Vatican City, Jan 6, 2021 / 04:45 am (CNA).- As he celebrated Mass on the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord Wednesday, Pope Francis urged Catholics to devote more time to worshiping God.
Preaching in St. Peter’s Basilica Jan. 6, the pope sai… […]
Vatican City, Jan 6, 2021 / 03:01 am (CNA).- As of the first month of 2021, the College of Cardinals is composed of 229 members, 128 of whom are under the age of 80, and therefore eligible to vote for the next pope in a future conclave.
It was St. Paul VI who established, on Nov. 20, 1970, that cardinals aged 80 and over could not participate in the process for electing a pope.
Paul VI wrote in his motu proprio Ingravescentem aetatem that “the higher good of the Church demands that we consider the problem of old age also in relation to the eminent office of Cardinals, for which we have shown special concern several times in the past.”
The office of cardinal “is indeed a matter of an office with particularly serious and delicate tasks,” the pope stated, “both because of the very singular connection which binds it to Our supreme responsibility at the service of the whole Church, and because of the high responsibility it entails in the vacancy of the Apostolic See with respect to the universal Church.”
Paul VI declared that after reaching the age of 80, a cardinal loses the right to elect the Roman Pontiff and, therefore, the right to take part in the conclave.
In 2021, six cardinals of the Catholic Church will lose this privilege: three from Africa, two from Europe, and one from Oceania. Four of the six were given the red hat by St. John Paul II in his last two consistories, in 2001 and 2003.
The first cardinal to turn 80 years old in the course of the year — on Feb. 27 — will be Gabriel Zubeir Wako, archbishop emeritus of Khartoum. He was made cardinal by St. Pope John Paul II in 2003.
On March 8, Cardinal Wilfried Fox Napier of Durban, will lose the right to vote in a future conclave. He was also made a cardinal by John Paul II.
Also made a cardinal in 2003, Cardinal George Pell, former prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, will turn 80 June 8.
On July 19, Cardinal Maurice Piat of Port Louis will have his 80th birthday. He was given the red hat by Pope Francis in the November 2016 consistory.
Cardinal Beniamino Stella, prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, will reach age 80 Aug. 18. He received the red biretta from Pope Francis’ first consistory, held in February 2014.
The last cardinal to turn 80 in 2021 will be Angelo Scola, archbishop emeritus of Milan. St. John Paul II made him cardinal in the 2003 consistory, when Scola was patriarch of Venice.
The continental breakdown of the College of Cardinals is that 108 hail from Europe, 54 of whom are electors. There are 16 North American cardinals eligible to vote, out of a total 26. There are nine cardinals from Central America, of whom seven are electors. South America has 25 cardinals, 14 of whom have voting rights. Asia is represented by 27 cardinals, of which 16 are under age 80. There are 28 African cardinals, 17 of whom are electors. Oceania has four cardinal electors and two non-electors.
Hannah Brockhaus contributed to this report.
Washington D.C., Jan 6, 2021 / 12:25 am (CNA).- Los Angeles County has announced it is limiting non-COVID emergency care, due to hospitals having reached a “point of crisis” during the pandemic, promoting ethicists to discuss whether the act is justified.
On Monday, the Emergency Medical Services Agency for Los Angeles County issued two directives limiting emergency care during the pandemic, because of a spike in COVID hospitalizations.
One directive stated that emergency medical personnel should not transport patients who suffered cardiac arrest to the hospital, if they could not be revived in the field. The directive was given “due to the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on EMS and 9-1-1 receiving hospitals.”
Another directive stated that supplemental oxygen should only be given to patients with less than 90% oxygen saturation due to “the acute need to conserve oxygen.”
The actions were taken as the number of COVID hospitalizations is expected to spike after the Christmas holiday season, according to the Los Angeles Times.
One medical ethicist told CNA that the county had to make a difficult decision in extraordinary circumstances.
“I think they have gone about a very difficult decision in a reasonable way,” said Dr. Barbara Golder, staff member with the Catholic Medical Association, in an interview with CNA.
