Police: Man attacked Tulsa cathedral attendant with sword, tried to set building on fire

The hidden chapel where St. Catherine of Siena died in Rome is located in the Palazzo Santa Chiara on Via di S. Chiara, 14. / Credit: Photo by Courtney Mares.

Rome, Italy, Apr 29, 2024 / 04:00 am (CNA).
While most people associate St. Catherine… […]

Denver, Colo., Apr 19, 2020 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- After receiving more than 1.6 million applications, a key part of the US government’s economic response to the coronavirus pandemic, known as the Paycheck Protection Program, ran out of money Thursday and will no longer be accepting new applications.

In the two weeks the Paycheck Protection Program was active, the application process for the loans excluded small business owners with criminal records from applying— potentially hurting both business owners with criminal records and their employees, advocates and those with personal experience told CNA.

What is the PPP?

Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act March 27 to help relieve the economy during the coronavirus pandemic.

Among various measures, including expansions to unemployment benefits, the CARES Act authorizes some $350 billion in loans to small businesses, intended to allow these businesses to continue to pay their employees. The loans were given on a first come, first serve basis.

The loans were capped at $10 million, were open to businesses with fewer than 500 employees per location, and were intended to cover two months of payroll costs.

The federal government promised to forgive the loans if a business used at least 75 percent of the funds to maintain its payroll at “pre-pandemic levels” for eight weeks after the loan is disbursed, the New York Times reports.

The remaining money could be used only to pay for certain expenses, such as a mortgage, rent, and utilities, according to the Times.

Those with criminal records left behind

The most recent guidelines from the Small Business Administration regarding the PPP stated that business owners will be denied a loan if they are facing criminal charges, or have had a felony conviction in the past five years.

This policy is, according to a group of nonprofit social justice organizations who wrote an April 10 letter to Congress, more restrictive than the SBA’s existing regulations regarding criminal record restrictions for small business loans.

Applicants are asked about criminal history for regular SBA loans. A typical small business loan application from the SBA allows applicants to provide details about their criminal history beyond a simple “yes” or “no”— unlike the emergency loan application, which explicitly states that the loan will not be approved if the applicant answers “yes” to either of the two questions pertaining to criminal records.

“With one in three Americans having some sort of record, and people with records experiencing an unemployment rate five times higher than the average rate, these restrictions will have a significant and detrimental impact on individuals, families, and communities across the United States,” the group of nonprofits said in their letter.

The application form for the PPP itself had more restrictions, such as mandating that no one owning 20% or more of the business be subject to any “means by which formal criminal charges are brought in any jurisdiction.”

A similar loan from the SBA called the Economic Injury Disaster Loan also asked for the applicant’s criminal history, and seems to exclude those who have “ever” been convicted, pleaded guilty, pleaded no contest, been placed on pretrial diversion, parole, or probation for “any criminal offense.”

The small business hustle

James Blum, a Catholic who runs a community in Aurora, Colo., that assists men coming out of prison, told CNA that people with criminal records already face major challenges finding employment and getting loans.

Blum— who himself spent time in prison and has a felony on his record— considered applying for the PPP himself, but knew his felony would exclude him.

Many guys with criminal records hope, Blum said, that it would be easier to start their own company rather than try to get hired. The truth is, he said, most businesses, even if you’re not a felon, don’t succeed. There’s a lot of money that must be invested, and there’s an attitude of hustle that you have to have.

Reporting from the non-profit Marshall Project bears out Blum’s experience, suggesting that because people with felonies, in particular, often cannot get jobs, many start their own businesses.

Blum said he knows a man with a criminal record who started his own janitorial business, and found some success doing that until the company eventually went under.

Another man he knew started a company doing custom tile, and took on several employees, but “he’s working like a dog” to make ends meet.

“Many guys think, ‘Oh I’ll just work for myself.’ And that sounds good, but it’s very difficult to be successful as a small business owner in this country,” he said.

“The call never comes”

Blum’s organization, My Father’s House, helps men gain the skills they need to be successful post-prison. He said at least three of the men who frequent the house are currently out of work, one of whom was just released from prison and did not have a chance to look for a job before the pandemic began.

