Pro-abortion activists disrupt Joel Osteen’s Pentecost Sunday service

Phoenix, Ariz., Mar 31, 2019 / 04:13 am (CNA).- Women leaving prison can face numerous challenges – from finding housing and employment despite a criminal record to repairing relationships with family members and friends.

At one women’s ho… […]

Houston, Texas, Nov 28, 2018 / 10:11 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Investigators have executed a search warrant on the chancery offices of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. A search warrant obtained by the district attorney’s office for Montgomery County was served Wednesday morning by officers from the Texas Rangers and Conroe Police Department.

According to local media reports, the district attorney’s office is seeking documents related to the case of Fr. Manuel La Rosa-Lopez, who was arrested by Conroe police in September on four charges of indecency to children.

The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston was unavailable to comment on the search, or to clarify whether it was limited to the case of La Rosa-Lopez.

The district attorney’s office has already conducted searches at two churches where La Rosa-Lopez had been previously assigned – St. John Fisher in Richmond and Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Conroe – as well as the Shalom Treatment Center in Splendora, where La Rosa-Lopez was sent for evaluation and treatment in the early 2000s.

While stationed at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Conroe, Father Manuel La Rosa-Lopez was accused in 2001 of kissing and inappropriately touching a 16 year-old girl. Following consideration of the allegation by both civil authorities and the archdiocesan review board in 2003, La Rosa-Lopez was allowed to return to ministry in 2004.

On Aug. 10, 2018, a 36-year-old man alleged to the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston that Fr. Manuel La Rosa-Lopez sexually abused him from 1998-2001, when he was a high school student and La Rosa-Lopez was assigned to Sacred Heart Parish.

The archdiocese said in a statement following La Rosa-Lopez’s arrest Sept. 11 that it had immediately reported the man’s allegation to Child Protective Services.

In October, a third individual came forward with allegations that La Rosa-Lopez had sexually abused him on several occasions during the mid-1990s. According to reports, a lawyer for the third accuser said that the family of the alleged victim had reported La Rosa-Lopez at the time.

La Rosa-Lopez is currently released on bail and scheduled to return to court in January.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston and president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, has found himself at the forefront of the American hierarchy’s response to the sexual abuse crisis. He chaired the U.S. bishops’ conference general assembly in early November, during which he announced that the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops had instructed them to delay voting on a proposed code of episcopal conduct or on the creation of an independent commission for investigating allegations of misconduct against bishops.

Last week, DiNardo was the subject of a television report claiming he had knowingly left two priests in active ministry despite “credible accusations” of abuse having been made against them. Cardinal DiNardo denied that either case was “credible.”

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Phoenix, Ariz., Dec 27, 2017 / 04:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- You’ve probably heard of Bruce Jenner.

Now referred to as Caitlyn Jenner, the high-profile Olympic athlete with a famously dramatic family had a very high-profile transition from male to female – including mutilple surgical alterations, a cover on Vanity Fair magazine and the now-canceled docu-series “I am Cait.”

You probably haven’t heard of Bruce Reimer.

Bruce and his twin brother Brian were born in Canada in the 1960s. At the age of seven months, the otherwise healthy boys were circumcised. But the doctors used a new method of circumcision, involving an electric cauterizing needle, on Bruce. An accident occurred, completely burning off the little boy’s penis.

Brian’s operation was canceled, but his parents were devastated.

The Reimers decided to take Bruce to Dr. John Money, a psychologist and sexologist at Johns Hopkins they had seen on T.V.

Dr. Money had a theory that aside from reproductive and urinary functions, gender was a social construct. Until the Reimer twins, he had largely worked with intersex cases – children born with ambiguous genitalia or abnormal sex chromosomes.

But the Reimer twins – otherwise healthy and biologically normative – were the perfect experiment on which to test his theory of gender fluidity. Brian would be raised as a boy, and Bruce would from now on be called Brenda, and raised as a girl.