With the virus spreading around the country, many local health systems are seriously burdened or at capacity, Golder said. “I’m inclined to believe that this is, in fact, a very extraordinary circumstance,” she said in reference to Los Angeles.
The county’s director of health services, Dr. Christina Ghaly, stated on Monday that many area hospitals “have reached a point of crisis and are having to make very tough decisions about patient care,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
She added that the current numbers of COVID cases in the county are still reflective of the post-Thanksgiving surge with a post-Christmas surge yet to come—a point that Golder also made.
“It’s not going to get better,” she said of an anticipated post-Christmas surge of virus cases looming. “It’s really bad right now.”
Los Angeles county has seen an increase in COVID-19 cases since the end of October. More than 9,100 new COVID cases were reported on Monday, according to county health data. In some areas, ICU bed shortages have been a concern.
There have been a total of 10,850 deaths and more than 827,000 confirmed COVID cases overall in Los Angeles County, according to data provided by Johns Hopkins. While the number of reported cases is the highest by far among U.S. counties—Los Angeles is the most populous county in the U.S.—the rate of 8,189 infections per 100,000 residents is high, but is topped by many other counties around the country.
However, Charles Camosy—a theology professor at Fordham University—emphasized that care is being limited in Los Angeles due to an expectation of a further COVID surge, and not because hospitals are already overwhelmed.
“To be clear, they are *not* overwhelmed now. This directive is in *anticipation* of having traditional capacity (no hospital ships, no converted convention centers, no cooperating facilities in other counties) overwhelmed,” he tweeted.
Ghaly, explaining the county’s policy of not transporting cardiac arrest victims who had not been resuscitated in the field, said that the county was “emphasizing the fact that transporting these patients arrested leads to very poor outcomes.”
“We knew that already and we just don’t want to impact our hospitals,” Ghaly said.
Camosy noted that “[t]he phrase ‘poor outcomes’ is quite suggestive,” adding, “it is likely that [Ghaly] and others mean that patients who are likely to survive cardiac arrest for the during of an ambulance ride are likely to be disabled in ways which lead them to judge that a limited number of beds should be given to able-bodied patients.”
“If there are better explanations for this policy, I’d genuinely like to hear them,” Camosy added.
However, Golder said that it is not necessarily unethical to limit care for patients with a low expectation of survival—if the situation is one of true “triage” where demand for care is great and resources are limited, and as long as patients are not denied care on the basis of age or disability.
According to studies, patients suffering cardiac arrest who are taken quickly to a hospital still have around only a 5% chance to survive and eventual discharge, she said. During a pandemic, they would essentially be competing with COVID patients for limited health care resources.
While this population may be mostly elderly, she said, it could also include younger patients—and the county’s policy did not explicitly discriminate against the elderly.
“Nobody likes to see these things happen,” she said. “There’s always a limit on what we have available, and sometimes our demand exceeds it. And we’re just there, we’re there all over the country.”
In the spring of 2020, Camosy was one of three scholars to warn against health care triage plans that explicitly discriminated against the disabled.
As doctors in various jurisdictions were considering how to ration health care if hospitals were overwhelmed with an influx of COVID patients, Camosy was joined by Princeton law professor Robert George and Harvard sociology professor Jacqueline Rivers in demanding that care not be denied patients on the basis of their age or disability.
Camosy warned that many state health officials, hospital heads, and leading doctors lack ethics training and make decisions on a utilitarian “quality-adjusted life years” approach that favors younger, healthier patients and discriminates against elderly and disabled patients.
“As somebody who has studied bioethics, and who is a professor of bioethics, I know the overwhelming majority of them have virtually no ethics training,” Camosy told CNA.
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 5, 2021 / 06:19 pm (CNA).- An 18-month-long investigation into child sexual abuse in North Dakota’s two dioceses has concluded, the state’s attorney general announced Monday.
The investigation focused on a li… […]
CNA Staff, Jan 5, 2021 / 04:59 pm (CNA).- Looking ahead at 2021, abortion advocates are hoping the incoming presidential administration will bring policy changes and new personnel who are sympathetic to their goals.
