US bishops: Fighting racism is a long-term battle – but a critical one

St. Joseph Cathedral, Buffalo diocese / CiEll/Shutterstock

Washington D.C., Jun 7, 2021 / 17:01 pm (CNA).
The Diocese of Buffalo has placed three diocesan priests on administrative leave, following a new abuse accusation that dates back to the 1… […]

Washington D.C., Apr 13, 2018 / 04:38 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholic leaders have said that the dramatic decrease in the number of Syrian refugees accepted by the United States is of great humanitarian concern.

While the United States government is in the midst of condemning and investigating recent suspected chemical warfare attacks reportedly carried out by the Syrian government, the number of Syrian refugees accepted by the United States has declined dramatically this year.

According to the State Department, the United States has accepted only 11 Syrian refugees so far this year, compared with 790 over the same period in 2016.

More than 10 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes over the course of a civil war that has been ongoing for the past seven years. Many of these refugees have overwhelmingly flooded neighboring countries such as Jordan and Lebanon.

“The precipitous decline in the number of Syrians the United States is resettling is extremely concerning,” Bill O’Keefe, vice president for government relations and advocacy for Catholic Relief Services, told CNA.

“…millions of Syrians remain displaced, caught in a web of violence and proxy wars,” he added. “The United States has traditionally taken the most vulnerable refugees, including Syrians, who have suffered terrible trauma or would be unable to go home. These refugees are the neighbors Jesus told us to love in the Gospel. We can safely welcome thousands of these women, men, and children to our country.”

In 2016, the United States resettled more than 15,000 Syrian refugees, and just over 3,000 in 2017. If the current rate is maintained, fewer than 50 Syrian refugees will be resettled in the United States in 2018.

For 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump set the total number of refugees that would be accepted by the United States at 45,000, and travel bans and other obstacles have slowed immigration even further.

Edward Clancy, director of outreach for Aid to the Church in Need, USA, told CNA that U.S. immigration policies have also been particularly unfair to Christian refugees in previous years.

“The number of Christian refugees has been very low compared to their representation in the population, so we’re speaking out on behalf of Christians with no voice in the Middle East…we’ve made it part of our mandate to support the Christian community in the Middle East in these areas of refugees, food shelter, pastoral care, whatever is needed,” Clancy told CNA.

Clancy noted that many churches in the United States have been very generous at the local level in supporting and welcoming new refugees, but he urged Catholics and Christians to get in touch with their representatives to voice their concerns about policies affecting Syrian and other refugees.

“If they feel that something needs to be done, then they should contact their congressman or senator to say that we have to make sure that these people have every opportunity for life, because that’s what it comes down to,” Clancy said.

“They’re leaving…mainly just to stay alive. Almost all of them want to stay home, they want to stay where they come from, they don’t want to move, they’re being forced to do so, so we should be understanding of that,” he said.

Bill Canny, executive director for Migration and Refugee Services for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), told CNA that the number of refugees the United States was accepting from Syria in past years was already small in comparison to the millions who were forced to flee their homes.

The U.S. Bishops had advocated for an annual refugee cap of at least 75,000 for the United States for 2018, before the Trump administration announced it would be 45,000, Canny added.

“We were already only able to help a few, and not being able to do that is very disconcerting,” Canny told CNA.

The USCCB’s Migration and Refugee Service is one of nine national resettlement programs, working with the Catholic Charities network throughout the country to help resettle refugees, including Syrians. Most refugees arrive in the United States simply wanting a dignified life and are eager to be contributing citizens, Canny noted.

“They want good education for their children, they jump on work opportunities, I think that in a matter of a few months at least 75 percent of refugees get a job and start working,” he said. “These are people who have suffered badly, languishing in either refugee camps or urban slums oftentimes, who deserve another chance.”

He added that refugees who enter the United States were already subjected to the strictest vetting, and that additional security measures were not necessary.

“While we respect safety concerns and we know it’s the government’s right to keep us safe, we don’t think the refugee program is an avenue of danger to our citizens, due to the extensive security checks that have been done for a number of years,” Canny said.

Furthermore, the issue of refugee resettlement should be of particular concern to Christians because the Gospel compels them to care for the poor and the needy, Canny noted.

“Certainly it’s a core responsibility of our faith, from exhortations in the Old Testament to welcome the stranger, to make sure that one cares for newcomers, and of course from the New Testament and the teachings of Christ,” he said. “Matthew 25 compels us to help the neediest, and certainly refugees are really the neediest.”

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Washington D.C., Mar 29, 2017 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Supreme Court case about pension plans of religious hospitals could decide something much bigger – whether religious groups are legally part of churches.

