TCA Podcast, – “Conversations with Consequences,” Episode 309 – Sister Clare Crockett’s Road to Sainthood & Beverly Jacobson on Trisomy Awareness Month!
With the cause for canonization officially open for Sister Clare Crockett, we talk with the postulator for the cause, Sister Kristen Gardner all about the life of this soon-to-be saint. From her amazing conversion back to Christ, her radiant joy and tragic death, and the many possible miracles as millions have been praying for her intercession, Sister Gardner shares intimate never-before-heard details about this beloved sister that she knew personally. Marking Trisomy Awareness Month, we also talk with Beverly Jacobson about her darling daughter Verity who was born with Trisomy-18, and why all life should be protected, especially the most vulnerable. We also hear from our TCA chaplain Msgr. Roger Landry on the witness of St. Joseph as we marked his feast day this week. Catch the show every Saturday at 7amET/5pmET on EWTN radio!
https://thecatholicassociation.org/podcast/ep-309-sister-clare-crocketts-road-to-sainthood-beverly-jacobson-on-trisomy-awareness-month/
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1. Thank a Priest: A Movement to Honor the Church’s Silent Servants, A small act of gratitude can have a big impact. The ‘Thank a Priest’ campaign invites Catholics to support and encourage their priests., By Ashley McGuire, National Catholic Register, March 20, 2025, Opinion
They’re not the Catholic priests that you’re likely to hear about these days. They’re not the newsmakers. They’re not involved in campaigns to push the Church in one direction or another, and they’re not trafficking in hot takes on social media platforms.
You won’t always know their names — unless you happen to belong to their parish or run into them at a school or charity or any of the thousands of Catholic venues where Catholic priests serve their God and their flocks.
But isn’t it time to thank these everyday priests?
The International Institute for Culture in Philadelphia thinks so and has just launched a “Thank a Priest” campaign. It’s high time. The priesthood in America is in crisis. Our aggressively secular culture and clerical sexual abuse scandals continue to take a toll on the priesthood. The Church’s reforms — addressing scandals that largely occurred decades ago but came to light only in recent years — have made Catholic institutions among the world’s safest for children. But the scandals have also intensified pop culture’s ridiculing and pillorying of priests.
One result: One national survey showed that 25% of non-Catholics associated the Catholic priesthood with predatory behavior and 28% consider our priests untrustworthy. As the main character in Georges Bernanos’ The Diary of County Priest stated, “We pay a heavy, very heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always so near to the sublime. And the world, usually so indulgent to foibles, hates ours instinctively.”
And Bernanos wrote this almost a century ago.
Another not-unrelated result is the dramatic decline in the number of American men entering the priesthood. The number of active priests was 60,000 in 1970; it’s just 35,000 as of 2020. This declined as the U.S. Catholic population grew by some 20 million.
“There is a crisis in the Church due to a lack of young men choosing to respond to God’s call to the priesthood,” says the “Thank a Priest” website. “We believe that the cultural negativity surrounding the priesthood is a significant factor in this crisis. We are actively countering the negative perceptions by sharing the reality — that priests are courageous, holy and selfless men devoted to serving God and their communities.”
The “Thank a Priest” program aims to shift attitudes and highlight the stories of the many unsung priests who quietly serve the Church. Their names are not in the headlines. They are the men Catholics encounter daily in the unremarkable yet essential life of their parishes, and they are a busy band.
Some have heeded Pope Francis’ call to go and minister at the “ends of the earth,” like Bishop Christian Carlassare of South Sudan — an Italian missionary who, shortly after taking his post in the violent and poverty-stricken nation, was shot in his home by terrorists.
Rather than flee, Bishop Carlassare sent a message of forgiveness from his hospital bed in Nairobi, where he pleaded for “forgiveness in all our community” and called on his flock “to seek justice with the same heart of God that is a merciful heart because these values are present in the deep of each one of us.”
You won’t find his face on the cover of a glossy magazine — but you will find his story on the website of “Thank a Priest.”
