Vatican City, Mar 26, 2020 / 04:03 pm (CNA).- Pope Francis has entrusted the Office of Papal Charities with 30 ventilators to be distributed to 30 hospitals in need during the coronavirus pandemic, the Vatican announced Thursday.
Because coronavirus i… […]
Chicago, Ill., Mar 26, 2020 / 03:38 pm (CNA).- As homeless shelters have been limited by the coronavirus, the Clerics of Saint Viator will help fund an initiative to house homeless people amid the pandemic.
The religious order based in Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb, has donated $63,000 to help over 60 homeless people stay at two hotels in the city. The initiative will last for at least three weeks, but it will likely be extended.
The religious order partnered with Journeys: The Road Home in Palatine to help homeless people have a place to quarantine during this pandemic. As of March 25, over 1,800 cases of the coronavirus have occurred in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reported.
As the organization has also received donations from numerous other religious organizations in the area, the hotels were able to house 81 people last night with 10 more clients who will be checked-in today.
Suzanne Ploger, Journey’s director of development, told CNA that it is essential to help homeless people protect themselves from the virus as they are unable to self-quarantine.
Not only has the pandemic caused public facilities and businesses to close, but it has closed homeless shelters. Because of the pandemic, the organization’s services and volunteers have been limited. She said a majority of the volunteers for the homeless ministry are elderly people, who also need to be kept safe from the outbreak.
Experts are urging people to “ stay indoors, and then all the restaurants are closing and all the public facilities are closing,” she said.
“If you don’t have a home to shelter in place, where are you supposed to be? That’s where we were struggling with how we can provide the best services to our clients and keep them safe as well as be able to keep our staff and our volunteers healthy too.”
She said the clients have been chosen by those who are most at risk of COVID-19. She said the organization has prioritized 100 people who normally use their shelters and ranked them in terms of those with advanced age, families, or health issues.
“As we have secured the hotel room and we have secured the amount of funding to house that person in that hotel room for three weeks, then we house them and then we’d go down to the next rank on the list,” she said.
The organization will also help feed the clients in the hotel with a meal delivery system.
“We’re packing up food pantry bags, we’re packing up meals, some people are donating food again, and we’re starting that system of delivering meals to the hotels. Right now we’re doing it almost every day,” she said.
The Journey is a homeless service agency that partners with 21 religious organizations that provide emergency shelter. It began 30 years ago and, under normal circumstances, will house about 100 homeless people each night.
Besides the hotel, the organization will keep open a limited number of services including a food pantry, clothing closet, mail services, and emergency case management.
Father Daniel Hall, the provincial superior for the Viatorians, said, without living assistance, this pandemic may cause dozens of homeless people to get sick. He said this project should be important to Catholics and encouraged parishioners to donate.
“This is in line with our mission as a Catholic religious community,” said Hall, according to the Daily Herald. “This crisis could lead to between 60 to 80 men, women and children on the verge of living on the streets, and even more vulnerable to the coronavirus.”
“It is my hope that you join us in this commitment to care for our most vulnerable sisters and brothers during this crisis.”
CNA Staff, Mar 26, 2020 / 01:01 pm (CNA).- The British government has published its legal framework for abortion services in Northern Ireland, which will come into force March 31. It allows for elective abortions up to 12 weeks of pregnancy.
“Our guiding principles for this framework are to uphold the protection of women and girls, the promotion of their health and safety, and the provision of clarity and certainty for the healthcare profession, while being responsive and sensitive to the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly being back up and running,” read a foreward to the framework written by Robin Walker, Minister of State for Northern Ireland.
The Abortion (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2020 also allow abortions up to 24 weeks “in cases where the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or girl, greater than the risk of terminating the pregnancy.”
Abortion access will be permitted with no time limit in cases of severe fetal impairment and fatal fetal abnormalities, i.e. when “there is a substantial risk that the condition of the fetus is such that the death of the fetus is likely before, during or shortly after birth; or if the child were born, it would suffer from such physical or mental impairment as to be seriously disabled,” and when “there is a risk to the life of the woman or girl, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, or where necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or girl, including in cases of immediate necessity.”
Doctors, registered nurses, and registered midwives will be allowed to perform abortions. They will be able to do so at General Practitioners premises, and Health and Social Care clinics and hospitals. The Northern Ireland Health Minister will be able to approve further locations for medical abortions.
In elective abortions or in cases of immediate necessity where there is a risk to the life of the mother, only one medical professional is needed to certify that there are lawful grounds for abortion. For abortion on other grounds, two medical professionals must make the certification.
