CNA Staff, Nov 3, 2020 / 12:52 am (CNA).- Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, has called on Catholics to support adoptive families, while recognizing the important work of faith-based adoption agencies during National Adoption Month.
“For 25 years, our country has observed November as National Adoption Month, a time set aside to celebrate adoption and consider how we can support those who are adopted, their birth parents, and their adoptive families,” he said in a statement from the diocese.
“Adoption has deep roots in our Catholic faith and is evident in Sacred Scripture, as St. Joseph was [the] loving foster father of Our Lord.”
The bishop praised the work of Catholic Charities of Arlington, which began offering adoption services in 1947. That work continues today, he said, as Catholic Charities serves expectant parents who have “courageously and selflessly discerned they can best provide for their children by making an adoption plan,” and helps match couples seeking to adopt with children of all ages, children with special needs, and those in foster care.
Pope Francis has encouraged adoption and called for support of adoptive families, to make the often difficult bureaucratic process easier.
“[There are] many, many families who do not have children and would certainly have the desire to have one with adoption,” he told employees and patients of an Italian hospital for abandoned children last year. “Go forward, to create a culture of adoption, because there are so many abandoned children, alone, victims of war and so on.”
Burbidge said faith-based adoption agencies are often appealing to parents who want to work with organizations that share their values.
“Many parents who seek the services of Catholic Charities come to us because they want to work with staff and counselors whose faith motivates their work, and Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington remains a lifelong support for all who have worked with our adoption program, including the adoptees.”
In recent years, Catholic adoption agencies in several states have had to shut down because of their conviction that children should be placed in homes with a mother and a father. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case this week – Fulton v. Philadelphia – involving a Catholic foster agency that lost a city contract due to a requirement that it place children with same-sex couples.
In 2018, Senator Kamala Harris – now the Democratic vice presidential candidate – questioned a judicial nominee about his membership of the board of Bethany Christian Services, a global non-profit that provides adoption services and crisis pregnancy support. She said the organization “discriminated against LGBTQ couples who sought to adopt children.”
In December 2019, a new rule from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services clarified that faith-based adoption and foster agencies would be allowed to receive federal funding without being required to place children with same-sex couples. The rule replaced a 2016 regulation by the Obama administration that prohibited adoption and foster care agencies from receiving federal funds if they chose to place children only with a married mother and father.
Burbidge voiced gratitude that Catholic Charities of Arlington has “maintained this legal protection for faith-filled families and their adoption providers.” He asked Catholics to pray for continued protection for faith-based groups as they carry out their work.
“Let us also seek guidance from Our Lord, and the intercession of Mary our Mother and his adoptive father, St. Joseph, as we work to ensure that children find the homes to which God calls them,” he said. “And may Our Lord Jesus continue to bless parents who place their children for adoption and the families who adopt children.”
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New Orleans, La., Mar 9, 2018 / 02:49 am (CNA).- Melissa Coles found herself pregnant at the age of 18.
Fearing that she and the father could not support a child, she went to the local abortion clinic on Parker Avenue in Indianapolis. But right before… […]
Washington D.C., Sep 18, 2019 / 11:40 am (CNA).- The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm a prominent Catholic law professor to a high-ranking State Department position.
By a margin of 49 to 44, Robert Destro, a law professor at Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law, was confirmed by the Senate as the next Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) joined Democrats in opposition to Destro’s confirmation.
“Robert Destro is one of the nation’s experts on human rights, both in terms of international law and the moral basis for human rights,” Thomas Farr, president of the Religious Freedom Institute, told CNA in a statement, noting Destro’s experience both as a human rights scholar and activist “in the best sense of that term.”
Destro’s new role at the State Department is tasked with promoting democracy, civic and religious freedom around the world.
It “is the senior human rights position in American diplomacy,” Farr said, charged with promoting human rights “not simply as the right thing to do (which it is), but also as a strategic interest of the United States.”
“Destro will excel in both tasks,” Farr said.
Destro is the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Law & Religion at Catholic University; he previously served as a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1983 to 1989, addressing issues of discrimination on the basis of disability, national origin, and religion.
He has also served on the State Department’s Working Group on Religion in Foreign Affairs, as well as the special counsel for voting rights for the Ohio Secretary of State from 2004 to 2006.
Stephen C. Payne, dean of Catholic’s law school, said he was “thrilled” by the appointment, and that in Destro the “country — and the rest of the world — is getting a strong advocate and leader for Democracy and Human Rights, and we wish him well.”
