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California abbey’s consulting firm takes ‘desperately needed’ approach to fundraising

January 9, 2024 Catholic News Agency 0
A view from in St. Michael’s Abbey in Orange County, California. / Credit: St. Michael’s Abbey

CNA Staff, Jan 9, 2024 / 10:30 am (CNA).

An abbey in California launched a consulting and fundraising firm that its leaders say is helping “serve and nourish the Church during a very unique moment in her history.”

The Abbey Group was launched at St. Michael’s Abbey in Orange County, California, in 2020 after the priests saw major success with a capital campaign to build a new monastery there. 

The abbey, of the Norbertine order, launched the campaign in 2006 but it stalled after “a decade of fits and starts,” Gregory Clark, the strategic planning director of the Abbey Group, told CNA. The abbey’s leadership consequently assembled “a small, internal team of confreres to rethink the project,” hiring R. Shane Giblin in the process. 

Within short order the abbey had secured over $150 million in commitments, more than doubling earlier projections of $60 million. The team also found “creative ways to immediately pay off all their bank debt in the same year it opened.”

St. Michael’s Abbey Father Prior Chrysostom Baer told CNA the project had transformed to the point that it was “no longer about what the abbey needed but rather the opportunity the benefactors had to do something of great consequence for themselves and the Church.” 

“This not only fit with our calling as religious, but it was simply more effective,” Baer said. 

The major success of that campaign led people to seek out both Giblin and the Norbertine Fathers “asking for strategic counsel on how to move forward with their own projects,” Clark said. 

Giblin and the abbey’s Father Justin Ramos “began offering pro bono counsel for about 18 months until they saw there was a real need in the Church that wasn’t being met.” The Abbey Group was launched as a result. 

St. Michael's Abbey in Orange County, California. Credit: St. Michael's Abbey
St. Michael’s Abbey in Orange County, California. Credit: St. Michael’s Abbey

‘Not dissimilar from what St. Norbert encountered 900 years ago’

St. Norbert established the Canons Regular of Prémontré in Prémontré, France, in 1121. The order’s task was in part to revitalize both clergy and lay faithful that had become dissolute in the faith at the time. 

The Abbey Group “exists to help serve and nourish the Church during a very unique moment in her history — not dissimilar from what St. Norbert encountered 900 years ago,” Clark told CNA. 

The initiative “provides strategic counsel and direction to faithful Catholic religious communities, educational institutions, and apostolates around the world,” Clark said, with a focus on institutions that have “ambitious apostolic endeavors and strong leadership but are in need of the financial and temporal resources to accomplish their objectives.”

The Abbey Group team has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for worthy Catholic projects, though it does not engage in any formal marketing. The group intentionally eschews online marketing, avoiding the common business practice to “saturate the internet with messages” of self-promotion. 

Giblin, now serving as CEO and co-founder of the Abbey Group, said this is intentional. “All of our clients come to us through unsolicited word of mouth,” he said. “So our reputation is all we have — if we don’t do good work we won’t exist — and we shouldn’t exist.”

The group has already developed “a queue of clients” — it takes on just four projects at any one time, vigorously vetting each proposal for its fidelity to the Catholic Church as well as the leadership guiding the project in question.

The majority of the staff are drawn from the laity, and the Norbertine Fathers offer “spiritual guidance” to the team and play a role in the governance of the organization.

Altogether the effort is directed toward “providing worthy Catholic projects with the strategy and resources they need to fulfill what God is calling them to accomplish,” Clark said. 

Giblin said he was fortunate to have had “a front-row seat to see the way Father Abbot and Father Justin were able to work with a special group of people from all over the country to courageously support this unique project.” 

“I saw people grow spiritually through this process and I realized this was just as much an opportunity for them as it was for the abbey,” he said. “It is an authentically Catholic approach to fundraising — one that is desperately needed in our Church during this moment in her history.”

Co-founder of the Abbey Group Father Ramos, meanwhile, said the endeavor’s work “is rooted inexorably in faith and charity, and in Christ.” 

“We’re aiding in discernment,” Ramos said, “to allow generous souls to participate in the renewing of the Church.”

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Bishop Barron: Assisted suicide can never be morally sanctioned

January 8, 2024 Catholic News Agency 0
Bishop Robert Barron speaks to EWTN’s Colm Flynn about evangelizing the culture today in October 2023. / Credit: Word on Fire

CNA Staff, Jan 8, 2024 / 15:00 pm (CNA).

