1. Building in ‘God’s backyard’: Los Angeles affordable housing project could herald things to come, By Jonah McKeown, Catholic News Agency, August 26, 2024, 6:30 AM
Los Angeles is one of the most expensive cities in the United States, with an average home price almost touching a million dollars in 2024 — a landscape that crowds out not only the poor, but also young families with children. The high cost of housing is one of the primary reasons why tens of thousands of people live on the streets of LA, and most of those who are housed are “rent burdened,” which means they spend more than 30% of their income just keeping a roof over their heads.
In the face of such challenges, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles recently announced it will provide land for a new housing development dedicated to serving community college students and young people exiting the foster care system.
Amy Anderson, executive director of Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance and a former chief of housing for the City of Los Angeles, told EWTN News that a group of Catholic lay leaders from the business and philanthropic community reached out to the archdiocese with a vision for creating an independent, nonprofit affordable housing development organization.
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The proposed building, which will be located steps from Los Angeles Community College, will feature 74 affordable housing units, as well as “on-site supportive services” for young people transitioning out of foster care — a population that often ends up experiencing homelessness.
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https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/258907/building-in-god-s-backyard-los-angeles-affordable-housing-project-could-herald-things-to-come
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2. The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow, By David French, The New York Times, August 26, 2024, Pg. A19, Opinion
This June, I was invited on a friend’s podcast to answer a question I’ve been asked over and over again in the Trump era. Are Christians really persecuted in the United States of America? Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. This sense of dread and despair helps tie conservative Christians, people who center their lives on the church and the institutions of the church, to Donald Trump — the man they believe will fight to keep faith alive.
As I told my friend, the short answer is no, not by any meaningful historical definition of persecution. American Christians enjoy an immense amount of liberty and power
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But that’s not the only answer. American history tells the story of two competing factions that possess very different visions of the role of faith in American public life. Both of them torment each other, and both of them have made constitutional mistakes that have triggered deep cultural conflict.
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When you’re inside evangelicalism, Christian media is full of stories of Christians under threat — of universities discriminating against Christian student groups, of a Catholic foster care agency denied city contracts because of its stance on marriage or of churches that faced discriminatory treatment during Covid, when secular gatherings were often privileged over religious worship.
Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians. If the left is angry at conservatives for seeking the protection of a man like Trump, then it has only itself to blame.
But when you’re pushed outside evangelicalism, the world starts to look very different. You see conservative Christians attacking the fundamental freedoms of their opponents. Red-state legislatures pass laws restricting the free speech of progressives and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Christian school board members attempt to restrict access to books in the name of their own moral norms. Other conservatives want to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, to bring legal recognition of same-sex marriages to an end.
Combine those stories with personal tales of progressives and other dissenters experiencing threats from and intimidation by conservative Christians, and you begin to see why the Christian persecution narrative rings hollow. And if conservative Christians are angry at progressive Americans for believing they are hateful hypocrites, then they have only themselves to blame.
After living inside and outside conservative evangelicalism, I have a different view. While injustice is real, the Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false. America isn’t persecuting Christians; it’s living with the fallout of two consequential constitutional mistakes that distort our politics and damage our culture.
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First, for most of American history, courts underenforced the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
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In the 1960s the Warren court began dismantling the soft Protestant establishment by blocking school prayer and Scripture reading. A series of cases limited the power of the state to express a religious point of view. But then state and local governments overcorrected. They overenforced the establishment clause and violated the free speech and free exercise clauses by taking aim at private religious expression.
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The Supreme Court has spent much of the past two decades correcting the overcorrection that began in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, religious liberty proponents haven’t lost a significant Supreme Court case in 14 years. During that time, the court has established (often through supermajorities that include justices from the left and the right) that people of faith enjoy equal access to school facilities, equal access to public funds (including tuition assistance to fund private religious education) and extraordinary independence from nondiscrimination laws that would otherwise interfere with the hiring and firing of ministerial employees.
