Mexico City, Mexico, Jul 2, 2018 / 12:27 pm (ACI Prensa).- The bishops of Mexico congratulated Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador on his election as the next president of the country, stressing the need to “collaborate in a positive way with our … […]
Canberra, Australia, Jul 2, 2018 / 11:32 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Sunday Australia launched a program to compensate the victims of institutional child sex abuse.
“The development of the National Redress Scheme was one of the key recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse and was supported by the Catholic Church in Australia (which was the first non-government entity to join the scheme) and many survivor groups,” read a statement from the Archdiocese of Sydney.
The scheme runs ten years, from July 1, 2018 until June 30, 2027.
The Australian bishops announced May 30 they would be joining the plan.
“Survivors deserve justice and healing and many have bravely come forward to tell their stories,” said Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane.
Sister Ruth Durick, OSU, president of Catholic Religious Australia, said that while monetary restitution is not enough to take away survivors’ pain, but they hope it will provide “practical assistance on the journey towards recovery from abuse.”
She also stressed a commitment “to providing redress to survivors who were abused within the Catholic Church.”
The National Redress Scheme will provide an estimated AUD 4 billion ($2.9 billion) to approximately 60,000 Australians. Compensation per victim has been capped at AUD 150,000 ($110,000), and average payments are expected to be about AUD 67,000 ($49,000).
Victims who apply for compensation under the plan waive their right to sue.
Australian Social Services Minister Dan Tehan said the Catholic Church’s participation in the plan is “incredibly significant” and demonstrates it is “prepared to take responsibility and it shows they want to offer redress to those survivors.”
Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney said that in joining the redress scheme, the Church expects “to be paying out for survivors for many years to come” and the bishops “stand ready to do that. We are going to back that [with] our insurance and our assets,” reports ABC News.
“We are determined to bring justice and full redress, healing if we can, to the victims of this terrible crime.”
A report from the Australian Royal Commission released Dec. 15, 2017, found serious failings in the protection of children from abuse in the Catholic Church and other major secular and religious institutions.
Vatican City, Jul 2, 2018 / 11:24 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A young Nigerian woman who escaped from forced prostitution in Italy was honored by the U.S. State Department last week as a 2018 Trafficking in Persons Hero.
Blessing Okoedion “is an example that through perseverance and support, trafficking victims can overcome, thrive, and help others to do so as well,” said U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Callista Gingrich in a June 30 statement.
“She is a survivor, an activist, an author, and a fierce protector of victims suffering under the evil of human trafficking. She has helped a multitude of women escape horror. Her advocacy on their behalf has quite literally saved lives.”
Every year, alongside the release of its report on global human trafficking, the U.S. State Department honors individuals who work to fight trafficking, though raising awareness, working with victims, or pushing for tougher laws against perpetrators.
Okoedion, originally from Nigeria, was one of 10 Trafficking in Persons Heroes honored this year. She was recognized at a June 28 ceremony with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and presidential advisor Ivanka Trump.
Shortly after graduating from college with a degree in computer science, Okoedion was contacted by a recruiter through her local church in Nigeria. She was offered a job in a tech store in Spain.
She accepted the offer, but when she arrived in Spain, she discovered it was a fraudulent promise by traffickers, who forced her into prostitution in Naples, Italy. She eventually escaped to a shelter run by Ursuline nuns, who cared for her and offered her help.
Today, Okoedion works to fight modern slavery. According to the U.S. State Department, “Okoedion plays an integral role in pushing Italian authorities to ensure that survivors, especially Nigerian women and girls, receive the services they deserve during their healing process and that law enforcement and service providers engage with survivors in an increasingly culturally informed, victim-centered manner.”
She also works with a local shelter run by Ursuline sisters, where she acts as cultural mediator for trafficking victims, and travels throughout Nigeria to educate women and girls about how to detect trafficking schemes.
In a book published last year – entitled Il Coraggio della Libertà or The Courage of Freedom – she tells her story and calls for greater awareness surrounding the modern plague of trafficking.
