Chaput: Rep. Brian Sims’ harassment of pro-lifers ‘unbecoming of an elected official’

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 25, 2024 / 10:50 am (CNA).

Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, has expressed his support for the pro-life activists who have been aggressively prosecuted and jailed under the Biden administration.

Trump raised the issue during a June 22 speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, where he specifically mentioned the case of 75-year-old Paulette Harlow, a Catholic, who was convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act this year. 

The U.S. Department of Justice has tried and convicted more than a dozen pro-life activists in 2024 based on the federal law, which increases penalties for anyone who obstructs access to an abortion clinic. Harlow, who is in poor health, was sentenced last month to 24 months in prison for participating in a blockade of an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C.

“Paulette is one of many peaceful pro-lifers who Joe Biden has rounded up, sometimes with SWAT teams, and thrown them in jail,” Trump said. “Many people are in jail over this. … We’re going to get that taken care of immediately — [on the] first day.”

Trump added that, if elected to another term as president, his administration would “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who’s unjustly victimized by the Biden regime, including Paulette, so we can get them out of the gulags and back to their families where they belong.”

When reached for comment, the former president’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, did not elaborate on Trump’s pledge. CNA specifically asked whether Trump would commit to pardoning Harlow and the other pro-life activists convicted of FACE Act violations during the Trump administration.

During his speech, Trump said Christians, and especially Catholics, are being persecuted under the county’s current leadership. The former president also reiterated his promise to create a federal task force to investigate anti-Christian bias and other forms of illegal discrimination against people of faith. 

“We will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, in our hospitals, and in our public square,” Trump said.

Trump also took credit for the United States Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. He said abortion policy was given “back to the states … where the people [can] vote and make their decisions.” He said if Democrats “get their way, they will have a federal law for abortion to rip the baby out of the womb in the seventh, eighth, and ninth month and even execute the baby after birth.”

For her part, Leavitt said the Biden administration has “waged a yearslong assault on Christianity.” She added that, under Biden, the Federal Bureau of Investigation “plotted to infiltrate Catholic Masses to spy on attendees” and emphasized that as president, Trump will “end Biden’s discrimination against Christians and stand up for religious freedom, as he did in his first term.” 

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Los Angeles, Calif., Oct 10, 2019 / 01:01 pm (CNA).- The Archdiocese of Los Angeles is hosting a day in the park to not only celebrate foster families throughout the archdiocese but to get to know these “heroes,” who are often unknown among the Catholic community.

“To be a foster parent is really to be a hero, honestly,” said Kathleen Domingo, the archdiocese’s senior director of the Office of Life, Justice, and Peace.
 
“We know for sure that there are thousands of Catholic families in our parishes and in our schools who are fostering; we just don’t always know who they are. Part of the reason that we are doing this event is to help them come out of the woodwork a little bit so we can get to know them and find out better ways to support them.”

The event is titled “Catholics Love Foster” and is part of the archdiocese’s march for life organization, OneLife LA. It will take place Oct. 13., beginning a Mass said by Archbishop Jose Gomez.

Afterward, attendees will walk to LA State Historic Park, where there will be music, food, and games. There will also be 20 organizations with giveaways for kids and resources for foster parents.

According to Domingo, the event will be catered for free by a few local vendors, who will prepare enough food for 1,000 people.

Domingo said lots of Catholics in the archdiocese are foster parents, but these families are perhaps unknown to the parish community or their pastor. She said that since the archdiocese revamped its foster care efforts two years ago, parishioners have loved the idea but do not know who these families are or how to support them.

“A number of different parishes we have been working with told us that they are happy to have foster agencies come and speak and that they are happy to make these introductions… [However], they really felt like they wanted to do more for the families,” she said.

“They know that families are going through the process and they can tell sometimes when some families … come with kids they didn’t have before … but they didn’t always know who they were or they didn’t always know if it would be okay if they [approached them].”

She said fostering needs extra support because it’s a 24/7 job with kids who face additional challenges. She said, very often, foster children come with almost nothing – sometimes only a garbage bag full of clothes – and experience instability, affecting mental health and school. She said the kids may have also faced abuses and court pressures.

“Because many of them have been through times of trauma in their young lives, they may come with some more needs where they may need some additional counseling or some therapy,” she said.

“What I hear from foster families is even just that extra help with tutoring and making sure that their kids have extra support in the classroom.”

She said the archdiocese will help connect foster families to a greater support system in the Church. She said numerous parishioners, who may not have foster kids themselves, have offered to provide physical aid like clothes, food, or daycare. She also stressed the spiritual support of a praying community.

