It’s not too late to join this pro-life novena

Washington D.C., Jun 13, 2019 / 04:18 pm (CNA).- Though a majority of Americans oppose taxpayer-funded abortion, leading Democrats in Congress have repeated their opposition to the Hyde Amendment while simultaneously keeping its strong limits on abortion funding in federal spending appropriation bills.

“I do not think it is good public policy, and I wish we never had a Hyde Amendment, but it is the law of the land right now,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told a fiscal summit hosted in New York by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

“I don’t see that there is an opportunity to get rid of it with the current occupant of the White House and some in the United States Senate,” she said, according to National Public Radio.

Congressional Democratic leaders suppressed an effort by first-term U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., to strip the Hyde Amendment from the funding bill.

The Hyde Amendment prohibits the use of Medicaid funds for most abortions. It was introduced in 1976 by Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill. It is not a law, but rather has been passed as a rider to budget legislation every year.

At the time the Hyde Amendment was first signed into law in 1977, it had the support of nearly half of Congressional Democrats. It still enjoys some bipartisan support.

In its current form the amendment prohibits federal tax dollars from paying for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest, or when it is deemed necessary to save the life of the mother.

The Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, has estimated that more than 2 million unborn lives have been saved as a result of the policy.

Leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have all voiced opposition to the Hyde Amendment, including former vice president Joe Biden. As recently as early June his campaign said he backed the amendment. He then reversed his view after heavy pressure from his party and from pro-abortion rights advocates, though this policy could hurt Biden in key Midwestern states in a general election.

In his June 10 column, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia strongly criticized Biden, a Catholic, for adhering to party politics rather than defending his beliefs.

“The unborn child means exactly zero in the calculus of power for Democratic Party leaders, and the right to an abortion, once described as a tragic necessity, is now a perverse kind of ‘sacrament most holy’,” Chaput said, citing a Catholic hymn. “It will have a candidate’s allegiance and full-throated reverence… or else.”

Biden’s reversal was lamented by Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America.

“With all the major candidates fighting to be the most extreme on abortion, there is a wide-open lane for a candidate to bring an alternative position to the discussion and to unify Democrats around common ground principles,” she told CNA in a recent interview.

Day said that Democrats should instead work for equal opportunity and equality, instead of paying for abortions for poorer women.

“Poor women don’t want money for abortions; they want the same opportunities to parent as their rich counterparts,” she said.

House Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., told reporters she opposes the amendment and the Democratic Party is overwhelmingly pro-abortion rights. While most Congressional Democrats would favor eliminating the Hyde Amendment, she said, spending bills need support from both parties to avoid a government shutdown.

“People don’t want to throw that into an appropriations bill that has to go to a Republican Senate and be signed by a Republican president,” Jayapal said.

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said he thinks every presidential candidate who has served in Congress has voted for an appropriations bill with the Hyde Amendment.

U.S. Sen Kamala Harris, D-Calif., contended that a vote for such spending bills is not a vote for the amendment itself.

“The Hyde Amendment is the law. And so it has been attached to other funding bills, and until we repeal it, which is what I am in favor of, it will be attached to federal government funding bills. That’s the problem with the Hyde Amendment,” Harris told The NPR Politics Podcast.

A bill that included a provision to make the amendment permanent, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, failed to gain the 60 votes needed to win a procedural vote in the Senate in January 2019. In that vote 48 senators, including two Democrats, voted for cloture while 47 senators, including two Republicans, voted against it.

Nationally, more than half of Americans say they do not support federal funding of abortions.

While three out of four women who undergo abortions are living in poverty, the Hyde Amendment is actually far less popular among low-income voters. A September 2016 poll of likely voters conducted for Politico and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that only 24 percent of people making under $25,000 a year said they were in favor of the public funding of abortion services, compared to 45 percent of people making over $75,000.

Overall, 58 percent of likely voters opposed public funding for abortion, with only 36 percent voicing support, the 2016 poll said. A February 2019 Marist poll reported that 54 percent of all American adults opposed any taxpayer funding of abortion, while only 39 percent did not.

Presidential incumbent Donald Trump had voiced strong support for legal abortion in the years before he ran for president, but professed a change of view. He took on several prominent pro-life advisers and now has strong backing from many Republican and Republican-leaning pro-life advocates.

The Susan B. Anthony List, whose president Marjorie Dannenfelser headed his campaign’s pro-life advisory committee, claimed that Trump has delivered “pro-life wins,” such as his appointment of federal judges believed to be sceptical of pro-abortion rights jurisprudence and his approval of measures that help defund abortion providers like Planned Parenthood.

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Washington D.C., Mar 25, 2018 / 12:03 am (CNA/EWTN News).- With the arrival of Palm Sunday, Catholics across the globe will soon be handed leaves as they walk into church. Some might fold them into elaborate little crosses. Kids will poke each other with them. But it’s safe to say most won’t know where they came from.