In England, Wales, and Scotland, two medical professionals must certify in all cases that there were lawful grounds for abortion. While consulting on the framework, the government noted that only one doctor’s certification might be appropriate in Northern Ireland, “as it is likely that there will be a more significant number of people raising conscientious objections than in other parts of the UK. This could create practical difficulties, in particular delays in women accessing termination services, if two medical professionals … are required to certify the grounds for an abortion.”
Northern Ireland’s conscientious objection provisions will mirror those of the Abortion Act 1967, which legalized abortion in England, Wales, and Scotland. Under the provisions, “no person shall be under any duty, whether by contract or by any statutory or other legal requirement, to participate in any treatment authorised by the Regulations to which the person has a conscientious objection. The only exception will be where the participation in treatment is necessary to save the life or to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of a pregnant woman or girl.”
Conscientious objection will not be extended to “ancillary, administrative and managerial tasks that might be associated” with abortions.
The government wrote that “broadening the scope ‘beyond the participation in treatment’ would have consequences on a practical level and would therefore undermine the effective provision of abortion services in Northern Ireland. For example, fewer people providing ancillary services in relation to abortion could result in fewer appointments and longer waiting times, creating de facto barriers to access, and almost certainly adversely impacting the quality of care and standard of services. The Government is satisfied that the current scope of the conscientious objection provision in the Abortion Act 1967 works satisfactorily in practice, is human rights compliant, and is therefore appropriate to apply in Northern Ireland to the provision of abortion services.
Performing an illegal abortion will be a criminal offense punishable with a fine of up to GBP 5,000 ($6,070), and intentional failure to comply with certification and notification will be punishable with a fine of up to GBP 2,500 ($3,035). These will not apply to the mother, or anyone acting in good faith to save the mother’s life or to prevent grave permanent injurty to her health.
Buffer zones will not be set up around locations where abortions are procured, barring protest in the locations’ immediate vicinity. The government has decided to wait and see what the situation will be, keeping the matter under review so it can “respond to any challenges as needed at the time.”
The new framework was adopted to implement to the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act 2019, which decriminalized abortion in Northern Ireland and placed a moratorium on abortion-related criminal prosecutions, and obliged the UK government to create legal access to abortion in the region by March 31.
It was passed while the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended, though the legislature resumed meeting in January.
Prior to the NI EF Act abortion was legally permitted in the region only if the mother’s life was at risk or if there was risk of long term or permanent, serious damage to her mental or physical health.
Walker wrote in his foreword that despite the restoration of the Northern Ireland Assembly, “the Government remains under a legal duty under section 9 of NI EF Act, and that the government “understands the strength of feeling on this issue and we have always been clear that the best way of bringing forward reform in this area would have been for the Executive and Assembly to take this forward, in the best interests of Northern Ireland.”
The framework was adopted following a consultation in November and December 2019 which asked 15 questions regarding particularities of how legal abortion provision should be made in Northern Ireland. The consultation was based on a proposed framework.
More than 21,200 responses to the consultation were received. Of the responses, 79% “expressed a view registering their general opposition to any abortion provision in Northern Ireland beyond that which is currently permitted.”
“The Government appreciates the wide range of consultation responses received and we are extremely thankful to all individuals and organisations who took the time to respond,” Walker wrote. “We also recognise that there are a wide range views on these sensitive policy issues, which we have carefully considered and sought to ensure are appropriately reflected in the Government’s response to the consultation.”
He said that “in considering the consultation responses, we have sought to balance the range of views against our legal obligations, and taken pragmatic decisions informed by evidence, in order to bring forward a new legislative framework that will be operationally sound, that works best for Northern Ireland and that delivers on the Government’s duty.”
The government said it “particularly reflected” on the consultations provided by “respondents with experience or expertise in terms of operational workability and proper access to services on the ground in Northern Ireland.”
The adopted framework closely mirrors the proposed framework.
The 12 week limit for elective abortions was adopted “to allow access for victims of sexual crime (i.e. rape and incest)” and because, the government said, “introducing a framework which creates barriers to access is unlikely to reduce the rate of terminations, but would rather be likely to lead to women buying abortion pills online, unlawfully, with attendant health risks, rather than accessing safe services.”
Many of the provisions were adopted to be in line with existing law in England, Wales, and Scotland.
Carla Lockhart, a newly-elected MP for a Northern Irish constituency who is a member of the Democratic Unionist Party, said the adopted framework “ignores the devolution settlement and the overwhelming viewpoint of the Northern Ireland people.”
Northern Ireland rejected the Abortion Act 1967, and bills to legalize abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormality, rape, or incest failed in the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2016.
The amendment to the NI EF Act obliging the government to provide for legal abortion in Northern Ireland was introduced by Stella Creasy, a Labour MP who represents a London constituency.
