TCA Podcast, – Ep. 311 Helen Alvaré on JPII’s Feminine Genius & Matt Haas Reminds Us: Thank a Priest
As we remember John Paul II on the 20th anniversary of his passing, Helen Alvaré takes us back to all the great riches he offered us, especially within Evangelium Vitae, reminding us that the gift of life is the most essential human right. Msgr. Roger Landry also shares his many memories of meeting JPII and how his teachings helped shape his own priestly vocation. Matt Haas tells us about a new initiative, Thank a Priest, calling the faithful to share our gratitude for the priests who offer us in persona Christi, silent servants who work tirelessly keeping us bolstered in the sacraments. Catch the show every Saturday at 7amET/5pmET on EWTN radio!
https://thecatholicassociation.org/podcast/ep-311-helen-alvare-on-jpiis-feminine-genius-matt-haas-reminds-us-thank-a-priest/
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1. Recovering Pope Surprises Pilgrims With a Public Appearance, By Elisabetta Povoledo, The New York Times, April 7, 2025, Pg. A9
As entrances go, this one was both unexpected and welcome. That much was clear from the thunderous applause and cheers on Sunday as Pope Francis made his first public appearance since leaving a Rome hospital two weeks ago.
Francis arrived, unannounced, on the dais in St. Peter’s Square near the end of a Mass that was part of a pilgrimage by health care workers and their patients.
The pope said very few words, his voice still strained after a six-week hospital stay for pneumonia and other problems that his doctors said twice brought him close to death.
“Happy Sunday to everyone, many thanks,” Francis said, waving his hands. A nasal cannula was visible in both nostrils; Francis continues to rely on supplemental oxygen, the Vatican has said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/world/europe/pope-francis-surprise-public-appearance.html
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2. China Is Offering Cash in Exchange for More Babies. But Does It Work?, By Karoline Kan, Bloomberg, April 7, 2025, 6:00 AM
China lifted its long-held one-child policy almost a decade ago now as concerns shifted from having too many babies to not having enough. Years on however, the birth rate hasn’t risen. The population in what was formerly the world’s most-populous country has decreased for three consecutive years. And its marriage rate — a key predictor of future births in a country where few children are born out of wedlock — has also just hit its lowest level in almost half a century.
The solution? Many local governments are rolling out cash incentives for families with new born babies. Such incentives were first launched in Sichuan province in 2021 and have since been expanded across the rest of the country. Last month, Hohhot, the regional capital of Inner Mongolia, made national headlines for its generous subsidies of 50,000 yuan ($6,840) to couples who have a second child and 100,000 yuan for a third or more. Some cities also provide subsidies for buying homes.
Now the question is whether such cash incentives help, and if they do, how much?
“These kind of baby bonuses may have a temporary and moderate effect when they are first introduced, but I don’t expect anything long term.” Shuang Chen, Assistant Professor at London School of Economics and Political Science, told me. “It only provides incentives for people who were planning to have babies anyway.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-04-07/china-is-offering-cash-in-exchange-for-more-babies-but-does-it-work
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3. Report says terrorists,Nigerian forces killed Over 20,000 Christians in Nigeria’s South East, By Ngala Killian Chimtom, Crux, April 7, 2025
A new report says over 20,300 Christians have been massacred in South East Nigeria since 2015.
According to the Catholic-inspired NGO International Society for Civil Liberty and the Rule of Law Intersociety, the killings were carried out by a plethora of jihadist organizations, including the Jihadist Fulani herdsmen, the Niger Delta jihadist militants, and the Jihadist Fulani bandits, the Fulani Muslim vigilantes as well as the Nigerian military deployed to the region.
The report, signed by Intersociety Board Chair Emeka Umeagbalasi, states that jihadist groups which infiltrated Nigeria—particularly the South-East—during the administration of Muhammadu Buhari, have been responsible for approximately 9,800 jihad-related deaths since June 2015.
Additionally, approximately 10,500 unarmed citizens were killed by officers and personnel of the Nigerian Armed Forces, allegedly targeted based on their ethnicity and religion, according to the report.
Besides the killings, “members of the South-East civilian population have been singled out for false labeling, mass criminalization and trump-up charges on the grounds of their ethnicity and religion,” the report states.
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-africa/2025/04/report-says-terroristsnigerian-forces-killed-over-20000-christians-in-nigerias-south-east
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4. Theodore McCarrick, Cardinal Defrocked Over Sex Abuse, Dies at 94, By Robert D. McFadden, The New York Times, April 6, 2025, Pg. A26
Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington and the highest American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church to be accused of sexually abusing minors and seminarians — a charge that stripped him of his ministry, his place in the College of Cardinals and his priesthood, reducing him to the status of a layman — has died. He was 94.
Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, archbishop of Washington, confirmed the death in a statement, which provided no further details. A statement by the Vatican said he died on Thursday in Missouri, where he had been reported to be living.
The accusations against Cardinal McCarrick, who had helped shape many of his church’s policies for responding to its sexual abuse crisis, were shocking but hardly incredible when they came to light in 2018, after a church investigation concluded that he had molested a teenage altar server in 1971 and 1972 while he was monsignor in New York City. Thousands of priests before him had faced charges of abuse, and the church had paid victims hundreds of millions in settlements. In 2012, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the archbishop of Boston and America’s senior prelate, resigned amid revelations that he had protected pedophile priests for years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/us/theodore-mccarrick-dead.html
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5. Pope makes surprise appearance at St. Peter’s Square, 2 weeks after leaving hospital, By Silvia Stellacci and Colleen Barry, The Associated Press, April 6, 2025
Pope Francis made a surprise entrance to St. Peter’s Square during a special Jubilee Mass for the sick and health workers on Sunday, marking his first public appearance at the Vatican since leaving the hospital two weeks ago after a life-threatening bout with pneumonia.
The pontiff waved at the crowd of faithful that stood and applauded as he was pushed in a wheelchair unannounced to the front of the altar in the square. Some exclaimed, “I see the pope!’’ as his image first emerged on a big screen showing him passing through the Holy Door before being brought down a ramp to the altar.
“Good Sunday to everyone,’’ Francis said, speaking into a microphone, which he tapped to make sure it was working on a second attempt. “Thank you very much.”
The pontiff’s voice sounded stronger than when he addressed well-wishers outside of Gemelli hospital on the day of his release March 23, after a five-week hospital stay.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/apr/6/pope-makes-surprise-appearance-st-peters-square-2-weeks-leaving/
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6. TV and Movies for America’s Vast Middle, By Barton Swaim, The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2025, Opinion
I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s. My conception of life in the adult world was formed to a great extent by television and movies. As a teenager I didn’t have much in the way of insight, but I did notice one difference between my own experience and the world portrayed on screen: In the worlds of “Happy Days,” “The Jeffersons,” “Three’s Company” “Family Ties” and a thousand other shows and movies, religion had no place, except occasionally as an object of ridicule. No character in these productions, or none I recall, expressed a serious thought about God or faith or religious practice or doctrinal leaning. Millions of Americans for whom religious belief is a normal part of life learned to accept this absence. But it felt unnatural.
Based in New York and Los Angeles, America’s entertainment industry has long ignored the interests and worldviews of ordinary religious people in the country’s vast middle. That has begun to change. Technological improvements—roughly from the development of the digital camera to the rise of streaming platforms—have enabled independent filmmakers across the country to produce high-quality movies and series that explore themes mainstream studios don’t understand and prefer to ignore.
That’s the supply side. The demand side is ready for new stuff. That there are enormous numbers of American viewers who will pay to watch well-made films that avoid gratuitous crudity and sacrilege and present religious sentiment as typically human was made evident by the unpredicted success of “Sound of Freedom,” the 2023 movie starring Jim Caviezel as a former government agent whose belief in God leads him to rescue children from sex traffickers. It was distributed by the Provo, Utah-based Angel Studios and took in $250.5 million in gross revenue against a $14.5 million budget.
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“American Underdog,” a 2021 movie about Kurt Warner, the quarterback who didn’t make the NFL draft but eventually led the St. Louis Rams to a Super Bowl victory, is as well-acted and skillfully filmed as any Hollywood sports movie. The Erwin brothers’ “Jesus Revolution,” starring Kelsey Grammer and Jonathan Roumie, is a sympathetic but not uncritical account of Southern California’s “Jesus people” movement of the late 1960s and ’70s. “Jesus Revolution” grossed $54 million against a $15 million production budget.
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In the meantime, Mr. Erwin offers the simple hope that his biblical adaptation will spur viewers to read the book on which it’s based, rather as Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy persuaded many of its viewers to read J.R.R. Tolkien’s original. “I remember when some Amazon executives read the scripts for ‘House of David’ for the first time,” Mr. Erwin recalls. “They said, These are really good. I said, It’s based on a best-seller, man. Five billion copies sold. It’s a good book. You should check it out.”
Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tv-and-movies-for-americas-vast-middle-jon-erwin-house-of-david-religion-e7890efc
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7. Theodore McCarrick Dies, But His Scandal Lives On, By Matthew McDonald, National Catholic Register, April 5, 2025
When the clergy sex-abuse scandal exploded in the United States in early 2002, then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was a leading public voice in the bishops’ efforts to stop it — even as he was privately denying inquiries from reporters about whether he had ever abused anybody himself.
McCarrick, who died Thursday at age 94, was also a voice of moderation.