“Planned Parenthood is committed to partnering with the Biden-Harris administration to ensure sexual and reproductive health doesn’t take a backseat in health policy and when making appointments,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, in a December 31 essay in Elle.
“On day one, we want Biden to issue an executive order that demonstrates the administration’s commitment to advancing health care access and rolling back harmful policies like the Title X gag rule, which has blocked patients from accessing care at Planned Parenthood health centers,” said Johnson.
The Title X “gag rule” is a Trump administration policy which prohibits the distribution of Title X funds to facilities which refer for abortion services or who provide abortion services.
Johnson called for the Biden-Harris administration to “make critical updates” to Title X, in order for more people to benefit from its funds. She did not elaborate in the essay as to what these “updates” would be.
“Finally, Planned Parenthood will continue to advocate for the appointment of diverse reproductive health champions to executive and judiciary vacancies,” said Johnson.
Johnson is hopeful that the Biden administration will repeal the Hyde Amendment “for good.” She called the Hyde Amendment, a 1977 law which prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for abortion services, “a discriminatory policy that blocks people who get their health insurance through Medicaid or other government-funded programs from accessing coverage for safe, legal abortion.”
President-elect Biden had previously supported the Hyde Amendment and voted for it numerous times throughout his time in the Senate. Over the course of a 24-hour period in June 2019, Biden changed course, following five decades of support for the policy, and announced that he was now in favor of repealing the Hyde Amendment.
Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris took credit for Biden’s abrupt about-face on the Hyde Amendment. In 2021, said Johnson, abortion advocates “must fight for policies that ensure every single person, regardless of their income or zip code, can actually access sexual and reproductive health care.”
Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL, had similar sentiment as Johnson. Speaking on a podcast, Hogue was concerned that the makeup of the Supreme Court could result in Roe v. Wade being overturned.
“We’re certainly preparing with our partners in the movement for [the overturning of Roe],” said Hogue. She said that much of her organization’s work recently “has been about making sure that we have what we call ‘islands of access’–blue states that are codifying the right to abortion, making sure that we have like practice in place where women can go.”
Many states, including New York, have moved to codify a right to have an abortion into state law. Should the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision be overturned, it would be up for states to decide their own abortion policies.
Hogue stated that she would support the creation of a “women’s health czar” in the upcoming administration. “It would send such a clear message that the terrible era that Trump ushered in is over,” said Hogue.
Biden, a Catholic, has previously pledged to codify the right to abortion into federal law.
“Number one, we don’t know exactly what [Justice Amy Coney Barrett] will do, although the expectation is that she may very well move to overrule Roe, and what the only thing–the only responsible response to that would be to pass legislation making Roe the law of the land,” said Biden in October.
“That’s what I would do.”
CNA Staff, Jan 5, 2021 / 04:36 pm (CNA).- Catholic and human rights groups have condemned the killing of nine indigenous group leaders, who were shot as authorities arrested protesters late last month.
On Dec. 30, government authorities attempted to a… […]
CNA Staff, Jan 5, 2021 / 03:31 pm (CNA).- The number of babies with Down syndrome who were born in Europe fell by half between 2011 and 2015— confirming the fears of pro-life campaigners in the UK, who have long argued that increased prenatal testing for Down syndrome has led many women to abort their children.
A study published during December 2020 in the European Journal of Human Genetics examined the years 2011-2015 to determine the number of babies born with Down syndrome across all countries in Europe, and compared those numbers to estimates of how many babies would have been born with Down syndrome had they not been aborted.
The study found that 54% fewer babies with Down syndrome were born during that period in the United Kingdom than estimates would have expected— a figure roughly in line with the European average.
Notably, in the UK, non-invasive prenatal testing for Down syndrome has been available since 2012 to any woman willing to pay the £500 bill, the BBC reports.
In Spain and Italy, the percentage of reduction was 83% and 71%, respectively.