In October 2019, the High Court in Belfast had ruled that the region’s ban on the abortion of unborn children with fatal abnormalities violated the UK’s human rights commitments.
Northern Irish women have been able to procure free National Health Service abortions in England, Scotland, and Wales since November 2017.
Washington D.C., Mar 26, 2020 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- The Department of Justice said Tuesday that biological males who identify as women should not be classified as girls when it comes to athletics.
Attorney General Bill Barr and several other Depart… […]
Washington D.C., Mar 26, 2020 / 11:00 am (CNA).- The Senate passed a massive relief package Wednesday night to counter the economic damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The measure passed unopposed, and contained provisions excluding abortion pro… […]
Vatican City, Mar 26, 2020 / 09:31 am (CNA).- A Vatican official who is a resident of the guesthouse where Pope Francis lives has tested positive for coronavirus, according to reports.
The Catholic Herald wrote March 26 that Fr. Gianluca Pezzoli, an o… […]
Vatican City, Mar 26, 2020 / 09:00 am (CNA).- Pope Francis urged Catholics to cling to Christ and pray for the courage to say “yes” to God in his call for vocations. Acknowledging that discerning God’s plan is a daunting task, the pop… […]
Vatican City, Mar 26, 2020 / 04:04 am (CNA).- Pope Francis Thursday prayed for everyone who is fearful of the future because of the coronavirus outbreak, asking the Lord for help in bearing these worries.
“In these days of so much suffering, the… […]
Washington D.C., Mar 26, 2020 / 03:01 am (CNA).- Despite the closure of churches and lockdowns in place in many areas of the United States due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, many social service agencies are ramping up their efforts to feed the poor, while at the same time taking unprecedented precautions to avoid getting their guests sick.
“The neighbors are mostly just thankful that we have not shut down. Many, many pantries have shut down,” Sister Stephanie Baliga of the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels in Chicago told CNA.
“In good news, most of the pantries that are associated with either a Catholic or Protestant church have not shut down.”
The Mission normally serves around 1,000 families a month, and each month processes around 70,000 pounds of food. The food pantry is set up like a grocery store to allow guests to “shop” for the items they need.
Now, to reduce the potential for contamination, the Mission has switched to a bag-based to-go pantry, distributed outside.
Sister Stephanie said they served 260 families last Tuesday, with the local police delivering boxed food to homebound seniors.
“We weren’t spending a lot of time talking to people, as you might guess. We were kind of just like: ‘Here’s your food, I wish we could spend time with you!’ It was kind of a very fast ‘Here’s your food, thanks be to God,'” Sister Stephanie laughed.
Sister Stephanie said her community is blessed to be able to continue to attend Mass and is praying for all those who cannot currently do so.
Volunteers harder to come by
Many food pantries depend on seniors as their most reliable volunteers. But since the eldery are more susceptible to COVID-19, most are staying home.
The Father McKenna Center, a Catholic day shelter for homeless men in Washington DC, normally acts as a drop in center for homeless men where they can get a meal, do laundry, and avail themselves of case management and other aid.
The center normally has 55 regularly scheduled volunteers from the community, but none are now able to come. Besides a small staff, a Jesuit Volunteer Corps volunteer and a Franciscan Missions volunteer are all who remain.
“This is not what they signed up for, but they’re jumping in,” Kim Cox, president of the center, told CNA.
Following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services, the FMC has had to suspend its case management and ask most of the men who come to the center to go elsewhere.
DC’s homeless shelters that house people at night have changed their hours to be open all day, so the homeless can remain there and shelter in place.
The only homeless men that are left at the McKenna Center are a group of ten men who sleep at the center during the hypothermia season, which is coming to a close as spring arrives.
“I think that this is actually a really good opportunity. These guys are more than happy to help us,” Cox said.
In addition to scrubbing and deep cleaning the center’s kitchen, the homeless men have been helping to make masks out of fabric to help stem the spread of COVID-19.
“And they felt good about that…these guys that are currently homeless, it really enhances their dignity for them to do something constructive.”
There are about 120 low-income seniors who live within five blocks of the center, Cox said. The homeless men in the hypothermia program are helping to bag groceries to distribute to the center’s neighbors.
The Capital Area Food Bank asked the McKenna Center to ramp up its food distribution by becoming a community hub, handing pre-made bags of groceries to DC residents who show up, with appropriate precautions taken for social distancing.
“To prepare the first 100 bags of groceries…the men in our hypothermia program helped make that happen,” Cox said.
“They helped to bag the groceries and move them where we need them…it’s terrific that they have this desire to help other people, and that we have this opportunity to give them something to do.”
