1. Abortion rights advocates eye ballot measures for 2024, By Rachel Roubein, The Washington Post, October 11, 2022, 6:00 AM
Abortion rights advocates are exploring ballot measures to enshrine access to the procedure into state constitutions in 2024, including in a handful of Republican-led states with restrictions on the books.
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While in the early stages, discussions around whether to pursue an abortion rights ballot measure are occurring in states including Ohio, Florida, Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado and Missouri, according to interviews with over a dozen advocates, liberal groups and others, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations.
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Some abortion rights advocates warn the movement should proceed carefully, wary of pouring millions of dollars into a ballot measure campaign only to be defeated. Such endeavors can take years to plan and are resource intensive, involving copious cash, research and time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/11/abortion-rights-advocates-eye-ballot-measures-2024/
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2. Pope marks 60th anniversary of Second Vatican Council, By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press, October 11, 2022, 8:39 AM
Pope Francis is commemorating the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, the landmark meetings that brought the 2,000-year-old Catholic Church into the modern era, amid continued disagreements about what the council taught that divides the faithful today.
Francis is celebrating a Mass on Tuesday in honor of St. John XXIII, who convened the council and presided over its opening session. Tuesday’s commemoration opens with a reading of John’s inaugural speech and ends with a re-enactment of the candlelight procession that lit up St. Peter’s Square on the night of Oct. 11, 1962.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-marks-60th-anniversary-of-second-vatican-council/2022/10/11/9f8507f0-4937-11ed-8153-96ee97b218d2_story.html
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3. Girls as . . . Not Necessarily Woke, By Bruce Gilley, The Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2022, Pg. A17, Opinion
I am blessed to be the father of a beautiful young woman who just began university after graduating from St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic school in Portland, Ore.
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Like all Catholic schools, St. Mary’s was pressured during the past decade to get woke with equity teams, affinity groups, Black Lives Matter movements, Native American land acknowledgments, transgender affirmations, climate-change hysteria and all the rest. I found myself counting the days until my daughter was out.
Like all prudent parents, I kept my peace for the most part. But after my daughter graduated, I had an opportunity to reflect on the school’s direction when I received the first alumni donor appeal. The school president defined St. Mary’s mission as preparing girls “to bridge equity gaps, explore careers in STEM, and advocate for change in every element in society.”
Every element in society? This appeal for girls to become mindless agitators without any contemplation of the need, direction and consequences of change should scare the living daylights out of any parent.
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To me, the list looked rather circumscribed. I turned the letter over and scribbled down a dozen or so roles that were missing: loving mother, faithful witness of Christ, steward of a free society, corporate executive, patriot, advocate for parental rights, soldier, caregiver, civil servant and so on. In other words, I noted things girls are discouraged from being by today’s liberal mainstream.
I worry that my daughter will feel like a failure if she doesn’t appear in alumni updates for working on intersectional justice in marginalized communities. I worry that a whole generation of girls is being sent screaming into the culture wars by the social anxieties of its parents.
Mr. Gilley is a professor at Portland State University and a member of the board of the National Association of Scholars.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/girls-catholic-school-woke-portland-social-justice-educational-mission-feminism-career-fundraising-catholicism-christianity-11665428907
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4. Spread of Catholic hospitals limits reproductive care across the U.S., Religious doctrine restricts access to abortion and birth control and limits treatment options for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, By Frances Stead Sellers and Meena Venkataramanan, The Washington Post, October 10, 2022, 6:00 AM
The Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion is revealing the growing influence of Catholic health systems and their restrictions on reproductive services including birth control and abortion — even in the diminishing number of states where the procedure remains legal.
Catholic systems now control about 1 in 7 U.S. hospital beds, requiring religious doctrine to guide treatment, often to the surprise of patients. Their ascendancy has broad implications for the evolving national battle over reproductive rights beyond abortion, as bans against it take hold in more than a dozen Republican-led states.
The Catholic health-care facilities follow directives from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that prohibit treatment it deems “immoral”: sterilization including vasectomies, postpartum tubal ligations and contraception, as well as abortion. Those policies can limit treatment options for obstetric care during miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, particularly in the presence of a fetal heartbeat.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/10/abortion-catholic-hospitals-birth-control/
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5. Justice Delayed for Father MacRae, By Harvey Silverglate, The Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2022, Pg. A15, Opinion
Father Gordon MacRae has been in prison since 1994, when a New Hampshire jury convicted him of sexual assault and he was sentenced to 33½ to 67 years. The charges against him were “built by a determined sex-abuse investigator and an atmosphere in which accusation was, in effect, all the proof required to bring a guilty verdict,” the Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in 2013. Father MacRae has maintained his innocence all along.
A new development will soon provide Granite State courts an opportunity to reconsider Father MacRae’s conviction. The state attorney general has published a so-called Laurie List of law-enforcement officers with credibility problems.
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The list initially included Detective James F. McLaughlin of the Keene Police Department, who was the lead investigator in the MacRae case. He made the list for alleged “falsification of records” in an unrelated case in 1985. Detective McLaughlin successfully petitioned to have his name removed from the list, but the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism sued to learn who had been removed. (Detective McLaughlin has declined to respond to local press requests for comment on the list.)
