Texas man sues ex-wife’s friends for facilitating unborn child’s abortion

CNA Staff, Jun 30, 2020 / 05:19 pm (CNA).- A man has been arrested for allegedly tearing down a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of a county courthouse in northwest Montana.

The man, a 30-year-old Columbia Falls resident, allegedly wrapped a chain around the monument at the Flathead County courthouse grounds in Kalispell on June 27. He attached the chain to his truck, then pulled the monument into the street. He removed then chain, got into his truck, and left the area.

The Kalispell Police Department told NBC Montana that observers saw him and called police.

The accused man, Anthony Weimer, faces a felony charge of criminal mischief. Police said they did not know any motive for the action.

Kalispell Police Chief Doug Overman told MTN News he has no affiliation with any protest or demonstration groups in Flathead County.

Local media did not know whether the monument could be restored or if it had to be replaced.

The Ten Commandments monuments, often spread in collaboration with the movie of the same name, have been a tool for building Catholic, Protestant and Jewish unity in America. They have sometimes drawn objections, protests, and legal cases due to perceived violations of constitutional provisions regarding separation of church and state and non-establishment of a religion.

Many public monuments have been the focus of vandalism or have been thrown down in recent weeks.

Largely peaceful protests against police brutality swept the United States after the spread of video showing the death of Minnesotan George Floyd, a black man, during his detention by police.

However, civil unrest, looting, and vandalism have sometimes accompanied or followed these protests. Long-controversial statues of Confederate leaders were toppled in some localities, as were statues of George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and Ulysses S. Grant.

At least two statues of St. Junipero Serra were knocked down by rioters in California.

During the eighteenth century, the saint founded nine Catholic missions in the area that would later become California, many of those missions would go on to become the centers of major California cities. Serra helped to convert thousands of native Californians to Christianity and taught them new agricultural technologies.

Critics have lambasted Serra as a symbol of European colonialism and said the missions engaged in the forced labor of Native Americans, sometimes claiming Serra himself was abusive.

But Serra’s defenders say that Serra was actually an advocate for native people and a champion of human rights. They note the many native people he helped during his life, and their outpouring of grief at his death.

Biographers note that Serra frequently intervened for native people when they faced persecution from Spanish authorities. In one case, the priest intervened to spare the lives of several California natives who had attacked a Spanish outpost.

In St. Louis, Missouri the statue of the city’s namesake French king St. Louis IX has drawn protests from Muslims, Jews, and others who object to the crusader king. The statue has also drawn hundreds of Catholic defenders who have prayed at the base of the statue.

St. Louis was King of France from 1226-70, and he took part in the Seventh and Eighth Crusades. He restricted usury and established hospitals, and personally cared for the poor and for lepers. He was canonized in 1297.

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USCCB President Archbishop Timothy Broglio speaks at the bishops’ spring meeting, Thursday, June 13, 2024 / USCCB

Louisville, Ky., Jun 14, 2024 / 08:00 am (CNA).

The president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, in a speech to his fellow bishops gathered in Louisville, Kentucky for their spring meeting, discoursed on the subject of the incompatibility of “sex change” with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

In his speech to kick off the meeting, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who serves as Archbishop for the Military Services and is president of Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), reflected on the war in the Holy Land, the migrant crisis, the National Eucharistic Congress, and the persecution of the Church in Nicaragua, among other issues. 

The largest portion of his address, however, was devoted to a catechesis on the subject of the dignity of the body, with the prelate citing Pope Francis’ recent declaration on gender ideology, and referring specifically to the issue of “sex change.”

Broglio’s remarks come less than a month after news broke that a woman identifying as a man had attended seminary and was living a religious vocation as a male hermit in Kentucky, with the apparent approval of Bishop John Stowe, who leads the Diocese of Lexington.

In his speech to the bishops, Broglio quoted heavily from Pope Francis and his recent document on gender theory.

“We are grateful for the recent declaration Dignitas Infinita from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. There we read a clear message about many issues that plague our times. In particular, ‘Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God,’” he said.

“‘This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel,’” Broglio quoted from the Vatican document.

Broglio also cited the the “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” saying it “expressly invites us to recognize that ‘the human body shares in the dignity of ‘the image of God.’”

“Such a truth deserves to be remembered, especially when it comes to sex change, for humans are inseparably composed of both body and soul,” Broglio said.

He concluded his discourse quoting from Pope Francis again on the dignity of the human body.

“Teaching about the need to respect the natural order of the human person, Pope Francis affirmed that ‘creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created…”

At a press conference at the conclusion of the first day of the meeting, Broglio fielded a question about his speech. 

Asked whether the closed door sessions during the bishops’ meeting had included any discussions of the transgender hermit in the Diocese of Lexington and possible implications for action by the conference, Broglio said the subject had come up at the “committee levels.”

“There certainly hasn’t been any discussion in the general assembly of the bishops. There is concern that has been expressed at some of the committee levels because of the nature of what hermetic life is in the Church and also the preparation necessary for that,” Broglio said.

“And also it’s just the general honesty that should be a part of that whole process of determining a vocation and responding to that vocation. At this point, that’s basically where the discussion is,” he said.

[…]

CNA Staff, Sep 15, 2020 / 05:00 am (CNA).-  

A political advocacy group led by Catholics said Tuesday it has launched a campaign to reach Catholic voters in swing states to call attention to presidential candidate Joe Biden’s policy agenda … […]