The other two, he said, have been laid off and are filing for unemployment.

“When they first get out of prison, men, especially those convicted of sexual offenses, aren’t even allowed to access the internet, and they have to have permission, and that can take months to build the trust with the parole officer and the treatment providers and let them access the internet, and even have an email address,” Blum said.

“To try to apply for a job in this world without an email address is just ridiculous. Every time you go on a website, the first thing they ask you is what’s your email address. And so even if you can get permission to go to a monitored computer site, like at the parole office, and you go to a website, the very first thing they’re going to ask you is for your email address.”

At some point the parole officer will allow them to create an email address, but they can only access that email at the parole office, Blum said. The logistics are difficult, partly because they have to create a resume on a computer they’re not familiar with, and they can’t access their email every day.

When an employer finally gives someone with a criminal record a job interview, you can explain a felony as best you can, but it may not always make a difference, Blum said. The interview could be going well, and the interviewer could be impressed with the applicant’s knowledge and experience, but it may end up being moot once they learn of the applicant’s record.

“The answer is just: ‘Well, we’ll give you a call.’ And the call never comes,” Blum said.

Though a recruiter may interview a candidate with a criminal record, most Human Resources departments will step in after that. Success in the interview is not a predictor of success in getting the job, Blum said.

“There’s a whole series of decision makers that you never even get to meet,” he said.

“At some point you end up with a whole class of people that have served their sentence, they’ve supposedly paid their debt to society, and yet they cannot enter into the economy, and into society at a regular level.”

Blum noted that he himself is very blessed to be able to work full-time hours from home during the pandemic, and not be laid off, but “I’m in the minority, for sure, among felons.”

“How does that make any sense?”

Brian, a Catholic living in Denver who is working to start a software consulting business, told CNA that he tried to apply for the emergency loan, but a misdemeanor on his record automatically excluded him.

Brian is on a diversion program and has a misdemeanor harassment charge on his record. While he does not have a felony on his record, he has found it difficult to find employment since his misdemeanor charge, despite being an experienced computer programmer.

“Now I’m going to have to suffer financially for it, as if I haven’t suffered enough,” he told CNA.

While it may be politically expedient to include a clause excluding those with criminal records from the emergency loan program, Blum said it ends up hurting not only the bosses, but the workers as well.

“By stopping the business owner— who was convicted of a felony five, six, seven years ago and served his time and paid his debt to society— by stopping that man from getting the loan, you’re punishing another guy who’s never committed a crime in his life, and that guy’s family,” Blum said.

“[The worker] is going to lose his job because the business owner can’t afford to pay the payroll. How does that make any sense?”

If the purpose of the emergency loan program is to relieve the American economy, he said, he doesn’t see why a business owner’s criminal history is important.

“They think they’re punishing the business owner, but really they’re punishing these other people,” he said.

[…]

CNA Staff, Aug 6, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- The Knights of Columbus announced a new initiative Thursday to report on Christian persecution in Nigeria, where at least 60,000 Christians have been killed in the past two decades.

Since 2014, the Catholic fraternal and charitable organization has spent more than $25 million on behalf of persecuted Christians and other religious minorities targeted for elimination in the Middle East, the organization says, which includes the rebuilding of the majority-Christian town of Karemlesh on the Nineveh Plain.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation and the demographics overall are almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims.

Nigeria’s Christians, especially in the northern part of the country, have for the past several decades been subjected to brutal property destruction, killings, and kidnappings, often at the hands of Islamic extremist groups.

“The effort is similar to what we have done in Iraq and is based in the hope that greater attention by American diplomacy and humanitarian aid can make a difference there,” said Knights of Columbus Supreme Knight Carl Anderson in an Aug. 6 announcement of the new initiative.

Multiple Nigerian Catholics have told CNA in recent days that attacks on Christians by Fulani Muslim herders, as well as by the militant group Boko Haram, have not slowed in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic.

The worst of the persecution, in the north, comes at the hands of Muslim terrorists against the majority-Christian population, CNA has been told.

Such incidents include attacks in late July on four Christian villages in Southern Kaduna, in which more than 62 Christians were killed by Islamic terrorists. Last month, an Islamic extremist group boasted of killing five international aid workers, three of whom were known employees of Christian aid agencies.