“[Parishioners] loved doing this work to promote fostering, but, so often, they aren’t aware of who in the community is actually fostering and they would love to provide traditional support,” she said.

“[We want to] find out how can the parish can support you, how can we support your kids, how can we integrate them better and reach out in love to them.”

Daria Ongsing, a 53-year-old grandmother, and her husband Virgilio will be attending the event. This couple was approved to be foster parents in July, but they are not new to foster care.

Around five years ago, she and her husband took in the children of their daughter, who had been struggling with drug addiction and had her kids confiscated by Child Services. After two and a half years, her daughter was able to get her children back.

She told CNA that the experience awoke a desire within her to help other people through foster care. Then last February, the couple went on a pilgrimage to Cebu. Once they returned, they saw flyers on their back door for a foster care orientation at the parish.

“There were flyers in the back, for Foster ALL had come to our church to do like an orientation. I just felt in my heart again, look, God is calling us to this,” she said. 

After the couple was approved, the Virgilios received four siblings into their home for a few days at the beginning of August. Later that month, the family took in Bryant, who turned five in September, and Bri-Asia, who will be turning seven in December. The two siblings are still at her house and have become a source of joy, she said.

Ongsing said the process has been a struggle at times. She expressed hope to meet more Catholics at the event who may be a source of support and that it inspires other parents to take on this ministry which has a great need.

She is currently working for Kaiser Permanente as a certified ophthalmic technician, but she plans to enter into early retirement within the next few years and take on fostering full-time.

“The [fostering] need is so great. It’s crazy. So my plan is to retire young in the next year or two and certainly give it even more than I can do now,” she said.

“It’s quite challenging, but it’s very rewarding. I keep praying and asking God to just get us to do the best thing for these kids while they need us,” she further added. “I’m just trying to share a little bit of our blessings.”

Domingo told CNA that the Catholic Church in California has been shut out of the foster system because they will not place children with same-sex couples. She said the archdiocese’s Catholic Charity has not acted as a foster care agency for nearly 20 years.

“When Catholic Charities got out of the business of doing foster care, what happened is nobody picked it up, nobody in the Church was tasked with working on foster issues. What I’ve come to realize is that that is a similar story in most dioceses,” she said.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles decided to ramp up its foster care efforts during the second OneLife event, after Nick Vuljicic, a motivational speaker born with no arms and no legs, encouraged the archdiocese to act “pro-life” to the unborn as well as those already born, like foster kids. Domingo said, at the time, LA County had an estimated 30,000 foster children.

Since then, Domingo has spoken to numerous parishes to booster fostering efforts. She said, although the archdiocese can no longer place kids into foster care, parishes in the area will host agencies to come talk to the laity.

Domingo said foster care is a “bridge-building topic” and supported by a variety of different people and groups. She also said good foster care is a solution to many issues in society.

“You can talk about fostering as a preventative for human trafficking, you can talk about it for keeping young adults off the streets, … you can talk about it in terms of helping birth parents, … who often get cleaned up and get prepared to accept their children back.”

“What we find is that when are talking about fostering and do these kinds of events, we are bringing people from different perspectives together to say we need to do something wonderful for these children and their families.”

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Denver Newsroom, May 28, 2020 / 03:00 am (CNA).- All of Florida’s death row inmates live in the Diocese of St. Augustine. Many are Catholic. At least twice a year St. Augustine’s Bishop Felipe Estevez goes to visit death row inmates himself.

So when Estevez issued a pastoral letter this week chronicling the efforts of Catholics in Florida to end the death penalty, and laying out the Catholic case for its abolition, the issue was personal.

“Justice needs to be restorative, not out of vengeance,” Estevez told CNA May 27.

“We don’t want anyone in society to be in danger because of these criminals, but we don’t think that death is the answer. Killing them because they have killed would perpetuate the cycle of violence.”

Jesus, on the cross, stopped a cycle of violence, Estevez said, by forgiving his killers.

“We need to put a stop to the death penalty because, as John Paul II said, it is not necessary. We can put all our energy into having the best prison system so that these prisoners who are a danger to society will not do any harm to anybody.”

Estevez notes that no death row inmate in Florida has been granted clemency since 1983, and with 350 death row inmates, Florida has the largest active death row in the United States— indeed, in all the Americas.

California has more prisoners on death row, but the state’s death penalty is currently under moratorium. 

At least 50 of the men on Florida’s death row are Catholic, Estevez told CNA.

Estevez said he wanted his letter to reflect the commitment and care of those involved in prison ministry to death row inmates. There are over 27 prisons in the St. Augustine diocese.

Prison ministers provide much-needed accompaniment to prisoners, he said, helping provide an opportunity for them to repent.

