1. Supreme Court Case: Is Catholic Charities ‘Secular’?, The Justices review a doozy of a ruling from Wisconsin’s new liberal high court majority, The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2025, Editorial
Does the pope keep a detailed time card? That’s a joke, but it’s also a legal argument relevant to a case at the Supreme Court on Monday. Under Wisconsin law, the Diocese of Superior is exempt from paying taxes into the state’s unemployment system. Yet the state says this opt out doesn’t cover the diocese’s Catholic Charities nonprofit and its sub-entities.
“Their activities are secular in nature,” the Wisconsin Supreme Court, newly controlled by a 4-3 liberal majority, held last year. They “neither attempt to imbue program participants with the Catholic faith nor supply any religious materials.” The majority therefore ruled that the Catholic Charities arm—whose president, for the record, is the local bishop—is “not operated primarily for religious purposes,” at least under this Wisconsin law.
Hence the U.S. Supreme Court’s argument Monday in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin. The nonprofit, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, argues that the First Amendment prohibits the state’s “effort to pick and choose among religious groups—and carve out works of mercy from the realm of the ‘religious’ altogether.” The group’s mission is to be “an effective sign of the charity of Christ,” and its expression of that includes providing services to the disabled.
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What’s at issue Monday isn’t the status of individual employees, but whether the Catholic Charities nonprofit itself is run for “religious purposes,” so the context of the dispute is different. But one thing that Hosanna-Tabor stands for is the difficulty of judicial inquiries that attempt to disentangle, over protests by some faith community, which of their conduct isn’t “primarily” or “distinctively” religious, to use Wisconsin’s terms.
By the way, Wisconsin’s ruling against Catholic Charities was written by state Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, who is retiring. On Tuesday (see nearby) voters will pick her replacement.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/supreme-court-case-is-catholic-charities-secular-wisconsin-nonprofit-religion-3993e867
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2. Losing My Nonreligion, By Mr. Coyne, The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2025, Opinion
As an evolutionary biologist, I joined the Freedom From Religion Foundation because I supported its work guarding the wall of separation between religion and government, educating the public about how to be moral without faith, and, most important, upholding science and rationality over dogma and superstition. I served on an FFRF advisory board, and the foundation gave me its annual “The Emperor Has No Clothes” award in 2011.
I resigned because the foundation has abandoned science. Two other board members, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, joined me.
The trouble began in November, when the organization published an essay on its website denying the basic biological fact that all animals, including humans, have only two sexes. The FFRF piece, titled “What is a woman?,” concluded by begging the question: “A woman is whoever she says she is.”
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The FFRF’s road to quasireligious views was a long one, paved by secular philosophers and the movements they spawned. It includes the Gnostic view that one’s true identity goes well beyond the physical body. As a Catholic website comparing Gnosticism with transgenderism notes, “The underlying concept is the same, that who we ‘really’ are is not our bodies, but rather some sort of interior ‘ego,’ or ‘I’ that constitutes our true self. It is incumbent that the body must conform to that true self.”
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The FFRF has not only abandoned science but suppressed discussion and argument about its decision. Given the organization’s embrace of quasireligious and unscientific dogma, I’m proud to proclaim myself a heretic.
Mr. Coyne is a professor emeritus of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/losing-my-nonreligion-transgender-ideology-essay-resign-b7e6d745
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3. Trump Wanted an Apology. He Got Maine’s No-Nonsense Governor Instead, By Zusha Elinson, The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2025
President Trump wants an apology from Maine Gov. Janet Mills for her prickly refusal to go along with his executive order banning trans athletes from women’s sports.
But Mills, a flinty former prosecutor who stands just over 5 feet tall, won’t give it to him even as his administration launches several probes into Maine and threatens to pull federal funding.
The Democratic governor is a contrast to a number of powerful chiefs of industry, law and academia who have yielded to Trump under the prospect of losing business or federal dollars. Her stubbornness in the weekslong standoff over the state allowing transgender athletes to compete based on their gender identity hasn’t surprised Mainers.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-wanted-an-apology-he-got-maines-no-nonsense-governor-instead-62834175
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4. Should Catholics identify as ‘feminists’? Notre Dame conference tackles the issue, By Jonathan Liedl, Catholic News Agency, March 31, 2025, 07:00 AM
Should Catholics identify as “feminists?” A panel of prominent female Catholic thinkers explored the question at a recent conference at the University of Notre Dame dedicated to the Church’s teaching on women, with some speakers embracing the strategic use of the term while others expressed uncertainty.
Those in favor of using the feminist label described it as rhetorical tool for finding common ground with non-Catholic women who might support practices like abortion and contraception but are nonetheless open to pursuing what is good for women.
