Pro-life leaders call on Trump to defund Planned Parenthood

Phoenix, Ariz., Jul 19, 2018 / 05:20 pm (CNA).- A new Arizona law awards contested custody of frozen embryos to the parent seeking to “develop them to birth.” A Catholic bioethicist told CNA it was a “positive development” in an otherwise unusual ethical situation.

The law, which came into effect July 1, is first of its kind in the United States. It was partly inspired by a custody dispute over frozen embryos. Ruby Torres, a 37 year old woman from Arizona, and her ex-husband John Joseph Terrell created the embryos prior to Torres’ treatment for breast cancer, when she was told she was unlikely to conceive after radiation and chemotherapy. They married shortly thereafter, divorcing three years after she had finished cancer treatments.

Seven embryos were created and remain frozen in storage. Torres told the judge during divorce proceedings that she wanted the embryos,calling them her last chance of having a biological child. Terrell protested, saying he did not want to become a father or be responsible for supporting a child.

Last year, the judge ruled that the embryos should be donated, but not to Torres. She appealed this decision. The law does not apply retroactively to this case or other similar cases.

In other custody disputes, judges have ordered frozen embryos to be either destroyed, remain frozen until an agreement can be made, or donated for use in research purposes. Rarely have they been awarded to a person seeking to actually gestate a child.

Should an embryo be successfully carried tol birth, the Arizona law does not make the unwilling party liable for child support.

Critics of the law say that it “forces” people to become parents against their will. Dr. Ted Furton, director of publications at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, said that this argument is the result of a mentality that considers embryos to be property, not human life.

“As soon as you produce embryos, the man and wife are parents,” Furton told CNA in an interview. “Parenthood doesn’t happen later, it happens at that moment.”

“So, they’re already parents. What they don’t realize when they say ‘I don’t want to be a parent’–it’s too late.”

Furton said that he thought the law’s recognition of an embryo as a human life and not as a form of property was a “very positive development” and a “good sign,” and that he is hopeful these kinds of laws would help people “to better understand that these are indeed human lives, and like every human life, deserve protection.”

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Milwaukee, Wis., Jan 29, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- A Wisconsin Catholic women’s college has just announced plans to build housing welcoming both single mothers and retired nuns living in a residential community.

The project is a collaboration between Mount Mary University, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, who founded the college over a hundred years ago, and Milwaukee Catholic Home.

Mount Mary President Christine Pharr told CNA that the project will be a “big win-win” for students, single mothers, religious sisters, and campus life. She said the project will empower women of all ages.

Founded in 1913, Mount Mary University is a small, private Catholic college with about 1,200 undergraduates, all of whom are women, and 500 postgraduates, including both men and women.

The school will break ground on the project this summer and plans to complete the initiative by November 2021. The $45 million dollar project will consist of four buildings.

Within three of the buildings, there will be 90 apartments for sisters and other senior citizens, 24 dorm rooms for enrolled single mothers, and 52 assisted living units.

Those buildings will surround a “town center” that features a small clinic, dining services, a hair and nail salon, exercise facilities, and a chapel.

“It’ll have a beautiful two-story chapel in it, and many of the artifacts and the stained glass windows from the current convent will be brought over to this new venture to make sure that the heritage of the sisters is preserved as we go forward,” Pharr said.

One of the dorms will also offer on-site child care with space for 120 children. Pharr said about 10 percent of students at the college are single mothers.

While Pharr was vice-president of College of St Mary in Omaha, Nebraska, she witnessed the success of the college’s single mother dorm. Although she did not supervise the program, she said, she was able to become familiar with its operations and engage closely with the students.

Pharr emphasized the importance of providing mothers with the proper resources to overcome the barriers that prevent them from pursuing higher education. She pointed to statistics that show a growing trend of single mothers in higher education, but with much lower graduation rates than women without children.

“If you’re looking at data over maybe the last 15, 20 years, the number of single mothers returning to college has increased significantly nationally. About 11% of college students are single mothers in the state,” she said.

