Attack on Byzantine priest in Indiana investigated as hate crime

Washington D.C., Mar 24, 2020 / 02:30 pm (CNA).- In Italy, which has the most deaths from coronavirus, some doctors have said they have had to overlook older patients to focus on younger ones who are more likely to survive as the virus overwhelmed the healthcare system.

In the US, states and hospitals are considering how to distribute healthcare if demand for limited resources exceeds what can be provided. Worldwide, there are 332,930 confirmed cases of Covid-19, and 14,509 deaths. Of those, 31,573 cases are in the US, where there have been 402 deaths due to the virus.

Colorado adopted a Crisis Standards of Care Plan in 2018 as guidelines “to assist healthcare providers in their decision making with the intention of maximizing patient survival and minimizing the adverse outcomes that might occur” when healthcare needs “far surpass” what is available.

“It’s very military-style triage,” Dr. Matthew Wynia of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus told The Colorado Sun’s John Ingold. “If we get hit that hard, we are going to have some very difficult decisions to make. And we can’t wait until then to get ready for that … it would be irresponsible not to plan right now for a huge surge of patients.”

Colorado’s crisis standards of care would be activated only after the governor declares a public health emergency, and even then, it would implemented locally, depending on the conditions in individual counties or communities.

Among the goals of the state plan is to “minimize serious illness and death by administering a finite pool of resources to those who have the greatest opportunity to benefit from them”.

Guiding ethical elements of Colorado’s plan are stewardship of resources, duty to care, soundness, fairness, reciprocity, proportionality, transparency, and accountability.

It focuses especially on fairness, proportionality, solidarity, and being participatory.

The Colorado guidelines say healthcare providers should be fair to all the affected “without regard to factors such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability or region that are not medically relevant.”

With regard to solidarity, the Crisis Standards of Care Plan says that “all people should consider the greater good of the entire community.” It adds that for transparency and accountability, “the community, healthcare providers, and emergency management agencies” should be engaged during the process.

Dr. Charlie Camosy, an associate professor of theology at Fordham University, last week discussed with CNA the principles that should be used as doctors might face choices over healthcare distribution.

“There are virtually no universally agreed-upon principles to do this–excepting, perhaps, the idea that health care providers, first-responders, law enforcement, and others primarily responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the polity should get priority,” he stated.

For Catholics, he said that serving “the most vulnerable first” is a fundamental principal.

“Those people are Christ to us in a special way and we will be judged according to how we treat them. We don’t think about, say, how long they might stay on a ventilator vs. how long someone we might encounter next week might stay on a ventilator. We also don’t think about how long they might have to live if the treatment is successful vs. how long other someone we might encounter next week might live if their treatment is successful.”

He added that it makes sense among limited resources “to treat those first who are most likely to benefit from the treatment. And there may be a disproportionate number of younger people in the former category. But that is not the same as deciding that we ought to prefer the young to the old because they have longer to live.”

While the US bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services do not directly address resource allocation during crises, they do note that “Catholic health care should distinguish itself by service to and advocacy for those people whose social condition puts them at the margins of our society and makes them particularly vulnerable to discrimination: the poor; the uninsured and the underinsured; children and the unborn; single parents; the elderly; those with incurable diseases and chemical dependencies; racial minorities; immigrants and refugees.”

The directives add that “in particular, the person with mental or physical disabilities, regardless of the cause or severity, must be treated as a unique person of incomparable worth, with the same right to life and to adequate health care as all other persons.”

In Washington, advocates of persons with disabilities have filed a complaint saying that crisis care guidelines issued by the state health department are improperly discriminatory.

“There’s been a long history of people with intellectual, development mental disabilities having our medical care denied,” Ivanova Smith, one of the complainants, told NPR. “Because we’re not seen as valuable. We’re not seen as productive or needed. When that’s not true. We have people that love us and that care for us. Many people with disabilities work and they do amazing things in their communities but they need that life saving care.”

Attorneys representing the Thomas More Society and the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund published a memo March 23 urging that “policies rationing care on the basis of disability or age … would violate federal law regarding invidious discrimination.”

“Anticipated longevity or quality of life are inappropriate issues for consideration. Decisions must be made solely on clinical factors as to which patients have the greatest need and the best prospect of a good medical outcome. Therefore, disability and age should not be used as categorical exclusions in making these critical decisions,” the memo concludes.

Peter Breen, vice president of the Thomas More Society, commented that “The horrific idea of withholding care from someone because they are elderly or disabled, is untenable and represents a giant step in the devaluation of each and every human life in America.”