“As they are being treated with love…something happens within their hearts, that tenderness transforms their hearts. And it is a very slow process…they have been damaged by violence. And so gentleness, mercy, accompaniment, and friendship and dialogue, all of that creates a culture of peace,” he said.

“I think the reason why [the volunteers] persevere, and they are so committed, it is because they witness that transformation.”

He said he sees the decline over the past few decades in executions throughout the country as a sign that more and more people are embracing a culture of life.

Society often tends to meet acts of violence with more violence, Estevez said.

“We need to heal that reaction— violence needs to be tempered by mercy,” he said.

“We don’t need to be engaged in vengeance, we don’t need to be involved in killing. We need to be involved in restoration.”

The bishop pointed to instances where the families of murder victims have asked that their loved one’s killer not receive the death penalty.

“They who have been hurt the most are thinking and acting as Christians,” he observed.

Estevez’s letter lays out a recent history of the development of the Church’s teaching on the death penalty.

The letter quotes a speech that Pope St. John Paul II delivered in St. Louis in 1999, in which he called for an end to the death penalty, calling it “cruel and unnecessary.”

“The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life in every situation,” John Paul II said.

“A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform.”

\John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae notes that cases in which executing an offender is an “absolute necessity” are, thanks to improvements in the penal system, “very rare if not practically nonexistent,” and reaffirms the Catechism’s teaching that “bloodless means” are “more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.”

“Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this,” John Paul II wrote.

Pope Benedict XVI, too, continued to support the limitation and eradication of the death penalty during his pontificate, Estevez writes.

During August 2018, Pope Francis ordered a revision to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, updating it to describe the death penalty as “inadmissible” and an “attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”

Many Christians attempt to use Bible passages to justify the death penalty, but the death penalty as it exists in the United States, Estevez says, is particlarly contrary to a biblical view.

Dale Recinella, a Catholic death row chaplain in Florida and frequent collaborator with Bishop Estevez, used his skills as a lawyer to analyze how the death penalty, as applied in the US, compares to the requirements found in the Bible.

Recinella identified 44 requirements of the biblical death penalty when it was the law of the land in Israel. He found that the death penalty, in Florida and the US, scored zero out of 44 on the requirements of the biblical death penalty.

Estevez noted that the bishops of Florida have collectively expressed their opposition to the death penalty ever since the US Supreme Court ruling in 1972 that forced states to resses their statutes for capital offenses.

At the time, the Florida bishops acknowledged that those who could pay for lawyers and appeals would likely avoid the death penalty, while “circumstantial evidence and discrimination in jury selection would inordinately affect the poor and minorities.”

John Sullivan, a Catholic inmate executed in 1983, received spiritual support and advocacy from Bishop John J. Snyder, Estevez’s predecessor.

The bishops continued to speak out as Florida scheduled more executions, issuing public pleas for stays of execution and mercy in every case of a scheduled execution in the 2000s.

The pastor of St. Mary, Mother of Mercy Parish, in Macclenny, Florida has had the primary responsibility for the church’s ministry at death row since 1976, Estevez said, with volunteers making themselves available for a quiet prayer vigil with the inmate’s family during the execution, and the pastor available to celebrate Mass at the church immediately following the execution.

The prison ministers at St. Mary’s also make the rounds in the death row prisons to bring the sacraments to those who are Catholic.

In June 1999, St. Marys’ parish council unanimously voted to formally pass a moratorium resolution on the death penalty, making it one of only two parishes in the country to have done so.

Defending human life at all costs requires courage and can be dangerous, Estevez said, recalling the story of Father Rene Robert, a St. Augustine priest who in 2016 attempted to help a troubled young man who subsequently kidnapped and murdered him.

Father Robert had, in 1995, signed a “Declaration of Life” asking that his killer not be put to death should he ever die by homicide. As a result, his killer was sentenced to life in prison.

Prisons are human institutions, and thus are fallible, Estevez writes, and thus “there is a great need for vigilance toward the effectiveness of prison security, even in well-developed societies, so these systems do not deteriorate or become corrupt and endanger their citizens.”

But:

“Our system of incarceration needs to change from inhumane punishment to hopeful rehabilitation. Everyone must be concerned that not a single innocent human is condemned to deadly execution,” he wrote.

“Our pastoral experience in caring for inmates has revealed that many of them have experienced a conversion of heart, and society can benefit from a reunion with their families and re-entry to society,” he concluded.

Estevez invoked the intercession of Our Lady of La Leche— who is honored at the newly-elevated national shrine at Mission Nombre de Dios in St. Augustine— consecrating to her the effort to end capital punishment in Florida.

 

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