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Christians who bemoan cultural hostility to their faith should be humbled by a sad reality. When it comes to inflicting pain on their political adversaries, conservative Christians often give worse than they get.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/25/opinion/christianity-evangelicals-persecution-faith.html
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3. In Catholicism, Vance Adopts A ‘Resistance’., By Elizabeth Dias, The New York Times, August 25, 2024, Pg. A1
From his new home in Cincinnati, JD Vance would go to St. Gertrude to meet the friar.
It was a fitting place for the millennial aspiring politician, who was drawn to the Roman Catholic Church’s ancient ways. For years he had flirted with joining the church. Now he wanted to explore the desire in earnest.
St. Gertrude Church was led by the Dominican Friars from the Province of St. Joseph, part of a religious order founded in 1216. Its sanctuary smelled of incense but felt modern, its concrete walls pierced with bright stained-glass rectangles in reds and blues.
Mr. Vance would meet with Father Henry Stephan. For months, they read works of theology, mysticism, and political and moral philosophy. Sometimes they went to coffee or lunch. It was bespoke private instruction, a hallmark of Dominicans who are known for their lives of intellect and study.
Then, one summer day in 2019, Mr. Vance, then 35, returned to St. Gertrude, this time to be baptized and receive his first communion in the Dominicans’ private chapel. The friars hosted a celebratory reception for his family with doughnuts. He chose as his patron Saint Augustine, the political theologian whose fifth-century treatise “City of God” challenged Rome’s ruling class and drew Mr. Vance to the faith.
“It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read,” Mr. Vance later explained in a Catholic literary journal. “A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue.”
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Becoming Catholic for Mr. Vance, who was loosely raised as an evangelical, was a practical way to counter what he saw as elite values, especially secularism. He was drawn not just to the church’s theological ideas, but also to its teachings on family and social order and its desire to instill virtue in modern society.
That worldview served as a counterpoint to much of his messy childhood, and meshed with his own criticisms of contemporary America, from what he saw as the abandonment of workers to the unhappiness of “childless cat ladies.” It has also infused his politics, which seeks to advance a family-oriented, socially conservative future through economic populism and by standing with abortion opponents.
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Catholics of every generation debate how to best express church teaching. If President Biden, who was raised Catholic, represents the working class and social justice-oriented Catholicism that defined his era, Mr. Vance reflects the traditionalist wing of the church that has taken root in his own generation.
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His conversion happened at a time when many American Catholics have been returning to traditionalist practices, like the old Latin Mass, largely against Pope Francis’ wishes. Speaking to the Napa Institute, a conservative Catholic-oriented network, during his Senate run in 2021, Mr. Vance said he is “not a big Latin Mass guy,” though he really liked the stability of a church that was “just really old,” standing against the flux of the modern world.
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Mr. Vance is also part of the changing coalition of conservative Christians in Republican politics. Traditional social conservatives, like Donald Trump’s first vice-presidential pick, Mike Pence, emphasized personal morality and social causes like fighting against abortion rights and gay marriage.
Mr. Vance joined a stream of Catholic converts working to reshape Republican politics, challenging free-market principles and championing the welfare of workers.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/25/us/jd-vance-catholic-church-conversion.html
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4. Trump would veto legislation establishing a federal abortion ban, Vance says, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance says Donald Trump wouldn’t support a national abortion ban if elected president and would veto such legislation if it landed on his desk, By Jill Colvin, Associated Press, August 25, 2024, 5:59 PM
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance says Donald Trump would not support a national abortion ban if elected president and would veto such legislation if it landed on his desk.
“I can absolutely commit that,” Vance said when asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he could commit to Trump not imposing such a ban. “Donald Trump’s view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions because we don’t want to have a nonstop federal conflict over this issue.”
The Ohio senator also insisted that Trump, the former president who is the Republican nominee this year, would veto such legislation if it were passed by Congress.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/25/trump-vance-abortion-ban-veto-roe-democrats/d89241ee-6301-11ef-a399-4245aabdb0ed_story.html
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5. The Young Catholic Women Bringing Back Veils, A new generation of worshippers is longing for a ‘lost type of Catholicism.’., By Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press, August 25, 2024, Opinion
“I definitely don’t feel like the odd woman out anymore.”
