US

No Picture
News Briefs

‘Lives have been turned upside down’: Priest sets up crisis center for families after ICE raids

August 31, 2019 CNA Daily News 2

Canton, Mississippi, Aug 31, 2019 / 03:57 pm (CNA).- Fr. Mike O’Brien doesn’t speak Spanish, though he still speaks English with the Irish brogue of his homeland.

However, that didn’t stop the priest from stepping up to the plate to help his parish after hundreds of people in the surrounding area, including many of his Latino parishioners, were arrested during U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) raids at seven local food processing plants in early August.

“It was a big shock for us. We weren’t prepared, so it’s hard,” O’Brien told CNA. “We’re just winging it.”

Federal authorities told Fox News that investigations would be made into the food processing plants where the raids took place as well, to determine whether the owners knowingly hired undocumented workers.

O’Brien said he estimates that about 80% of the Latino families at his parish alone were affected by the raids, with one or more family members detained.

With help from outside agencies and lawyers in the days following the raids, O’Brien and his small, part-time volunteer staff at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Canton, Mississippi set up a crisis management center, where they are now helping 85 affected families.

“We’re not just trying to serve Catholic families, but everybody who was affected by the raid,” he said. “Of course they lost jobs, they lost income…they’re trying to pay their rent for their for homes and utility bills and all that kind of thing.”

Besides financial assistance, affected families need help with meals, legal assistance, psychological counseling, childcare and other services. They need to keep their phone bills paid, so that they can be contacted by the lawyers working on their cases.

O’Brien said he has been amazed by the “tremendous work” done by lawyers and counselors who came from throughout the country to offer their help. One group of lawyers from Colorado shut down their main office for a week and set up shop at the parish in Mississippi, O’Brien said, offering pro bono legal counsel to anyone who needed it.

He is also proud of the generosity of the rest of his parishioners, he said, noting that his parish is made up of a diverse group of Latino and non-Latino people.

“They’ve been very supportive, I must say. I’m very pleased with that. I’m very happy with that,” Father said.

Immediately after the raids, parishioners set up a fun event for the affected children after the Spanish Mass the following Sunday to try to lift their spirits, O’Brien said. They have also provided families with meals and childcare while the adults meet with lawyers in the evenings.

O’Brien said the parish center has also been helped by Catholic Charities and by other Christian churches in the area. Other Catholic parishes in the region of the raids have set up similar crisis management centers, he added.

Father said from the outset, he wanted his parish to put politics aside and help out the families affected by the raids.

“I didn’t give them (the parishioners) too much of a choice, you know, either,” O’Brien said with a bit of a laugh. “I let the people know in no uncertain terms…these are my parishioners, and my parishioners are in trouble. Many of them are in jail, and this is a major crisis.”

O’Brien said he’s been calling it the parish’s own Hurricane Katrina. In August 2005, Katrina devastated parts of Louisiana and Florida, sending people whose homes had been damaged or destroyed flooding into Mississippi.

“The whole state was traumatized by that,” O’Brien said, “and this, that’s how I’m feeling. We’re right in the middle of Katrina, you know, people’s lives have been turned upside down and they’re in great distress and greatly struggling to respond.”

Right now, O’Brien said, he and the crisis management team and lawyers are working to get the detained workers out on bail before their immigration hearings, so that they can be with their families in the meantime.

The priest said it was “shocking” to talk with another crisis management group in Iowa that helped about 35 families after a similar ICE raid. The group told O’Brien that it took more than $350,000 and more than a year to finish the work of helping families recover.

“So that’s kind of shocking,” O’Brien said. “I thought if we got $20,000 or $50,000 we’d be in great shape.”

He added that he’s “purposely” stayed away from any political talk about the raids, and has focused on helping the families and parishioners in his care.

“What I need right now is not to talk about any political party,” he said. “I’m trying to keep my parish united.”

“And you know, there are two sides to the argument, and neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have solved it. Nobody’s been able to solve it. Everybody is talking around it and sometimes it’s made into political football, and they play to their base and nothing gets done, except talk.”

But despite the difficulties, O’Brien said he believes he will look back on this time in five or ten years as one of the “highlights of my life as a priest.”

“I must say, in fairness, it’s been an awesome experience, spiritually for me,” he said.

“I’ve seen the Holy Spirit like I’ve never seen the Holy Spirit, you know? Just things falling into place, events happening. I found myself making very fast decisions with very little thought…but that’s because I had to do it. That’s just it. You have to jump in,” he said.

“I’ve seen the hand of God all over the place,” he said, including in the Gospel reading the Sunday after the raids.

“In the Scriptures the Sunday after it happened, oh my gosh. It was very powerful – Abraham leaving his home place, called by God to go out into the desert and to go to a new land and living in tents and depending on God and trusting in God.”

“And God could take care of them,” he said. “So the word of God came to life big time.”

 

[…]

No Picture
News Briefs

Analysis: What is next for pro-life legislation?