“It has an instrumental use if we want to establish that we are both on the side of addressing the needs of women,” said Helen Alvaré, a legal scholar and Church leader who has advocated for the need for a “new feminism.”
Philosopher Melissa Moschella offered a similar perspective, encouraging attendees, which included religious sisters and nursing mothers, to call themselves feminists if doing so is useful with a particular audience, “and if it’s not, don’t.”
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But other panelists suggested that there is value in Catholics appropriating the feminist label precisely because of the rise of so-called “red pilled” anti-feminist views, including among Catholics. These views, speakers argued, not only reject secular feminism but also recent magisterial teaching on the dignity of women.
“We have to defend women’s full rights and dignity,” said legal scholar Erika Bachiochi, who has argued that 19th-century feminism was motivated by Christian principles. “We have to tell young women today, ‘I’m with you, not with them.’”
And although “trad wife” influences are popular with young Catholic women right now, theologian Angela Franks said staking out a Catholic feminism now will be important in the event of widespread disillusionment with the anti-feminist turn.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/263053/should-catholics-identify-as-feminists-notre-dame-conference-tackles-the-issue
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5. Pope Francis Came Near Death in Hospital, His Doctor Says, By Jason Horowitz and Patricia Mazzei, The New York Times, March 30, 2025, Pg. A6
Pope Francis faced a life-threatening health crisis last month, with his doctors fearing he might not survive due to pneumonia in both lungs and a dangerously low oxygen level. Despite ruling out intubation, the pope responded to aggressive treatments, and after a difficult recovery, he was discharged from the hospital 38 days later. His weakened state was visible during his first public appearance, with his breathing strained and voice frail, but doctors are optimistic about his gradual recovery, though he will require an extended period of rest. The pope’s frailty has become a symbol of human dignity and the challenges of aging, with some seeing it as a profound teaching moment about vulnerability and resilience.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/world/europe/pope-francis-doctor-interview.html
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6. Transgender people are about 1% of the U.S. population. Yet they’re a political lightning rod, By Geoff Mulvihill and Jesse Bedayn, The Associated Press, March 30, 2025
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump used contentiousness around transgender people’s access to sports and bathrooms to fire up conservative voters and sway undecideds. And in his first months back in office, Trump has pushed the issue further, erasing mention of transgender people on government websites and passports and trying to remove them from the military.
It’s a contradiction of numbers that reveals a deep cultural divide: Transgender people make up less than 1% of the U.S. population, but they have become a major piece on the political chess board – particularly Trump’s.
For transgender people and their allies – along with several judges who have ruled against Trump in response to legal challenges – it’s a matter of civil rights for a small group. But many Americans believe those rights had grown too expansive.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/30/transgender-people-1-us-population-yet-theyre-political-lightning-rod/
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7. Why Some Christians Are Getting IVF Wrong, IVF doesn’t cure infertility; it bypasses it — leaving countless human beings lost in the process, By Katie Breckenridge, National Catholic Register, March 30, 2025
I recently had a conversation with a fellow Christian about President Trump’s Feb. 18 executive order reducing barriers to accessing in-vitro (IVF) procedures — an order that states like Georgia are already codifying into law. This conversation revealed to me that many Christians still hold the misguided belief that IVF is a “pro-life” procedure.
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“I understand why you’re against IVF, but it does have practical applications,” said my friend. “IVF is so expensive. We need to make IVF cost less than abortion.”
Of course, IVF has “practical” applications. The fact that the industry isn’t dealing with abstract, theoretical human beings is precisely the issue. Real children are created and killed in laboratories. There are many practical issues inherent in the IVF process.
Foremost of these issues: IVF takes more lives than abortion. The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported 389,993 IVF cycles in the U.S. in 2022, compared to the CDC’s report of 609,360 abortions. If every cycle produced eight children, then there were about 3.1 million embryonic human persons created.
There’s a huge game of trial-and-error that takes place with millions of embryonic human beings, since even the “best prognosis” patients, those under 35 years of age, have an average of two egg retrieval cycles, and those over 40 can undergo up to nine. If 10 eggs are retrieved, then about eight of them will become embryos upon fertilization. Even just two retrieval cycles create 16 people who won’t all survive.
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Even though it’s considered standard medical practice, physicians are called to heal, to “do no harm,” and to uphold the innate worth and dignity of every human being. IVF is not healing, nor does it honor the worth and dignity of embryonic persons. IVF provides women with unneeded medications, risking unnecessary side effects, leaves underlying fertility conditions unhealed, and prejudices every single human being created as potentially disposable. This is human experimentation — not medicine.
Let’s stop pretending that IVF is a child-honoring procedure just because it “helps people” and brings life into the world. We Christians can’t expect anyone to listen to us when it comes to honoring the basic right to life of every human being made in God’s image when we’re condoning the creation and trial of even one human life in a laboratory.