Nicole Moore, 30, wears a veil to church every Sunday. Sometimes called a mantilla, these sheer head coverings are usually made of lace or silk; Nicole’s is gray, with a floral-like pattern. Worn by women throughout the Catholic church’s history, chapel veils fell out of favor during the late twentieth century, but in recent years there’s been “an explosion of veiling,” says Moore, who attends St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in Manhattan.
Her pastor, Father Peter Martyr Yungwirth, 39, tells The Free Press he has also noticed an increase in veiling over the last two decades. Indeed, Veils by Lily, a website that sells mantillas, has gone from filling 30 to 60 orders per month to an average of 900 in the last ten years. And it seems to be young Catholics driving the trend. “I have definitely noticed an increase of women, especially young adult women, wearing veils,” says Father Roger Landry, 54, Catholic chaplain of Columbia University. He interprets the veiling trend “as an attempt to be maximally reverent to God at Mass and in receiving Holy Communion.”
That may be the ultimate reason for veiling, but it’s not the only one. To better understand what’s behind the boom, I reached out to over a dozen Catholic women, ranging in age from 19 to 42, who choose to wear a veil to church.
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Initially at least, the appeal can be aesthetic.
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Yet all the women I spoke to say veiling has become a profoundly meaningful religious practice in their lives.
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Veiling ceased to be the norm after the Catholic Church’s modernizing reforms of the 1960s, commonly known as “Vatican II”—which, among other things, placed restrictions on whether parishes could offer the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).
In the following decades, these regulations were gradually relaxed. But the roots of the mantilla’s resurgence lie in 2007, according to Father Landry. That’s when Pope Benedict XVI increased younger generations’ exposure to the TLM by officially lifting the restrictions on it. Pope Francis reversed this decision in 2021. By that point, however, it had caught on. The year before, a survey found a “high volume of participation” in the TLM among 18- to 39-year-old practicing Catholics in the U.S.
Veiling at the TLM is the norm, but many women “just kept veiling,” Father Landry says, even when they attended the modern Mass.
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Catholicism is experiencing a wave of nostalgia for an ancient, more solemn and reverent form of the religion—the kind that inspired Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Even many Catholics who attend the modern Mass remain attached to the pre-Vatican practices and help to preserve some of the church’s reverent traditions. Among the laity, this might mean wearing formal attire instead of jeans, or kneeling at communion and having the priest place the host directly on one’s tongue rather than standing and receiving by hand. Among priests, it might mean facing the altar as opposed to the congregation, or insisting on male-only altar servers.
And among women—it might mean wearing a veil.
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Among progressives, the veil, representing distinct gender roles, is sometimes interpreted as a sign of female subservience. One op-ed writer for the National Catholic Reporter argues that it is “backward, if not downright repressive.”
But the women I spoke to rejected comparisons to the hijab, arguing that the mantilla is not mandatory. The decision to wear one is and ought to be freely made. They also note that the veil is not worn in all public places, but simply in church, to signify a difference between sacred and non-sacred spaces.
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https://www.thefp.com/p/the-young-catholic-women-bringing
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6. After traveling the world for dialogue, will Francis talk to his own workers?, By John L. Allen Jr., Crux, August 25, 2024, Opinion
Though the Vatican has an entire gaggle of international business experts it can call upon for advice, it hardly requires an MBA from Stanford or IESE to realize that if your own workforce is expressing “alarm,” “discontent,” “demotivation” and “confusion,” you’ve got a fairly serious problem on your hands.
Such is the situation facing the Vatican today under Pope Francis, with the latest confirmation coming in an Aug. 20 statement from the Association of Lay Employees, the closest thing to a union the place actually has.
Formed in 1985, the association has had only mixed results in defending labor rights, but it has at least become a unique sounding board for knowing how the worker bees in the pope’s realm are thinking and feeling.
In its latest cri du cœur, issued in the form of an unsigned statement on its web site, the association asserts that while the Vatican is supposed to be a unique environment rooted in the dignity of the human person and shaped by Catholic social teaching, in fact the effect of reforms unleashed by Pope Francis has been to turn the Vatican into just another multinational company, only one that’s “limping” because of the shabby way it treats its workforce.