In her statement, Ambassador Gingrich stressed that “human trafficking is a global crisis,” with more than 25 million victims worldwide, “often lured with false promises by people they trust…and forced into prostitution, domestic servitude, or other forms of modern slavery.”
“The path to ending human trafficking demands action, but also cooperation. No single government or individual can do it alone,” she said. “Governments, faith-based organizations, civil society, and survivors must work together.”
Gingrich said the fight against modern-day slavery is a “top priority” for the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See.
“We have a great ally in Pope Francis who has called for a victim-centered approach to human trafficking,” she said, also noting that U.S. President Donald Trump has promised to use the “full force and weight” of government to fight trafficking.
In March, Okoedion spoke to Pope Francis at the start of the pre-synod youth meeting in Rome. Okoedion was one of five young people who presented questions to the pope.
She told the pope that while she was being trafficked, many of the men soliciting prostitutes were Catholic and asked about how to raise awareness of the problem and fight the “sick” mentality that exploits women.
In his response, the pope called human trafficking “a sickness of mentality, it’s a sickness of social action, it’s a crime against humanity.”
He asked forgiveness “for all the Catholics who commit this criminal act” and asked young people in particular to take a stand against it, saying, “This is one of the battles that I ask you young people to do, for the dignity of women.”
Bari, Italy, Jul 2, 2018 / 09:48 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis’ visit to Bari this Saturday to pray for peace in the Middle East will have a strong ecumenical focus, the city’s archbishop has said.
Taking place July 7, the day of prayer and reflection will include leaders of Catholic and Orthodox Churches in the Middle East, and will have an “authentically ecumenical breath,” Archbishop Francesco Cacucci of Bari-Bitonto told Vatican News.
He said the day’s events will “combine the ecumenical vision of the Christian Churches and [give] particular attention to the Middle East, to invoke peace, but also to be close to our Christian brothers, who live in suffering.”
Pope Francis announced April 25 he would hold the day primarily for “prayer and reflection on the dramatic situation of the Middle East which afflicts so many brothers and sisters in the faith.”
Cardinal Louis Raphael I Sako, the Chaldean Patriarch of Babylon, has confirmed he will be in attendance, as will Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, who leads the Eastern Orthodox Churches. Which other patriarchs will attend has not yet been confirmed.
During his Angelus address July 1, Pope Francis said he and the other Christian leaders in Bari “will implore with one voice: ‘Peace be upon you,’” as it says in Psalm 122. “I ask everyone to accompany with prayer this pilgrimage of peace and unity,” he said.
Bari is often called the “porta d’Oriente” or the “Eastern Gate” because of its connection to both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox through the relics of St. Nicholas, venerated by members of both Churches.
Historically, many Eastern Churches have been present in the city, Archbishop Cacucci said, but an ecumenical culture was imprinted upon it most strongly after the Second Vatican Council, when the archbishop of the time opened the crypt of the Basilica of St. Nicholas to the Orthodox by creating a small chapel dedicated to them.
“It was the first such act in the world,” he said. “And so, the journey continued through a constant dialogue with the other Christian confessions but, above all, with the Eastern world, that continually comes here to St. Nicholas to venerate the relics of the thaumaturge [wonder-worker].”
He said both the Russian Orthodox and other Eastern Christian Churches are present in Bari, as well as
Anglican and evangelical ecclesial communities.
All of these will be present for and participate in the pope’s visit July 7. A bishop for 31 years, Cacucci said he has “always lived in the light of St. Nicholas, who is the saint of unity.”
“The choice of Bari [to host the meeting] was a decision of the pope that I received with gratitude and with anticipation,” he said.
The main program for July 7 will begin at the Basilica of St. Nicholas, where Francis will greet the patriarchs and a local community of Dominican friars.
From there, the pope and patriarchs will go down into the basilica’s crypt to venerate a relic of St. Nicholas and to light a lamp, the flame representing unity.