In other areas, many Christians, especially clergy, suffer kidnappings at the hands of terrorists seeking ransom. In many cases, for kidnapped priests, their parishioners band together to raise the ransom money.

In a high-profile case from earlier this year, gunmen abducted four seminarians from Good Shepherd Seminary in Kaduna, holding them for random. The kidnappers eventually released three of the seminarians, but killed 18-year-old Michael Nnadi after he refused to renounce his faith.

Fr. Charles Uganwa, communications director of the south-central Issele-Uku diocese, said six priests of the diocese have been kidnapped by Fulani herdsmen in the past two years. The most recent priest kidnapping took place in June.

“He was released after about four days in captivity. He was so injured. He was beaten with clubs and with stones, with the butt of their gun. He was seriously injured. He had to be in the hospital for many weeks,” Uganwa told CNA.

Father Joseph Fidelis, a priest of the northeastern diocese of Maidugui, told CNA this week that he estimates that since 2009, Boko Haram has driven out half of the 300,000 Catholics who used to live in the diocese. Though Catholics there still celebrate Mass openly, they have to take stringent security measures against suicide bombers.

“Boko Haram is still very active, not in the city so much [as] in the outskirts…They still do the kidnapping, they still do the bombing. They still set mines on the road,” Fidelis said.

The problem of internally displaced people (IDP), mostly Christians who have been driven from their homes, is especially acute in the north, where thousands of the destitute live in refugee camps.

“Around here, around Maiduguri, over 1.2 million are displaced. About 1.4 million, and the number keeps rising on a daily basis. [In] the entire country, you have over 2.4 million people internally displaced. Now that’s quite huge,” Fidelis said.

Part of the problem, Nigerian Christians have told CNA, is that the Muslim-controlled government has largely responded slowly, inadequately, or not at all to the problem of Christian persecution.

“The most important issue is that unfortunately, the government in Nigeria does not show enough will, either in speech or in action, to help to curb the violence and the bloodshed that we see, either from the terrorists or from bandits or from a headsman, because we have so many sorts of groups running riots all over the Northeast of Nigeria,” Bishop Emmanuel Badejo of the southern diocese of Oyo told CNA.

Bishop Badejo said although his diocese is more peaceful than some in the north, with Muslims and Christians largely co-existing peacefully, there are some means of persecution that are more systemic and subtle, with government appointments and written laws seeming to favor Islam over Christianity.

“It’s no secret that in Nigeria, especially with the [President Muhammadu] Buhari government, there are all written laws that have not favored Christians at all, that have favored, in other words, the Muslims,” Badejo said.

“The Christian Churches have protested, Christian leaders have protested, but the federal government has not said any word in order to show any desire to protect the Christian religion.”

The Knights hope to raise greater awareness of Nigerian Christians’ plight by means of their new initiative.

In addition to financial aid, the Knights of Columbus have in the past advocated for persecuted Christians before the U.S. government, sending researchers to Iraq in 2016 to compile a 300-page report on the crimes of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) against Christians in the country.

Anderson has also testified multiple times before Congress, urging action to protect the Middle East’s Christians from potential extinction.

Later that year, both houses of Congress unanimously passed resolutions declaring ISIS’ targeting of Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East to be a genocide.

Christianity had been present in the Nineveh plain in Iraq – between the city of Mosul, the country’s second-largest city, and Iraqi Kurdistan– since the first century. ISIS’ brutal invasion six years ago displaced at least 125,000 Christians from the area, and to date only about 40,000 have been able to return.

The Knights have worked closely with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to ensure funds reach persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

The Knights are in the midst of their 138th annual convention, which this year is being held virtually for the first time, due to restrictions in place because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Founded in New Haven in 1882, the Knights of Columbus was originally intended to assist widows and their families upon the deaths of their husbands. It has grown into a worldwide Catholic fraternal order, with more than 2 million members carrying out works of charity and evangelization across the globe. The Knights also offer life insurance policies to their members.

The convention comes a few months after the Vatican announced that Fr. Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus, will be beatified following Pope Francis’ approval of a miracle attributed to his intercession.

[…]