1. Pope lands in Canada, set for apologies to Indigenous groups, By Nicole Winfield, Rob Gillies and Peter Smith, Associated Press, July 25, 2022
Pope Francis began a historic visit to Canada on Sunday to apologize to Indigenous peoples for abuses by missionaries at residential schools, a key step in the Catholic Church’s efforts to reconcile with Native communities and help them heal from generations of trauma.
Francis kissed the hand of a residential school survivor as he was greeted at the Edmonton, Alberta, airport by Indigenous representatives, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mary Simon, an Inuk who is Canada’s first Indigenous governor general.
The gesture set the tone of what Francis has said is a “penitential pilgrimage” to atone for the role of Catholic missionaries in the forced assimilation of generations of Native children — a visit that has stirred mixed emotions across Canada as survivors and their families cope with the trauma of their losses and receive a long-sought papal apology.
https://apnews.com/article/pope-francis-canada-religion-edmonton-alberta-b4831ad22056aa2f862f04464966b66e
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2. Kansas Vote Is Key Test on Abortion, By Laura Kusisto, Joe Barrett and Jennifer Calfas, The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2022, Pg. A6
A statewide referendum on the future of abortion in Kansas is shaping up as the first major political test on the issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
On Aug. 2, Kansas voters will decide whether to amend the state’s constitution to explicitly say that it doesn’t protect abortion. The referendum, planned for months, comes after the high court’s June 24 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ended the federal constitutional right to the procedure.
A normally sleepy August primary is now the subject of an intense get-out-the-vote effort, with groups on both sides spending millions sending out glossy mailers and organizing volunteers to knock on doors. Television ads paid for by abortion opponents show crying babies and urge Kansans to protect their state from becoming a haven for out-of-state women seeking to end their pregnancies. Highways are lined with electronic billboards sponsored by abortion-rights supporters featuring an image of Rosie the Riveter and urging voters to trust women.
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The Kansas race is shaping up to be a tight one. In a state in which registered Republicans outnumber Democrats, a poll released July 19 by Co/efficient, a data-analytics firm based in Kansas City, Mo., found that 47% of likely primary-election voters planned to vote for the amendment, while 43% said they planned to vote against it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/kansas-abortion-amendment-is-closely-watched-ahead-of-other-state-referendums-11658579068?
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3. A parish that had long embraced the Latin Mass mourns the impending loss of the tradition., Congregants will soon have to change languages or change churches, By William Wan, The Washington Post, July 25, 2022, Pg. B1
Last year, prompted by ideological wars between conservative and liberal wings, Pope Francis said he wanted to limit use of the old Latin form of Mass.
This week, the consequences of that papal letter — issued halfway across the world — landed here in Washington with heavy consequences for this small parish in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood.
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By Sept. 21, the parish was told, they were to cease use of the Latin rituals that had been part of St. Mary’s history almost since its founding in 1845.
Friday’s local decree, written by Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who oversees the archdiocese of Washington, allows only three non-parish churches in the region to perform the Latin Rite. That means hundreds of Catholics who attend that type of Mass at roughly six parishes in the D.C. area — including St. Mary Mother of God — will be forced to overhaul their ritual or abandon their spiritual homes to attend the three locations in the area allowed to perform it.
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In his decision last year, Pope Francis explained that he believed the Latin Mass had become a wedge, deepening divisions. Those who favored the Latin Mass, he said, had exploited the rite as a way to “reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/07/24/dc-latin-mass-saint-mary/
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4. Catholic hospitals’ growth impacts reproductive health care, By Susan Haigh and David Crary, Associated Press, July 24, 2022
Even as numerous Republican-governed states push for sweeping bans on abortion, there is a coinciding surge of concern in some Democratic-led states that options for reproductive health care are dwindling due to expansion of Catholic hospital networks.