Father MacRae plans to ask a court to throw out his conviction, arguing that Thomas Grover, his only accuser at trial, testified falsely at Detective McLaughlin’s behest. As Ms. Rabinowitz has documented, Detective McLaughlin’s own reports showed that he attempted a sting by writing a letter to Father MacRae and forging the signature of Jon Grover, the accuser’s brother.
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Ms. Rabinowitz wrote a series of stories about such cases beginning in the late 1980s. False and implausible accusations of child sexual abuse led to conviction and imprisonment of innocent people from New York and Florida to Washington state.
All this happened because “believe the children” became a nationwide mantra. Society has a duty to protect young children—but also to assess accusations rationally and fairly, especially when they’re improbable, spectacular and horrifying. Journalists, too, must maintain a level of skepticism when cases as improbable as these arise. Any reporter who covers the legal system should have recognized the high probability that these accusations were false.
Most of the defendants in these cases were ultimately released, but their lives had been ruined. The recent development in Father MacRae’s case offers hope of another such bittersweet vindication.
Mr. Silverglate is a Boston-based criminal-defense and civil-liberties lawyer.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-delayed-for-father-macrae-detective-mclaughlin-new-hampshire-laurie-list-credibility-evidence-clergy-11665321991
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6. New York judge paves way for recognition of ‘multi-person relationships’, By Catholic News Agency, October 10, 2022, 4:25 PM
A New York judge opened the door to legal recognition of multi-partner relationships while ruling in a housing court case.
In a ruling on a dispute over a rent-stabilized apartment, Judge Karen May Bacdayan of the Civil Court of the City of New York opined that the legal protection of same-sex relationships shouldn’t be limited to two people.
The case centers on three men: Scott Anderson, who died in 2021; Markyus O’Neill, who lived with Anderson in the now-deceased’s apartment; and Anderson’s life partner Robert Romano, who lived at a different location.
After Anderson’s death, O’Neill was forced to give up the rent-controlled apartment because, according to the landlord, he was “nothing more than a roommate.” The late Anderson’s “life partner of 25 years” was Romano, the petitioner stated.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/252514/new-york-judge-paves-way-recognition-multi-person-relationships
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7. Pope slams treatment of migrants as 2 Italians become saints, By Colleen Barry and Luigi Navarra, Associated Press, October 9, 2022, 9:48 AM
Pope Francis on Sunday denounced Europe’s indifference toward migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea as he elevated to sainthood an Italian bishop and Italian-born missionary whose work and life paths illustrated the difficulties faced by 19th Century Italian emigrants.
Francis departed from prepared remarks to slam Europe’s treatment of migrants as “disgusting, sinful and criminal.” He noted that people from outside the continent are often left to die during perilous sea crossings or pushed back to Libya, where they wind up in camps he referred to as “lager,” the German word referring to Nazi concentration camps.
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“ The exclusion of migrants is scandalous,’’ Francis said, generating applause from the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the canonizations of Don Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, an Italian bishop who founded an order to help Italian emigrants in 1887, and Artedime Zatti, an Italian who emigrated in 1897 to Argentina and dedicated his life as a lay-worker there to helping the sick.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-slams-treatment-of-migrants-as-2-italians-become-saints/2022/10/09/bd77d5e6-47cd-11ed-8153-96ee97b218d2_story.html
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8. Judge blocks restrictive Ohio abortion law as suit proceeds, By Julie Carr Smyth, Associated Press, October 7, 2022, 5:52 PM
An Ohio law banning virtually all abortions will remain blocked while a state constitutional challenge proceeds, a judge said Friday in a ruling that will allow pregnancy terminations through 20 weeks’ gestation to continue for now.
Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Christian Jenkins issued the preliminary injunction from the bench after a daylong hearing where courthouse guards screened spectators and one abortion provider testified to wearing a Kevlar vest over fears for her safety.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/judge-to-decide-next-steps-on-ohio-heartbeat-abortion-ban/2022/10/07/4d2b1e80-4631-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html
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9. Vanderbilt pauses gender surgeries on minors after backlash, By Edie Heipel, Catholic News Agency, October 7, 2022, 5:56 PM
Vanderbilt University Medical Hospital has paused irreversible gender surgeries on children following Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s calls for investigation after pressure from social media activists.
The decision was made public Friday afternoon, announced in a letter written by the university medical center’s deputy CEO, C. Wright Pinson.
“You have asked that VUMC halt permanent gender affirmation surgeries being performed on minors,” Pinson wrote Oct. 7.
The letter went on to say that due to recently updated guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the medical center would be conducting an internal clinical review on the program.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/252504/vanderbilt-pauses-gender-surgeries-on-minors-after-backlash
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10. Appeals court ruling allows Arizona abortions to restart, By Bob Christie, Associated Press, October 7, 2022
Abortions can take place again in Arizona, at least for now, after an appeals court on Friday blocked enforcement of a pre-statehood law that almost entirely criminalized the procedure.
The three-judge panel of the Arizona Court of Appeals agreed with Planned Parenthood that a judge should not have lifted the decades-old order that prevented the older law from being imposed.
The brief order written by Presiding Judge Peter J. Eckerstrom said Planned Parenthood and its Arizona affiliate had shown they are likely to prevail on an appeal of a decision by the judge in Tucson to allow enforcement of the old law.
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-us-supreme-court-health-planned-parenthood-business-8cedb01d5ce493968ef75d731f1084cd
__________________________________________________________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. |
