Columbus, Ohio, Dec 13, 2018 / 04:40 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Ohio Senate has passed a modified bill to ban abortions when the unborn child has a detectable heartbeat, and backers could have enough votes to override a promised veto from Gov. John Kasich.
The 18-13 vote on House Bill 258 came Oct. 12, with four Republicans voting against the bill. Though 20 votes are required to override a veto, two absent Republicans’ votes could still help the bill become law.
An override vote would have to take place during the week of Christmas before the official end of the legislative session Dec. 31. Senate president Larry Obhof did not seem enthusiastic about the possibility of a Christmas week vote, the Columbus Dispatch reports.
Kasich, a Republican, has a strong pro-life record, signing into law at least 18 abortion regulations or restrictions, including a 20-week abortion ban. The heartbeat bill is the only one he has vetoed, doing so in 2016, when legislators did not have the votes to override him.
Kasich is about to leave office in January for Governor-elect Mark DeWine, a Republican who supports the legislation.
The Ohio Senate passed an amendment clarifying that the bill would not require the use of a transvaginal ultrasound to detect a heartbeat, which would extend the period of pregnancy before a heartbeat can be detected. It removed language that would have allowed the state to suspend a doctor’s medical license before a crime related to abortion is proved in court.
The law allows exceptions to prevent a woman’s death or bodily impairment, or in cases of medical emergency.
Republican votes in committee and on the Senate floor rejected several Democratic amendments, including one that would have added exceptions for victims of rape or incest.
The House of Representatives passed the bill last month by a vote of 60-38, exactly the number of votes needed to override. Once the House agrees to the Senate’s changes to the bill, the governor would have ten days from a bill’s passage to veto it, excluding Sundays.
During 2016 debates over the bill, some pro-life critics voiced concern it could result in a counterproductive Supreme Court decision that would strengthen legal abortion in the U.S. It is unclear how the Supreme Court will rule with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh replacing Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, even if a legal challenge is made and progresses to the high court.
While groups like Ohio Right to Life have remained neutral on the bill due to constitutional concerns, backers of the legislation have said it is specially designed to pass Supreme Court scrutiny.
The Ohio Catholic Conference on Nov. 15 said it supports “the life-affirming intent of this legislation,” but stopped short of endorsement. The conference said it will continue to assist efforts to resolve “differences related to specific language and strategies.”
“In the end, the Catholic Conference of Ohio desires passage of legislation that can withstand constitutional challenge and be implemented in order to save lives,” the Catholic conference said.
Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, who is a past leader of Ohio Right to Life, said Dec. 12 that women who had testified against the bill spoke about their abortions with “tears in their eyes, pain in their heart,” the Columbus Dispatch reports.
“I have never had a woman cry when she said she chose life. Not once. Not a single time,” she said. “Because in our hearts we know this is a human life.”
Bill opponents like Sen. Charleta Tavares, D-Columbus, charged that the bill sends the message that women “don’t have the capacity to make decisions themselves.” Women would still have abortions, in “a cruel and very dangerous way,” she said.
The bill’s text makes clear that a pregnant woman who undergoes an abortion is not considered in violation of the law. Rather, it allows her to take civil action against the abortion doctor involved if it is proven he or she broke the law, on grounds related to the “wrongful death of the unborn child.”
A doctor who performs an abortion in violation of the law would commit a fifth-degree felony, punishable by up to one year in prison and a $2,500 fine, the New York Times reports. The bill requires state inspections of abortion facilities to ensure their compliance with reporting requirements. It also establishes more ways to promote adoption.
The legislature is expected to pass a bill to ban the dilation and extraction abortion procedure, typically used between 13 and 24 weeks into pregnancy.
Ohio law currently bars abortion 20 weeks or more after conception, based on when an unborn child can feel pain. Pro-abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio is considering a legal challenge to that law.
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Washington D.C., Jul 26, 2017 / 03:40 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As Congress prepares to vote on whether to fund the further construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, bishops of dioceses along both sides of the border have been outspoken against such a policy.
“While countries have a duty to ensure that immigration is orderly and safe, this responsibility can never serve as a pretext to build walls and shut the door to migrants and refugees,” Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, Texas said in his July 18 pastoral letter on migration, “Sorrow and Mourning Flee Away.”