The appointment was also welcomed by Toufic Baaklini, president of the group In Defense of Christians (IDC), who cited Destro’ years of work with the group and called him “a critical leader in the fight for genocide recognition for victims of ISIS in Iraq and Syria” and “a powerful voice for religious freedom in the Middle East, and throughout the world.”
Senate Democrats questioned Destro at his confirmation hearing in March over the role of religion in foreign affairs as well as the redefinition of marriage.
Destro said that he would work to improve both training on religious freedom and understanding of the role of religion in foreign affairs within the State Department, and cited his own past work bringing various religious groups together on the international stage.
Destro said that he had learned from “the many years that I have been dealing with the State Department” that many at the agency “have had a hard time dealing with the issue of religion, and that’s one of the issues I’d like to bring to their attention.”
Later in the hearing, he explained that the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act of 2016—authored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and signed into law by President Obama—required religious freedom training for all foreign service officers.
Destro said he would work to expand on that, saying that “not only do the foreign service officers need to be trained, but so do the lawyers at the State Department and at USAID.”
“I think that we need to bring people together, and I’ve devoted most of my career, for at least the last 16 years, to doing just that,” he said of bringing religious groups together.
“Wheel of Fortune” host Pat Sajak attends a taping of the show’s 35th anniversary season at Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, in 2017. / Credit: Gerardo Mora/Getty Images
Boston, Mass., Sep 3, 2023 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Pat Sajak, the longtime host of the popular television game show “Wheel of Fortune,” will be retiring after this upcoming season.
After more than 40 years in that role, Sajak is like a member of the family for the show’s millions of fans.
A lesser-known fact about the Emmy winner is that he’s the chair of the board of trustees at Hillsdale College, a small Christian, classical liberal arts school in southern Michigan that is often branded as “conservative” and which one magazine has even described as being “at the heart of the culture wars.”
Founded by Freewill Baptist slavery abolitionists in 1844, Hillsdale defines itself as “nonsectarian Christian.” But Sajak’s many Catholic fans might be interested to know that Hillsdale has a thriving Catholic community of students and faculty — and has become something of a hub for converts to the Catholic faith.
An average of about 15 students from Hillsdale convert to Catholicism each year, Kelly Cole, a staff member from the local St. Anthony Catholic Church, which ministers to the students, told CNA.
Additionally, in recent years certain Catholic prelates have made visits to campus including Winona-Rochester Bishop Robert Barron, who gave the college’s graduation commencement address in May, and German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, who offered a lecture on campus in 2021.
Is Pat Sajak Catholic?
Sajak declined an interview with CNA. While his religious affiliation isn’t clear, a 1993 article from the Los Angeles Times reported that Sajak received an annulment from the Catholic Church. Sajak’s first marriage was with Sherril Sajak, but after they divorced, he married Lesly Brown, his current spouse of over 30 years, according to Hollywood Life.
People magazine reported that Sajak married Brown at a Catholic church in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1989. Outsider reported that this church was St. Mary’s.
A Chicago native, Sajak, who called himself an “unapologetic conservative” in a 2012 interview with the Hoover Institution, has Polish roots and described his upbringing as blue-collar. A Vietnam veteran, he served as a television weatherman before his time at “Wheel of Fortune.”
“Wheel of Fortune” host Pat Sajak speaks at the Hillsdale College graduation ceremony on May 17, 2019, in his first year as chairman of the board of trustees at the college, located in Hillsdale, Michigan. Credit: YouTube/Hillsdale College
Since 2019, Sajak, who is 76 according to the History Channel, has been serving as chairman of the board for the school. But he’s been involved with the school long before he was the chair, serving as the vice chairman of the board of trustees beginning in 2003.
He said in his interview with the Hoover Institution that he came to Hillsdale as a result of his relationship with the school’s president, Larry Arnn, whom Sajak met when he served on the board of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank.
In that interview, he praised the school for not taking government funding, something that Hillsdale prides itself on.
The school was included in the Princeton Review’s 2024 edition of the nation’s best colleges, earning a No. 3 ranking of “most conservative students,” a No. 2 ranking of “most religious students,” and a No. 2 ranking of having the “friendliest students.”
A Great Books curriculum
Why is Catholic life at Hillsdale so vibrant?
On Hillsdale’s website, the school prides itself on a core curriculum that “considers the spiritual and intellectual inheritance of the Western Tradition and provides a fuller perspective on the world and its workings.”
From the school’s longtime English professor David Whalen’s perspective, the college’s “traditional, Great Books-heavy curriculum” inevitably brings students into contact with many ideas that are influenced by the Catholic faith.
The Great Books curriculum consists of literature courses mandatory for every student.
