Biden says ‘Equal Rights Amendment’ is ‘law of the land’

New Orleans, La., Dec 22, 2017 / 04:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Venerable Henriette DeLille, born a “free woman of color” before the Civil War, had all the makings of a life of relative ease before her.

Born in 1812 to a wealthy French father and a free Creole woman of Spanish, French and African descent, Henriette was groomed throughout her childhood to become a part of what was then known as the placage system.

Under the placage system, free women of color (term used at the time for people of full or partial African descent, who were no longer or never were slaves) entered into common law marriages with wealthy white plantation owners, who often kept their legitimate families at the plantations in the country. It was a rigid system, but afforded free women of color comfortable and even luxurious lives.

Trained in French literature, music, dancing, and nursing, Henriette was prepared to become the “kept woman” of a wealthy white man throughout her childhood.

However, in her early 20s, Henriette declared that her religious convictions could not be reconciled with the placage lifestyle for which she was being prepared. Raised Catholic, which was typical for free people of color at the time, she had recently had a deep encounter with God, and believed that the placage system violated Church teaching on the sanctity of marriage.

Working as a teacher since the age of 14, Henriette’s devotion to caring for and educating the poor grew. Even though she was only one-eighth African and could have passed as a white person, she always referred to herself as Creole or as a free person of color, causing conflict in her family, who had declared themselves white on the census.

In 1836, wanting to dedicate her life to God, Henriette used the proceeds of an inheritance to found a small unrecognized order of nuns, the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Her non-white heritage had barred her from admission to the Ursuline and Carmelite orders, which only accepted white women at the time.

This group would eventually become the Sisters of the Holy Family, officially founded at St. Augustine’s Church in 1842. Like Henriette, the other two founding sisters had denounced a life in the placage system.

The Sisters taught religion and other subjects to the slaves, even though it was illegal to do so at the time, punishable by death or life imprisonment.

They also encouraged free quadroon women (women of one-fourth African descent) to marry men of their own class, and encouraged slave couples to have their unions blessed by the church.

The Sisters also established a home to care for elderly women, many of them likely former slaves. It was the first nursing home of its kind established by the Church in the U.S., and it was there that the early Sisters cared for the sick and the dying during the yellow fever epidemics that struck New Orleans in 1853 and 1897.

Homes for orphans and eventually schools were also established by the order, which continued to grow and spread its mission throughout the South.

Henriette Delille died in 1862 at the relatively young age of 50, probably of tuberculosis. At the time of her death, the order had 12 members, but it would eventually peak at 400 members in the 1950s.

The Sisters of the Holy Family are still an active order in Louisiana today, with sisters working in nursing homes and as teachers, administrators and other pastoral positions.

In 1988, the Mother Superior of the order at the time requested the opening of Henriette Delille’s cause for canonization. She was declared a Servant of God, and then was declared Venerable by Pope Benedict XVI on March 27, 2010. A miracle through her intercession is needed for her beatification, the next step in the process before canonization.

Throughout her life, Henriette was inspired by this prayer, which she wrote in one of her religious books when she first founded her order: “I believe in God, I hope In God. I love. I want to live and die for God.”

This article was originally published on CNA Feb. 12, 2017.

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Washington D.C., Oct 6, 2017 / 09:46 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In a set of memos issued Friday, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions outlined principles of religious freedom that federal agencies and departments are to incorporate into their work.

“Our freedom as citizens has always been inextricably linked with our religious freedom as a people,” Sessions said in an Oct. 6 statement. “Every American has a right to believe, worship, and exercise their faith. The protections for this right, enshrined in our Constitution and laws, serve to declare and protect this important part of our heritage.”

The memos were issued in response to an executive order signed by President Trump in May, declaring, “It shall be the policy of the executive branch to vigorously enforce Federal law’s robust protections for religious freedom” and instructing the attorney general to “issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in Federal law.”

Friday’s memos do not resolve specific cases currently in the court system. However, they were issued on the same day that the administration announced changes to the federal contraception mandate, allowing broad religious and moral exemptions to the regulation.

The first memo lists 20 principles of religious liberty that should govern all administrative agencies and executive departments in their work as employers, contract- and grant-makers, program administrators, rule-makers, and adjudicators.

These principles recognize religious freedom as “an important, fundamental right,” expressly protected by the Constitution and by federal law. This freedom extends to both individuals and organizations, and it is not surrendered when Americans engage in the marketplace or interact with the government.

Furthermore, the guidance says, religious freedom is more than the right to worship or believe privately. It includes “the right to perform or abstain from performing certain physical acts in accordance with one’s beliefs.”

The document notes the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which says that the federal government may not substantially burden the exercise of religious freedom, unless there is a compelling state interest in doing so, and it is carried out in the least-restrictive manner possible.

This law “does not permit the federal government to second-guess the reasonableness of a sincerely held religious belief,” the guidance says, and it places a demanding standard on government interference with religious belief or practice, including when the religious party is seeking “an exemption from a legal obligation…to confer benefits on third parties.”

The guidance also reiterates that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employers covered by the regulation from discriminating based on an individual’s religious belief, observance or practice, “unless the employer cannot reasonably accommodate such observance or practice without undue hardship.”

Furthermore, the memo clarifies, religious employers are entitled to limit employment to people whose beliefs and conduct adhere to their religious precepts.

“Generally, the federal government may not condition federal grants or contracts on the religious organization altering its religious character, beliefs, or activities,” the document says.

A second memo by the attorney general directs implementation of the guidance within the Department of Justice. It instructs the department to vigorously defend religious liberty protections in federal law.

