1. Justices Let Order Stand for LGBT Club at Yeshiva University, By Jess Bravin, The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2022, Pg. A6
The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied Yeshiva University’s emergency request to block New York state court orders requiring it to recognize an LGBT student club, but left room for the Orthodox Jewish institution to object again in future proceedings.
The YU Pride Alliance and several students sued the university in state court last year after administrators refused to recognize the undergraduate group as an official student club.
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The Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote, lifted that stay Wednesday and said in an order that Yeshiva had yet to exhaust its options in the state court system.
“If applicants seek and receive neither expedited review nor interim relief from the New York courts, they may return to this Court,” the order said. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson were in the majority.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-declines-yeshiva-universitys-bid-to-deny-recognition-of-gay-student-group-11663201206?
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2. Pope urged to avoid ‘supermarket of religions’ in Kazakhstan, By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press, September 15, 2022, 6:20 AM
Pope Francis reaffirmed the critical value Thursday of interfaith dialogue to contrast the “folly of war,” even as one of his own bishops warned that Francis’ participation in a big interfaith peace conference in Kazakhstan could imply papal endorsement of a “supermarket of religions.”
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As an auxiliary bishop of Kazakhstan’s capital, [Bishop Athenasius] Schneider had to help play host to Francis during his three-day visit and had a prominent role in the pontiff’s Thursday morning visit to the capital’s cathedral.
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But Schneider has also joined American Cardinal Raymond Burke in criticizing a landmark 2019 document Francis signed with the grand imam of al-Azhar university in Cairo which, among other things, said that all religions are “willed by God.”
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He welcomed the pope’s visit to Kazakhstan, but he warned that Francis’ participation in such a big international interreligious event could call into question what he said was the Catholic Church’s unique role in providing the sole path to salvation.
“The congress as such has a good aim to promote mutual respect and understanding in the world today. But it has also a danger because it could give the impression of a ‘supermarket of religions’ and this is not correct because there is only one true religion, which is the Catholic Church, founded by God himself,” Schneider said.
He urged the Vatican to reconsider participation in such international events in the future and instead focus on building relationships at a more local level.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-urged-to-avoid-supermarket-of-religions-in-kazakhstan/2022/09/15/cab0ce4c-34c3-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html
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3. Kazakhstan interreligious congress adopts declaration calling religious pluralism ‘God’s will’, By Hannah Brockhaus, Catholic News Agency, September 15, 2022, 4:07 AM
The interreligious congress in which Pope Francis participated this week in Kazakhstan adopted a declaration calling religious pluralism an expression “of the wisdom of God’s will in creation.”
The 35-point declaration was “adopted by the majority of the delegates” of the Seventh Congress of the Leaders of World and Traditional Religions Sept. 15 in the capital city of Nur-Sultan.
Pope Francis participated in the opening and closing ceremonies of the interreligious summit during his Sept. 13-15 visit to the Central Asian country.
Almost 100 delegates from around the world, representing the world’s major religions, participated in the three-day conference, including Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Cardinal Miguel Angel Ayuso Guixot, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/252298/kazakhstan-interreligious-congress-adopts-declaration-calling-religious-pluralism-gods-will
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4. GOP Senators Balk at Marriage Bill, By Natalie Andrews, The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2022, Pg. A4
Bipartisan Senate backers of a bill to codify same-sex marriage into law haven’t lined up enough Republicans to pass the measure after weeks of lobbying, potentially delaying Democrats’ plan to hold a vote on the proposal.
Senators from both parties advocating for the legislation had expected to turn to the bill on Thursday, with the first procedural vote as soon as next week after some changes were made to the text. But the legislation needs 60 votes to advance under Senate rules, and there aren’t 10 Republicans on board to join with all 50 members of the Democratic caucus, according to aides.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-republicans-divided-on-same-sex-marriage-bill-11663158385?
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5. Judge temporarily blocks Ohio law banning most abortions, By Julie Carr Smyth, Associated Press, September 14, 2022
A judge temporarily blocked Ohio’s ban on virtually all abortions Wednesday, again pausing a law that took effect after federal abortion protections were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in June.
The decision means abortions through 20 weeks’ gestation can continue for now, in keeping with state law in place before the ban.
Hamilton County Judge Christian Jenkins’ decision to grant a 14-day restraining order against the law came as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Ohio on behalf of abortion providers in the state. The clinics argue the law violates protections in the state Constitution guaranteeing individual liberty and equal protection. The suit also says the law is unconstitutionally vague.
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-health-ohio-mike-dewine-government-and-politics-43558a59477f0260f7eec6db33fd30f4
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6. Can Exceptions to a Ban on Abortion Work?, By Ross Douthat, The New York Times, September 15, 2022, Pg. A24, Opinion
In terms of what conflicted Americans might fear most from an abortion ban, the most immediately potent argument is the first one, which focuses on pregnancies gone so terribly wrong that the mother’s life can only be saved at the expense of the unborn child.
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But just having a debate over the scope of a life-of-the-mother exception inevitably redounds to the pro-choice side’s benefit, because it focuses public attention on a fraught gray area, a zone of ambiguity in which even abortion opponents won’t all agree with one another about what pro-life principle requires.
That ambiguity takes two forms. There’s the inherent uncertainty of situations that might be life-threatening or physically devastating, where the evidence is provisional and there’s no simple medical answer. There’s also the ambiguity about whether a particular means of ending a dangerous pregnancy satisfies anti-abortion commitments.
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In the two kinds of gray-area cases, two pro-life doctors might disagree about the gravity of the pregnant woman’s situation, or two pro-life moral theorists might disagree about the licit means of ending the pregnancy. Lawmakers trying to devise exceptions thus have to choose between a system that errs entirely on the side of the unborn life and a system that follows the familiar pro-choice line about leaving certain difficult decisions to “the woman and her doctor.” And when abortion opponents argue that current pro-life laws allow doctors considerable latitude, they are effectively taking the second option, which concedes something to the pro-choice side’s philosophy.
The question is what, if anything, that concession means for the wider abortion debate. One argument would be that it has implications well beyond medical exceptions: that once you’ve conceded gray areas in some cases, once you’ve deferred to women and doctors in the hardest situations, you don’t have a reasonable way to draw a line and forbid abortion anywhere.
But I don’t think this argument makes sense.
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[T]he fact that even most liberals seem to accept that balance with end-of-life issues implies that the same balance could exist with abortion — or at least that the existence of medical emergencies, and the legal gray areas they create, doesn’t generalize in any way to a near-universal right to take an unborn life.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/opinion/abortion-roe-exceptions.html
__________________________________________________________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. |