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/breckenridge-getting-ivf-wrong
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8. Doctor cites the pope’s ‘surprising improvement’ after surviving life-threatening crises, By Colleen Barry and Trisha Thomas, The Associated Press, March 29, 2025
Pope Francis has shown ‘’a truly surprising improvement’’ since returning to the Vatican to convalesce after surviving a life-threatening bout with double-pneumonia, the doctor who coordinated the pontiff’s five-week hospitalization said Saturday.
“I find him very lively,’’ Dr. Sergio Alfieri said, after visiting the pope at his apartment in the Santa Marta Domus on Wednesday, three days after his release from Rome’s Gemelli hospital. “I believe that he will return if not to 100%, 90% of where he was before.’’
Francis appeared frail and weak as he greeted a crowd of well-wishers from a hospital balcony on Sunday. His voice was waning as he praised a woman in the crowd for bringing yellow flowers. He was able to only partially lift his arm to bless the people and he gasped for air as he was wheeled back inside.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/29/doctor-cites-popes-surprising-improvement-surviving-life-threatening/
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9. SCOTUS to Decide Whether Catholic Charities Are ‘Religious Enough’, By Matthew McDonald, National Catholic Register, March 29, 2025
Unemployment insurance seems unlikely territory for a disagreement over religious freedom. But a Wisconsin dispute before the U.S. Supreme Court could have far-reaching effects on how Catholic nonprofit organizations function, observers say.
Oral arguments in the case, Catholic Charities Bureau Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, are set for 10 a.m. Monday in Washington.
At issue is whether a charitable organization created by a Catholic diocese and overseen by a Catholic bishop can claim a religious exemption provided by state law, or whether a state agency can determine instead that the charitable organization doesn’t qualify for the exemption because its activities don’t meet the state’s standards for being “religious.”
“It’s a lot bigger than just unemployment insurance. Here, the court has to figure out a basic rule about religious exemptions,” said Christopher Lund, a professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit and a religious-liberty expert.
“Can the government exempt some kinds of religious organizations from rules without exempting others? If the answer is Yes, then there’s a risk that some religious organizations will be, in fact, favored over others. If the answer is No, then there’s a risk that government won’t be able to give special protections to different kinds of religious organizations,” Lund told the Register by email. “There are difficulties either way.”
https://www.ncregister.com/news/catholic-charities-wisconsin-case-consequences
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10. Can the Jesus of History Support the Christ of Faith?, By Ross Douthat, The New York Times, March 28, 2025, Opinion
The latest issue of The New Yorker includes an essay by Adam Gopnik, “We’re Still Not Done With Jesus,” on the scholarly debates about the origins of Christianity. In the piece, Gopnik positions himself as a nuanced balancer between two serious schools (though he tilts toward the first): a school that holds that the early Christians mythologized and invented, but on the basis of some set of true events; and a school that treats the historical core of Christian faith as illusory and inaccessible and the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as pure literary-mystical inventions.
Entirely absent is any meaningful treatment of the arguments for taking the Gospels seriously as what they claim to be: eyewitness accounts, or syntheses of eyewitness accounts, with a straightforward claim to basic historical credibility. This absence is not exactly surprising to a longtime reader of Gopnik’s work. But I will admit that I had been hoping — wishcasting? — that we were finally moving past a cultural landscape in which the only interpretations of Christian origins offered to inquiring readers of secular publications were those bent, as Gopnik puts it, on “rehabilitating aspects of Christianity on terms that a secular scholar can respect,” while taking for granted that “nothing happened quite as related.”
To be clear, I would not expect a non-Christian writer to simply embrace the thesis that events in the New Testament did mostly happen as related. But readers who look at the headline of Gopnik’s essay and its implicit questions — We aren’t done with Jesus? Why aren’t we? — deserve a fuller answer than you can get from just considering the range of perspectives he presents. They deserve an explanation of how the persistence of Christianity is connected not just to the Gospel story’s moral or mythopoetic power, but to the enduring plausibility of its historical claims even in the face of so many determined debunking efforts.
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Which means that there is a very straightforward reading of Luke-Acts that explains why it doesn’t include Paul’s martyrdom or any reckoning with everything that followed. It’s because those things hadn’t happened yet; the books were completed by the early 60s at the latest — and, as such, provide further evidence that a fully supernaturalist Christianity, Gospel narratives and all, was off and running before the traumas of war, persecution and exile intervened.
