Archbishop Gomez urges calm and restraint as ICE protests erupt in Los Angeles

Washington D.C., Apr 24, 2019 / 03:00 pm (CNA).- The founder of a Catholic health-share group has said that battling loneliness is crucial to opposing the growing acceptance of assisted suicide in popular culture.

Chris Faddis, co-founder of Solidarity HealthShare, spoke to CNA about the importance of respecting the dignity of all patients at the end of life.

Speaking to CNA during the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast April 23, Faddis said that a rising social and legal acceptance of assisted suicide is exacerbated by a lack of healthcare options that are both ethical and affordable, but is ultimately driven by loneliness and despair in the face of suffering.

“When you see no way out, something like a pill seems tempting,” he said.

Solidarity helps patients and their families find other options to assisted suicide to ease suffering and, Faddis said, expressed a kind of communion in its structure. In a health-share system, members of the organization help to pay each other’s healthcare costs. Members are self-pay patients who can see the provider of their choice while Solidarity helps to negotiate a lower rate, which would then be paid by the group of members.

“We’re just there to facilitate and to kind of direct them,” said Faddis. “The affordability is there because there’s no profit in it. We’re a non-profit, we’re just kind of facilitating that sharing.”

“In all ways, we lead our members to the options that are going to respect life, that are going to promote their dignity. We provide care management, we provide services. And we encourage them.”

Faddis, who serves as the Catholic health-sharing company’s chief operating officer, told CNA that the experience of suffering and death in his own family had formed his commitment to protecting human dignity at the end of life and led to his founding Solidarity. He served as a caregiver for his wife as she was dying of cancer, and experienced first-hand the importance of dignified and respectful hospice and palliative care.  

The experiences like his, Faddis said, needed to be shared in the wider battle to resist a culture of death in which suffering has no meaning.

“If we don’t tell [an alternative view of suffering], the other side’s telling the horror stories of suffering all day long.”

Approaching death with dignity, Faddis said, is important for patients and families alike. “It’s worth taking time over,” he said, noting that his family benefited “in ways too many to count” from the care and support his wife received from their own community.

Solidarity does not pay for health services that are contrary to Catholic teaching, such as abortion, contraception, or euthanasia. When members are diagnosed with terminal illnesses, Faddis said that his organization works to ensure that members are directed to specific palliative care physicians who will not encourage assisted suicide.

Faddis said that an approach that underscores the value of life is especially important for terminal patients who are often feel as though they are a burden on their family and community. Terminal illness was, he said, a painful experience, but one that can be lived with dignity and meaning.

“When people are cared for well, then they can suffer well. So as they’re going through those difficult times, or just those difficult decisions, people can help them just by caring well for them,” he said.

Assisted suicide is now legal in eight states, and is being considered by an additional four. New Jersey’s Catholic governor recently signed it into law in his state, after “careful prayer.”

Faddis said that in the United States, there is a general fear of suffering, which has resulted in an embrace of a quick death.

“I think we have a responsibility to console and give solace to the dying,” he said, stressing that preventing isolation was a vital part of respecting the dignity of human life.

“And I think if we do that well, we’ve solved the problem. I mean, if you’re dying alone, you want the pill.”

[…]

Denver Newsroom, Jan 23, 2021 / 02:00 am (CNA).- In the waning months of 2020, the United States watched as the Senate conducted hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic mother of seven. President Donald Trump had nominated Barrett to fill the Supreme Court seat left by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

Among the observers was Father Pius Pietrzyk, OP, a canon lawyer and among the few Catholic priests to, like Barrett, hold a Senate-confirmed political appointment.

In late 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Pietrzyk to serve on the board of the Legal Services Corporation, a nonpartisan body that gives grants to local legal aid offices to provide free civil legal services for the poor.

“I never thought I’d like the work as much as I have. I’ve enjoyed it very much. And a big part of that is because I’ve seen the people who have been helped by it,” Pietrzyk told CNA.

“But I also see, in a much bigger way, the people who continue to need to be helped by it. And there’s far more need certainly than we have resources. But we keep trudging along doing our best and helping as many people as we can.”

Pietrzyk is a Dominican friar of the Province of St. Joseph, and chairs the Pastoral Studies department at St. Patrick Seminary in Menlo Park, California, where he also teaches canon law. 

Before being ordained to the priesthood in 2008, he practiced civil law for several years at a large firm in Chicago. 