These are states such as Oregon, Washington, California, New York and Connecticut, where abortion will remain legal despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
Concerns in these blue states pertain to such services as contraception, sterilization and certain procedures for handling pregnancy emergencies. These services are widely available at secular hospitals but generally forbidden, along with abortion, at Catholic facilities under the Ethical and Religious Directives set by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The differing perspectives on these services can clash when a Catholic hospital system seeks to acquire or merge with a non-sectarian hospital, as is happening now in northeastern Connecticut.
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-health-religion-new-york-oregon-8994d9b5fd0040d40d19fd1e44c313d8
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5. How the Federalist Society Won, The conservative legal movement was pivotal in getting Roe v. Wade overturned. But does it have any control over what happens next?, By Emma Green, The New Yorker, July 24, 2022, Opinion
A few minutes before Roe v. Wade was overturned, Sherif Girgis sat in his office at Notre Dame Law School, desperately clicking refresh on the Supreme Court’s Web site. Girgis had been looking forward to this precise moment for months. He’d been gaming out the arguments for years, really.
Conservatives of an older generation, who suffered a Supreme Court betrayal in 1992—when a trifecta of Republican-appointed judges upheld the constitutional right to an abortion, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey—couldn’t believe that Roe would ever truly fall. But Girgis, who is thirty-six, came up in a different era. “I was in kindergarten when Casey was decided,” he said. Unlike his jaded elders, he believed that the Court would one day follow through on the simple, powerful idea that animates the conservative legal movement: that a judge’s job is not to make value judgments or to speculate about the potential consequences of his or her decisions but, rather, to decide cases by looking solely at how the Constitution was understood at the time it was written. This method of interpretation, called originalism, would inevitably lead to the end of Roe.
Girgis, a professor who specializes in philosophy and the law, embodies a young, energized, traditionalist wing of the conservative legal movement that will likely be galvanized by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Early in his career, Girgis clerked for Samuel Alito, the Justice who wrote the majority decision in Dobbs. He’s a rising star in the Federalist Society, a powerful network of conservatives and libertarians that has a chapter at many major law schools, as well as dozens of professional chapters across the country. The organization prides itself on being a forum for ideas, even those which some conservatives hate, which is part of what drew Girgis to become a member when he was a student at Yale Law School, in 2011.
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In 1982, when the Federalist Society was founded, the conservative legal movement was still finding its footing. Law-school campuses were predominantly liberal, and there was a prevailing sense among students and professors that the conclusions in Roe and other major Supreme Court decisions of the prior thirty years—on issues such as birth control, racial integration, and voting rights—were both morally good and legally correct. But an ideological counter-revolution was beginning. Lee Liberman Otis—one of the Federalist Society’s founders, who was then a law student at the University of Chicago—recalled thinking, It’s funny that there are these ideas about law which Reagan seemed to have run on, in part, and nobody’s talking about them.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/how-the-federalist-society-won
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6. Biden’s Abortion Politics Will Hurt America’s World Standing, By Jakub Grygiel and Rebeccah Heinrichs, The Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2022, Pg. A13, Opinion
It isn’t surprising that Biden administration officials strongly disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. But it’s shocking that they’ve denounced it for foreign audiences. By trying to recast the U.S. as the world’s pro-abortion power, officials will weaken the legitimacy of U.S. foreign policy and undermine America’s standing in the world.
America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, issued a statement calling Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization “a cruel, dark and dangerous decision” and asserting: “I have traveled the globe advocating for women’s rights. Now, this decision renders my own country an outlier among developed nations in the world.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that “the State Department will remain fully committed to helping provide access to reproductive health services and advancing reproductive rights around the world.”
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Dobbs isn’t a stain on America’s standing in the world. To the contrary, it upholds what the Biden foreign-policy agenda purports to employ as an organizing principle for the free world: democratic self-governance. To defend the decision against the criticism of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or the Chinese Communist Party is to defend national sovereignty and democracy. America’s top diplomats, regardless of their views on abortion, should applaud the high court for respecting the rule of law, democratic decision making and the merits of debating complex matters that touch on the most important questions of justice and human dignity.
Perhaps Dobbs offers lessons about the merits of stronger federalism at home and robust geopolitical pluralism in the free world. Learning those lessons would strengthen the hands of our diplomats during these tumultuous times.