“There’s about 32,000 single mothers who are college students, and yet their graduation rates are less than half of women without children. The obstacles that they face are rather significant: affordable housing, quality childcare, transportation, [and] just plain financing that can allow them the resources to go to a university and get an education.”

Pharr said that through grant programs, the university has been able to provide academic tutoring, counseling, advising, emergency loans, and food assistance to single mothers.

“This is important because it provides a place for single mothers to get an education in a safe environment. As a small Catholic institution, we provide tremendous resources to our students,” she said.

“I think at this institution, the potential to provide an environment where these women can be successful when they might not be living out in the community commuting, trying to address all of those other issues.”

Pharr said the housing project has been in the development over the past couple years as a response to the order’s declining number of nuns and an increase in retired sisters. When the project was initially under development, she said the order was looking at opening the space to non-religious elderly people.

Pharr had the idea to include single mothers.

Many of the nuns who will live on campus now live in convents elsewhere. Since many sisters had been involved with the school, Pharr said they are excited to come back to campus. She noted the importance the nuns’ presence will have on student life, bringing a light to the mothers, students, and to the sisters themselves.

“I think having the sisters in proximity to students and children will allow them to really stay young and be excited about the kinds of things they see happening on campus. It’ll be a short walk over to seminars. They can take classes; they can participate in events on campus much easier,” Pharr said.

The campus is planning for both serendipitous and planned interactions among the students, families, and nuns, Pharr said. The sisters, besides running into students on campus more, will be able to share meals in the dining room with both students and children. She also said the clinic and day-care center will become a learning opportunity.

“We also have what we call planned interactions. So in other words, intergenerational learning opportunities. We hope that the early childhood education center [will] be a lab school, which will allow for our education majors to actually learn and participate in early childhood education.”

“In addition, we have programs in occupational therapy and nursing and social work and numerous others where we will have onsite clinical opportunities and internships so that the students can learn and be in direct connection with the sisters and the seniors.”

Pharr emphasized the value of the project – which will help mothers, campus life, and the nuns – noting that the project is deeply tied to the beliefs of the sisters.

“This is a great mission fit. The School Sisters of Notre Dame, part of their charism has always been to care for the needs of women and children. Mount Mary, in a similar manner, our vision statement says that we educate women to transform the world,” Pharr told CNA.

“To me, this is just one more way in which we can continue to empower women at all ages, whether they’re sisters, whether they’re seniors, whether they’re children or students.”

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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 12, 2020 / 06:00 am (CNA).- As thousands of protesters prepared to march against racism in Washington, D.C. last Saturday, Louis Brown helped organize a rosary procession on Capitol Hill.

Lay Catholics joined Dominican friars, nuns, and priests of the Washington archdiocese in prayer for justice and healing. As tens of thousands of Americans have been actively protesting racism and police brutality, Brown, who is an African-American and Catholic, told CNA he chose to focus on prayer.

The present moment demands both prayer and action against injustice, he told CNA. “It’s a both-and.”

“Ultimately this is a problem of the heart,” Brown said. “Our country desperately needs God and the love of God to heal these wounds.”

“We are not the ultimate protagonists of the story,” he added. “Jesus Christ is the ultimate protagonist.”

Brown spoke of acute pain within the African-American community, caused by the recent deaths of young African-Americans at the hands of police or fellow citizens—most notably George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor— which, he said, are just the latest in a centuries-long history.

“As an African-American, the pain of going back into that history is so painful, and is so gut-wrenching, and it’s so hard to deal with,” he said.

“Part of it is just the fear,” he said, of being pulled over in a “routine traffic stop” that could end in a tragedy—“or something could get pinned on me.”

“It’s an anger, it’s an anxiety, and it’s also a fear of it happening again, and a pain of seeing what others have gone through,” he said.

Video of George Floyd’s May 25 arrest in Minneapolis showed him calling out “I can’t breathe” and “mama” as police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck. Floyd later died at a hospital, and Chauvin has since been fired and charged with second-degree murder in Floyd’s death.

