Their chapel caught fire, but Salesian sisters remain thankful

Long-time pro-life activist Eva Edl (left) prays in front of a Senate office building on Capitol Hill, Sept. 6, 2001 to protest US President George W. Bush’s decision to allow limited stem cell research. / Credit: MIKE THEILER/AFP via Getty Images

CNA Staff, Aug 21, 2024 / 14:14 pm (CNA).

An elderly survivor of a Soviet concentration camp and six other pro-life advocates were convicted of blocking access to a Michigan abortion clinic, the latest in a high-profile series of judgments against anti-abortion demonstrators in federal courts.

The seven defendants in the case were found guilty for their involvement in a “blockade of a reproductive health care clinic in Sterling Heights, Michigan” on Aug. 27, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a press release on Tuesday. 

The demonstrators were convicted of both a felony conspiracy against rights and a Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act offense, the government said. Sentencing will be set at a later date. 

Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, claimed the pro-life activists had “orchestrated an unlawful clinic blockade and physically obstructed patients seeking access to their doctors, without regard to the serious medical needs of the women they blocked from accessing reproductive health care.”

The defendants — Calvin Zastrow, Chester Gallagher, Heather Idoni, Caroline Davis, Joel Curry, Justin Phillips, Eva Edl, and Eva Zastrow — reportedly staged the demonstration as part of a “Michigan Holiness Revival Tour,” one that allegedly set out with the “express purpose of blockading a reproductive health clinic,” the Justice Department said. 

The 89-year-old Eva Edl is a well-known pro-life activist and a survivor of a communist concentration camp who fled Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.

Her biography reveals that her mother was kidnapped by the Soviets in postwar Europe after which she and her siblings were sent to communist concentration camps in Yugoslavia. She eventually escaped and emigrated to the United States.

The Biden administration has aggressively prosecuted several FACE Act cases over the last few years, handing out prison sentences to men and women who attempted to block access to abortion clinics around the country. 

Some of the activists found guilty this week, including Eva Edl, were also found guilty earlier this year of a similar abortion clinic blockade in Tennessee in 2021. Edl has yet to be sentenced for that conviction. 

Last year multiple pro-life activists were convicted under the FACE Act for an October 2020 demonstration at the Washington Surgi-Clinic run by Cesare Santangelo in Washington, D.C.

Pro-life advocate Lauren Handy, 30, was sentenced in May to four years and nine months in prison for organizing the protest. 

Several other demonstrators ultimately received prison sentences ranging from about two to three years.

Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy and 25 House Republicans last year introduced a resolution to repeal the FACE Act, arguing that the Biden administration had “brazenly weaponized the FACE Act against normal, everyday Americans across the political spectrum, simply because they are pro-life.” 

Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, indicated earlier this year that he would move to release some of the convicted pro-lifers from prison if he is re-elected president in November. 

“Many people are in jail over this.… We’re going to get that taken care of immediately — [on the] first day,” he told the Faith and Freedom Coalition in June. 

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Denver Newsroom, Apr 27, 2020 / 05:15 pm (CNA).- Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J. wanted to be a missionary in the Soviet Union. He didn’t know he’d spend most of the decades he lived inside the country within the walls of a prison, much of the time in complete isolation. But Ciszek found closeness to God in labor camps and prison cells, never knowing what might happen to him next.

The isolation Fr. Ciszek experienced as a prisoner of the Soviet Union brought out heroic virtues that can help those suffering from the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic today, says a priest who will discuss Ciszek’s life in an April 28 webcast.

“Father Ciszek lived many kinds of isolation,” Father Eugene Ritz told CNA. “He experienced physical isolation from his family, his Jesuit spiritual family, and friends. He often lived in isolation from the sacraments. He lived in isolation from a culture that permitted a notion of God and worship of Him. He lived in interior and spiritual isolation, especially when he could not present himself as a priest or exercise ministry.”

“Many lost faith during their time in the Gulag, including other priests,” said the Pennsylvania priest. However, Ciszek showed the virtue of fortitude in his isolation. Ritz praised Ciszek’s “firmness in difficulty, his constancy in pursuit of the good, and his resolve to resist temptation, conquer fear and face tremendous trials.”

Ritz’s presentation, “Living in Isolation: The Story of Fr. Walter Ciszek,” will be livestreamed Tuesday, April 28 at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. The event is presented by the diocese’s Commission for Young Adults.

Fr. Ciszek was born in 1904 in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, in what is now the Allentown diocese.

He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1928 and was ordained in 1937, after training to say Mass in the Russian rite. After two years in Poland, he used the chaos of World War II as cover to enter the Soviet Union so that he could minister to Christians who lived under communist persecution.

