1. Lifted Out of Cuba 6 Decades Ago. Now, Caught in a Modern Fight, By Patricia Mazzei, The New York Times, March 16, 2022, Pg. A15 The state was threatening the Roman Catholic Church’s ability to shelter immigrant children when Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of Miami went for South Florida’s emotional jugular: He compared the unaccompanied children who were crossing the border today to those who fled Communist Cuba six decades ago without their parents. Offended by the comparison, angry Cuban Americans called Spanish-language radio. They wrote letters to the editor. A discussion at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora to denounce the archbishop’s comments turned emotional. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who had directed his administration to stop renewing shelter licenses, called the comparison to Cuban exiles who had arrived legally ”disgusting.” … Even in Miami’s knockabout politics, the scrap has been striking, exposing a deep divide among the former children of Operation Pedro Pan, the secret program run by the Catholic Church with help from the State Department that resettled some 14,000 young Cubans after the island’s 1959 revolution. In the past, the program’s beneficiaries, known as Pedro Pans, had largely avoided making internal rifts so public. But for some Pedro Pans today, either Archbishop Wenski’s comparison went too far — or Mr. DeSantis’s policy did. … ”There’s a lot of bad analogies that get made in modern political discourse, but to equate what’s going on with the southern border with mass trafficking of humans, illegal entry, drugs, all this other stuff — with Operation Pedro Pan — quite frankly is disgusting,” Mr. DeSantis said. Three days after that, Archbishop Wenski held his news conference with a different group of Pedro Pans, the Honduran family and Mike Fernández, a wealthy health care executive who then financed the radio ads against Mr. DeSantis. ”Children are children, and no child should be deemed ‘disgusting,’ especially by a public servant,” Archbishop Wenski said — though the governor had used the word ”disgusting” for the comparison with the Pedro Pan program, not the unaccompanied minors themselves. A spokeswoman for Mr. DeSantis wrote on Twitter that the archbishop ”lied.” Archbishop Wenski acknowledged in the interview that his wording had been ”imprecise” but maintained that the only difference between the Pedro Pan children and today’s unaccompanied minors is their countries of origin. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/us/florida-immigration-cuba-pedro-pan.html___________________________________________________________ 2. For Working-Class Boys, Religion May Be the Key To College Success, By Ilana M. Horwitz, The New York Times, March 16, 2022, Pg. A23, Opinion American men are dropping out of college in alarming numbers. A slew of articles over the past year depict a generation of men who feel lost, detached and lacking in male role models. This sense of despair is especially acute among working-class men, fewer than one in five of whom completes college. Yet one group is defying the odds: boys from working-class families who grow up religious. … [T]eenage boys from working-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in their church and strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees as moderately religious or nonreligious boys. Religious boys are not any smarter, so why are they doing better in school? The answer lies in how religious belief and religious involvement can buffer working-class Americans — males in particular — from despair. Ilana M. Horwitz is an assistant professor of Jewish studies and sociology at Tulane University and the author of “God, Grades, and Graduation.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/opinion/religion-school-success.html___________________________________________________________ 3. Jackson has legal history that worries pro-lifers, Aligns with Biden vow on abortion, By Alex Swoyer, The Washington Times, March 16, 2022, Pg. A1 The Senate confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court could slow down the pro-life movement, conservative advocates warn. Though her record on abortion is slim, Judge Jackson did rule against the Trump administration’s move to defund some reproductive-rights groups in 2018 when she was on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She also represented pro-choice organizations in a 2001 challenge to prolife protests outside abortion clinics in Massachusetts.https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/14/supreme-court-nominee-ketanji-brown-jacksons-recor/___________________________________________________________ 4. Ukrainian Archbishop Calls for Worldwide Novena Ahead of Pope Francis’ Consecration of Russia and Ukraine, ‘We believe that this act will be listened to by Our Lady and she will intercede before God for peace in Ukraine,’ Archbishop Mokrzycki said., By Alejandro Bermudez, Catholic News Agency, March 16, 2022 Ukrainian Catholic leaders have been urging