These men are the unsung priests who run the schools, open the churches each morning, and get up in the middle of the night to give Last Rites. They’re the priests who do marriage prep and counseling and go out of their way to comfort the mourning and bury the dead. They’re the priests on the other side of the confessional, offering in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) forgiveness of sin and, most importantly, saying Mass and offering you the body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ in the Eucharist. And they are the priests on the other side of the world, braving danger to bind spiritual and physical wounds.
They do all this, day in and day out, in season and out of season, year after year, decade after decade. So much service, so much sacrifice, so much grace.
The world in general, and our culture in particular, needs to know their stories, and they need our prayers. The International Institute for Culture’s “Thank a Priest” campaign provides a much-needed campaign for both.
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/mcguire-thank-a-priest
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2. Texas AG announces closure of illegal Houston abortion clinics, By Sean Salai, The Washington Times, March 21, 2025
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the closure of three illegal abortion clinics in the Houston area, following a temporary restraining order from a federal court. The clinics were operated by Maria Rojas, a midwife, and staff of unlicensed medical providers, who now face felony charges for performing illegal abortions and practicing medicine without a license. Paxton’s office has emphasized the enforcement of Texas’ strict abortion laws, which criminalize most abortions after six weeks, while pro-choice groups argue these actions disproportionately target minority and low-income clinics.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/20/ken-paxton-texas-ag-announces-closure-illegal-houston-abortion/
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3. Pope Francis says ‘confused messages’ in the world are hurting young people, urges vocations, By Crux, March 20, 2025
Pope Francis, in his message for the 62nd World Day of Prayer for Vocations, addressed the struggles of young people who face insecurity, identity crises, and the negative influences of the digital world. He emphasized that vocations are rooted in hope and trust in God’s providence, encouraging young people to discern their call through prayer, silence, and service, and to listen to God’s dreams for them. The pope also reminded Christians, especially the lay faithful, that answering God’s call involves serving those on the periphery of society and being Christ’s presence in places of suffering and exclusion.
https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2025/03/pope-francis-confused-messages-in-the-world-are-hurting-young-people-urges-vocations
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4. After IVF nightmares, patients have few protections, An NBC News analysis found hundreds of lawsuits over five years alleging that embryos were lost, destroyed or swapped by fertility clinics or companies., By Aria Bendix, Kenzi Abou-Sabe, Alexandra Chaidez, Priya Sridhar and Ellison Barber, NBC News, March 19, 2025, 3:01 PM
Krystena Murray, after giving birth through in-vitro fertilization (IVF), discovered that her baby, who had dark skin, was not biologically hers due to a mix-up at the fertility clinic. A DNA test confirmed that a different couple’s embryo had been implanted, and Murray had to surrender the child after five months of raising him. Her case is part of a larger issue, as over 300 lawsuits have been filed between 2019 and 2024 alleging IVF errors, including lost, swapped, or destroyed embryos. Legal experts argue that the rapid growth of the IVF industry has outpaced regulations, and many clinics are not held to the same reporting or safety standards as other medical providers. IVF errors, often treated as accidents in court, present unique challenges for patients seeking redress, as many lawsuits are settled or dismissed without trial. Amidst these issues, some advocates are calling for stronger regulations to ensure better oversight and patient protection in the growing IVF industry.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/ivf-errors-legal-protections-nightmare-mistakes-lawsuits-rcna194215
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5. After historic indictment, doctors will keep mailing abortion pills over state lines, By Rosemary Westwood, NPR, March 19, 2025, 5:00 AM
On January 31, Dr. Kohar Der Simonian, the medical director at Maine Family Planning, was deeply affected by the indictment of Dr. Margaret Carpenter for mailing abortion medication to Louisiana, a state with abortion bans. Der Simonian, who provides similar services, understood that this case marked an escalation in the battle over abortion rights after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. Carpenter was charged alongside a Louisiana mother who allegedly passed the medication to her minor daughter, leading to the first criminal case against a doctor for shipping abortion pills across state lines. The legal conflict highlights the tension between states with abortion bans and those with laws protecting abortion providers, including eight states with shield laws that block extradition. Despite the legal risks, Der Simonian and other providers continue offering medication abortion to out-of-state patients, responding to rising demand, particularly in states with abortion bans. Legal scholars predict this conflict will lead to a broader test of state sovereignty and legal protections, potentially escalating to federal court and challenging traditional interstate legal practices.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5312115/margaret-carpenter-indictment-telemedicine-abortion-louisiana-mail-mifepristone-misoprostol
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6. Flannery O’Connor’s Tales of Evil and Grace, She had a Catholic vision. Her stories were ‘grotesque’ but not gratuitously so., By Jennifer A. Frey, The Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2025, 5:25 PM, Opinion
Flannery O’Connor, arguably the best Catholic writer this country ever produced, was born 100 years ago March 25 in Savannah, Ga. Her short life was marked by profound suffering: She was 15 when her father died of lupus and 25 when she was diagnosed with the same disease, which would end her life at 39. Her grief gave her an insight into the power of God’s grace—that it could be violent but also revelatory and redemptive. Her experience with the mystery of suffering would become the enduring theme of her fiction.
