ruotolo said Oct. 1.

Fr. DiStefano, 61, was chaplain of Oratory Preparatory School in Summit, N.J., 13 miles west of Newark, until he was suspended in January during the investigation. He had been chaplain at the school since at least 2012.

He was charged with five counts of second-degree use of a juvenile to commit a crime and six counts of third-degree endangering the welfare of a child.

The prosecutor’s office said his behavior had threatened the welfare of six students at Oratory Prep.

Fr. DiStefano’s “conduct as the leader of an official school club of about 30 hand-picked Oratory Prep students, known as the ‘Knights of Malta,’” had been investigated by the Special Victims Unit, according to the prosecutor’s office statement.

“For instance, the investigation revealed that DiStefano would frequently attempt to speak with the students about sex and instructed a student to masturbate in order to relieve stress. He also allegedly made repeated attempts to entice a student to accompany him away from the school alone and took steps to conceal that activity, for instance telling the student to leave his cell phone at school so that his true location would be hidden from his parents when he met with him off-campus.”

The investigation also found that the priest texted and called the club members routinely, and at various times in late 2019 he would let them consume cannabis edibles in his office, and allegedly bought THC cartridges for them, as well as providing them money to do so.

Fr. DiStefano allegedly encouraged students to bully others, intending “to maintain his control over the group.”

“At one point, according to the investigation, DiStefano attempted to convince multiple students to harass and otherwise intimidate a former Knights of Malta member who had been dismissed from the club, ordering them to make the victim’s daily life so difficult that he would quit school.”

For example, he allegedly convinced one student to spread rumours about another on social media, and had them plan a rival party so that no one would attend one being hosted by the former Knights of Malta member.

Prosecutors said that “when students or others expressed concerns about his conduct to DiStefano, he also allegedly took steps to cover up his activities, such as telling one victim to delete all of the text messages between them from his phone.”

Both the Archdiocese of Newark and Oratory Prep cooperated with prosecutors in their investigation.

The investigation was part of the effort of the New Jersey Clergy Abuse Task Force, which was announced in September 2018 to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics in New Jersey.

The Union County prosecutor’s office said Fr. DiStefano is the fourth priest to have been charged in a criminal case filed by the task force.

The priest’s lawyer, Vincent J. Sanzone Jr., told The Star-Ledger that Fr. DiStefano is innocent of the charges, and noted, “he’s not charged with a sexual crime … it’s about students bullying each other, and it got out of control.”

When Fr. DiStefano was placed on leave amid the investigation in late Janury, NJ.com reported that a Newark archdiocese spokeswoman said that the archdiocese “takes very seriously any and all credible complaints of sexual misconduct or sexual abuse of minors by members of the clergy, religious, lay staff and volunteers of the Archdiocese.”

According to NJ.com, Fr. DiStefano was an assistant principal in the New York City Public Schools and was a New York City police officer before being ordained a priest.

Prosecutors said the priest was recently residing at Our Lady of Peace parish in New Providence, which is adjacent to Summit.

[…]