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Let’s be clear: These are the complaints of what is, in effect, a trade union, and as is always the case, a union doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of everyone who works in a particular industry. Often they’re the voice of the more militant and disgruntled elements of the workforce, while those basically content don’t issue communiques or stage walkouts.
Still, anyone who’s been around the Vatican for more than five minutes realizes that these aren’t isolated or idiosyncratic complaints, but rather real concerns from people who’ve given their lives in service to the Vatican and the pope, and who now find themselves fearful not only for their financial future, but very much their present.
In truth, the discontent runs even deeper, because the dollars and cents dimension of these issues probably could be hammered out in a sincere give-and-take. The root problem is that many Vatican employees believe their superiors don’t really care about their problems, and that the lack of dialogue is an index of a lack of interest.
Here’s a basic piece of math: There are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world and a little over 5,000 workers on the Vatican payroll, combining the Roman Curia with the Vatican City State. If you were to apply the same ratio of citizens to bureaucrats to the United States, the federal government would have just under 600 employees, not the two and a quarter million currently receiving federal paychecks.
In other words, the Vatican is an incredibly lean operation, one in which even small disruptions in morale and motivation can have mammoth consequences in terms of productivity and quality.
Pope Francis is currently preparing to head off to Asia and Oceania for a four-nation, 11-day odyssey that will take him to Indonesia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea and Singapore. Along the way, he’ll meet faith leaders, politicians, missionaries, indigenous groups, captains of culture and industry, and any number of other movers and shakers, engaging them all in earnest conversation.
Perhaps when he gets back to Rome, he may want to consider actually talking to his own employees in the same fashion. Such in-house outreach might, in the end, have a far more direct effect on the success or failure of his initiatives than just about any other use of his time one could imagine.
https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2024/08/after-traveling-the-world-for-dialogue-will-francis-talk-to-his-own-workers
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7. Getting ‘Roe’ Wrong, ‘The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America’ by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, By David J. Garrow, The Washington Free Beacon, August 25, 2024, Book Review
Reviewing really excellent books is great fun: You learn important new facts, are hugely impressed by an author’s analytical ability or archival research, or come away with a far deeper understanding of someone you knew only passingly. In stark contrast, having to review a really bad book is deeply unpleasant and sticks in your memory even many years later.
Almost always the latter scenario occurs only when you know a topic so well that you feel professionally obligated to call a turd a turd. So it is with The Fall of Roe. Thirty years ago I wrote the standard history of Roe v. Wade, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe V. Wade, the updated paperback edition of which clocks in at a door-stopping 1,047 pages. Ten years ago, with additional Supreme Court justices’ private case files now available, I expanded that account with a law review article entitled simply “How Roe v. Wade Was Written.” Since then I’ve continued to write about abortion litigation for law professor blogs and to endorse first-rate books that add significantly to our understanding of Roe or to abortion rights history more broadly.
To call The Fall of Roe hugely disappointing is an understatement. Coauthors Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, both national correspondents for the New York Times, state that they interviewed some 350 people while writing this book, but oddly not a single one of those sources is explicitly identified. A disciplined reader can easily make out that a host of pro-choice organizational leaders are clearly among the authors’ top sources, and with painstaking quote-checking one can surprisingly confirm that leading anti-abortion figures like Marjorie Dannenfelser and Leonard Leo also spoke extensively to Dias and Lerer.
Thus The Fall of Roe is rich with detailed accounts of interest group media strategies and organizing efforts, but anyone expecting to learn anything new about how the Supreme Court in 2021-22 actually came to its decision to strike down Roe in its sweeping 5-to-4 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will be sorely and totally disappointed. That absence is especially striking given how just eight months ago, two of the Times’s best remaining journalists, Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, published a very lengthy news story—“Behind the Scenes at the Dismantling of Roe v. Wade”—that energetically tried to discover how that slim five-justice majority—Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—had decided to issue such a landmark decision by the narrowest possible margin.