Professor David Whalen has been teaching English at Hillsdale College for almost 30 years. Credit: YouTube/Catholic Diocese of Lincoln
Whalen, a Catholic who is also the school’s associate vice president for curriculum, said that the amount of Catholic conversions each year is a result of “grace” but “also the natural consequence of young people reading deeply in the Western intellectual and spiritual tradition and reflecting on their own beliefs.”
While the “great majority” of Hillsdale’s faculty and students are not Catholic, Whalen said that the atmosphere on campus is “highly collegial” and the Catholic community flourishes at the school.
“There are enough Catholic students, faculty, and staff to sustain a quite vibrant Catholic community and, at the same time, integrate with the campus as a whole,” he said. “This makes the college attractive to Catholic students, as does its traditional curriculum and strong academics.”
Being a minority on campus, Catholics would do well to brush up on their faith, Whalen said.
“This is a highly intelligent place, and people with different beliefs are going to be articulate and thoughtful about them. So, the Catholics here need to be so as well,” he said.
Taking Catholicism seriously
Cole, who converted to Catholicism the year she graduated from Hillsdale in 2002, said that she took Whalen’s literature course and it had a major impact on her conversion.
But it wasn’t just the literature classes that pushed her to convert, it was mainly the history courses, she said.
“And my history courses were taught by Protestants; it wasn’t Catholics that were teaching this or anything,” she noted.
Kelly Cole, who is seen in this photo with two of her seven children William (right) and Alex (left), graduated from Hillsdale College and converted to Catholicism in 2002. Credit: Kelly Cole
Cole, 43, said that “trying to faithfully engage with history and the history of Christendom and talking about our Judeo-Christian heritage just led to me feeling like I needed to take Catholicism seriously.”
Earlier this year, the Diocese of Lansing posted a video highlighting the 2023 Easter Vigil at St. Anthony’s in which 24 people, 22 of them Hillsdale students, were received into the Catholic Church.
Today, Cole, her husband, Lee Cole — a professor at the college — and her seven children all reside in Hillsdale, where she serves on staff at the city’s St. Anthony Catholic Church, where she was received when she converted more than 20 years ago.
Defenders of the faith
Just as it did then, St. Anthony is the sole institution providing the sacraments to students on campus. But the church works hand in hand with the school’s “Catholic Society,” a student-led club that organizes social events and opportunities for students to receive the sacraments and brings speakers to campus.
Noah Hoonhout, a 2023 graduate who led the school’s Catholic student organization, said that the Catholic Society is “the most active” club on campus.
Among the recent speakers the society has sponsored are German Cardinal Gerhard Müller and American theologian George Weigel, both of whom drew large crowds, according to Hoonhout.
Noah Hoonhout, 22, a 2023 graduate, was the president of Hillsdale’s Catholic Society in his senior year. Credit: Noah Hoonhout
According to the Hillsdale Daily News, the school’s president called Weigel and Müller “ardent defenders of the immemorial teachings of the Christian faith and of the liberty of the human soul before God that Hillsdale College holds so dear” following their lectures in 2021.
Whalen told CNA that when Müller visited campus he was invited to say a few words at a dinner in his honor at the school’s president’s house.
Whalen said that Müller “gave an extemporaneous short talk that was both brilliant and beautiful. It was a great moment.”
The Catholic Society points students toward St. Anthony’s many ministries, one of which is specifically established for Hillsdale students called “The Grotto.”
The Grotto is a house located near campus where students can come and pray before the Blessed Sacrament.
Each week, the Grotto offers Mass, confession, eucharistic adoration, the recitation of the rosary, formation events, and social gatherings for the students, such as “convivium,” where dozens of students will gather for dinner at the house on Thursday nights and hear a talk on the Catholic faith from a professor at the school.
Hoonhout, 22, said that the Grotto is one of the “centers of Catholic culture” on campus.
What’s next?
In Sajak’s long tenure at “Wheel of Fortune,” he has earned several awards, including a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In 2019, Guinness World Records deemed him to have “the longest career as a game show host for the same show,” which was 35 years and 198 days at the time, according to abc.com.
Although not much is known about what Sajak will do following retirement from “Wheel of Fortune,” Hillsdale has said that he will continue serving in his role as chairman of its board of trustees.
His role at the game show will be taken over by celebrity host Ryan Seacrest. Sajak’s longtime co-host, Vanna White, reportedly will remain with the show.
“Well, the time has come. I’ve decided that our 41st season, which begins in September, will be my last,” Sajak tweeted on June 12. “It’s been a wonderful ride, and I’ll have more to say in the coming months. Many thanks to you all.”
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