Although “the Church has long recognized the first right of persons not to migrate, but to stay in their community of origin,” the bishop wrote, “when that has become impossible, the Church also recognizes the right to migrate.”
The House will reportedly vote this week on approving $1.6 billion in funding for construction of a wall along part the U.S.-Mexico border, as requested by President Donald Trump in his FY 2018 budget proposal.
Trump had campaigned for president by repeatedly promising to build a wall on the border. Around 700 miles of the approximately 2,000 mile-long border is already fenced.
In a January executive order on immigration, President Trump stated:
“It is the policy of the executive branch to…secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border, monitored and supported by adequate personnel so as to prevent illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, and acts of terrorism.”
He also called for the allocation of federal funding “for the planning, designing, and constructing of a physical wall along the southern border” and to “project and develop long-term funding requirements for the wall.”
Bishops of dioceses along both sides of the border, however, said that the additional construction of a wall would pose dangers to migrants and would create unnecessary divisions in societies that have transcended countries’ borders.
The chair of the U.S. bishops’ migration committee, Bishop Joe Vasquez of Austin, Texas said he was “disheartened” by the President’s request.
“This action will put immigrant lives needlessly in harm’s way,” he said.
“Construction of such a wall will only make migrants, especially vulnerable women and children, more susceptible to traffickers and smugglers,” he said. “Additionally, the construction of such a wall destabilizes the many vibrant and beautifully interconnected communities that live peacefully along the border.”
Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas tweeted after the executive order was issued: “Walls only impede and put at risk the poor and children, because those who have resources always find other options.”
The Mexican bishops’ conference responded as well to the call for the further construction of the wall. In their Jan. 26 statement “Value and Respect for Migrants,” they expressed “pain and rejection” at the announcement and said that the wall would interfere in the multi-cultural societies that have developed where there are cities directly across the border from each other.
“We express our pain and rejection over the construction of this wall, and we respectfully invite you to reflect more deeply about the ways security, development, growth in employment, and other measures, necessary and just, can be procured without causing further harm to those already suffering, the poorest and most vulnerable,” the conference stated.
For over 20 years, the statement added, the bishops in dioceses including both borders have worked to achieve “the best care for the faithful that live in the sister countries, properly seen as a single city (from a faith perspective); communities of faith served by two dioceses (such as Matamoros and Brownsville, or Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, for example).”
“What pains us foremost is that many people who live out their family relationships, their faith, work or friendships will be shut out even more by this inhuman interference,” the conference said.
The bishops also said that the U.S. has a right to enforce its own border, but that “a rigorous and intense application of the law” would “create alarm and fear among immigrants, breaking up families without further consideration.”
President Trump requested $1.6 billion for a wall in his FY 2018 budget request. He also directed the Department of Homeland Security to spend $100 million of existing appropriations on “border security, fencing and infrastructure.”
Tom Homan, director of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, told reporters on June 28 that “the border wall is one tool to help control the border,” among other actions like the presence of border patrol agents and law enforcement.
When asked by a reporter after a July 7 bilateral meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto if he still wanted Mexico to pay for the construction of the wall, President Trump responded “absolutely.”
Bishop Seitz explained in his pastoral letter “When Sorrow and Mourning Flee Away” that the construction of a border fence poses harm to migrants in forcing them to cross the border in more dangerous areas.
“The burning sands of our desert are an unmarked grave for too many migrants who have died attempting to cross,” he wrote. “Increased militarization and more walls will only make this journey even more dangerous.”
And, he said, walls that separate cities directly across the border from each other – like El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico – interfere in the societies there and separate loved ones.
“Misguided policies and walls are widening the divide between us and our sister city of Ciudad Juárez,” he said. “I am pastor of a diocese divided by walls and checkpoints that separate individuals from loved ones.”
Pope Francis said Mass at the U.S.-Mexico border in February 2016 at Ciudad Juárez. He asked all those in attendance to pray for “the gift of tears” amidst the hardships of migrants and their “exploitation.”
“Let us together ask our God for the gift of conversion, the gift of tears, let us ask him to give us open hearts,” Pope Francis said at the Feb. 17 Mass. “No more death! No more exploitation!”
Pope Francis meets with the United States bishops at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 23, 2015. / Credit: L’Osservatore Romano
CNA Staff, Apr 22, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Pope Francis, who died on April 21 at the age of 88, visited the United States just once, nearly 10 years ago, in September 2015.
