St. Louis, Mo., Oct 5, 2018 / 02:58 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A federal judge ruled Sept. 30 that a St. Louis ordinance banning discrimination based on reproductive health decisions violates both the U.S. Constitution and Missouri law.
The St. Louis ordina… […]
Tallahassee, Fla., Oct 5, 2018 / 01:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi launched a tip site Thursday for people to report allegations of past child sex abuse in Florida.
“We’re not limiting this to the Catholic Churc… […]
Jefferson City, Mo., Oct 4, 2018 / 02:21 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Abortions at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbia, Missouri ended this week after the facility failed to adhere to state rules, and its state license to perform abortions expired Oct. 3. This leaves Missouri with one clinic licensed to perform abortions, located in St. Louis.
“I am just thrilled, and I give all the honor and glory to God for this,” Kathy Forck of Columbia 40 Days for Life told CNA. “We’re pretty confident that [Planned Parenthood] will never be able to recover from this latest blow.”
Forck said that her organization has been praying outside the Columbia clinic for nine years, and during that time abortions had ceased and resumed nine times.
“Even though they have stopped doing the abortions, they’re still open to refer for abortions,” she said. “And until that place actually closes its doors, we’ll be out on the sidewalk offering help and hope to women and letting God use us to save babies by sending them across the street to MyLife Clinic [a pro-life pregnancy center].”
Missouri passed regulations in 2017 which granted the state attorney general more power to prosecute violations, and required stricter health codes and proper fetal tissue disposal. The new rules also required that doctors have surgical and admitting privileges to nearby hospitals, and that clinics meet hospital-like standards for outpatient surgery.
U.S. District Judge Howard Sachs temporarily blocked the regulations in April 2017, with the rationale that the rules were denying Missouri women a constitutional right to abortion. However, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month to end the district judge’s injunction, with a three-judge panel writing that the district judge failed to weigh any of the “benefits” that could proceed from the state’s rules.
This sends the case back to the district court for further consideration and allowed the rules to take effect Oct. 1. The Missouri DHSS announced last month that they would begin enforcing the new rules immediately.
The appellate court ruling comes in a case filed by Planned Parenthood affiliates in 2016 after the US Supreme Court struck down similar abortion restrictions in Texas.
In addition to the regulations, the Columbia clinic also must pass an inspection from the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services. According to the Columbia Missourian, a September inspection by the department found that the facility failed to “ensure a sanitary environment,” and was using equipment on which rust and substances believed to be mold and bodily fluids were found.
Doctors performing abortions in Missouri have been required since 2005 to have clinical privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. In 2015, University Hospital in Columbia revoked admitting privileges for a St. Louis-based doctor who had previously been performing abortions at the Columbia clinic.
“No one in Columbia wants to give [medical] privileges to the abortion industry,” Forck commented. “They’ve tried and tried and they just can’t get it.”
She said 40 Days for Life attracts many members of the local medical community to their sidewalk prayer vigils, and that the Columbia clinic had lost seven abortion doctors in the three and a half years that it performed abortions.
Missouri law has held, since the 1980s, that life begins at conception. The state is now one of seven that has only one licensed abortion clinic.
Washington D.C., Oct 4, 2018 / 02:00 pm (CNA).- Human dignity and the common good are the essential aims of work, attendees heard at the 2018 Principled Entrepreneurship conference in Washington, D.C. The three-day conference is being cosponsored by th… […]
Lansing, Mich., Oct 4, 2018 / 11:48 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Police raided diocesan properties at all seven Catholic dioceses in Michigan this week as part of an ongoing investigation into cases of child sex abuse by clergy.
In the Archdiocese of Detroit,… […]
Tulsa, Okla., Oct 4, 2018 / 03:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Whether you dress up as a ghoul, a hero, or a saint, Halloween has a Christian origin that should inspire us to remember our mortality and our redemption in Christ, Bishop David Konderla of Tulsa has said.
“In contrast to popular culture’s observance of Halloween, even the customary appeal to the ‘frightful’ has a devotional meaning in the Catholic tradition. Props such as skulls and scythes have historically recalled our mortality, reminding us to be holy because we are destined for judgment,” the bishop said, citing Hebrews 9:27 and Revelation 14:15. “Visible symbols of death thus represent a reminder of the last things – death, judgment, Heaven, and hell.”
Bishop Konderla discussed the upcoming holiday, which falls before the Nov. 1 feast of All Saints, in a Sept. 28 memorandum on the celebration of Halloween in the Diocese of Tulsa.
Halloween has origins in the Catholic liturgical calendar, he said, but the customs surrounding it have “drifted from the feast’s intended meaning and purpose.” The name itself derives from the archaic English phrase “All Hallows’ Evening,” referring to the Eve of All Saints. Since All Saints can begin with evening prayer the night before, Halloween is the feast’s “earliest possible celebration.”
“While the ‘Gothic’ aspect of Halloween reminds us of Christian teaching about the resurrection of the dead, our culture often represents this in a distorted manner, for when the dead are raised they will in truth be ‘clothed with incorruptibility’,” said Bishop Konderla.
When separated from Catholic teaching, the holiday’s grim, ghoulish, or “Gothic” costumes can be mistaken as “celebration or veneration of evil or of death itself, contradicting the full and authentic meaning of Halloween.”