Mr. Grygiel is a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America. Ms. Heinrichs is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-abortion-politics-will-undermine-americas-world-standing-roe-v-wade-dobbs-jackson-foreign-policy-11658511777?
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7. Pope’s Indigenous tour signals a rethink of mission legacy, By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press, July 23, 2022
Pope Francis’ trip to Canada to apologize for the horrors of church-run Indigenous residential schools marks a radical rethink of the Catholic Church’s missionary legacy, spurred on by the first pope from the Americas and the discovery of hundreds of probable graves at the school sites.
Francis has said his weeklong visit, which begins Sunday, is a “penitential pilgrimage” to beg forgiveness on Canadian soil for the “evil” done to Native peoples by Catholic missionaries. It follows his April 1 apology in the Vatican for the generations of trauma Indigenous peoples suffered as a result of a church-enforced policy to eliminate their culture and assimilate them into Canadian, Christian society.
Francis’ tone of personal repentance has signaled a notable shift for the papacy, which has long acknowledged abuses in the residential schools and strongly asserted the rights and dignity of Indigenous peoples. But past popes have also hailed the sacrifice and holiness of the European Catholic missionaries who brought Christianity to the Americas — something Francis, too, has done but isn’t expected to emphasize during this trip.
https://apnews.com/article/pope-francis-canada-religion-vatican-city-2c2fbd7e29f871c1cdbc5308a0c7ab44
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8. Vatican court rejects appeal in financial crime case, By The Pillar, July 22, 2022
The court of appeal in Vatican City has upheld the conviction of the former director of a Vatican bank, bringing a years-long legal process to a close.
The decision, handed down by judges on Thursday, confirms the conviction last year of Angelo Caloia, who led the Institute for Works of Religion — often called the Vatican Bank — for 20 years. He was found guilty on charges of corruption and embezzlement. The decision ends his legal appeal.
The decision means Caloia’s sentence of more than eight years in jail and financial penalties of 12 million euros stands. He is 81 years old.
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/vatican-court-rejects-appeal-in-financial
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9. Kentucky judge dismisses life at conception as a ‘Christian and Catholic belief’, By Shannon Mullen, Katie Yoder, Catholic News Agency, July 22, 2022, 7:11 PM
A circuit judge in Kentucky has again blocked a pair of state abortion bans from taking effect — in part, he said, because they adopt “a distinctly Christian and Catholic belief” about when life begins.
“The laws at issue here adopt the view embraced by some, but not all, religious traditions, that life begins at the moment of conception,” Judge Mitch Perry of the Jefferson County Circuit Court wrote in an opinion issued Friday.
“The General Assembly is not permitted to single out and endorse the doctrine of a favored faith for preferred treatment. By taking this approach, the bans fail to account for the diverse religious views of many Kentuckians whose faith leads them to take very different views of when life begins,” he said.
“There is nothing in our laws or history that allows for such theocratic based policymaking,” he added.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/251859/kentucky-judge-abortion-ban-christian-catholic-belief
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10. ‘To guard the charism’: In new decree, Pope Francis makes changes to Opus Dei, By Courtney Mares, Catholic News Agency, July 22, 2022, 8:20 AM
Pope Francis issued a document on Friday that changed the oversight of Opus Dei. It also decreed that its leader, the prelate, can no longer be a bishop.
In the motu proprio, issued on July 22, the pope confirmed the Catholic organization and urged its members to safeguard its charism in order “to spread the call to holiness in the world, through the sanctification of one’s work and family and social occupations.”
“It is intended to strengthen the conviction that, for the protection of the particular gift of the Spirit, a form of government based more on the charism than on hierarchical authority is needed,” Pope Francis wrote.
The motu proprio, known as Ad charisma tuendum (“To guard the charism”), contains six articles that go into effect on Aug. 4.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/251851/to-guard-the-charism-in-new-decree-pope-francis-makes-changes-to-opus-dei
__________________________________________________________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. |