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A better book than The Fall of Roe would highlight the extreme importance of Justice Kavanaugh’s additional concurring opinion, in which he concluded that decades of unending abortion litigation had “damaged the Court as an institution,” with 26 states rejecting Casey and calling for Roe’s overruling. Likewise, a more in-depth book would have acknowledged, and drawn upon, a sizeable shelf of essential histories—e.g., Steven Teles’s The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (2008) and well-known abortion law expert Mary Ziegler’s five relevant titles, including Dollars For Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment (2022)—none of which The Fall of Roe ever mentions.
In retrospect, had Hillary Clinton run a competent 2016 general election campaign, or had elderly Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg retired well prior to her 2020 death, Donald Trump and friends would not have been able to transform the Supreme Court. But in what’s perhaps The Fall of Roe’s most memorable gem, Dias and Lerer recount how in 2018 then-North Dakota Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp had uttered a prophetic warning to the president: “If your Court reverses Roe v. Wade, the Republicans might be a minority party for a generation.”
https://freebeacon.com/courts/getting-roe-wrong/
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8. Three Books on What Being a Parent Really Means, Having a child, like getting married, requires making a lifelong commitment—in this case, to someone you’ve never met., By Jennifer A. Frey, The Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2024, Pg. C7, Book Review
Demographers argue that countries need to have a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman to sustain long-term generational replacement of the population. Every European country is below replacement, and since 2007 the U.S. is too, with our current fertility rate at an record low of 1.62 births per woman. Economists point out that as a country’s population shrinks, government budgets come under pressure, which poses grave threats to programs like Medicare, Social Security and pensions.
As serious as a demographic winter is, it supplies the wrong reason to start a family. Surely, in the normal case, young couples should choose to raise a family because they believe that it is an excellent way to live together. Unfortunately, very few people regard it in this light. Only 26% of Americans say that having children is important for living a fulfilling life, whereas 71% consider “having a job or career they enjoy” to be essential, and 61% say the same for “having close friends.”
Our contemporary attitude toward children is the topic of “What are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice,” by Anastasia Berg, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California-Irvine, and Rachel Wiseman; both women are editors at the Point magazine. The authors, both elite-educated millennials, surveyed hundreds of their contemporaries about their desire for children, and discovered widespread doubts and anxieties. Many argued that they could not in good conscience have children unless they could guarantee a very high standard of living. Others feared children would be a threat to their freedom. For most of those surveyed, work was the dominating value, the source of meaning and purpose in their lives.
Even those who do not want to remain childless are putting off parenting. Millennial women are often in their mid- to late-30s before they feel ready to be mothers—but by that time they are already well past their peak fertile years. Their anxiety over their “readiness” leads to delays that become de facto decisions: Children never appear because the clock runs out.
These problems of time, anxiety and female biology permeate “The Big Freeze: A Reporter’s Personal Journey Into the World of Egg Freezing and the Quest to Control our Fertility,” by the journalist Natalie Lampert. Women decide to freeze their eggs, Ms. Lampert argues, to “buy time” to decide when to have children. Egg freezing purports to offer women more agency—more options and more control. It promises transcendence from the limitations of the female body, and expanded reproductive freedom.
Ms. Lampert begins her book giddy with excitement about the prospect of using medical means to satisfy her desire for greater control over her life. Surprisingly, she doesn’t end up where she began. In addition to learning about the somewhat tortuous procedures women undergo in this quest, readers learn quite a bit about the author’s own loneliness and anxieties, as well as those of many of the women she interviews.
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By the end of her years of reporting on the extreme means that American women take to control their fertility, Ms. Lampert ends up deciding not to freeze her own eggs and instead to let go of “the illusion of control.”
The women who are the subject of “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,” by the economist Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, all similarly concluded that more control isn’t desirable. Ms. Pakaluk writes about those who are open to children not for a narrow window of their lives, but for the entire span of their fertile years: the 5% of women in this country who are mothers of big families, which Ms. Pakaluk defines as five or more children per household.