Pope Francis to take the dramatic step to consecrate both Ukraine and Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and will lead a nine-day novena to prepare for the March 25 event, a top prelate in the war-ravaged country told CNA Tuesday. “We are very happy by the fact that the Holy Father responded positively to the request of the Bishops of the Latin Catholic Church, all its priests, and all its people,” said Archbishop Mieczysław Mokrzycki of Lviv, Ukraine. https://www.ncregister.com/cna/ukrainian-archbishop-calls-for-worldwide-novena-ahead-of-pope-francis-consecration-of-russia-and-ukraine___________________________________________________________ 5. Guatemala congress shelves abortion law passed previous week, By Associated Press, March 15, 2022, 10:23 PM Guatemala’s Congress voted Tuesday to shelve a controversial law stiffening penalties for abortion, prohibiting same-sex marriage and banning discussion of sexual diversity in schools, acting a week after it passed by a wide margin. The reversal came after President Alejandro Giammattei threatened a veto because elements of the legislation were considered unconstitutional and in violation of international treaties that Guatemala has signed. Lawmakers again voted by a wide margin, this time to indefinitely archive the “Protection of Life and Family” law, which had been passed on International Women’s Day, drawing howls of criticism. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/guatemala-congress-shelves-abortion-law-passed-previous-week/2022/03/15/10c65b92-a4d0-11ec-8628-3da4fa8f8714_story.html___________________________________________________________ 6. Tennessee lawmakers introduce Texas-styled abortion bill, By Kimberlee Kruesi, Associated Press, March 15, 2022, 4:11 PM Despite already enacting one of the strictest abortion bans in the U.S., Tennessee Republicans on Tuesday began advancing yet another anti-abortion measure strategically written to sidestep federal court challenges. … The Tennessee version introduced Tuesday would ban all abortions rather than allowing a patient to have a six-week window. But similar to the Texas model, it still would make legal challenges difficult because the government would not be the enforcer. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/tennessee-lawmakers-introduce-texas-styled-abortion-bill/2022/03/15/9a799dea-a499-11ec-8628-3da4fa8f8714_story.html___________________________________________________________ 7. Ask Your Husband is a superficial, ideological, and incoherent “guide”, Stephanie C. Gordon’s view of femininity and marriage has all the hallmarks of the fundamentalist complementarianism while relying on proof-texting, ignoring context, and dismissing magisterial teaching of the past eighty years., By Abigail Favale, The Catholic World Report, March 13, 2022, Book Review Reading Stephanie C. Gordon’s Ask Your Husband: A Catholic Guide to Femininity feels like a meandering stroll down a familiar lane. I was raised in conservative evangelicalism, and Gordon echoes many of the messages I heard about women in my youth: namely, that women shouldn’t work outside the home and that they owe unilateral obedience to their husbands. If this book were simply another spin on evangelical complementarianism, I wouldn’t have read it, and I wouldn’t be writing about it. But Gordon claims that her book presents the “timeless teaching” of the Catholic Church and attempts to bind the consciences of her female readers to a one-size-fits-all authoritarian model of marriage. I was originally drawn to Catholicism because of its rich, beautiful, and dignifying account of womanhood; I had long been on a quest to understand my vocation as a woman, dissatisfied with the impoverished accounts offered by Protestantism and secular feminism alike. To my surprise, the Catholic Church alone held the wisdom I sought, and seeing a Catholic author trade those gems for cheap counterfeits calls for a response. … Ask Your Husband is an earnest attempt to respond to some real problems in our culture, ones that plague many marriages. Yet Gordon’s approach is legalistic and ideological; she snips and twists scripture and tradition to align with her preconceived views, and is ultimately unable to escape the same trap that often ensnares feminists: a tendency to see man-woman relations primarily through the lens of power. Her proof-texting approach might work in a fundamentalist Protestant context, but it falls far short of expressing a Catholic hermeneutic, which always holds the totality of scripture and tradition in view. Gordon writes from a place of good will, but apparently has not been formed in the fullness of the faith. If she desires a truly Catholic understanding of femininity, she might need to ask someone other than her husband. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/03/13/ask-your-husband-is-a-superficial-ideological-and-incoherent-guide/___________________________________________________________

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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