“Whether you’re black or white, you can’t help but see that person as our brother and as a child of God,” Brown said of Floyd crying out.

Yet protests against injustice, he emphasized, must be rooted in “the right to life” for all and not be “hijacked” by the culture of death.

“The rioting, the looting, is only making it more likely that a black man like me will be a victim of police misconduct, or a victim of bias and stereotypes,” Brown said.

Other Catholics around the country told CNA that they attended recent protests against racism and police brutality in cities, suburbs, and towns—in California, New York City, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, D.C., Nebraska, West Virginia, and Tennessee.

Most who talked to CNA of their experiences were lay men and women, although both a priest and a religious sister—Fr. Brent Shelton of the diocese of Knoxville, and Sister Mumbi Kigutha CPPS, of the Sisters of the Precious Blood—said they too attended local protests against racism.

Some Catholics said it was their first protest; others said they had attended a pro-life march before, but now felt the need to march against racism. Some marched with fellow Catholics and Christians, others attended larger marches by themselves.

All involved all had one thing in common—they felt that they had to do something to stand against injustice.

“To me it’s simple. People need help and we help them. That’s all,” said Jenne O’Neill of Wahoo, Nebraska.

And many of those who talked to CNA said they prayed at the rallies and protests.

Peter Nixon, a parishioner at Saint Bonaventure Church in the Diocese of Oakland, said his pastor led a Eucharistic procession at the tail end of a march in Clayton, California.

“The presence of the Blessed Sacrament had a powerful impact on many at the demonstration,” Nixon said. “Some police and firefighters crossed themselves as we passed. Others genuflected when passing in front of the monstrance.”

On June 1, the evening before President Donald Trump visited Washington, D.C.’s St. John Paul II Shrine, the president stood outside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. holding a Bible in front of cameras. The Washington Post reported that federal police shot gas canisters and grenades with rubber pellets to dispel protesters in the area shortly before the president arrived outside the church.

Protesting in Lafayette Square that night was Anna Fitzmaurice, a 2019 graduate of the Catholic University of America. Fitzmaurice prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet in the square, but left shortly before police dispersed the protesters. She attended a protest of the president’s visit to the shrine on the morning of June 2.

“As he [Trump] was going to visit my church, I felt a moral responsibility to tell him what we believe in terms of the dignity of the suffering and the oppressed. Instructing the ignorant and admonishing the sinner are both spiritual works of mercy,” she said.

Jenn Morson, a writer and parishioner at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton church in Crofton, Maryland, said she prayed the rosary to herself “in between chants initiated by the organizer” at a local march with around 350 people.

Not all Catholics who talked to CNA marched in protests. Some have been conducting outreach in their communities, or trying to foster constructive conversations about race.

Kathy Redmond, of St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Castle Rock, Colorado, told CNA that she has organized around 450 people in her local “very white, affluent community” involved in community outreach.

Redmond said she saw injustice first-hand when a black family moved in four houses down from her and their cars were tagged immediately. “It was very unnerving for me,” she said. “It was in my face at that point.”

“As people of faith—as people of a Christian faith—we should be front and center on this,” Redmond said.

Catherine Perry, of Atlanta, Georgia, founder of the InwardBound Center for Non-Profit Leadership, has organized workshops of cross-race conversations on “Racism in America: What is Mine to Do?”

Her workshops are not shaming sessions, she said, but rather help participants to reflect, dialogue, and reconcile with each other, ending with them making a “uniquely personal to-do list” such as prayer, listening to voices they may not agree with, or talking to a boss about subtle discrimination in the workplace. A new workshop will be offered online beginning on June 25.

As Catholics, she said, “one of the great things about our institution is we talk about difficult things” such as abortion and the death penalty. “We understand this is mysterious stuff, and it’s emotional work, and it’s not easy sometimes,” she said.

“Well let’s take on race. Why not?” she asked. “We’ve been silent on race too long.”

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