What she makes clear, through extensive interviews with 55 of them, is that these women reject autonomy as a supreme value and understand their individual happiness in terms of their participation in something that transcends themselves. Consider Angela, for example, a black tenured academic and mother of five who proudly claims that “autonomy is not my primary value . . . people are.” Like all the women in “Hannah’s Children,” Angela values being a mother more than she values the other goods that motherhood often cuts against: careerism, wealth building, traveling the world. She freely admits that she is not “a paragon of self-care” and that her children are the reason she doesn’t have a more impressive CV, but she is content with the trade-offs she has made.
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What all three books reveal, in different ways, is that the question of parenthood cannot be separated from the question of human flourishing. If we value autonomy above all else, and we understand freedom as the maximization of our options, then spending a life sacrificing for our children will seem like a very bad bet. As a mother of six myself, I can tell you that having a child is like getting married in at least one important respect: If you are honest with yourself, you will admit that you had no idea what you were getting into. Marriage and parenthood are leaps of faith that require individuals to go from thinking and choosing for “me” to thinking and choosing for “we.” This is a transition in thought and action that our culture increasingly struggles to embrace.
With parenting, the problem is worse, because the loss of control is greater—parents commit themselves to unconditionally loving someone they have never even met. In a very deep and unsettling way, we do not choose our children. The mystery of birth is that when the child is born it is entrusted to its parents, who must accept, love and care for it. Parent and child are bonded for life; over time, they will change one another deeply and irrevocably. It is ironic that we delay this bond in the name of being prepared for it, because when we do that, we delay the very changes in ourselves that are necessary to parent well. Parenting may make us more patient, generous, hopeful and loving, but these changes are brought about through the practices of family life—a daily, subtle, continuous transfiguration.
If Hannah Arendt was on to something when she declared new life “the miracle that saves the world,” we need to recover our sense of its miraculous nature by being receptive to the real and exacting demands of love. If we no longer cultivate this receptivity in young people, or help them to accept the loss of autonomy that comes with it, we will be poorer for it in a deeper sense than our demographers have the tools to articulate.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/three-books-on-what-being-a-parent-really-means-1a83bb23
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9. Opus Dei prelate responds to those who consider group ‘conservative, powerful and secretive’., By Walter Sánchez Silva, Catholic News Agency, August 24, 2024, 8:30 AM
During his recent trip through Latin America, the prelate of Opus Dei, Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz, gave an interview to the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, in which he spoke about various topics, such as the role of women, the reform ordered by Pope Francis, and a response to those who consider Opus Dei to be “conservative, powerful and secretive.”
“Everyone can have their own opinions and reasons for evaluating reality. If some people perceive it that way, it will be because there is something objective and/or subjective that can cause that impression,” said the third successor of St. Josemaría Escrivá as the head of Opus Dei.
“Making the Work [Opus Dei] better known is, in part, the task of each member: to live one’s own vocation in an authentic way. It is something great and wonderful, although I understand that a perspective of faith is required to understand it in depth,” the prelate added.
“However, I think that, on the human level, those who know Opus Dei up close will be able to perceive normal people, with virtues and defects. I would like us to be known as joyful, simple, and serene people, peaceful, with whom it is easy to make friends, people with an open and understanding mentality,” he continued.
Ocáriz then expressed his desire that “the variety of the faithful of Opus Dei be recognized, and not only the few who acquire a certain public relevance. In this way, it would be seen that each one of them struggles to live the faith to the fullest, at the same time living with their own defects and trying to put their talents at the service of their family, their friends, and society.”
The prelate also stressed that “the main contribution of Opus Dei is to accompany the laity (98% of its members) so that they can be protagonists of the evangelizing mission of the Church in the midst of the world, one by one.”
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https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/258899/opus-dei-prelate-responds-to-those-who-consider-group-conservative-powerful-and-secretive
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10. New York temporarily barred from taking action against groups for promoting abortion pill ‘reversal’, A federal judge has temporarily blocked New York’s attorney general from taking enforcement action against certain pregnancy counseling centers for promoting what critics say is an unproven method to reverse medication abortions, By Dave Collins, Associated Press, August 23, 2024, 6:42 PM
Citing free speech rights, a federal judge has temporarily blocked New York’s attorney general from taking enforcement action against certain pregnancy counseling centers for promoting what critics say is an unproven method to reverse medication abortions.