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Washington D.C., Oct 28, 2020 / 08:00 pm (CNA).-  

During the 2016 Republic primaries, some prominent conservative Catholics warned about Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. Four years later, some say they now support his reelection, while one Catholic scholar told CNA his focus is on the future of American political discourse.

“I have never been more happy about being wrong,” Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote.org, told CNA about Trump.

In January 2016, Burch issued a warning that Trump, who was by then the Republican front-runner, would not uphold Catholic principles as president. Burch exhorted Catholics to support another candidate, saying that Trump would “sell out everyone and anyone when it benefits him.” In the general election, CatholicVote.org did not endorse Trump.

But four years later, Burch told CNA that Trump has delivered “far more than we ever thought possible” on pro-life issues and religious freedom.

In September, CatholicVote launched a nearly $10 million campaign to target Catholic voters, highlighting Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s record “on issues of fundamental importance to Catholics including the sanctity of life, religious liberty, judges, education, the dignity of work, and other core issues.”

Trump has been widely praised by pro-life advocates for his appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic, to the Supreme Court. The president said in 2016 that he would fully defund abortion providers, and sign laws to ban abortions after 20 weeks and make the Hyde Amendment permanent, actions which have not been completed during his term in office.

Burch noted those moves depend upon Congressional action.  “The president’s done what he can via executive order, but he had an unwilling Congress,” he told CNA.

Other Catholics also told CNA last week that Trump’s White House support for life and religious freedom causes has surprised them. They recalled that, early in the 2016 election, his record did not evince a deep grasp of social conservatism.

Trump was on the record in 1999 saying that he was “very pro-choice.” He had been criticized for making crude, sexually-explicit comments about women on host Howard Stern’s radio show and in other contexts.

Looking at those factors in 2016, some critics thought the president’s pledges on abortion would not have much follow through.

“I did not believe his promises on behalf of the unborn, or on judges, or on foreign policy. I thought he would start wars,” Chad Pecknold, a theology professor at the Catholic University of America, told CNA this month. “I was wrong.”

Pecknold added that he has not endorsed Trump, but he thinks a case can be made for supporting him in the 2020 election.

Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie did not believe that Trump would defend life and religious freedom causes, but voted for him reluctantly in 2016 because she thought his opponent Hillary Clinton would “expand” attacks on those causes.

When President Trump dramatically expanded a policy that prevents federal funding of foreign groups that provide or promote abortions—known as the “Mexico City Policy”— Christie said her doubts about him subsided.

As someone who grew up in Latin America, Christie saw Trump’s policy as a victory against “ideological colonization” of groups that promote abortions in developing countries.

“I know that he [Trump] has surrounded himself with really good people,” she said, “who really understand in a deeply philosophical way the issues of human dignity, marriage, and family.”

Nina Shea, an expert in religious freedom at the Hudson Institute, also warned about Trump’s candidacy in 2016. She recalled thinking that he did not have the foreign policy background required to promote religious freedom and defend persecuted religious minorities overseas.

A year later, Shea watched Vice President Mike Pence promise a summit on international Christian persecution that promoting religious freedom would be a priority for the administration.

The direct assurance was a departure from earlier administrations’ seeming reluctance to promote religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy, Shea said. Since then, she noted that Trump’s “speeches, initiatives, and directives” on religious freedom “have set the high water mark” for the issue.

Not all conservative Catholics who opposed Trump in 2016 support his re-election four years later.

Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review and a Catholic, wrote an Oct. 15 column he said was “a case for principled abstention.”

Ponnuru wrote that in his view, Trump’s “character flaws” are bad enough to “keep him from meeting the threshold conditions to be entrusted with the presidency.”

The president is “deficient” in “judgment, honesty, and self-control,” Ponnuru wrote, lamenting “a more degraded and less honest political culture, the cheapening of the president’s word, and a decline in trust.”

But in the same column, Ponnuru said he would also not be voting for Biden.

Biden “says he now favors taxpayer funding of abortion. He may seek to enlarge the Supreme Court to make room for more justices who won’t make room in American law for unborn children,” Ponnuru wrote.

“If there’s a persuasive case for recognizing abortion as a grave injustice and voting for Biden anyway, I haven’t seen it,” the columnist said, while explaining why he will abstain from voting for a presidential candidate.

George Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, helped in March 2016 to initiate a petition urging Catholics to support alternative candidates to Trump during the Republican primary.

Weigel told CNA that he is grateful the Trump administration has defended religious freedom “at home and internationally” and has been “firmly pro-life.”

But the author lamented “continued coarsening of public debate, the deliberate polarization of opinion and sentiment, and the lack of any magnanimity toward opponents.”

Weigel said his focus is on the future. The author said that in his view both Trump and Biden are “seriously flawed in numerous ways.”

“My primary focus now is on building a political culture that doesn’t, in the future, produce two such distasteful options. America can and must do better than this,” Weigel told CNA.

In an Oct. 28 column, Weigel pointed to the U.S. Senate as a critical aspect of the 2020 election.

American cultural renewal “will be more difficult if the Democratic party wins the presidency, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives—and is thus able to enforce the agenda of lifestyle libertinism and intolerant ‘tolerance’ to which its platform commits it, especially in matters of the sanctity of life and the conscience rights of believers,” Weigel wrote.

“As the House will certainly have a Democratic majority in 2021-2022, prudence dictates maintaining a Republican Senate, irrespective of who is elected president,” he added.

Supporters told CNA that after reviewing his record, they think Trump’s policies are a more important consideration than his personal behavior.

“I’m happy with his policies. I don’t plan to have him over for dinner,” Christie said.

Pecknold acknowledged the importance of character in a president, but cautioned that character should not be “reduced to table manners.”

Political leaders, he said, “should be judged by whether their laws help a society to live in greater accord with virtue.”

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