Despite the brevity of the visit, he accomplished a lot: Attracting hundreds of thousands of participants, he canonized a new saint (St. Junípero Serra), became the first pope to ever address a joint session of Congress, and galvanized the U.S. Catholic community with his presence and his speeches on the East Coast.
Washington, D.C.
Pope Francis began his tour of North America with several days in Cuba. Landing in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 22, 2015, Pope Francis met with President Barack Obama first thing the next morning. The meeting came amid a time of concerns for many American Catholics regarding politics, including the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate and the recent legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide, via the June 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Pope Francis is greeted by President Barack Obama on Sept. 22, 2015. Credit: Somodevilla/Getty Images
During the presidential meeting, Francis praised Obama’s commitment to inclusivity and noted that American Catholics have contributed greatly to building a tolerant and inclusive society while also stressing that religious liberty “remains one of America’s most precious possessions.” He also encouraged commitment to addressing the “urgent” issue of climate change, building on his expansive 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’.
Pope Francis says Mass for clergy and religious in Philadelphia’s Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul, Sept. 26, 2015. Credit: L’Osservatore Romano.
While in D.C., that same day, the pope addressed bishops and priests at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle and later celebrated Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. At the latter Mass, he celebrated the first canonization on American soil by declaring Junípero Serra, who founded missions along present-day California, a saint.
“He was the embodiment of ‘a Church which goes forth,’ a Church which sets out to bring everywhere the reconciling tenderness of God,” the pope said.
Crowds gather for the Mass canonizing St. Junipero Serra at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 23, 2015. Credit: Alan Holdren/CNA
On the same day, Francis made an unscheduled stop to visit with the Little Sisters of the Poor in Washington, D.C., to support the sisters as they awaited word on whether or not the Supreme Court will hear their case against the federal contraception mandate. (The sisters are still fighting aspects of the mandate, even after more than 14 years in court.)
Pope Francis greets Sister Marie Mathilde, 102 years old, at the Jeanne Jugan Residence in Washington, D.C., Sept. 23, 2015. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Little Sisters of the Poor
Francis addressed a joint session of Congress the next day, Sept. 24, making him the first pope to ever to do so. During his lengthy speech, he condemned the arms trade and the death penalty — statements that reportedly made some lawmakers in the room squirm.
Francis went on to assert that the family was being threatened like never before and praised American figures, including Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., for their tireless efforts to defend freedom and moral values. He also touched on respect for human life and the environment in the well-received speech.
Pope Francis speaks to the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24, 2015. Credit: L’Osservatore Romano
The pope also visited St. Patrick Parish and met with people experiencing homelessness at Catholic Charities, addressing people who minister to the poor. He offered St. Joseph as their patron and model, because, he said, St. Joseph grappled with injustice and suffering in his care for Mary and Jesus.
“The Son of God came into this world as a homeless person,” the pope said. “The Son of God knew what it was to start life without a roof over his head.”
“We can find no social or moral justification, no justification whatsoever, for lack of housing. There are many unjust situations, but we know that God is suffering with us, experiencing them at our side. He does not abandon us.”
Controversially, while in D.C. Pope Francis met with Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who had become a cultural lightning rod for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses. The pope reportedly told her to “stay strong,” offering rosaries to Davis and her husband. The Vatican later clarified that Francis met with Davis and her husband as part of a large group invited by the nunciature, with the Vatican spokesperson adding that the pope “did not enter into the details” of her situation.
New York City
After flying to New York City the evening of Sept. 24 and praying vespers at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, Francis addressed the United Nations General Assembly the next day, Sept. 25, the fifth time a pope had addressed the body.
The pontiff issued a call to the countries of the world to reject what he called “ideological colonization” — the “imposition of anomalous models and lifestyles which are alien to people’s identity and, in the end, irresponsible.”
Pope Francis’ historic address to the U.N. in New York City on Sept. 25, 2015. Credit: Alan Holdren/CNA
Like his predecessor, Benedict XVI, Pope Francis made a solemn visit with other religious leaders to Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 attacks, later on Sept. 25. He met with families of first responders, saying at the site museum that acts of destruction always have “a face, a concrete story, names.” He offered a “prayer of remembrance” for all those killed that day, along with a prayer for the survivors and those who are mourning the loss of their loved ones.