U.S. District Judge John Sinatra Jr. in Buffalo issued a preliminary injunction against state Attorney General Letitia James and her office on Thursday. The order says James’ office cannot take legal action against two centers and a related association while their lawsuit against James is pending in federal court.
The lawsuit accuses James of unfairly targeting anti-abortion groups because of their viewpoints, including their promotion of a protocol called the “Abortion Pill Reversal.” It cites a lawsuit James’ office filed in state court in May against another anti-abortion group and nearly a dozen other pregnancy counseling centers for promoting abortion medication reversals.
James’ case against the other groups follows a similar lawsuit in California and other legal action in states such as Colorado regarding unsubstantiated treatments to reverse medication abortions.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2024/08/23/abortion-pill-reversal-new-york-lawsuit/7491b160-619a-11ef-ae22-cef4d8785d67_story.html
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11. Judge blocks 24-hour waiting period for abortions in Ohio, citing 2023 reproductive rights amendment, A county judge in Ohio has temporarily blocked several state laws that combined to create a 24-hour waiting period for obtaining an abortion in the state, By Julie Carr Smyth, Associated Press, August 23, 2024, 5:38 PM
A county judge in Ohio temporarily blocked several state laws on Friday that combined to create a 24-hour waiting period for obtaining an abortion in the state, in the first court decision on the merits of a 2023 constitutional amendment that guarantees access to the procedure.
Republican Attorney General Dave Yost said he would appeal.
Franklin County Common Pleas Judge David C. Young said the language of last year’s Issue 1 was “clear and unambiguous.” He found that attorneys for Preterm-Cleveland and the other abortion clinics and physician who sued clearly showed “that the challenged statutes burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, and discriminate against patients in exercising their right to an abortion and providers for assisting them in exercising that right.”
The challenged rules included a 24-hour waiting period requirement, the requirement for an in-person visit and several state mandates requiring those seeking abortions to receive certain information. Young said the provisions don’t advance patient health.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2024/08/23/abortion-ohio-waiting-period-lawsuit/15ed540e-6198-11ef-ae22-cef4d8785d67_story.html
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12. Judge declines to order New York to include ‘abortion’ in description of ballot measure, A New York judge says he won’t force state election officials to tell voters that a proposed antidiscrimination amendment to the state’s constitution would protect abortion rights, By Michael Hill and Anthony Izaguirre, Associated Press, August 23, 2024, 6:53 PM
A New York judge said Friday he won’t force state election officials to tell voters that a proposed antidiscrimination amendment to the state’s constitution would protect abortion rights, dealing a blow to Democrats who pushed for the change.
The decision from Judge David A. Weinstein came in a lawsuit over the language that voters will see on ballots this November explaining what the proposed Equal Rights Amendment would do if passed.
Democrats wanted the state Board of Elections to include the words “abortion” and “LGBT,” arguing that they would make the amendment’s purpose clearer to voters. Supporters of the measure said it would protect abortion access by expanding the state’s antidiscrimination protections.
But Weinstein said he was reluctant to declare that the amendment would protect abortion rights.
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New York’s Constitution currently bans discrimination based on race, color, creed or religion. The amendment would expand the list to ethnicity, national origin, age, disability and “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy.”
Weinstein said the amendment’s actual impact on abortion is complex and likely to become the subject of future court battles.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2024/08/23/abortion-new-york-election-2024/de68a05a-6184-11ef-ae22-cef4d8785d67_story.html
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13. The abortion endgame comes into view, While Democrats have a clear objective, Republicans do not., By Jason Willick, The Washington Post, August 23, 2024, 4:09 PM, Opinion
The slogan of the 2024 Democratic convention — freedom — is given substance by one issue: abortion. Sure, some speakers also alluded to same-sex marriage, but that right is protected nationwide. Some alluded to book bans, but the issue of local school boards’ choice of K-12 material has been blown out of proportion.