Other possible criteria for healthcare distribution during crises include first-come-first-served, or a lottery system.

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CNA Staff, Jul 23, 2020 / 02:16 pm (CNA).- The statue of Christopher Columbus outside of Worcester’s Union Station will remain, the city council decided Tuesday, citing the need to respect the local Italian community despite a spate of vandal attacks on statutes of historic figures and a wave of critical commentary on American monuments.

The Worcester City Council voted 8-2 on July 21 to shelve a proposal that would have ordered the removal of the Christopher Columbus statue and its replacement with a different statue or memorial to honor the Italian community.

Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson, who claims Italian ancestry, moved to shelve the proposal. She cited the recent razing of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church and the closing of the cultural center there, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports.

“As someone who is Italian, that statue does represent our heritage,” said Mero-Carlson. “The Italian community has been through hell and back the last couple of years having lost their church and cultural center.”

“We don’t get the right to tell the Italian community what they should think about a statue,” she said. “Italians are proud people. We don’t get the right to tell them what to do with their statue; it should be up to the Italian community to decide. We get to make those decisions on who we are.”

The statue was donated to the city by Italian-American attorney Nunziato Fursaro in memory of his wife and erected in 1978.

Columbus has long been an American Catholic and Italian-American folk hero. They have seen his pioneering voyage from Europe as a way of validating their presence in a sometimes hostile majority-Protestant country and as the means by which Christianity reached the New World.

Columbus was long depicted as a symbol of exploration and discovery, critical for launching the encounter between Europe and the Americas. He was also a symbol of immigrants, and honors for Columbus drew opposition from nativist and anti-Catholic groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

While Columbus never set foot in North America, the District of Columbia bears his name and he is the namesake of the Knights of Columbus, now the largest Catholic men’s fraternal organization in the world.

In recent decades, Columbus has drawn critical coverage. Some blame him for the launch of the transatlantic slave trade, and fault him for the enslavement and other mistreatment of some Native Americans under his command. Some critics blame him for the subsequent sufferings of Native Americans under Spanish rule, or under the rule of European colonists generally.

Councilor Sarai Rivera had introduced the failed proposal. She said the statue should be removed because of atrocities and devastation caused for indigenous people in the Caribbean, Central America, and North America.

Rivera identifies as Afro Taina and claims descent from the Taino indigenous people of Puerto Rico. She said she never participated in Worcester’s annual Columbus Day Parade.

“I could never go to celebrate someone who committed genocide on my ancestors,” she said, according to the Worcester Gazette & Telegram.

“Columbus is not about heritage. Columbus is about hate,” Rivera said to the council meeting, according to the Boston Globe. “And when you think about the amazing contributions the Italian community has done, even within our own community … that’s who we should be honoring. That’s who we should be talking about.”

The explorer had good relations with a Native American leader on Hispaniola. There, a Taino chief named Guacanagari aided Columbus after the wreck of his main ship the Santa Maria. Columbus adopted one of his sons. That son took the name of Columbus’ natural son, Diego, and accompanied Columbus on his final three voyages

In June the Worcester Columbus statue was vandalized with red paint, with the word “genocide” written on it. A Columbus statue in Boston’s historically Italian North End was beheaded.

This followed protests originally launched in response to the death of Minnesotan George Floyd, a black man, while he was being detained by Minneapolis police. Violence and vandalism, rejected by protest organizers, have caused massive damage to American cities.

Vandals particularly targeted statues of Confederate leaders, but also moved against statues of U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, and Spanish missionary St. Junipero Serra, a major figure of early Californian history. Catholic churches and statues have also come under attack.

In Worcester the Columbus statue’s location at Union Station is owned and operated by the Worcester Redevelopment Authority, but the statue itself belongs to the city.

Councilor Kathleen M. Toomey also spoke against removing the statue.

“I feel very strongly that we need to respect each other and not tear each other down,” she said. “And when you start taking away other peoples’ symbols without having conversation, without trying to understand what things mean, I think that’s a problem.”

The proposal cannot be brought again for 90 days unless the city council agrees to to reconsider it.

The Italian American Alliance welcomed the shelving of the proposal, and voiced hope the city would “take special care to protect the statue against vandals.”

Worcester Mayor Joseph M. Petty recused himself from voting.

[…]

Arlington, Va., Oct 29, 2018 / 10:30 am (CNA).- In a statement released last Wednesday and repeated at Masses over the weekend, Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington and Bishop Barry C. Knestout of the Diocese of Richmond pledged that the… […]