Pope Francis speaks during an interreligious prayer service at Ground Zero, Sept. 25, 2015. Credit: Addie Mena/CNA
Later that day, after visiting Our Lady, Queen of the Angels School in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Francis celebrated Mass at Madison Square Garden. He encouraged people to remember those in the city who are often forgotten, including “foreigners, the children who go without schooling, those deprived of medical insurance, the homeless, the forgotten elderly.”
Madison Square Garden prepares for the papal Mass, Sept. 25, 2015. Credit: Alan Holdren/CNA
“Knowing that Jesus still walks our streets, that he is part of the lives of his people, that he is involved with us in one vast history of salvation, fills us with hope. A hope which liberates us from the forces pushing us to isolation and lack of concern for the lives of others, for the life of our city,” the pope said.
“A hope which frees us from empty ‘connections,’ from abstract analyses, or sensationalist routines. A hope which is unafraid of involvement, which acts as a leaven wherever we happen to live and work. A hope which makes us see, even in the midst of smog, the presence of God as he continues to walk the streets of our city.”
Philadelphia
Pope Francis’ visit included an appearance at the 2015 World Meeting of Families (WMF) in Philadelphia, an event that focuses on celebrating the gift of the family.
Pope Francis at the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia on Sept. 26, 2015. Credit: L’Osservatore Romano
After flying to the “City of Brotherly Love” the morning of Sept. 26, Pope Francis took part in a Mass for clergy and religious at Philadelphia’s Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul. In his homily address, the pope challenged the clergy and religious to inspire new vocations.
He called for women to take on a greater role in the Church, highlighting the example of St. Katharine Drexel — a Philadelphia native — and he reminded the priests and religious present of their role in ministering to families, couples preparing for marriage, and young people.
He later addressed a crowd of some 50,000 people at Independence Mall, the site of Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, for a religious freedom rally with Hispanic and other immigrants.
Speaking to thousands of families gathered on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia that night, a visibly moved Pope Francis ditched his prepared remarks and instead gave an impromptu reflection on the beauty and dire importance of family life. He voiced his thanks at “the presence of all of you — who are a real witness that it’s worth being a family!” A society “is strong, solid, and edified on beauty, goodness, and truth,” he added.
Pope Francis addresses the Festival of Families in Philadelphia on Sept. 26, 2015. Credit: EWTN
On Sept. 27, the next day, Francis had an unscripted meeting with five abuse survivors — three women and two men — all of whom had been abused in childhood either by members of the clergy, family members, or educators. He promised accountability for perpetrators and expressed sorrow for the victims’ suffering.
In the face of such heinous acts as sexual abuse, “God cries,” he said, adding that “the criminal sins of the abuse of minors can’t be kept in silence any longer … I promise, with the vigilance of the Church, to protect minors and I promise [that] all of those responsible will be held accountable.”
He told a gathering of international bishops afterward that the survivors’ stories of suffering “have aggravated my heart” and said that crimes of abuse must never be kept in silence.
Later that morning, Francis visited a Philadelphia correctional facility, saying at the meeting with a group of 100 inmates and their families that every person is marked and bruised by life, but Jesus washes away our sins and invites us to live a full life.
Pope Francis embraces a man at Curran-Fromhold Correction Facility in Philadelphia on Sept. 27, 2015. Credit: EWTN
Reflecting on the trip, the Holy Father said it was “particularly moving for me to canonize St. Junípero Serra, who reminds us all of our call to be missionary disciples.”
He added that he was touched “to stand with my brothers and sisters of other religions at Ground Zero, that place which speaks so powerfully of the mystery of evil. Yet we know with certainty that evil never has the last word, and that, in God’s merciful plan, love and peace triumph over all.”
Furthermore, he promised his prayers for the U.S. people, saying: “This land has been blessed with tremendous gifts and opportunities. I pray that you may all be good and generous stewards of the human and material resources entrusted to you.”
“I thank the Lord that I was able to witness the faith of God’s people in this country, as manifested in our moments of prayer together and evidenced in so many works of charity.”
Concluding, he asked those present: “Do not let your enthusiasm for Jesus, his Church, our families, and the broader family of society run dry.”
“May our days together bear fruit that will last, generosity and care for others that will endure!” he said. “Just as we have received so much from God — gifts freely given us, and not of our own making — so let us freely give to others in return.”
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