Gunman kills one at Catholic store in Missouri

Denver Newsroom, Aug 20, 2020 / 12:25 am (CNA).- For more than 170 years, Catholics in Pittsburgh have observed a day of thanksgiving for their parish’s deliverance from a Cholera pandemic that killed hundreds of local people in the mid-1800s.

The annual Cholera Day Mass is held each year in August, fulfilling a promise from a prior generation of parishioners.

When Cholera hit Pennsylvania in the summer of 1849, more than 1,000 people in Pittsburgh alone died from the disease. Saint Michael’s Catholic Parish was hit hard – the parish was nearly wiped out by the epidemic.

An Italian priest at the parish then invoked the Blessed Mother and St. Roch, a 14th-century saint who dedicated his life to the care of diseased people in Italy. The priest asked for their intercession for the parish’s safety and promised to observe a day of gratitude each year in remembrance.

When another Cholera outbreak hit the city in 1853, not a single person from Saint Michael’s parish got sick or died. That year, the first bishop of Pittsburgh, Bishop Michael O’Connor, formally authorized the celebration. Pope Leo XIII later sent a relic of St. Roch in recognition of the holy day.

“The people at St. Michael’s Parish, they prayed to Saint Roch because he had saved people from a similar place [in the past],” said Donna Gillespie, office manager for the South Side/Mt. Washington Parish Community.

“So they prayed to him and they vowed … that they would keep holy a day,” she continued. “They have for the last 171 years.”

The celebratory anniversary is today held by South Side/Mt. Washington Parish Community – a collection of consolidated parishes in Pittsburgh including Prince of Peace and St. Mary of the Mount.

Each year, the parish holds three Masses, each with a different focus. One Mass is dedicated to St. Roch, another is in remembrance of the victims of the Cholera pandemic, and the last one is in honor of the Blessed Mother, since the Masses are usually held within the octave of the Assumption.

This year, the occasion took on an additional special intention – healing and deliverance from the coronavirus pandemic. So far this year, Allegheny County has had over 9,500 cases of coronavirus and 291 deaths, according to the New York Times.

“This year was special because we tied it in with the pandemic. Our petitions were mentioned [for the] past and future people that die,” said Joseph Drzazynski, one of the organizers behind the event.

“We had a novena this year, nine days to St. Roch, and it was a prayer that we said for the people that died by themselves. We were trying to bring it into what’s going on today – praying for the [COVID-19 victims], the nurses, and the doctors,” he told CNA.

The Masses this year were held on August 15 and 16. Around 80 people attended the Mass in-person on Sunday, which was also streamed online. Attendees practiced social distancing and wore masks.

The occasion normally includes a celebration and dinner, but due to the current pandemic, the parish instead offered a Zoom meeting explaining the history of the holy day.

Personal devotion among the families in the parish has also continued. One local family saw their child cured after praying to St. Roch decades ago.

“The mother had an infant son who was very sick and she prayed to Saint Roch and promised him, if he would spare her son, then she would also keep holy a day to honor Saint Roch,” said Gillespie.

“The family has been doing that for the last 83 years, and the gentleman lived to be in his nineties before he died this year.”

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The U.S. Department of Education sign hangs over the entrance to the federal building housing the agency’s headquarters on Feb. 9, 2024, in Washington, D.C. / Credit: J. David Ake/Getty Images

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 19, 2024 / 15:22 pm (CNA).

An appellate court rejected a request from President Joe Biden’s administration to enforce a regulation in four states that would broadly prohibit discrimination based on a person’s self-asserted “gender identity.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that prevents the U.S. Department of Education from enforcing any part of the “gender identity” provisions in the Title IX rule for public schools and colleges in Montana, Idaho, Louisiana, and Mississippi. 

The lower court’s order will remain in place as all five states continue their lawsuit, which challenges the legality of the regulation.

Courts have blocked the Department of Education from enforcing the regulation in 15 states altogether, while attorneys general in about a dozen other states have also filed lawsuits. The regulation will go into effect on Aug. 1 in jurisdictions where courts have not blocked its enforcement.

The regulation, which the administration promulgated in April, reinterprets Title IX’s prohibition on “sex discrimination” to include a prohibition on “gender identity” discrimination. 

Some lawyers and Republican attorneys general have warned that the rule would jeopardize state laws that restrict girls’ and women’s locker rooms, bathrooms, dormitories, and athletic competitions to only girls and women and could force states to allow access to men who identify as women.

“The Biden administration’s radical redefinition of sex turns back the clock on equal opportunity for women, undermines fairness, and threatens student safety and privacy,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Natalie Thompson, who is representing the Louisiana-based Rapides Parish School Board in the lawsuit, said in a statement. 

“The 5th Circuit now joins the 6th Circuit in holding back the Biden administration’s illegal efforts to rewrite Title IX while this critical lawsuit continues,” she added. “The administration continues to ignore biological reality, science, and common sense.” 

“The Rapides Parish School Board and schools and teachers across the country are right to stand against the administration’s adoption of extreme gender ideology, which would have devastating consequences for students, teachers, administrators, and families.”

After the lower court blocked the Department of Education from enforcing any part of the rule, the department filed an appeal that requested permission to partially enforce the rule while the litigation continues. The department claimed that the prohibition on enforcement was too broad and requested permission to enforce reporting and record-keeping rules, grievance procedures, and a variety of provisions related to “gender identity” discrimination included in the new rule.

In the ruling, the judges wrote that “the answer is no,” adding that the provisions the department wants to enforce are “complex, lengthy, and burdensome” and that the department “has given us little basis to assess the likelihood of success” in the case.

“The implementation and compliance costs would double if the partially implemented rule differs from a final judgment,” the judges wrote. “They would first have to amend their policies, alter their procedures, and train their employees to comply with a partial version of the rule pending appeal, and then they would have to do it all over again to comply with the rule as it stands at the conclusion of the litigation.”

The prohibition on sex discrimination written into the law itself makes no mention of “gender identity.” When Congress added the Title IX sex discrimination provisions into federal law in the 1970s, the intent was to provide girls and women with equal access to education and did not have any reference to transgenderism.

In spite of this, the Biden administration argues that interpreting “sex discrimination” to include “gender identity” discrimination is within the scope of the Department of Education’s regulatory authority. The states opposed to the rule argue that this interpretation is not consistent with the actual text of the law and falls outside of the department’s regulatory authority.

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Kelly Clemente, who chose life and put up her son for adoption. / EWTN Pro-life Weekly/Screenshot

Denver Newsroom, Nov 16, 2021 / 16:01 pm (CNA).
Adoption doesn’t mean giving up. It takes courage and love. That’s what Kelly Clemente says she di… […]