1. Bishops Avoid Abortion Issue In Guidelines on Communion, By Ian Lovett and Francis X. Rocca, The Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2021, Pg. A4
The Catholic bishops of the U.S. ended a nearly yearlong debate Wednesday over whether to bar politicians who support abortion rights from receiving the Eucharist, passing new guidance on Communion that doesn’t address the issue.
The measure passed by a vote of 222-8 and was followed by applause at a gathering here of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
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Regardless of any guidance from the USCCB, individual bishops ultimately have the power under church law to deny Communion. Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who as archbishop of Washington, D.C., is the president’s pastor, has said that he wouldn’t refuse him Communion.
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, who has said that the president shouldn’t take Communion, has criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic whose home district is in his archdiocese, for her support of abortion rights. In an interview Wednesday, he said he didn’t expect Mrs. Pelosi would present herself for Communion in San Francisco, but wouldn’t offer it to her if she did.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/catholic-bishops-drop-effort-to-ban-communion-for-politicians-who-support-abortion-rights-11637169752?
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2. Russia added to State Department list of worst religious liberty violators, By Adelle M. Banks, Religion News Service, November 17, 2021, 5:44 PM
The U.S. State Department has added Russia to its list of nations it considers among the world’s most egregious violators of religious freedom.
Russia joins Myanmar (referred to as Burma on the list), China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan on the list of “countries of particular concern.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/russia-added-to-state-department-list-of-worst-religious-liberty-violators/2021/11/17/e6bf04b4-47f7-11ec-beca-3cc7103bd814_story.html
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3. Pope’s role in Vatican London building deal arises in court, By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press, November 17, 2021, 1:21 PM
Defense lawyers in the Vatican’s fraud and extortion trial accused prosecutors on Wednesday of defying a court order by withholding pieces of evidence — including an alleged interrogation of Pope Francis — as the pontiff’s own role in a flawed London property investment again came before the court.
The president of the Vatican City State tribunal, Giuseppe Pignatone, said he would rule Dec. 1 on a new defense request to throw out the indictment. Pignatone has already nullified several charges against some defendants because of prosecutorial errors.
“It’s clear we need more time before starting. If we manage to start,” Pignatone told the court.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/popes-own-role-in-vatican-london-deal-comes-before-court/2021/11/17/83f86b96-47b0-11ec-beca-3cc7103bd814_story.html
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4. Catholic Progressives And The Culture War, By George Weigel, First Things, November 17, 2021, Opinion
The culture war defining much of contemporary public life throughout the Western world comes in two forms. One group of cultural aggressors, well-entrenched in the Biden administration, insists that human beings are infinitely plastic and malleable, that there are no “givens” in the human condition (including the givens inscribed in our chromosomes), and that acts of will, aided by technology, can, for example, correct “gender assignments” misapplied at birth. Another group of cultural aggressors takes a sharply different tack, insisting that our race, sex, ethnicity, or some combination thereof indelibly marks us as either victims or oppressors.
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I won’t play Trotsky and engage in a dialectical argument to resolve the obvious question: How can we be both utterly undefined and forever defined at the same time? I’ll simply note that both these aggressors are at war with the biblical and Catholic view of the human person. That is the culture war and you can’t escape it, except by willful acts of denial, culpable ignorance, or sheer mendacity.
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In a recent video address to a Spanish conference on Catholics in public life, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, courageously challenged self-styled “social justice” movements based on thoroughly un-Catholic concepts of the human person. He was instantly attacked by the usual progressive trolls of the Catholic Twitterverse and blogosphere, who found the archbishop’s truth-telling to be insensitive culture-warring.
That indictment, like so much other progressive Catholic hysteria in recent months, was risible. It also smacked of the kind of bullying that failed to make Archbishop Gomez cower when he released a thoughtful public letter to President Biden this past January. The archbishop is a quiet man, not especially fond of controversy. But he is also a pastor who believes that there is no escaping the culture war when the aggressors deny essential truths of Catholic faith about our humanity. More power to him.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/11/catholic-progressives-and-the-culture-war
___________________________________________________________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. |