“For the Christian, Christ has conquered death, as has been prophesied and fulfilled,” he said. “Christ has conquered death by his Passion, Death, and Resurrection, the Paschal Mystery whose graces are evident in the glory of all saints.”
The bishop also discussed the custom of dressing up as Christian saints.
“The custom of dressing up for Halloween is devotional in spirit,” he said. “By dressing up as the saints whom we most admire, we imagine ourselves following their example of Christian discipleship. This practice allows the lay faithful in festive celebration to become ‘living icons’ of the saints, who are themselves ‘icons’ or ‘windows’ offering real-life examples of the imitation of Christ.”
“In dressing up as saints we make Christian discipleship our own in a special way, following the exhortation of St. Paul: ‘Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ’,” he said, citing Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians.
Bishop Konderla invoked the imagery of the saints used in the Book of Revelation.
“Proper veneration of the saints naturally leads to adoration of the Lamb who was slain, whom the saints adore and follow wherever he goes,” he said. “True devotion to the saints, through our prayers and imitation of their witness, leads us sinners back to Christ.”
The bishop also voiced a few warnings. He said it is important to avoid Halloween popularizations of things that are contrary to the Catholic faith. These include the glamorization or celebration of “anything involving superstition, witches, witchcraft, sorcery, divinations, magic, and the occult.”
“We want to be good models of Christian virtue for those we serve and make clear distinctions between that which is good and that which is evil,” he added.
“Let us urge one another this Halloween to express in every detail of our observance the beauty and depth of the Feast of All Saints,” Bishop Konderla concluded.
“Let us make this year’s celebration an act of true devotion to God, whose saints give us hope that we too may one day enter into the Kingdom prepared for God’s holy ones from the beginning of time.”
Washington D.C., Oct 3, 2018 / 02:24 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A recent poll has shown a drop in popularity for Pope Francis in the United States over the past year. The poll suggests that many Americans increasingly disapprove of how the pope has handled t… […]
Rapid City, S.D., Oct 3, 2018 / 12:21 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A priest in Rapid City, South Dakota has been arrested and charged with two counts of sexual contact with a child under 16, according to local police.
Authorities took Father John Praveen, 38,… […]
San Diego, Calif., Oct 3, 2018 / 10:00 am (CNA).- Bishop Robert McElroy told a crowd of more than 300 people that he was committed to increasing accountability for bishops and to maintaining a zero-tolerance approach to abuse in the diocese. The San Diego bishop spoke at the first of eight public meetings scheduled to provide a forum for feedback from the laity on recent abuse scandals.
The meeting was held Oct. 1 at Our Mother of Confidence parish in University City, San Diego.
“These meetings will focus on seeking input from people in the pews on the pathway to such reform, listening to those who have been victimized by clerical sexual abuse either directly or in their families, and praying for God’s grace to be our only guide,” McElroy said in a statement announcing the fora which was distributed after weekend Masses in the diocese.
Bishop McElroy began the session Monday evening by acknowledging the “wrenching” effect that recent scandals had had on Catholics, and he invited the audience to help form the Church’s response to the crisis.
The open forum proved to be a difficult event for the bishop, according to local media. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that McElroy fielded vocal criticism, including some booing, for his perceived “downplaying” of recent scandals, including the revelations about Archbishop Theodore McCarrick and the “testimony” of former apostolic nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.
McElroy has previously called Viganò’s initial public letter, released Aug. 22, a “distortion of the truth” and an attempt “to settle old personal scores.”
During the event, McElroy was asked about a number of topics related to the recent scandals, including increased accountability for bishops, the safety of seminarians from sexual abuse and coercion, and the existence of a “homosexual subculture” in some parts of the Church.
McElroy told those attending that there was no link between the sexuality of priests and instances of abuse. “Abuse is not about sex,” he said. “It is about power and domination.”
In an Aug. 27 statement on the crisis of sex abuse in the Church, Bishop McElroy wrote that “the bishops of our nation, in union with the Holy Father, should be focused solely on comprehensively revealing the truth about the patterns of the sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable adults by clergy in our Church, so that deep reform can be enacted.”
As part of the listening session, McElroy also explained the measures which the diocese has had in place since 2003 to enforce its policy of zero-tolerance for abuse.
“I think we’re in an OK place in the structures we have put in place for the protection of minors,” McElroy said.
According to the Union-Tribune, McElroy also said that the diocese had received no credible allegations of abuse against living priests in more than three years.
In March of this year, the Diocese of San Diego removed a religious priest from his position as associate pastor in the parish of St. Patrick in Carlsbad, CA, following an alleged sexual assault on a seminarian after a parish event.
While parishioners were not told why Fr. Juan Garcia Castillo was removed from his post, the diocese confirmed to CNA in September that they had suspended his priestly faculties. The priest is facing criminal charges of sexual battery.
Despite the sometimes aggravated tone of questions and contributions, loud bursts of applause did break out in appreciation of the priests of the diocese, of whom attendees spoke warmly.
A further seven “listening sessions” have been scheduled by the diocese, with the next taking place at 7pm, Oct. 3, at St. Joseph Cathedral.
Washington D.C., Oct 2, 2018 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- The United States Supreme Court will not hear a challenge to a pro-life amendment to the Tennessee state constitution.
Amendment 1 categorically excludes abortion rights from the state’s constituti… […]
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