Appearing on a Sunday morning talk show in April of that year, the then-archbishop of Washington expressed concern about a hypothetical cleric who had committed sex acts on children many years before “and since then has never had any trouble and the people know and they say, ‘He’s a good man. We don’t have to get rid of him; we’ll monitor him; we’ll take care of him.’”
“Do I say, ‘You’re out?’” McCarrick asked. “I’ve got to pray about it.”
Sixteen years later, McCarrick was out — out of the College of Cardinals and eventually out as a bishop and a priest, over allegations that he molested minors and seminarians and used the sacrament of confession to solicit sex.
Yet by the time he fell from public grace, McCarrick was 87, and the temporal consequences of his actions were limited.
Victims sued him, but the cases stalled. State prosecutors pursued criminal charges against him for sexual assault and abuse of a minor — first in Massachusetts and later in Wisconsin — but judges in both places found him unable to stand trial because of mental deterioration from dementia.
The public scandal led the Vatican to release a 459-page report in November 2020 that attempted to describe how he had risen in prominence in the Church over decades while he ignored or denied quiet but recurring allegations that he sexually abused boys and young men.
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To the public, McCarrick’s good name continued until Church authorities announced in June 2018 — at least 30 years after he was first accused — that the Archdiocese of New York disclosed it had received credible allegations of sex abuse against him.
Pope Francis asked him to resign as a cardinal. In February 2019, after a Church trial that included eight live witnesses and sworn statements from four others, McCarrick was found guilty of “solicitation during the Sacrament of Confession and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power,” according to the McCarrick Report.
The Sixth Commandment, which bans adultery, in Church terms refers more broadly to sexual sins.
Pope Francis dismissed McCarrick from the clerical state. After 60 years in ministry, McCarrick spent his last six years living as a layman.
https://www.ncregister.com/news/theodore-mccarrick-dies-but-his-scandal-lives-on
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8. Governments want more babies. Are reproductive freedoms at risk?, By Kelsey Ables, The Washington Post, April 4, 2025
Around the world, declining fertility rates have panicked governments and sparked a flurry of pro-natalist legislation and initiatives. These state-run campaigns include matchmaking in China, a proposal for fertility testing in France and South Korea’s efforts to create a new ministry devoted to dealing with what the country’s former president declared a “national emergency.”
This urgent language is echoed globally each year when birth rates are published. If births increase — as they did slightly last year in South Korea, though it still has the world’s lowest birth rate — it’s celebrated, and if they decrease, as in Japan, it’s often framed as a disaster in the making. Pronatalist rhetoric is on the rise in the United States. Vice President JD Vance recently told an antiabortion rally that he wants “more babies” in the country, while President Donald Trump’s influential adviser Elon Musk has repeatedly called low birth rates “the biggest danger civilization faces.”
But with significant anxiety and resources devoted to what is widely referred to as a crisis, it’s worth asking: Are low fertility rates really as bad as everyone seems to say? And do state-led efforts to boost births have a downside?
Some experts argue that low birth rates are not implicitly disastrous. They are looking for optimism in a trend that is proving difficult to reverse, and raising concerns about the ethics of pushing for more births and how this affects reproductive freedoms.
“The framing of low birth rates as a ‘crisis’ is a political and ideological choice rather than an objective description,” said Sunhye Kim, a professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul who studies the politics of reproduction.
“The real issue,” she said, “lies in how societies respond to demographic changes — whether through policies that enhance social welfare, gender equality and labor rights or through coercive pronatalist measures that restrict reproductive autonomy.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/04/low-birth-rates-south-korea-reproductive-rights/
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9. China’s new religion laws a ‘pretext’ for arrests, clerics say, Clerics in China say new restrictions on religious practice are about cutting Chinese Catholics off from the outside world, By Ed. Condon, The Pillar, April 04, 2025
The Chinese Communist Party announced this week new restrictions on religious practice by foreigners in mainland China, which are set to come into force May 1.
The rules, issued by the party’s National Religious Affairs Administration, ban foreign nationals from common worship with Chinese citizens, and require all visitors to affirm the national independence of Chinese Churches and faith communities.
The restrictions, which also ban any form of religious practice by visitors in unofficial locations, mark an escalation in Chinese control of religion on the mainland, and come six months after the extension of the Vatican’s controversial agreement with the Chinese government.
The new measures, which clerics in China told The Pillar were likely aimed at creating a “pretext” for arresting foreign nationals for religious activity, suggest that six years after the Holy See’s accord with China, the Church faces less, not more, freedom to operate.
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/chinas-new-religion-laws-for-foreigners
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TCA Media Monitoring provides a snapshot from national newspapers and major Catholic press outlets of coverage regarding significant Catholic Church news and current issues with which the Catholic Church is traditionally or prominently engaged. The opinions and views expressed in the articles do not necessarily reflect the views of The Catholic Association.
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