The main prayer service will take place at Bari’s beachfront. Afterward, Francis and the patriarchs will return to the basilica for a private dialogue and lunch. The trip will conclude around 4:00 p.m.
Washington D.C., Jul 1, 2018 / 04:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- When Maggie* was in high school, she stayed after class to talk to ask a teacher what to do about a very personal concern she felt her physician was not taking seriously.
What she learned led to the discovery of a brain tumor, and treatment for the growth, which had been affecting the teen for years. The tools she needed to find and treat this growth came from an awareness of her fertility and natural cycles.
“It wasn’t so much that I was trying to avoid pregnancy or get pregnant – it’s that there was something legitimately wrong with my body,” Maggie told CNA.
By the time she was in her late teens, Maggie had noticed that her cycles had never regulated, and had no idea what that meant except that it wasn’t normal. While for the first years after a young woman begins to menstruate her cycles are of varying length and heaviness, they typically regulate within a few years. But several years after her own cycles began, Maggie was concerned that they never had settled into a normal pattern – in fact, she sometimes would have as few as one cycle a year. In addition, she also faced rounds of headaches.
One day, Maggie approached her college-level biology teacher, who also happened to be a practicing Catholic, looking for an explanation for her concerns and asking what to do. The teacher told her to ask her pediatrician, but also put her in touch with her church’s fertility instructor to see what could be done.
Maggie said her pediatrician immediately assumed that she was pregnant: an impossibility, because she was not sexually active. When the pregnancy tests came back negative, the doctor responded, “‘I don’t know what your problem is’ and brushed me off,” she recalled.
Meanwhile, the local parish’s natural family planning (NFP) instructor saw the teen’s distress and put her in touch with a Catholic fertility physician who could teach Maggie how to observe and chart the signs of her fertility.
Understanding Fertility
“A sign of health in a woman is a normal, regular cycle,” Dr. Lorna Cvetkovich, a gynecologist and obstetrician at Tepeyac Family Center in Fairfax, Va., explains. “We know what a normal cycle looks like,” she continued, “so at any time the parameters fall outside of those, then that’s a clue that maybe they’re not ovulating, they may have a luteal phase defect, they may have fibroids. It can show you all sorts of things.”
For women whose cycles fall within a normal range, normal bodily processes present themselves in a predictable pattern.
In the first part of a woman’s cycle, called the follicular phase, hormonal signals from the pituitary gland trigger the follicles (egg-containing structures within the ovaries) to prepare an egg for ovulation and to secrete estrogen into the woman’s body. This rise in estrogen levels triggers changes in the kind of fluid the cervix secretes, as well as thickening the uterine lining, making them more able to support the conception process.
After ovulation a woman’s body secretes progesterone, which causes a sharp increase in a woman’s basal, or resting, body temperature, as well as a preparation of the uterine lining for possible implantation. If a pregnancy occurs, the basal body temperature and hormone levels may continue to rise, whereas if pregnancy does not happen, the resulting dip in hormones triggers a drop in temperature, menstruation, and the beginning of a new cycle.
In a healthy woman who is not pregnant, this cycle will repeat every 21-35 days.
These changes can be observed by any woman, and can be used by married couples as a valid method to achieve or delay pregnancy, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, which teaches that it is immoral to disrupt this natural cycle with the use of contraceptive pills, implants, barrier methods, or by having incomplete intercourse. Using these observations to help in the discernment of family size is known as natural family planning.
However, the same observations and data – commonly collected into charts for easier analysis – can be used to help diagnose gynecological issues such as ovarian cysts and growths in the uterus, called fibroids, as well as hormone deficiencies and other abnormalities affecting bodily functions. The information can also be essential in pinpointing issues surrounding pregnancy, such as the exact date of conception, infertility, and miscarriages.
This information is such a valuable insight into a patients health and symptoms – and an invaluable tool for doctors practicing reproductive medicine. “I just think it’s invaluable, and I don’t really know how people practice [gynecology] without having the charting,” said Cvetkovich. “There’s just so many uses, and it adds so much to your evaluation of the patient.”
