News Briefs

Washington D.C., Jul 14, 2020 / 12:45 pm (CNA).- The State Department on Monday said that Chinese sanctions of U.S. officials will not stop the U.S. from holding China accountable for abuses of Uyghurs.

“These threats will not deter us from taking concrete action to hold CCP officials accountable for their ongoing campaign of human rights abuses against members of ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang,” a state department spokesperson told CNA July 13.

Earlier on Monday, China’s foreign ministry announced sanctions on U.S. officials for speaking out about the mass detention of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

“It must be stressed that Xinjiang affairs are purely China’s internal affairs. The US has no right and no cause to interfere in them,” Hua Chunying, spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said on Monday.

China sanctioned U.S. religious freedom ambassador Sam Brownback, along with the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.). China did not specify the details and scope of the sanctions, although Rep. Smith said in a press release that his sanctions denial of an entry visa into the country.

According to observers, anywhere from 900,000 to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been imprisoned in Xinjiang, China’s far northwest province. The government has set up more than 1,300 detention camps where survivors have reported experiencing indoctrination, torture, beatings, and forced labor.

The AP reported on June 29 that many Uyghurs had also reported being forced by authorities to implant IUDs and take other forms of birth control, as well as being forced to undergo abortions and sterilizations in order to enforce China’s family planning policies. One expert told the AP that the campaign is “genocide, full stop.”

In addition, authorities have set up a system of mass surveillance in the region to track the movements of people, one that includes DNA sampling and facial recognition technology, as well as predictive policing platforms.

The bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China—listed for sanctions by China—warned in its most recent annual report that authorities in Xinjiang “may be committing crimes against humanity against the Uyghur people and other Turkic Muslims.”

Rubio and Smith were among the members of Congress sanctioned by China on Monday, and they each authored versions of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act which imposed sanctions on Chinese officials complicit in the abuses committed against Uyghurs.

Rubio’s version of the legislation was eventually signed into law by President Trump on June 17, but the administration did not immediately impose the sanctions on culpable officials.

On July 9, the U.S. issued visa sanctions against Chen Quanguo, Communist Party Secretary of Xinjiang, and two other party officials of the region, Zhu Hailun and Wang Mingshan, as well as their immediate family members.

The Treasury Department also issued financial sanctions against Chen, Zhu, Wang, and Huo Liujun, a former police official in Xinjiang, blocking their assets and entities in the U.S. and forbidding U.S. persons from doing business with them.

On Monday, China imposed sanctions on U.S. officials in response. The State Department said that the retaliatory measures “further demonstrates the CCP’s refusal to take responsibility for its actions.”

“There is no moral equivalency between these PRC sanctions and actions taken by countries holding accountable CCP officials for their human rights abuses,” the State Department said on Monday.
 
Smith said that in remarks on the House floor, he had accused Chinese president Xi Jinping of direct culpability in “the genocide against the Muslims” in Xinjiang.
 
“The U.S. sanctions Chinese officials for egregiously abusing human rights and Beijing responds by sanctioning Members of Congress for defending human rights,” he stated on Monday.

[…]

Denver Newsroom, Jul 14, 2020 / 11:30 am (CNA).- A California Catholic university has placed a statue of St. Junipero Serra in storage after at least three statues of the saint have been toppled by protestors in the state.

“In response to a statement from Archbishop Gomez, an outdoor statue of St. Junipero Serra on the University of San Diego campus was moved to temporary storage after several outdoor statues of the saint have been damaged in California,” a spokesman for the University of San Diego told CNA July 14.

The university referenced a June 29 letter from Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, who wrote that while “those attacking St. Junípero’s good name and vandalizing his memorials do not know his true character or the actual historical record,” increased security precautions meant that some California churches would “probably have to relocate some statues to our beloved saint or risk their desecration.”

Public statues of the saint were in June toppled in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and on July 4, a statue of Serra on the grounds of California’s state capitol in Sacramento was torn down, burned, and beaten with sledgehammers.

“The sad truth is that, beginning decades ago, activists started ‘revising’ history to make St. Junípero the focus of all the abuses committed against California’s indigenous peoples,” Gomez wrote in his June 29 letter.

“But the crimes and abuses that our saint is blamed for — slanders that are spread widely today over the internet and sometimes repeated by public figures — actually happened long after his death.”

For its part, the University of San Diego told CNA that although he “has become a touchstone for past cruelties to the indigenous peoples of California…St. Serra, America’s first Hispanic saint and missionary who brought Christianity to these lands, worked tirelessly to eliminate oppression that was clearly a part of the mission era.”

Serra was also a founder of the city of San Diego itself. In 1769, the Mission San Diego de Alcalá was founded by Franciscan missionaries led by Serra; the city grew up around that mission.

The university told CNA that it had in the last year “addressed some of the issues surrounding the recognition of injustice to Native Americans and in the mission era.” In April, the university renamed a campus building – Serra Hall – as “Saints Kateri Tekawitha and Junipero Serra Hall.” St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a convert to Catholicism who died at 24 in 1680, is the first Native American to be canonized a saint.