The Reimers agreed, and insisted on girl’s clothes and socialization for Brenda throughout childhood. They never told the twins about the accident, or about Brenda’s biological sex.

The twins were brought in for a yearly observation with Dr. Money, who dubbed the case a wild success by the time the twins were nine years old.

“No-one else knows that she is the child whose case they read of in the news media at the time of the accident,” he wrote.

“Her behavior is so normally that of an active little girl, and so clearly different by contrast from the boyish ways of her twin brother, that it offers nothing to stimulate one’s conjectures.”

What the Doctor didn’t tell

Deacon Dr. Patrick Lappert is two things you wouldn’t necessarily expect to occur in tandem – a plastic surgeon, and a deacon for the Roman Catholic Church.

These two roles give him a unique understanding of the human person, both physically and metaphysically. They’ve also given him a unique perspective on transgendered persons, and the current cultural movement to support surgical sex changes.

Dr. Lappert was asked to speak at this year’s Truth and Love conference for Courage in Phoenix. He included the case of the Reimer twins during his talk, “Transgender Surgery and Christian Anthropology.”

The on-paper success of Brenda Reimer as a lovely and well-adjusted little girl did not match the lived reality of the child, Dr. Lappert said. Brenda Reimer was a rambunctious tomboy – shunned by the boys for wearing dresses, and by the girls for being too wild.

“She was very rebellious. She was very masculine, and I could not persuade her to do anything feminine. Brenda had almost no friends growing up. Everybody ridiculed her, called her cavewoman,” Brenda’s mother, Janet, recalled in an interview with BBC News.

“She was a very lonely, lonely girl.”

During the twins’ yearly checkup and observation, Dr. Money would force the twins to strip naked and engage in sexual play, posing in positions that affirmed their respective genders. On at least one occasion, this sex play was photographed.

By their teenage years, the twins were strongly opposed to going to their checkups with Dr. Money.

By age 13, Brenda was suicidal.

By 15, the Reimers stopped taking the twins to Dr. Money and revealed the truth to Brenda – he was biologically male. He fully embraced his male identity, chose the name David, and began hormone therapy and a surgical genital reconstruction. He dated and married a woman, whose children he adopted.

But the wounds of his traumatic childhood were deep for both David and his brother. Both suffered from depression. After 14 years, David’s wife divorced him. Then Brian died from a drug overdose. Not long after, in May 2004, David committed suicide. He was 38 years old.

Despite everything, Dr. Money never printed any retractions of his studies, or added any corrections.

“He never said a word, never took any of it back,” Dr. Lappert said.

Which is hugely problematic, because this study is still frequently cited as a successful gender transition by the medical community at large, including the society of plastic surgeons to which Dr. Lappert belongs, he said.

“I put this case out there as an example, to show you the foundation – the sand upon which this whole thing is built,” Dr. Lappert said.

“We have to understand this as we’re talking about the human person as a unity of spirit and form, that there is an integrity to the maleness and femaleness with which we are made.”

One of the biggest problems with transgender sex change surgeries is that they are permanent and irreversible in any meaningful way, Dr. Lappert said.

“There’s nothing reversible about genital surgery – it’s a permanent, irreversible mutilation of the human person. And there’s no other word for it,” he said.  

“It results in permanent sterility. It’s a permanent dissolution of the unitive and the procreative functions. And even the unitive aspect of the sexual embrace is radically hindered if not utterly destroyed,” he said, because of the inevitable nerve damage that occurs during the surgery, and because the brain will always register the genital nerves as coming from their organ of origin.

In other words, nerves connected to a vagina will always register with the brain as a vagina, even if they are now part of a surgically constructed penis, and vice versa.

Another major issue is that sex change surgeries seek to solve an interior dysfunction with an external solution.

“Underneath it all, you’re trying to heal an interior wound with exterior surgery,” Dr. Lapper said.

This article was originally published on CNA Jan. 19, 2017.

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