This is a gloss on a complex debate that doesn’t address all the possible counterarguments. But I offer it because it’s just one example of why so many Christian believers who engage seriously with their religion’s origins don’t feel like the reasonable and historically minded person is required to choose between Gopnik’s two disenchanted options. They think that the best evidence, the most serious reading of history, still makes the original interpretation as plausible as ever, and the mystery not disenchanted but intact.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/opinion/jesus-history-faith.html
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11. What to know about Carlo Acutis, the Catholic Church’s new millennial saint, By Giovanna Dell’Orto, The Associated Press March 28, 2025
Carlo Acutis will become the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint at a solemn canonization Mass on April 27 in St. Peter’s Square. But throngs of pilgrims are already flocking to the church in Assisi, Italy, where his body wearing sneakers, jeans and a sweatshirt lies in a shrine.
Here’s more on the teenage boy who’s generating uncommon devotion.
Carlo Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London to a wealthy Italian family, and grew up in Milan. His precocious faith journey took off after he received First Communion at the young age of 7, and he regularly attended daily Mass, prayed the rosary and participated in eucharistic adoration.
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Acutis used his computer savvy to create an online exhibit about more than 100 eucharistic miracles recognized by the church over many centuries, focused on the real presence of Christ that Catholics believe is in the consecrated bread and wine.
In October 2006, at age 15, he fell ill. Ten days later, he died of acute leukemia at a hospital in northern Italy. His body was later transferred to an Assisi cemetery as Acutis had asked, because of his devotion to the hometown medieval saint, St. Francis.
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Acutis was named “venerable” in 2018 after the church recognized his virtuous life, and his body was taken to a shrine in Assisi’s Santuario della Spogliazione, a major site linked to St. Francis’ life.
He was then declared “blessed” in 2020 after the Vatican dicastery that studies sainthood processes recognized a miraculous healing through Acutis’ intercession — a child in Brazil who recovered in a “scientifically inexplainable” manner.
Last year, the church paved his way to sainthood by attributing to him a second miracle — the complete healing of a Costa Rican student in Italy from major head trauma in a bicycle accident after her mother prayed at Acutis’ tomb.
Acutis’ canonization Mass will be Sunday, April 27, at 10:30 a.m. in front of the Vatican’s St. Peter Basilica, in conjunction with the celebration of the Holy Year’s jubilee for teens.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2025/03/28/carlo-acutis-saint-millennial-catholic-church-assisi/084600c6-0c06-11f0-8e5e-3a8d70fc4250_story.html
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12. Will a Chicago lawsuit bring winds of change?, By JD Flynn and Ed. Condon, The Pillar, March 28, 2025, 9:21 PM
The Archdiocese of Chicago took an unusual step this week in response to a 2024 lawsuit alleging new counts of sexual abuse against a laicized Chicago priest, the notorious sexual abuser Daniel McCormack.
In a countersuit filed this week, the Chicago archdiocese said that several men conspired for years to commit fraud, pretending to be McCormack’s victims in order to secure settlements.
The story told by the Chicago archdiocese is extraordinary. But as the lawsuit begins, it’s worth asking what its long-term effect in the Chicago archdiocese might be on both how dioceses consider historical allegations of abuse and on how accusations against priests are handled by bishops.
According to a suit filed Monday, a group of young men worked together more than 10 years ago to coordinate a scheme in which they would falsely accuse McCormack of sexual abuse in order to secure legal settlements.
The scheme, which reportedly included several incarcerated men, including gang members and convicted murderers, came to light in 2013 when one defendant talked about the scheme on a recorded call from jail, the Chicago archdiocese says. And subpoenas of other jail house calls allegedly revealed defendants discussing how easy it was to “lick” the archdiocese — to pull a scam, and receive a payout.
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/will-a-chicago-lawsuit-bring-winds
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13. Woman sues abortionist for $250K over perforated uterus, dead baby’s skull fragments in intestine, By Ryan Foley, The Christian Post, March 28, 2025
A woman who had a botched abortion after parts of her baby’s remains were left inside her uterus is seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages as compensation for the physical and psychological distress she endured after the procedure.
In a complaint filed in the Sixth Judicial Circuit Court of Champaign County, Illinois, last week, the woman, listed under the alias Jane Doe, is suing abortionist Keith Reisinger-Kindle over complications she suffered from a botched abortion at Equity Clinic in Champaign, Illinois, in 2023.
The lawsuit, obtained by The Christian Post, maintains that Reisinger-Kindle perforated the plaintiff’s uterus during the abortion and claims that she received a note informing her that her uterus was empty and the abortion was complete.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/woman-sues-abortionist-over-perforated-uterus-skull-fragments.html
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TCA Media Monitoring provides a snapshot from national newspapers and major Catholic press outlets of coverage regarding significant Catholic Church news and current issues with which the Catholic Church is traditionally or prominently engaged. The opinions and views expressed in the articles do not necessarily reflect the views of The Catholic Association.
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