Cycles and Diagnosis
Disorders in other bodily systems – such as the endocrine system – can manifest in a woman’s menstrual cycle and her chart. “Thyroid plays a role in almost every function of the body, so it may show up as a sign in the cycle,” explained Cvetkovich.
For Christine, charting her bodily signs helped her to catch an issue with her thyroid that might otherwise have been missed. After charting for four years, she started noticing that some months there was no ovulation that could be detected by temperature or with chemical tests for the hormones that trigger ovulation.
“I had what looked like a really long cycle, and then eventually, what to the uninformed observer would look to be a light period. But because I knew I hadn’t peaked, I was able to identify it as estrogen breakthrough bleeding and not a real cycle,” she explained.
“It seemed like my body was trying to ovulate, and not really getting there.”
She approached her doctor, explaining she was not ovulating and that she would like to find the cause for something that was out of the ordinary. The doctor then ordered comprehensive blood tests, and found that some of her thyroid-stimulating hormone levels were elevated beyond normal – in fact, her levels were twice as high s they had been a year ago.
After receiving treatment, her cycles returned to their normal pattern.
“I didn’t have a lot of signs or symptoms of hypothyroidism, aside from missing ovulation,” Christine noted, saying she wouldn’t have picked up on the disorder had she not been charting. “ I wouldn’t have realized there was an issue,” Christine she added, reflecting on the fact that she probably would not have even received the treatment she needed.
“Whenever I’m sharing my experience with NFP with somebody, I’m always quick to point out not only all of the standard benefits, but that it enabled me to know my body and know there’s a problem that so many people wouldn’t be aware of.”
How Fertility Awareness Helped to Find a Tumor
After a local NFP instructor put Maggie in touch with physicians familiar with fertility awareness, she became more aware of what was going on in her own body. She learned to observe her basal body temperature and cervical fluid signs – and noticed that while sometimes she had a more typical menstrual cycle and her chart showed the usual peaks and dips of a healthy young woman, at other times her cycle was irregular and her temperature was more elevated.
Even though she was not sexually active, “my body was acting like it was pregnant,” Maggie said. The doctors at the Catholic fertility clinic sent Maggie out for blood work, which showed a high level of prolactin – a hormone present during pregnancy and breastfeeding. She took this information back to her pediatrician, and then to an endocrinologist, who ordered an MRI scan of her brain.
“There was a tumor pressing into my pituitary, pressing into my frontal cortex,” Maggie explained.
“When I first heard the word ‘tumor’ I freaked out,” she related, but thankfully, “it wasn’t cancerous,” but a benign growth which explained both her irregular cycles and some of her headaches.
Maggie received the treatment she needed to shrink the tumor, and told CNA that “things are pretty much normal now.” While the tumor is still there – “it’ll never really go away, unless I get surgery,” she related; “what’s happened at this point is that it’s checked.”
While since receiving treatment she has no need to monitor as rigorously all of her signs and symptoms, knowledge of her fertility and its signs has given Maggie tools she can use use if the tumor starts to grow again.
“I have this, and I know these are indicators to know [if] something is wrong with my prolactin.”
Fertility – ‘A Public Health Issue’
Cvetkovich suggested this level of awareness can be useful for any woman looking to take care of their health.
“I think that anytime you put someone more in tune with your body, they’re just going to know that things are wrong earlier. I think that’s what it’s all about, knowing what’s normal for you, and being in tune with it.”
She commented that many of her fellow physicians, as well as the general public, have grown accustomed to relying on hormonal contraceptives to address disorders, a practice she said “makes people very distant from their bodies and from their cycles.”
“We’ve lost the idea that having a normal monthly cycle is health – that’s normal. Being fertile is normal. I think that’s where NFP brings us back to, really: to reality.”