O’Connor’s work can’t be understood apart from her imaginative Catholic vision. She attended Mass daily and read St. Thomas Aquinas before bed every evening. Because of the violence O’Connor made her outlandish Southern characters endure, a critic once described her as a hillbilly nihilist. She protested that “hillbilly Thomist” was more apt, because she wrote happy stories thick with the promise of God’s mercy. O’Connor believed that although we are fallen, we are still good, and if we freely cooperate with God’s grace, our nature can be perfected in union with him.
Flannery also got from Aquinas her commitment to Christian realism, which puts forth a vision of happiness rooted in a person’s knowledge and love of reality. For the realist, a good and wise man must conform himself to what he knows is true, so that he can love what is good and take delight in what is beautiful. The true, good and beautiful are for Aquinas different ways a person is related to reality. Since God is the ultimate reality as the source and summit of all being, he is the fullness of truth, beauty and goodness.
Reality can be a tough master, and O’Connor saw that the temptation to resist, ignore or distract oneself from it is an obstacle to spiritual progress. Grace, in her understanding, works to pierce the veil of perception—especially to force us to see the effects of sin on our souls. She strongly resisted the claim that fiction was a form of escapism. At its best, such writing is “a plunge into reality” and “very shocking to the system.”
O’Connor aimed to shock her reader every bit as much as she was shocked by grace at an early age. She wrote “grotesque Southern fiction” because she thought her characters needed to confront the mysteries of evil and grace, and she believed this confrontation must be violent and comic to her secular and “Christ haunted” audience. One of her most famous characters, the Misfit, is a criminal on the run, haunted by the idea that Christ “did what He said.” Before the man kills a grandmother and her family, he complains to her that “it ain’t right I wasn’t there” at Calvary, because belief in Christ would have made him a good man. In this unexpected moment of confession, the grandmother is able to see the Misfit as “one of her own children” and worthy of an infinite love. This moment takes the darkness of the drama out of a nihilistic register and into a Thomistic one, making an otherwise bleak end tinged with the hope of redemption.
O’Connor’s stories are hard because she knew that her readers were coarsened and that it would take something drastic to get them to see the reality of sin and necessity of grace. She argued that “to the hard of hearing you have to shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
In all her fiction, there are moments of profound change, of grace breaking through the defenses people have put up against it. That divine influence often works to purify people in cruel, violent ways. O’Connor thought this revealed a deep truth about human nature—that we “vigorously” resist grace because it “changes us and the change is painful.” There is no way to clarity in her writing except through the painful transfiguration of suffering. Thus her characters are, for example, gored by bulls, shot, humiliated, attacked, abandoned or murdered.
Readers have often been turned off by the depths of depravity O’Connor explored in her fiction. But as she described her work, she was adamant that her Christian realism was opposed to the twin evils of bad fiction: fantasy and sentimentalism. She resisted any account of Christianity as comforting or easy as much as she resisted the claim that the job of the novelist is to entertain or comfort the reader. O’Connor aimed to unsettle readers, not for the sake of sensationalism but because the truths she aimed to reveal were hard-won.