For all the esoteric talk about the meaning of freedom, the Democratic Party is making a simple bet: that abortion restrictions in red states are an effective election wedge, even against a Republican opponent trying to distance himself from traditional pro-life positions. Vice President Kamala Harris’s crispest promise in her nomination acceptance speech was to sign “a bill to restore reproductive freedom.” If Democrats are asking voters for a mandate to do anything specific upon winning power in November, it’s a mandate to federalize abortion rights.
Sooner or later, the party will deliver.
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One reason a return to federalized abortion policy seems inevitable is partisan asymmetry. While Democrats have a clear objective, Republicans do not. Two Republican senators crucial to the GOP’s hopes of mustering a Senate majority after November — Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — have common cause with Democrats in wanting to restore Roe’s abortion protections. Many Republicans in Congress want to nationally restrict abortion, but many do not — and Republicans in competitive Senate races are uniformly moving to the center on the issue.
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The federalism angle raises a question: Would the Supreme Court strike down congressional legislation to “codify” Roe, removing states’ discretion over abortion policy? Such a law would certainly face legal challenges on the theory that it exceeds Congress’s power.
It’s a real constitutional question, but don’t expect the Supreme Court to stand in Congress’s way. In the 5-4 vote overturning Roe, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the majority, but his concurrence pointedly said, twice, that abortion should be left to “the democratic process in the States or Congress” — suggesting he believes Congress can protect abortion.
Of course, that would mean Congress can restrict abortion, too, and it’s possible to imagine a GOP trifecta rolling back the extent of a Democratic Congress’s national abortion protections, perhaps from viability to 20 weeks or fewer. But kicking abortion back to the states altogether, again, would impose a political penalty on the GOP greater than the significant one it paid for the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs.
The overturning of Roe raised the salience of abortion, putting it at the center of the Democratic Party’s “freedom” convention. There are advantages, including for democratic legitimacy, to letting the states decide their own abortion policies. But that is increasingly looking like an unstable equilibrium in a polarized age.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/23/abortion-gop-kamala-harris-freedom-congress/
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14. Planned Parenthood accused of violating tax-exempt status with abortion van at DNC., By Daniel Payne, Catholic News Agency, August 23, 2024, 3:44 PM
The pro-life group 40 Days for Life has filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over a mobile abortion clinic operated by Planned Parenthood in Chicago this week.
The abortion giant offered free abortions and vasectomies to residents and visitors in Chicago as the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) was held in the city’s downtown from Aug. 19-22.
Planned Parenthood described the service as a “mobile health clinic” set up in the city’s West Loop neighborhood. The van reportedly sold out of abortion appointments before it opened.
In a complaint obtained by CNA, 40 Days for Life told the IRS that Planned Parenthood, in using its abortion van, may have engaged in “potentially prohibited political activities” that could “impact the tax-exempt status” of the abortion provider.
The mobile clinic “openly advertise[d] and provide[d] free services from not-for-profit entities to participants of and in direct relation to a nationwide political rally for one party and certain political candidates,” the complaint said.
Those actions “clearly are and/or suggest direct or implicit endorsements of a certain party, platform and candidates,” which would qualify as “prohibited political activities” under U.S. nonprofit rules.
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https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/258893/planned-parenthood-violated-tax-exempt-status-with-abortion-van-at-dnc-says-pro-life-group
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15. Nicaraguan dictatorship eliminates tax exemptions for Catholic and Evangelical churches, By Walter Sánchez Silva, Catholic News Agency, August 23, 2024, 4:15 PM
One day after canceling the legal status of 1,500 NGOs in Nicaragua, the dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, eliminated the income tax exemption for churches.
Lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina considers the measure a “fiscal blow” that will end up “financially suffocating the (Catholic) Church so that it falls under its own weight.”
The official government newspaper La Gaceta published Law 1212 on Aug. 22, which modifies three other laws: the law on regulation and control of non-profit organizations, the law on regulation of foreign agents, and Law 822 on tax coordination. The newspaper reported that this decision comes from the country’s legislature at Ortega’s initiative.
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https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/258895/nicaraguan-dictatorship-eliminates-tax-exemptions-for-catholic-and-evangelical-churches
__________________________________________________________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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