“There’s really a big problem if you decide ‘church’ is sort of narrowly ‘worship’,” said Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

“That’s really something that a church should be deciding, whether they just worship or whether they go out and serve other people outside of the four walls of the sanctuary,” Rassbach told CNA.

The Supreme Court on Monday heard oral arguments in Advocate Health Care Network v. Stapleton, a consolidation of three cases involving the pension plans of religious hospitals like Advocate and St. Peter’s HealthCare System in New Jersey.

The employers are looking to move the plans, regulated like other plans of for-profit corporations, into a religious category exempt from some of those regulations.

The law in question, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, regulates pension plans of for-profit corporations, requiring the employers to hold an additional amount of funds in reserve. Setting up these reserves could be cost-prohibitive especially for community hospitals, some of whom “are not going to be able to do that,” Rassbach said.

“If Advocate and hundreds of other religious hospitals around the country were forced to follow for-profit rules, money currently used to serve the poor and inner city communities would be lost and many would be forced to shut down,” the Becket Fund argued.

Congress has recognized a religious exemption for pension plans of churches, and entities like St. Peter’s Hospital in New Jersey applied for this exemption after operating their pension plans according to the federal regulations for years. The plaintiffs bringing the suit, employees of the health care networks, claim their pension plan agreements are being unfairly altered.

The religious exemption applies to plans “established” and “maintained” by churches. In the case of St. Peter’s HealthCare, decided by the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the court ruled that since the Catholic Church (through a diocese or parish) did not “establish” the pension plans, they were not eligible for the ERISA religious exemption, even if a “church agency” like a religious order set up the plan.

St. Peter’s is a non-profit health care system sponsored by the Diocese of Metuchen. The court conceded that it has Catholic ties, like daily Mass offered at the hospital, Catholic devotionals present there, and many board members who are appointed by the local bishop.

“But can a church agency, in addition to maintaining an exempt church plan, also establish such a plan? The District Court concluded that it cannot. We agree,” the appeals court decided.

It also conceded that for years, plans set up by “church agencies” were recognized by the courts as religiously exempt: “In the decades following the current church plan definition’s enactment in 1980, various courts have assumed that entities that are not themselves churches, but have sufficiently strong ties to churches, can establish exempt church plans.”

“However,” the court added, “a new wave of litigation, of which this case is a part, has sprung up in the past few years and has presented an argument not previously considered by courts – that the actual words of the church plan definition preclude this result.” New lawsuits are shedding light on the “plain text” of ERISA that churches and only churches can set up pension plans that meet the religious exemption, the court said.

There are around 100 similar lawsuits involving religious hospitals – many of which are Catholic, Rassbach noted. New litigation is “taking from the poor to give to the rich class-action lawyers,” he argued.

Not only did the courts recognize that these religious entities were eligible for the pension exemption, but the IRS did as well, he maintained.

This question was raised in Monday’s oral arguments, where Justice Stephen Breyer pressed James Feldman, representing the respondents suing the health care networks, on whether orders like the Little Sisters of the Poor should be recognized as part of churches.

Justice Breyer asked “if it’s a legitimate organization like, let’s say the Little Sisters of the Poor, really affiliated with the church,” if they would be recognized as part of a church.

The U.S. bishops’ conference and religious freedom legal groups like the Becket Fund and Alliance Defending Freedom have sided with the health care networks in the case, saying that it is a religious freedom issue.

In their amicus brief siding with the St. Peter’s HealthCare and Dignity Health, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops argued that while Catholic health care providers may not be officially part of a church or parish structure, their plans should meet the religious exemptions under ERISA.

“Indeed, charity has always been a core component of the Catholic Church’s activities, ‘as essential to her as the ministry of the sacraments and preaching of the Gospel’,” the USCCB said, quoting Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Deus Caritas Est.”

This charity is lived out “through myriad Catholic ministries” like health care providers, they added, which should be treated as part of the Church.

And these charities may or may not be directly affiliated with Catholic dioceses and parishes or with the Holy See, they continued, “yet, as a matter of Catholic theology, the various ministries that the Church recognizes as Catholic ministries are all part of the Church” even though “they may be (and often are) civilly, structurally, and financially independent entities.”

These employers must be given a religious exemption, the bishops’ conference added, saying that “long before” the ERISA regulations were enacted for pension plans, “Catholic charitable organizations provided their workers with generous benefits.”

“In recognition of that reality (which is not unique to the Catholic Church), and to avoid imposing potentially crushing new obligations on such organizations, Congress has long exempted the benefit plans of church-affiliated organizations from the sometimes burdensome requirements of ERISA,” they continued.

And the Court must recognize this, they concluded, or this could bring about more problems in determining which religious groups are treated as part of a church.

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