In an April 17 letter, the university’s president wrote that “it is hoped that by placing these two Catholic saints together, we will recognize that indigenous peoples preceded the Catholic missionaries who settled here. It is also meant to encourage continued dialogue on the important topics of colonialization, the spread of the Catholic faith and the impact both had on Native American populations.”

A university spokesman told CNA the college had commissioned and hung tapestries of Saints Serra and Tekawitha, and hung them in the newly renamed hall.

Also in April, the university announced that it would rename a campus building to Mata’yuum, a word which means “gathering place” in the language of the Kumeyaay people native to Southern California. At the same time, the university said it would name campus plazas for St. Teresa of Calcutta and Venerable Francis Cardinal Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận, both of whom had visited the University of San Diego, and would work to strengthen its relationship with Missionaries of Charity working in nearby Tijuana, Mexico.

The University of San Diego was founded in 1949 by then San Diego Bishop Charles Buddy and Mother Rosalie Hill, RSCJ, of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. A Catholic university, it is now administered by a lay board on which San Diego’s bishop sits.

News that the university’s Serra statue was moved comes days after California’s San Gabriel Mission, founded by the saint, caught fire and burned Saturday night. Federal and local authorities are investigating the possibility of arson.

[…]

CNA Staff, Jul 14, 2020 / 09:50 am (CNA).- The federal government executed its first federal inmate in 17 years on Tuesday, following numerous delays and requests for clemency from the family of the victims.

Daniel Lewis Lee was executed on Tuesday morning and pronounced dead at 8:07 a.m. He was executed at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. An eyewitness told the Indianapolis Star that it took approximately two to three minutes for Lee to die after the lethal injection drugs were administered.

The execution was permitted by the Supreme Court one day after a lower court blocked it due to overwhelming evidence that the drug protocol the government wanted to use causes “extreme pain and needless suffering,” including feelings of panic and the sensation of drowning as fluid accumulates in the lungs.

A Catholic organization opposed to the death penalty condemned the execution as “unnecessary and avoidable.”

“The federal government relentlessly plotted its course to execute Daniel Lee despite a historic decline in public support for the death penalty, clear opposition by the victims’ family, unwavering Catholic opposition to the restart of federal executions, and an unyielding global pandemic which has already taken more than 135,000 American lives,” said a statement from Kirsanne Vallancourt Murphy, the executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network.

Lee was sentenced to death in the 1996 murders of a family of three, including an eight-year-old girl. He insisted upon his innocence, and his final words were, “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man.”

Lee, a onetime white supremacist, along with a man named Chevie Kehoe, was found guilty of robbing William Mueller, a gun dealer in Tilly, Arkansas, of cash, ammunition, and firearms before killing him, his wife Nancy, and stepdaughter Sarah. Kehoe and Lee were part of the Aryan People’s Republic, a white supremacist group which Kehoe reportedly founded. The two reportedly planned to use the stolen goods to establish a whites-only nation.

Kehoe was sentenced to life in prison. Family members of the Muellers had requested that Lee also receive a life sentence.

In June, Nancy Mueller’s mother Earlene Peterson stated that she did not wish to see Lee executed.

“As a supporter of President Trump, I pray that he will hear my message: the scheduled execution of Danny Lee for the murder of my daughter and granddaughter is not what I want and would bring my family more pain,” said Peterson.

Family members of the victims were also concerned about the safety of doing an execution during the coronavirus pandemic, as they were nervous about traveling to a prison and being in a confined room to view the execution. Prisons have been the sites of widespread coronavirus outbreaks.

The last federal execution took place in 2003. In 2014, President Barack Obama ordered a Department of Justice (DOJ) review of the federal death penalty after several botched executions by lethal injection in states including Oklahoma and Ohio.

Last summer, Attorney General William Barr instructed the Bureau of Prisons to resume execution of federal prisoners on death row.

Two more federal inmates are set to be executed this week.

On July 7, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Bishop William Medley of Owensboro, Kentucky, Bishop Oscar Solis of Salt Lake City, Bishop Thomas Zinkula of Davenport, Iowa, and Bishop Richard Pates who is the apostolic administrator of Joliet, Illinois, all joined more than 1,000 faith leaders in calling for a stop to scheduled executions of four federal death row inmates.

“As our country grapples with the COVID 19 pandemic, an economic crisis, and systemic racism in the criminal legal system, we should be focused on protecting and preserving life, not carrying out executions,” the faith leaders stated.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 2267 on the death penalty was updated in 2018 with a statement from Pope Francis, calling the death penalty “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”

[…]

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 14, 2020 / 08:25 am (CNA).-  

A pro-life Texas state senator running for re-election says he won’t be deterred by racial slurs directed against him by pro-abortion groups.

State senator Eddie Lucio, represent… […]