The feast commemorates Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem the week before his passion and crucifixion. The Gospels attest that as Jesus entered the city, crowds lay down palm branches and cloaks as he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.

For centuries, Christians have commemorated the feast day that begins Holy Week by waving branches of either palm or another local tree, as well as with liturgical processions and other celebrations.

In the U.S. alone, nearly 18,000 Catholic parishes will celebrate Palm Sunday by blessing and distributing palm branches to the faithful. That makes millions of palm leaves each year – and that doesn’t include all of the Protestant churches that observe the tradition.

Where do all those palms come from? While many Catholics know the final destination of their palms – they are burned to become ashes for next year’s Ash Wednesday – the origin of the leafy branches is less well known.

Credit: Klara Sasova / Unsplash

The journey from tree to church begins with the harvesters around the world who cut and prepare the leaves for their role in worship. The work needed to provide palms for Palm Sunday is so immense that it actually constitutes a full-time year-round job for some harvesters.

Thomas Sowell is one such palm harvester from Florida who has been helping to supply parishes with fresh palm leaves for more than five decades. Sowell began harvesting wild palm leaves from trees as a child to earn extra money in the springtime. Over the past several decades, he has grown his business into a palm supplier that ships the leafy branches to all 50 states and Canada.

Despite the growth in his business, Sowell says he tries to maintain his focus on the purpose behind it all.

“We try to do the best job that we can,” he told CNA. “Every bag that we send out to churches, every individual bag has been examined, cleaned – we go to extreme measures to make sure that everything we do for these churches is done in the honor of Jesus Christ.”

While there are more than 2,600 different species of palm that grow across the world, palm plants cannot survive outside of tropical and subtropical climates. Historically, parishes that could not source palm locally would instead substitute branches of another local tree such as olive or willow, although modern churches also have the option of sourcing palm fronds from other regions of the world.

In the United States and Canada, most parishes seek out suppliers who deliver fresh palms shortly before Palm Sunday, said Fr. Michael J. Flynn, Secretariat of Divine Worship for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Many of these parishes contact church goods suppliers such as Peter Munley of Falls Church, Virginia, who helps provide parishes year-round with supplies like candles and sacramental wine, along with palms for Holy Week.

Munley told CNA that in preparation for Palm Sunday, he works to deliver palms from their source to different parishes that place orders around the country. In addition to Florida, palms are sourced from Texas, California and elsewhere in the Southern United States, he said.

While nearly all of the palms Munley sells are individually pre-cut, church goods suppliers also helps to source decorative palms for altar centerpieces and larger palm fronds as well. Dealers also work to ensure that palms get burnt and ground into ashes for Ash Wednesday, for parishes that cannot burn the palms for ashes themselves.

Munley also stressed that although many American-based palm sources are not labeled as “eco-friendly,” the practices of many major U.S. palm harvesters are indeed environmentally sustainable.

“Our guys don’t kill the palm,” he said, adding that by sourcing palms from American harvesters as opposed to internationally-certified “green” farmers, they help to reduce the ecological impact of shipping and transportation.

Credit: Bohumil Petrik/CNA.

Sowell said that the palm trees he works with “are 100 percent wild.” He works with local ranchers and landowners to remove palmetto leaves from trees that grow naturally on local farmland.

Some of the trees Sowell harvests from have been producing palm leaves since he first started gathering palm leaves to sell as a boy.

“I know that there are trees that are still being cut today that I cut when I was twelve,” he said.

Originally, Sowell cut everything himself. Over the years, however, his growing cooperation with the caretakers who supply palm led him to focus more on preparing palms for church supply dealers and for shipment.

Cooperation with ranchers and landowners is critical. Sowell says the process of cutting, cleaning and preparing the strips of palm is incredibly labor intensive, and he could not complete it without local partnerships. “There’s no way that you could grow this much palm and just do it (alone). It’s hard.”

The work is so intensive that the Palm Sunday celebrations require an entire year’s work. “We work twelve months out of the year, in one aspect or another, for one day,” Sowell said.

He also supplies palm leaves for Eastern Orthodox Churches, which use a different calendar for Easter and Lent. After the celebration of Palm Sunday in the Catholic Church and other Western churches, “we’ll turn around in a couple of weeks and gather more palms so they’re fresh for the Orthodox,” he said.

The participation of Christians in Palm Sunday celebrations not only provides work and a living for Sowell and his employees, but financial support for the local ranchers who work with him.

“There are so many families that help us that can earn money in a way that otherwise they couldn’t.”

Ultimately, Sowell sees his job harvesting and preparing palm leaves – and the service he is able to offer to parishes across the country – as a blessing.

“There would have been no way we could have done this if it hadn’t been for God helping us,” he said.

This article was originally published on CNA March 16, 2016.

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Both the pastor of nearby San Bernabé parish in El Escorial, Fr. Florentino de Andrés, along with the Archdiocese of Madrid, anticipate the deconsecration of the chapel as a result of the ceremony. / Credit: Zarateman/Wikimedia Commons

Madrid, … […]