He was arrested by the Soviet authorities as a supposed spy in 1941. His imprisonment included torturous interrogation, solitary confinement and years of hard labor near the Arctic Circle. Despite the dangers, he said Mass in secret and heard the confessions of other prisoners.

When he was not imprisoned, he also ministered to several parishes. Ciszek was not released until a 1963 prisoner exchange, when he returned to the United States. He recounted his experiences and their spiritual meaning in his popular memoirs “He Leadeth Me” and “With God in Russia.”

Ritz, who serves as the Allentown diocese’s chancellor, is co-postulator of Ciszek’s canonization. In this role he helps advance the late priest’s case to become a saint through the processes of the Catholic Church.

For Ritz, there is much to learn from the priest’s example.

“One of my favorite lessons of Father Ciszek is that Christ alone guarantees success,” he said. “It was his message to the priests in the labor camp in Siberia that in their struggles of being isolated from their families, friends, parishioners, religious communities, and too frequently the celebration of the Sacraments, Father Ciszek called them to refocus on the person of Christ and his providence.”

The lecture is linked to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed some 200,000 people worldwide.

The pandemic has left many people isolated. Those in the hospital are barred from receiving visits. In dozens of countries authorities have ordered millions more to stay at home, disrupting family life, social life and economic life around the world.

“To those not handling this very well I would tell them that they are in good company, and remind them that what we suffer helps us to grow in virtue, and that in all things trust the providence that God remains with us, and he alone guarantees our success,” Ritz said.

Bishop Alfred Schlert of Allentown will provide opening remarks for Ritz’s lecture. The bishop, too, reflected on Ciszek’s example in a world rocked by a new disease.

“The people of the Diocese of Allentown, especially those in the area where Father Ciszek was born and raised, pray always that this man who once walked among us, will someday be a saint,” Schlert told CNA April 27. “As a priest, he spent many years in captive isolation in the Russian gulag. Due to the pandemic, we now live in a form of isolation, and so we look to Father Ciszek to teach us what God would want us to learn about our spiritual lives in this time of hardship.”

Father Ritz said the lecture will give an overview of Ciszek’s life and his cause for canonization. His heroic virtue is particularly relevant due to his response to atheistic communism and contemporary Americans’ response to secular relativism. As a priest, Ciszek is a model of holiness and identity for priests today.

Ciszek also escaped his isolation, Ritz told CNA, telling the story of the long-suffering priest’s return home.

“One of my favorite pictures of Father Walter is at JFK Airport, being escorted by his sisters. They have expressions of sheer joy on their faces while Father Walter almost looks startled,” Ritz said. “He recounts being ‘taken back’ when the agent of the U.S. State Department addressed him as Father Ciszek in English. It was the first time he heard that in decades. To my knowledge, he did not know he was returning home until it happened.”

Father Ciszek, who died at Fordham University in 1984, is buried in the Allentown diocese on the grounds of the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. The Father Walter Ciszek Prayer League, the official organization to promote his cause for canonization, is located in his hometown of Shenandoah.

“His accounts of time in Russia speak of his desire to return to Shenandoah,” said Ritz, who reported that Ciszek is “very well remembered there.”

“His grave is a place of pilgrimage, as is the font at which he was baptized, still in use at Saint Casimir Church,” Ritz continued. “To say that he is the most favorite son of the town or a hometown hero would be an understatement. We seek his intercession in ways that are miraculous, and learn heroic virtue from studying his life.”

The Easter season is also a key time to reflect on the Gospel passages that inspired Ciszek.

“The life of Father Walter points us directly to Christ,” Ritz said.

“There are moments we cannot feel the presence of God, especially when absent from usual consolations and especially the sacraments,” the priest continued. “From Mary Magdalene weeping at the tomb we learn that at moments of grief Christ is calling to us by name.”

In the gospel account of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, when the distraught disciples only recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread, “we understand that when we are downcast Jesus is there, even when we don’t recognize him,” said Ritz.

More inspiration can be found in the account of St. Thomas in the Upper Room, or the story of when Peter recognized Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Tiberias.

“In that locked room we become certain that in our deepest moments of fear Christ can reach us and offer us peace, even when we can only recognize him by the wounds of his suffering,” said Ritz. “At the Sea of Tiberias we recognize that Christ is still concerned for our earthly needs, and that at times it takes moving closer toward him or even the miraculous to know he is present.”

Ciszek’s canonization cause was opened in March 2012.
 