Winona-Rochester Bishop Robert Barron is urging Catholics to oppose an effort to make assisted suicide legal in Minnesota — one of an increasing number of states seeking to legalize the practice, which goes against the Catholic Church’s teaching on the sanctity of all human life. 

Minnesota is considering a bill (SF 1813/HF 1930) to legalize the practice of assisted suicide. In an article on the website of Word on Fire, Barron — who founded that ministry in 2000 and who previously ministered as an auxiliary bishop in California — noted that Minnesota is his home state. The bishop said the proposed law caused him to reflect on a billboard he saw in California when that state was considering legalizing assisted suicide in the mid-2010s: “My life, my death, my choice.”

The bishop wrote the billboard caused him to think of St. Paul’s exhortation to the Romans in which the saint writes: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”

“Did the billboard get it right, or did St. Paul? Does my life belong to me, or is it a gift from God? Is my death a matter of my personal choice, or is it under God’s providence and at his disposal?” Barron asked. 

Barron wrote that the premium placed on bodily autonomy in modern society misses the point that the intentional taking of an innocent life is always wrong, no matter what the perceived benefits may be. 

Instead of assisted suicide or euthanasia, the Catholic Church has long supported palliative care, which means accompanying patients toward the end of their lives with methods such as pain management and not accelerating the process of death. 

“Some advocates of physician-assisted suicide will argue that autonomy over one’s body is of utmost importance for those who face the prospect of a dreadfully painful demise,” Barron wrote. “But this consideration is largely beside the point, for palliative care is so advanced that in practically all cases, pain can be successfully managed.”

“The deeper point is this: Even if a dying person found himself in great pain, actively killing himself would not be morally justifiable. The reason is that the direct killing of the innocent is, in the language of the Church, ‘intrinsically evil’ — which is to say, incapable of being morally sanctioned, no matter how extenuating the circumstances or how beneficial the consequences.”

“Though we place a huge premium on it in our culture, I don’t consider autonomy the supreme value. Authentic freedom is not radical self-determination; rather, it is ordered to certain goods that the mind has discerned,” he continued. 

“If I speak obsessively of ‘choice’ but never even raise a question regarding the good or evil being chosen, I find myself in a moral and intellectual wasteland. True freedom is ordered toward moral value and ultimately to the supreme value who is God.”

The current version of Minnesota’s bill contains several “safeguards” designed to ensure that only autonomous adults with a terminal illness will be able to die by assisted suicide. Barron wrote that he is “skeptical” that such safeguards will remain in place, given the erosion of similar measures in recent years in several European countries and in Canada. 

“In many of those places, the elderly, those with dementia, those experiencing depression or severe anxiety can all be candidates for this form of ‘treatment.’ Though the advocates of medically assisted suicide will deny it until the cows come home, this law places the entire state directly on the slipperiest of slopes,” Barron said.

Minnesota is one of at least a dozen states currently considering a liberalization of its assisted suicide laws. As of last year, almost a quarter (21.6%) of the U.S. population lived in a state that has legalized physician-assisted suicide.

Barron in his article urged Catholics to speak out against the bill, which is being sponsored by 24 Democratic Minnesota lawmakers and is currently in committee. 

“[C]all your representative or senator, write to the governor, talk to your friends and neighbors, circulate a petition. And to those in other parts of the country, I would urge vigilance. If this legislation hasn’t come to your state yet, it probably will soon enough. If you stand for the culture of life, fight it!” Barron concluded. 

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are not the same, although the two terms are often used interchangeably. Assisted suicide is the act of making the means of suicide — such as a lethal dose of medication — available to the patient, who subsequently acts on his or her own. 

Euthanasia, in contrast, refers to the practice of a medical professional or other person directly acting to end the life of a patient, a practice that remains illegal across the entire U.S.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “intentional euthanasia, whatever its forms or motives, is murder” and “gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and the respect due to the living God, his Creator” (No. 2324). This teaching was reaffirmed in the 2020 Vatican document Samaritanus Bonus. Pope Francis has spoken frequently against euthanasia and assisted suicide and in favor of palliative care. 

Catholic teaching states that patients and doctors are not required to do everything possible to avoid death, but if a life has reached its natural conclusion and medical intervention would not be beneficial, the decision to “forego extraordinary or disproportionate means” to keep a dying person alive is not euthanasia, as St. John Paul II noted in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

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