August 30, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

Washington D.C., Aug 30, 2019 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- This week, a Missouri judge ruling against a state pro-life law which was drafted to withstand judicial review. The decision calls into question whether any legislation is possible on abortion in the fir… […]

No Picture
News Briefs

Study finds no ‘gay gene’ – What that means for Catholic morality

August 30, 2019 CNA Daily News 2

Washington D.C., Aug 30, 2019 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- After a major scientific study found there is not a singular genetic marker for homosexualty, a Catholic theologian explained that the findings are fully in accord with Catholic teaching.

The study was published Aug. 30 in Science. It examined data from several large genetic databanks in multiple countries, and surveyed nearly half a million people about their sexual partners and preferences. Previous studies on the matter have only examined sample groups of hundreds of people.

“From a genetic standpoint, there is no single [genetic distinction] from opposite-sex to same-sex sexual behaviors,” said Andrea Ganna, a geneticist at Finland’s Institute of Molecular Medicine, and the study’s lead author.

Speaking to Scientific American, Eric Vilain, a geneticist at Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., called the study’s result “the end of the ‘gay gene’” theory.

In recent decades, many of those involved in the LGBT movement have advanced the argument that sexual orientation is genetically determined, and that people who experienced same-sex attraction are born with a fixed orientation.

In a June interview, Fr. James Martin SJ, author of “Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity,” said that “most reputable psychologists, psychiatrists, biologists, social scientists say that people are simply born this way.” 

In a commentary published along with the study, Oxford University geneticist Melinda Mills noted an “inclination to reduce sexuality to genetic determinism” in support of sociological or ideological positions.

“Attributing same-sex orientation to genetics could enhance civil rights or reduce stigma,” she wrote. “Conversely, there are fears it provides a tool for intervention or ‘cure.’”

Still, Mills said the results of the study show that the use of genetics to predict same-sex attraction, or to change it through some kind of gene editing, is “wholly and unreservedly impossible.”

Commenting on the report Friday, Martin told CNA that “the study shows that a variety of factors, including genetic factors, influence human sexuality.” 

“For me, the most helpful quote came from a geneticist who was one of the lead researchers, who talked about how ‘natural’ homosexuality is,” Martin said, quoting Dr. Benjamin Neale of MIT.

Neale told the New York Times that same-sex behavior is “written into our genes and it’s part of our environment… this is part of our species and it’s part of who we are.”  

“That seems to sum up the results of the study accurately,” said Martin.

The research showed five distinct genetic data points which appear common among individuals who reported at least one same-sex encounter. Two of these markers appear linked to hormones and smell, factors in sexual attraction. 

But the five markers together explained less than 1% of differences in sexual activity among the population, the results found.

“Although they did find particular genetic loci associated with same-sex behavior,” Mills said, “when they combine the effects of these loci together into one comprehensive score, the effects are so small, under 1%, that this genetic score cannot in any way be used to predict same-sex sexual behavior of an individual.”

Noting that the study results highlight considerable differences by generation and the influence of cultural norms on sexual behavior, Mills concluded that future research was best focused on “how genetic predispositions are altered by environmental factors.”

“Once again it’s also important that we listen to the lived experience of LGBT people, as we minister to them in the church,” Martin said.

Dr. Kevin Miller, assistant professor of theology at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, told CNA that the results are in accord with the Church’s existing teaching about homosexualtiy.

“The Catechism treats homosexuality in nos. 2357-2359. Early in this treatment we read that its ‘psychological genesis remains largely unexplained.’ The new study does not change this.”

The study draws a distinction between people who engage in homosexual acts and those who identified as “gay” or “homosexual,” a distinction Miller noted was already central to the Church’s teachings.

The Catechism teaches that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “under no circumstances can they be approved.” This is because, Miller said, only sexual acts oriented by their nature to the possibility of procreation and set within marriage are “compatible with the essential moral virtue of chastity and – as St. John Paul II emphasized in both his pre-papal and papal writings – love.”. 

“Any others are – independent of the subjective dispositions of those who take part in them – objectively hedonistic and selfish, rather than authentically loving. Obviously there are many types of sexual acts that could fall into this category – homosexual acts are by no means the only type.”

Homosexual tendency or inclination, often called same-sex attraction, is defined by the Catechism as “objectively disordered,” Miller said. This is because a desire which, if acted on, would lead to immoral acts is by its nature disordered, he said. 

But, Miller noted, the desire or inclination itself is not “morally wrong,” since a person does not choose to have an inclination or exercise their free will over having it.

Central to understanding the distinction between sexual inclinations and acts, Miller said, is that all sexual acts are freely chosen; even if a person has an interior disposition toward engaging in homosexual acts, they have the same freedom to pursue them or not as a person inclined towards immoral acts with someone of the opposite sex.

“One can see that in this explanation of the Church’s teaching, there is no reference of any sort to the cause of the homosexual tendency or disposition. This is simply irrelevant to the analysis of the moral goodness or evil of homosexual acts, and of the ordered or disordered character of the homosexual tendency or disposition.”

Miller explained that the origin of a person’s sexual orientation, whether biological, environmental, or experiential, had no bearing on what the Church teaches about the morality of acting on a particular sexual urge. 

“These teachings do not depend on any assumption regarding the cause of the tendency or inclination,” he said.

“Even if it could be shown that a homosexual tendency or orientation is wholly biologically determined, this would not affect at all the logic underlying the Church’s teaching.”

[…]