The key to understanding and appreciating her fiction is to see that it engages with a deep mystery: that the suffering on Calvary, and all human suffering, is redemptive. For her, the problem of evil doesn’t admit of tidy philosophical or theological solutions; it is a mystery that must be endured. As a fiction writer, O’Connor believed it necessary to have her readers confront “mystery as it is incarnated in human life” through an imaginative vision that pays careful attention to our sensed experience. If we approach her writing with this in mind, we will have a deeper appreciation of the large and startling figures she so memorably drew.
Ms. Frey is dean of the honors college at the University of Tulsa.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/flannery-oconnors-tales-of-evil-and-grace-catholicism-fiction-writing-8982cda9
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7. Pope Francis Is Serious About Synodality, The synodal process is being positioned as a kind of capstone project for the entire Francis papacy., By Larry Chapp, National Catholic Register, March 21, 2025, Opinion
The Vatican announced March 15 that Pope Francis has initiated a new three-year implementation phase for the Synod on Synodality, which will culminate in a Church-wide meeting in Rome in October 2028.
The synodal process, launched by Pope Francis in 2021, has now completed its “consultation” and “discernment” phases. Many had assumed it was largely a finished project — at least in terms of Roman involvement — and that its implementation would now be left primarily to national episcopal conferences and individual bishops.
But this new initiative, issued while the Pope was still recovering from pneumonia in the hospital, dispels any expectation that the synod’s implementation would be left primarily to local churches. Instead, it signals that Rome remains keenly interested in guiding this implementation phase in a more centralized manner.
As such, this announcement, at the very least, underscores the seriousness with which Pope Francis takes the synodal process he has created and his determination not to let it die of neglect, even as he battles for his life. And as he grapples with his physical frailty and advancing old age, the establishment of a new three-year period of synodal implementation indicates his desire to put into place processes and structures that his successor will have to consider if Francis is not around in 2028.
Therefore, it would seem that the synodal process is being positioned as a kind of capstone project for the entire Francis papacy and must therefore be viewed as a central and defining aspect of his enduring magisterial legacy. This also means that it is something to be taken seriously by all faithful Catholics.
To that end, and in the spirit of synodal “listening” and parrhesia (free, bold and open discussion), I want to raise several questions concerning the synodal process so far — questions that are critical of certain aspects of the synodal process, but which are directed toward how to make synodality more properly understood by the faithful.
The questions I wish to raise can be summarized under three headings: Definitional clarity, pastoral analysis and theological orientation.
Definitional Clarity
One of the things that has most hampered the synodal process so far is the inability of the Vatican to provide a clear definition of just what “synodality” is. To be sure, some light has been shed on this in the various synodal documents. The synodal way has been described therein as a process of “listening,” “inclusion,” “dialogue,” “consultation” and as a “walking together” in the Holy Spirit.
But these are vague terms that are themselves in need of greater definitional clarity since they can all be taken as descriptors of ecclesial dispositions that need to be in place no matter the ecclesial form that is adopted.
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Pastoral Analysis
Given the current ecclesial situation, are the real needs of the moment best met by a yearslong process that boils down to a discussion of how the Church’s internal ecclesial furniture is to be rearranged in order to best facilitate “listening”?
Pope Francis himself, on numerous occasions, has criticized a Church that is too “self-referential” and staring at its own bureaucratic navel. But is not this entire synodal process just such an exercise? Is it not the equivalent of a set of meetings designed to create bureaucratic flow charts on authority structures that are now to guide our largely bureaucratic restructurings?
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Theological Orientation
Finally, the question of pastoral focus leads to the question of what the theological underpinnings of the synodal process are. This is a key question since more than a few observers have questioned the theological motivations of many synod participants and leaders.
The key question that the implementation phase needs to confront and answer, therefore, is a question that arises from the suspicion that the synod is merely a stalking horse for changing Church doctrine on a whole range of hot-button issues.
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My prayer is that Pope Francis regains his health, returns to the Vatican, and provides us with the magisterial guidance that a healthy synodal process requires.
https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/pope-francis-is-serious-about-synodality
__________________________________________________________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. |
