Salvadoran bishops visit US to ask that migrant protections be restored

April 13, 2018 CNA Daily News News Briefs 0 Print

Washington D.C., Apr 13, 2018 / 04:14 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A group of prominent Church officials from El Salvador visited the United States this week to urge a reconsideration of recent changes to immigration policy.

In January 2018, the Department of Homeland Security terminated the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that was granted to El Salvador in 2001, following a massive earthquake in the country. TPS is granted for countries who are experiencing an ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster, or “other extraordinary and temporary conditions that prevent people from safely returning home to the country.”

Citizens of countries with TPS are generally shielded from being deported if they are found to be in the country illegally. The Trump administration has also recently terminated TPS for Haiti, Sudan, and Nicaragua.

If nothing changes prior to Sept. 9, 2019, about 200,000 Salvadorans will have to leave the United States, presumably to return to El Salvador. In addition to the Salvadorans protected under TPS, there are an estimated 270,000 U.S. citizen children who have been born to these people over the last decade and a half. The bishops were concerned that the termination of TPS would force these families of mixed immigration status to be torn in half.

The forced return of 200,000 people to El Salvador is not an acceptable option, according to many Church officials. Cardinal José Gregorio Rosa Chavez, auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, joined by Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas of San Salvador, Bishop Elías Samuel Bolaños Avelar of Zacatecoluca, Bishop William Ernesto Iraheta Rivera of Santiago de Maria, and Bishop Mario Doronsville-Rodriguez, auxiliary bishop of Washington, spoke at a roundtable discussion hosted by the USCCB and Catholic Relief Services.

The situation in El Salvador is dangerous due to gang violence and severe poverty, said the bishops. This makes it unsafe for people to live in the country, and there are very few employment opportunities. The influx of people returning to El Salvador from the United States may overwhelm the already-fragile economy, they warned. Additionally, many Salvadorans living in the United States send remittances to El Salvador, which provides a boost to their economy.

If TPS is revoked, these payments would end and would further damage the economy in the country.

Gang violence has gotten to the point where the Archbishop Escobar issued a pastoral letter – his first – on the issue in 2016. The bishops spoke about their hope for the canonization of Blessed Oscar Romero, who would be the country’s first recognized saint. Romero was assassinated in 1980.

“The lack of employment opportunities, the fact that gangs have infiltrated every part of life, including schools, in El Salvador, make it almost impossible for a basic life,” explained Jill Marie Gerschutz-Bell, a senior legislative specialist at Catholic Relief Services.

“For these people, they have but few options than to come to the United States.”

Besides the requests for changes to TPS, the bishops and CRS also hoped that Congress would move forward on codifying part or all of DACA into law, plus create a path to citizenship for people who are living in the United States illegally.

The roundtable was part of a larger visit by the Salvadoran clergy. From April 9-14, the bishops were in the Washington, DC area to meet with members of Congress and to visit with Salvadorans living in the area. Alexandria, Va., which is located just outside of Washington, is home to one of the largest concentrations of Salvadoran immigrants.

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Alabama plans chemical castration for pedophiles seeking parole. Ethicists raise concerns

June 7, 2019 CNA Daily News 3

Montgomery, Ala., Jun 7, 2019 / 07:00 pm (CNA).- A Catholic ethicist raised concerns over a bill that would mandate “chemical castration” as a condition of parole for incarcerated pedophiles. The issue is at the crux of an Alabama bill that has passed the state’s legislature and now is awaiting the governor’s signature.

The bill, HB379, would mandate so-called “chemical castration” as a condition for granting parole to convicted sex offenders who offended against children 13 years of age or younger. The treatment would be provided and supervised by the Department of Public Health, and would be paid for by the parolees, unless they could demonstrate the inability to pay, the bill states.

The bill defines the chemical castration treatment as: “The receiving of medication, including, but not limited to, medroxyprogesterone acetate treatment or its chemical equivalent, that, among other things, reduces, inhibits, or blocks the production of testosterone, hormones, or other chemicals in a person’s body.” Medical experts have raised multiple concerns about the bill including the fact that a judge, rather than a doctor, would inform parolees about the possible and serious side-effects of the treatment, according to the Washington Post.

In comments to CNA, Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, an ethicist with The National Catholic Bioethics Center, said that blanket mandates of medical interventions “can raise more problems” than they solve.”

Pacholczyk said a case-by-case approach would be more appropriate.

“If testosterone-reducing agents are to be employed in a sensible fashion, it should be on a case-by-case, medically-indicated (and rehabilitation-oriented) basis, rather than as a universal requirement for every situation of establishing parole for convicted pedophiles,” Pacholczyk said in email comments.

A proponent of the bill responded to questions about whether the bill is inhumane, stating that he believes the “punishment should fit the crime.”

Rep. Steve Hurst, who introduced the bill, told local media that convicted pedophiles “have marked this child for life and the punishment should fit the crime.”

“I had people call me in the past when I introduced it and said, ‘Don’t you think this is inhumane?'” Hurst told CBS affiliate WIAT-TV.

“I asked them what’s more inhumane than when you take a little infant child, and you sexually molest that infant child when the child cannot defend themselves or get away, and they have to go through all the things they have to go through. If you want to talk about inhumane, that’s inhumane.”

According to Catholic ethical principles, punitive measures should always be ordered toward “rehabilitation and repentance, not towards the inflicting of unreasonable or disproportionate harm upon an individual who has committed an offense,” Pacholczyk added. For example, he said, the Catholic Church would not condone chopping off the hands of a repeatedly-offending thief.

Likewise, “chemically castrating” a person so as to “actively strip away any vestige of an offender’s personal sexuality and render him sterile, androgynous, and/or inert, this could raise legitimate ethical concerns about violating that person’s bodily and personal integrity,” he said.

“This would be a moral concern particularly if other means of treating these individuals were not exhaustively pursued, such as incarceration, directed treatments and therapies, counseling, spiritual support, etc.,” he added.

In some cases, the priest noted, it could be morally and ethically licit for a sex offender to take drugs that would lower their testosterone levels and overall libido “to more manageable levels” if it were found to be medically appropriate for that specific person, and if it were part of a broader therapetic regimen involving “extensive psychological and other supportive counseling aimed at helping them order their sexual impulses so as not to re-offend,” he said.

In those particular cases, the term “chemical castration” may be an improper term, Pacholczyk noted, if the goal is the overall healing and restoration of normal, baseline hormone levels in a person.

[…]