Abortion is legal in the United Kingdom until the 24th week of pregnancy, except when continuing the pregnancy is dangerous to the physical or mental health of the mother, as well as in cases where the baby will “suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.”
For these disabilities, which can include Down syndrome, cleft lip, and club foot, abortion is legal up to birth. Most of the country’s 200,000 or so annual abortions take place before 13 weeks.
Right to Life UK, a pro-life group active in the country, has documented several instances of women being pressured to abort their children as a result of the prenatal test, with one mother reporting that she had been “offered about 15 terminations,” including when she was 38 weeks pregnant. By some estimates, nine out of ten women in the UK who receive a diagnosis of Down syndrome abort their child.
Increased use of NIPT have prompted several medical professional organizations in the UK, including The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, to issue guidelines urging doctors not apply pressure for abortion based on the results of the tests.
An investigation last summer found that the number of births of Down syndrome babies has fallen by 30% in National Health Service hospitals that offer NIPT.
The “Don’t Screen Us Out” campaign in the United Kingdom has, for the past four years, been drawing awareness to and seeking to change the UK’s abortion laws, seeking to amend the Abortion Act 1967 so that abortions for non-fatal disabilities are outlawed in the third trimester, which starts around 28 weeks of pregnancy.
Lynn Murray, a spokesperson for the group, told CNA in an interview last year that the campaign began in response to the government’s proposal of a relatively new screening method for Down syndrome— known as “cell-free DNA” tests— that, according to the government, would find an additional 102 cases of Down syndrome a year.
Given the high rate of termination for babies in the UK found to have Down syndrome, the campaign formed in order to try to get the government to assess the impact that the non-invasive prenatal testing technique— which is already being offered at NHS hospitals— would have on the Down syndrome community. The campaign attracted attention among Britons with similar concerns, she said.
Early last year, a 25-year-old British woman with Down syndrome, Heidi Crowter, launched a lawsuit against the UK government seeking to change the laws.
Crowter is joined in the lawsuit by Cheryl Bilsborrow, the mother of a two-year-old with Down syndrome, who has said that she was strongly encouraged to have an abortion after doctors performed the screening test on her unborn child. Máire Lea-Wilson, mother of nearly two-year-old son Aiden, who has Down syndrome, also has joined the lawsuit.
In October, the High Court of England and Wales agreed to hear the legal challenge.
The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has consistently criticized countries which provide for abortion on the basis of disability. In some countries, such as Iceland, the abortion rate for babies believed to have Down syndrome is close to 100%.
Servant of God Jerome Lejeune discovered the genetic cause for Down syndrome— an extra copy of chromosome 21— in 1958. He spent the rest of his life researching treatments and cures for the condition, advocating against the use of prenatal testing and the abortion of unborn children who were found to have Down syndrome.
Berthe Lejeune, Dr. Lejeune’s widow, has said her husband was heartbroken that many doctors and governments have since used his discovery to “screen out” babies with Down syndrome, targeting them for abortion.
“He thought that all doctors would be happy to find research to cure them,” Lejeune told EWTN Pro-Life Weekly in 2017.
“But sadly, all government[s], not only in France, said: oh, it’s a wonderful discovery. You can detect these little sick children before they are born, and so take them away with an abortion.”
Bangassou, Central African Republic, Jan 5, 2021 / 02:56 pm (CNA).- The Central African Republic city of Bangassou has been captured by rebels aligned with an ex-president, Bishop Juan José Aguirre Muñoz of Bangassou has reported as he ap… […]
Rome Newsroom, Jan 5, 2021 / 12:30 pm (CNA).- Lebanon’s Maronite patriarch has said that the country could be facing “the risk of total collapse” amid a deepening economic and political crisis.
In his homily on Jan. 3, Cardinal … […]
CNA Staff, Jan 5, 2021 / 11:30 am (CNA).- The Scottish Catholic bishops have protested the closing of churches as part of Scotland’s newest coronavirus lockdown.
Scotland’s government announced the latest closure Jan. 4. The month-long loc… […]
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