“We’ve ramped up our services tremendously”
Walter Ritz, director of HOPE Community Services in New Rochelle, New York, told CNA that the center typically runs a soup kitchen, almost five days a week, and food pantry open every other week.
That was until New Rochelle became a relatively early epicenter of the virus in the United States. Most churches in the area had to suspend services nearly three weeks ago when Governor Andrew Cuomo on March 10 instituted a one-mile radius “containment zone” to try to stop the spread of the virus beyond a local synagogue.
Though the number of new COVID-19 cases has slowed since the restrictions were implemented, like in most parts of the country, places of worship— which typically provide many volunteers and donations for HOPE— remain shuttered.
“One of the biggest changes we’ve done is ramp up our services tenfold, in terms of our food pantry,” Ritz said.
“We went from serving every other week to serving three times a week so that people have much more opportunity to come to us in this time of great need….Food insecurity is a major concern, and it’s the last thing people need to be concerned about at this moment.”
Instead of operating the food pantry once a day, like usual, HOPE is now serving every weekday, because other soup kitchens in the area had to close down.
“We’ve ramped up our services tremendously…we’re fortunate to have the national guard here to help out, but it’s just been a tremendous change for us.”
The second drastic change has been doing everything outdoors. The pantry and the kitchen are both outside, serving in to-go containers.
“HOPE’s volunteer base has always been seniors. A large portion of our volunteers are seniors, and we made a call a while back when this started hitting New Rochelle that for the safety of our volunteers, we asked that anyone who was in the high-risk category, for their own safety, not to come into HOPE,” Ritz said.
“So that, right off the bat, reduced our ability to have as much help as we normally do. Even our pantry manager, who typically coordinates how our pantry restocks and goes out, we haven’t been able to have her in. So this has all been done with a skeleton crew here, and we’re certainly feeling the pinch. It’s been very difficult to support the community, but we are still committed to doing it for as long as we can.”
“We certainly don’t have enough to sustain the level of giving that we have been doing. And we feel that we are going to have to ramp it down very shortly,”
At this time, what HOPE needs most are donations, Ritz said. One major impact on their organization— and on other nonprofits— is that their annual gala, which is a major fundraiser for them each year, has been pushed back to October.
“It’s cost us a fairly dependable revenue stream that we’ve always been able to utilize during the spring and summer,” Ritz said.
“We are working more, with less, at the moment. We’re committed to our community, and again, we are going to be here as long as we can.”
CNA Staff, Mar 25, 2020 / 07:11 pm (CNA).- The Italian bishop of a missionary region of Ethiopia is the first Catholic bishop known to have died of the global coronavirus pandemic. He died March 25.
Bishop Angelo Moreschi, 67, was the leader of Ethiopia’s Apostolic Vicariate of Gambella, a missionary region of 25,000 Catholics in the western part of the country. He died Wednesday in the Italian city of Brescia, in the Lombardy region that has become the European epicenter of the pandemic.
A member of the Salesians of Don Bosco religious order, Moreschi had been a missionary in Ethiopia since 1991. He was ordained a bishop in January 2010.
“The Salesian community mourns the death of the Apostolic Vicar of Gambella (Ethiopia), namely Msgr. Angelo Moreschi, SDB, who died today, March 25, in Brescia (Italy) due to the coronavirus,” the Salesians of Don Bosco said in a statement released through the order’s information bureau.
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The secretary general of Ethiopia’s bishops’ conference announced the news in the country, announced conveying “deep condolences to the Clergy, religious, bereaved family and the lay faithful in the Apostolic Vicariate of Gambella.”
To the mourning people of the Gambella vicariate, the country’s bishops pledged the “closeness and prayers of members of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Ethiopia and the entire Catholic Church in Ethiopia. May his soul rest in peace.”
Bishop Moreschi was renowned in Ethiopia for his pastoral ministry to the service of young people and the poor. In the local dialect, he was afforded the title “Abba,” meaning “Father.”
“In his mission as prefect and then as apostolic vicar, he continued to embody the Salesian focus in helping children, accompanying them by his practical spirit and his strong apostolic zeal,” the Salesians of Don Bosco stated.
“In his visits to the villages, they still remember when the Salesian arrived with a battered SUV – or by motorboat in the villages along the Baro river when the roads were flooded – and he immediately began to distribute multi-vitamin biscuits to malnourished children.”
Bishop Moreschi died “after serving the young, the poor and his flock of souls as a Salesian for 46 years, as a priest for 38, and as a bishop for over 10,” the Salesians said.
More than 60 priests have died in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 21,000 lives globally. Several bishops have contracted the virus.
This story was first reported by ACI Africa, CNA’s African news partner. It has been adapted by CNA.
© Catholic World Report