Maggie agrees, saying that some of her initial struggle in receiving treatment was a result of people “missing the point that fertility isn’t sort of an accessory to being a human woman – it’s an integral part of how our bodies work.” Awareness of how women’s bodies work, and how to tell when they’re not working correctly, is important for everyone.
“It’s a public health issue.”
*Name has been changed to protect privacy.
This article was originally published July 31, 2015.
Patrick J. Deneen’s much-discussed book rightly points out that liberalism comes down to an individualism and subjectivism that divorce us from nature and make each of […]
Paderborn, Germany, Jul 1, 2018 / 02:22 pm (CNA).- According to a regional newspaper report, Archbishop Hans-Josef Becker of Paderborn has decided to allow Protestant spouses of Catholics living in his diocese to receive holy Communion "in individ… […]
Washington D.C., Jul 1, 2018 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- As the Department of State released its 2018 Trafficking in Persons Report this week, an apostolate which helps trafficking victims said that the practice remains a problem around the world, including in the US.
The Trafficking in Persons Report features narratives on each country, and the countries of the world were divided into three tiers. Tier 1 consists of “countries whose governments fully meet the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards.”
Although the United States is classified as Tier 1 country, human trafficking is still a problem here, Children of the Immaculate Heart President Grace Williams told CNA in an interview. Children of the Immaculate Heart is an organization in San Diego that assists those affected by trafficking.
Trafficking is the “fastest growing illegal industry worldwide, and it’s the same here in the United States,” said Williams.
Williams said that the vast majority of people trafficked in the United States are native-born citizens, and not people who were brought across the border. The average age of someone trafficked, Williams said, was 16 years old.
“The number one vulnerability factor, I can say in Los Angeles’ court for trafficked minors, was child neglect,” Williams explained, followed by child abuse. Williams told CNA that she believes providing a support system, as well as stemming the culture’s sexual appetite, are key to stopping abuse.
“Kids who don’t have the love and support that they need are the ones that traffickers are picking up on, and so that’s where our primary work as an American society lies.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday at the release of the 18th annual TIP Report that ending human trafficking should be a bipartisan issue.
In this year’s report, Pompeo highlighted the work done by local communities around the world not only to stop human trafficking, but also to aid the survivors of these crimes.
“Human trafficking is a global problem, but it’s a local one too,” Pompeo said June 28. “Human trafficking can be found in a favorite restaurant, a hotel, downtown, a farm, or in their neighbor’s home.”
Below Tier 1, Tier 2 contains countries that may not meet the TPVA standards, “but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.”
A “Tier 2 Watch List” consists of countries that are similar to Tier 2, but have other issues, such as an increasing number of trafficking cases or a lack of improvement on previously-implemented anti-trafficking efforts.
Tier 3 countries are those “whose governments do not fully meet the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.”
While no country in Africa is classified as Tier 1, Pompeo noted that 14 of the 48 African nations in this year’s report had been upgraded since last year’s TIP Report and offered praise for the work taken by the continent.
“Despite significant security threats, migration challenges, other financial constraints, and other obstacles, the region improved significantly,” said Pompeo.
“We commend those countries taking action, but we also will never shy away from pointing out countries that need to step up.”
First among these was Libya, where Pompeo mentioned the existence of “modern-day slave markets” arising from “trafficking and abuse of African migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers.” Many Africans seeking entry to Europe pass through Libya, which has not had a well-functioning government since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Pompeo said the US has engaged the Government of National Accord, recognized by the UN as Libya’s legitimate government, “to bring the perpetrators to justice, including complicit government officials. We welcome its commitment to doing so and look forward to seeing real action.”
Praise was offered for Tier 1 Argentina, which recently convicted government officials who were complicit with trafficking, and Estonia, which passed a law that will assist survivors of trafficking.
Vatican City, Jul 1, 2018 / 05:40 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholics have no reason to fear death, because Christ the Lord has power over death; instead, they should fear sin, which hardens and kills the soul, Pope Francis said Sunday.
“Jesus is the… […]
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