Pietrzyk received the news of his appointment to the LSC’s board in early 2010. As a lawyer, he had heard of the Legal Services Corporation and was vaguely aware of what they did. But his appointment was still a big surprise. 

“It was completely out of the blue for me. I never saw this coming,” he said. 

‘Fundamental disparities’

The Legal Services Corporation is a 501(c)(3) corporation created in 1974 with bipartisan Congressional sponsorship. 

Congress appropriates money to the LSC each year— for 2021, some $465 million in funding is expected. The LSC does not itself provide legal services, but rather provides grants to 132 independent nonprofit legal aid programs throughout the country. 

People earning 125% or less of the federal poverty line are eligible for the services that the local legal aid agencies provide. Pietrzyk said some of the common civil law issues that the aid agencies deal with are issues of domestic violence, housing (such as landlord-tenant disputes), elder law, and veterans issues. 

In civil cases, many people living in poverty cannot afford lawyers, and often have to represent themselves, making them less likely to win their cases. 

“You look in the housing courts in the United States, and most of the landlords are represented by a lawyer, and almost none of the tenants are represented by a lawyer. And so you’ve got these fundamental disparities when it comes to as basic a human need and human right really as housing issues,” he said.

So how did a Dominican priest get picked for a political appointment like this?

Apart from Pietrzyk’s legal qualifications for the position, there was another reason his name came up as a possible candidate. 

By tradition, at least two members of the LSC’s board are “client-eligible,” meaning they themselves qualify for the free services that they oversee. 

Because Dominicans take a vow of poverty, Pietrzyk is technically poor. So when the Senate was looking for potential nominees to recommend to President Obama, a Senate staffer suggested looking for a nominee who had taken a vow of poverty. 

Pietrzyk is quick to point out that his Senate hearing was not the flashy, high-profile media affair that often accompanies hearings for Supreme Court nominees, such as Barrett. 

Instead, his hearing was conducted as a conference call with several Democratic staffers, away from the public eye. Pietrzyk described the room where it took place as little more than a “cloakroom.” 

Still, as you might expect, any nominee for a Senate-confirmed position has to be vetted by the FBI. The FBI conducted interviews with several people whose names Pietrzyk provided, as well as with several of Pietrzyk’s parishioners and neighbors. 

At one point during the vetting process, Pietrzyk was studying in Rome. Since the FBI lacks jurisdiction outside U.S. territorial boundaries, a retired State Department agent living in Europe met with Father Pietrzyk and conducted additional interviews in Rome. 

“I had really nothing to hide, nothing that’s going to cause a major objection,” Pietrzyk laughed.  

“I wasn’t a foreign agent. I wasn’t engaging in some sort of heavy illegal practices. That made it a lot easier. I had no complicated financial situations that would cause embarrassment to the President or anything like that.”

Although Pietrzyk says he is not aware of any major ideological objections to his appointment, he says there was some suspicion in the Senate that he fit the mold of a “client eligible” candidate. After all, he says, not many poor people have a University of Chicago law degree. 

“And while I live a vow of poverty, it wasn’t as if there was any danger of me being on the streets. I don’t think my religious community was going to throw me out on the street anytime soon,” he pointed out. 

“So that caused, I think, a little bit of grumbling from some people, but it never came back to me, and it never affected my nomination, and it never affected the vote in the Senate.”

The Senate confirmed Pietrzyk’s nomination on March 29, 2010. He said he regularly wears his religious habit to board meetings, and has earned the respect of his fellow board members. 

“My other board members have accepted me as a Catholic priest, as Catholic religious, and have received that whole-heartedly and have just been very professional to me,” Pietrzyk said. 

“We rarely have, if ever, ideological disputes. That camaraderie and friendship and professionalism has been part of what’s made this such a rewarding experience for me, in addition to the stories that we hear of the poor people who are helped by the services. And some of them are really quite compelling.”

In Dec. 2019, Pietrzyk was further elevated to Vice-Chairman of the LSC’s board. 

‘We haven’t seen the worst of the poverty’

Pietrzyk said the work of the Legal Services Corporation is particularly important today, as millions of Americans face eviction from their homes because of the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. 

A handful of states have made it illegal for landlords to evict tenants during the pandemic, but many have not. In a July 2020 survey done by the LSC, 95% of their grantees reported an increase in eviction cases. 