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Providence, R.I., Feb 13, 2020 / 03:47 pm (CNA).- Rhode Island’s Catholic bishop has responded to a controversy in which a series of remarks from a priest in his diocese, which began with the Eucharist and pro-choice politicians and seemed eventually to diminish the gravity of child sexual abuse.

“In the context of the present public discussion, it is important to affirm that both the sexual abuse of minors and abortion are horrific, immoral actions that have very serious, harmful consequences,” Bishop Thomas Tobin said in a Feb. 13 statement.

“It is never acceptable to underestimate the harm caused by sexual abuse of minors,” Tobin added.

The discussion to which Tobin referred began when a Rhode Island priest, Fr. Richard Bucci, announced Jan. 26 that state lawmakers who voted in favor of a bill to expand abortion access in the state would not be permitted to receive the Eucharist at his parish.

The 66 legislators who voted in favor of Rhode Island’s Reproductive Privacy Act of 2019  should not approach Holy Communion, and would not be permitted to act as witnesses to marriage, baptismal or confirmation sponsors, or lectors at liturgies in his parish, Bucci said in a note he mailed to the lawmakers, and distributed at his parish, West Warwick’s Sacred Heart Church.

Bucci’s remarks suggested that proponents of abortion are prohibited from the Eucharist because of abortion’s unique gravity, and he has said that pro-choice legislators have incurred the penalty of excommunication.

The priest told local radio host Gene Valenti Feb. 7 that Catholic legislators who support same-sex marriage can be admitted to the Eucharist, while those who support abortion can not.

“There is not an innocent life at risk there. The Church has excommunicated people procuring, providing, guiding to abortion because there is an innocent life at stake, and so that is the reason that the excommunication has been in law since the beginning of Catholicism.”

The Church does say that pro-abortion politicians can be prohibited from the Eucharist, though Bucci’s argument is not consistent with canonical norms.

Canon law establishes that only Catholics who directly procure or perform abortions are subject to the canonical penalty of excommunication— doctors, and those who freely choose to undergo or directly facilitate particular abortions.

The Church says that pro-abortion politicians may be prohibited by their bishops or pastors from the Eucharist not because they are excommunicated, but because their political advocacy can constitute “obstinate perseverance in manifest grave sin.”

Catholics who advocate for other policies that can not be reconciled to Christian doctrine can also be forbidden from receiving the Eucharist, as can Catholics who publicly perdure in other consistent circumstances of grave sin, including ongoing and manifest sexual relationships, of any kind, outside of marriage. That prohibition, which would last until a person repented and amended his life,  does not constitute excommunication.

Bucci’s remarks sparked heated controversy when, in an effort to explain his position, he made a comparison between abortion and pedophilia.

“We are not talking about any other moral issue, where some may make it a comparison between pedophilia and abortion. Pedophilia doesn’t kill anyone and this does,” Bucci told local reporters Feb 9, apparently attempting to emphasize the gravity of abortion, and addressing the clerical sexual abuse crisis.

According to some studies, people who experience sexual abuse as a child are three times more likely to commit suicide than national average. People who experience multiple acts of abuse are even more likely to take their own lives.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 2005 called acts of child sexual abuse “a horrendous sin in the eyes of God.” The Church says that a person who has committed any act of sexual abuse should not recieve the Eucharist without first sacramentally confessing the sin.

Tobin’s Feb. 13 statement did not address Bucci’s specific arguments. It did emphasize that “abortion destroys innocent unborn life; it exploits vulnerable women; it diminishes family life; and it corrodes the moral fabric of society. There are no circumstances, personal or political, that justify the termination of unborn children.”

“The Catholic Church has been very clear and consistent in condemning the evil of abortion, and we affirm that those who promote, support and approve abortion, including civic leaders, are responsible for having committed a grave evil in the sight of Almighty God,” the statement added.

At the same time, Tobin also emphasized that “Sexual abuse, wherever and whenever it occurs, causes long-lasting, sometimes permanent and devastating harm to the victims/survivors, their families and the entire community.”

“Allegations of sexual abuse must always be taken most seriously and every effort should be made to protect children and youth, to eliminate abuse, to prosecute abusers, and to offer assistance to those who have been harmed,” Tobin added.

Tobin did not indicate how the Diocese of Providence will respond directly to Bucci, and the diocese declined to respond to questions from CNA.

“In the current public discussion, I urge all parties to refrain from unhelpful, inflammatory rhetoric, and to reflect personally and prayerfully on the consequences of these grave matters. May we renew our efforts to protect life and promote the common good, especially for children and youth, and may God bless our commitment with wisdom, prudence, humility and charity,” the bishop said.

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