Late last year, Congress extended a moratorium on evictions nationwide until the end of this month, January 2021.

The federal moratorium applies when renters meet certain conditions, and data show that landlords in many states have ignored moratoria and have continued with evictions. The Eviction Lab, a research group at Princeton University, has tracked at least 200,000 evictions in the US since the pandemic began.

President Joe Biden has pledged to make an extension of the federal moratorium one of his top priorities, pledging to sign an executive order extending the moratorium until March on his first day in office. 

Unless that moratorium is later renewed, an estimated 30-40 million needy people are going to find themselves homeless. 

“We haven’t seen the worst of the poverty that has been a result of the COVID, and we’ll see it a lot worse once the evictions crisis really hits. And so being on the front lines and trying to ameliorate that as much as possible, I think, is something we all really need to be invested in,” Pietrzyk said. 

The need for affordable legal services for the poor has been highlighted recently as an important component of the country’s response to poverty, especially in light of the pandemic. 

Notably, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a Sept. 2020 op-ed calling for reform of the court system, noting that “even to accomplish the simplest task, hiring a lawyer is expensive — too expensive.” 

As one possible remedy, Gorsuch highlighted new programs in Utah and Arizona that will, beginning this year, permit “trained, non-lawyer legal professionals” to represent clients in some legal areas. 

Although the LSC is set to receive $465 million in funding this year, the largest dollar amount ever appropriated, the figure is significantly lower than what the LSC requested for 2021. The Trump administration recommended “zero funding” for the LSC every year that Trump was in office. 

Pietrzyk said he believes all Americans— regardless of income—  ought to be able to access the court system. 

“When you’re a poor person, you can barely have money to feed your family. When you become a victim of injustice in the civil realm, you often have no outlet at all, because you can’t hire a lawyer,” he said.  

“You oftentimes don’t have the resources to be able to navigate yourself through a very complicated court system. And so what’s left?…I do think that if you are committed to the rule of law and to justice for all Americans, that you have to be committed in some way to a program that provides civil legal services to the poor.”

The LSC’s grantees nationwide have seen a large increase in demand for their services during the pandemic. 

Guy Lescault, executive director of Legal Services Alabama, one of the LSC’s grantees, told CNA that at least 1.5 million Alabama residents cannot afford to hire lawyers when faced with civil issues like fighting an eviction. 

Alabama has long ranked near the bottom in terms of average income and racial disparities, Lescault said. Alabama does not have a state moratorium on evictions, and it is one of only two states nationwide— the other being Idaho— that has never appropriated any state money toward legal services for the poor. 

Typically, some 80% of their funding comes from the LSC, and last year they got some much-needed additional funding from the CARES Act and in the form of a grant from HHS. Legal Services Alabama is hoping to fill in gaps with their own fundraising. 

Legal Services Alabama operates a call center where people can call to get connected to free legal services, and they have seen a massive increase in demand since the pandemic started. 

Most calls they receive at the call center, Lescault says, are from needy people seeking information, such as asking about how to access SNAP (Food stamps). 

Lescault says they deal with many elderly people and children in their work. Moreover, the population served by LSA is about 70% female and nearly two-thirds black.

For serious situations, such as a poor person facing eviction or domestic violence, a call to the statewide call center often will be directed to one of their lawyers. 

“Domestic violence sort of goes hand in hand when you have lockdown orders, loss of employment, all of the other things. These issues, they’re not isolated, they’re all intertwined,” Lescault said. 

“What we should be doing is addressing some of this holistically. So we are trying as fast as our little feet can get us to apply for more domestic violence money from the Department of Justice that would give us additional staff to help address that issue around the state.”

‘Make your town and community a better place’

Father Pietrzyk’s status as a Senate-confirmed Catholic priest is fairly unique. 

In 2015— five years after Father Pietrzyk’s confirmation— the Senate confirmed Father Paul Hurley to be U.S. Army Chief of Chaplains. The record of whether there have been any other priests confirmed by the Senate is thin.

Most Catholics will never get the chance to help the poor by way of a national political appointment. But Father Pietrzyk encouraged all Catholics to seek out opportunities to help the poor in their neighborhoods and local communities. 

“Where you can have a great deal of influence is at the local level, getting involved in helping people who are in need in your own community, in your own town, in your own city,” he said. 

“I think that’s what Catholics need to be about— to try to avoid all of the political and ideological gamesmanship that goes on sometimes at the national level, and ask yourself what you can do to make your town and community a better place.”

This story originally aired on Catholic News Agency’s podcast, CNA Newsroom. It has been adapted for print. Listen to the segment below, beginning at 23:13. 

CNA Newsroom · Ep. 90: For God and Country

 
 

 

[…]

Washington D.C., Apr 3, 2023 / 10:00 am (CNA).

The nationwide debate over abortion has spilled over into the Senate’s confirmation of military appointments, which has turned a usually simple and routine process into a battleground over the rights of unborn children. 

Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, has blocked 184 promotions for generals and officers, which the Department of Defense (DOD) has asked the Senate to confirm. Tuberville refused to allow their confirmations by unanimous consent of the Senate, which would force Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, to bring every nominee up for a vote individually if Tuberville remains firm.

Although these confirmations are usually approved by unanimous consent on the first vote, the politicization of the DOD has shaken up the process. Tuberville stood against their confirmations because of a DOD policy that uses taxpayer money to fund travel and paid time off needed for an employee to procure an abortion. The policy also provides funds for an employee’s spouse or an employee’s dependents who are seeking an abortion. 

“Let’s be clear about what we’re talking about,” Tuberville said on the Senate floor. “We’re not talking about access to abortion. We’re talking about taxpayer funding for travel and extra pay time to get elective abortions.”

“This policy includes spouses and dependents,” the senator continued. “We’re talking about taxpayer funding for somebody’s kids to get an abortion in another state. This has never been in the policy until now because Congress has ensured that the Pentagon cannot perform or facilitate abortions, except in legal circumstances and limited.” 

Current law prohibits the use of federal funds for abortion in most cases under the Hyde Amendment, which has been in effect since 1980. However, the Hyde Amendment does not explicitly prohibit the federal government from using taxpayer funds to support an employee’s travel expenses or time off for an abortion. Although Republicans have introduced bills that would block federal funding for this purpose, those proposals have been rejected by Democratic lawmakers.

Tuberville’s decision to hold up military appointments has led to attacks from Schumer and other Democrats who have urged everyone in the Senate to support unanimous consent.

“The senator from Alabama continues his hold on more than 180 … military promotions, blatantly ignoring many warnings of the harm he is causing to our national security,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “It’s reckless; it’s just reckless.”

Schumer quoted Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who said that holding up the nominations “actually creates a ripple effect through the force that makes us far less ready than we need to be.”

Tuberville has rejected those claims, stating on the Senate floor that “this entire line of attack on me is absolutely false” and argued that the military suffers from a shortage of recruits but not a shortage of generals. He added that Democrats can hold individual votes on each nominee if they want to do so.

“Every single one of these nominees can receive a vote if Sen. Schumer wants it,” Tuberville said. “… If Democrats are so worried about these nominations, let’s vote. If we’re not going to vote on taxpayer-funded abortion, then let’s vote on these nominees. Voting is our job. It’s not much to ask of the United States Senate to do our job to vote.” 

The senator also said his refusal to allow these nominations to go through with unanimous consent is not unprecedented. 

“My hold is far from unprecedented,” Tuberville said. “In fact, Sen. [Michael] Bennet himself threatened to do this exact same thing just a few months ago. … Two years ago, we had a senator from Illinois put a hold on 1,000 nominees over the promotion of one single officer.”

After he took his stand, some Republican lawmakers have come out to support Tuberville. 

“Until these policies are rescinded, I’m going to also have to consider holds against DOD nominees in solidarity with my colleagues,” Sen. Ted Budd, R-North Carolina, told Austin during a hearing. “Mr. Secretary, you can fix this … in nearly an instant. I would encourage that.”

Others, such as Sen. Mike Rounds, R-South Dakota, also came to his aid. 

“I think he’s right in his concern for what the department is doing because we have never agreed to fund abortions in the past, and on this particular case, it’s a pretty fine line when you’re funding to get them someplace to get an abortion,” Rounds told The Hill. 

As the Senate enters into recess for Easter, Tuberville intends to stand firm in his approach. 

“The Democrats are in panic over the idea of taking more votes,” the senator said. “I don’t mind working a full week; I worked all my life. I’ve had a full-time job. I’ll stay here until hell freezes over. I’m not going to be intimidated by a campaign of selective outrage.” 

[…]