National Eucharistic Congress opens ‘perpetual pilgrim’ application process

Little Rock, Ark., Mar 31, 2020 / 07:01 pm (CNA).- An EF3 tornado blew through Jonesboro, Arkansas, this week, and although no deaths have been reported, Catholic Charities of Arkansas is gearing up to help those whose livelihoods will be affected by the disaster.

Patrick Gallaher, director of Catholic Charities of Arkansas, told CNA that he anticipates that their involvement with the disaster in Jonesboro will involve long term case management to help uninsured and underinsured families recover and settle into permanent housing.

Typically, with a tornado like this, Catholic Charities will work with Habitat for Humanity to help get underinsured people into a Habitat for Humanity house, he said.

“We have been in contact with the parish in Jonesboro, Blessed Sacrament Church, and with their local Society of St. Vincent de Paul Council, but have not received any reports of damage or need at this moment. Once we begin receiving information from Jonesboro, we will be able to craft a response to meet the specific needs,” Gallaher said.

The tornado damaged nearly 200 structures, including several factories. Governor Asa Hutchinson has declared a state disaster and the state is seeking a federal designation from the national government.

Though Catholic Charities of Arkansas is not part of the immediate emergency response, Gallaher clarified, first responders in the county, with state assistance, have set up an emergency shelter with care being taken not to spread the coronavirus (COVID-19).

Craigshead County, where Jonesboro is located, has eight confirmed COVID-19 cases. The state as a whole has around 500.

Gallaher said the main difficulties in helping victims of the tornado is a lack of volunteers and funds amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“Most of my volunteers, my disaster volunteers, are elderly people. And I wasn’t even going to call them, I don’t want to take a chance,” Gallaher told CNA.

He also noted that fundraising has been made more difficult by the suspension of public Masses in the Diocese of Little Rock.

About three percent of the state’s population is undocumented immigrants, who will not be eligible for federal or state unemployment assistance, Gallaher said. With Jonesboro as a manufacturing hub, and much of the city’s factory capacity destroyed, Gallaher said he expects Catholic Charities will likely start receiving requests for assistance with food.

“I expect that as the protocols put in place to contain the epidemic continue, we will be hearing from families unable to meet their daily needs because of lack of employment. Although the federal and state response regarding unemployment insurance and direct payments will help most, there will be a segment of our population that is ineligible and will need assistance,” Gallaher said.

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Washington D.C., Aug 2, 2019 / 10:45 am (CNA).- The Japanese government is expected to approve funding for a research project, led by stem cell scientist Hiromitsu Nakauchi, to use stem cells to create animal embryos that contain human cells.

Father Tad Pacholczyk, Director of Education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told CNA that the research involves the implantation of human cells, typically human stem cells, into non-human animal embryos, such as embryos from pigs and sheep, for the purposes of growing human hearts, kidneys, and other organs in those animals.

“These organs would be generated for potential use in organ transplantation situations and to alleviate organ shortages…which could be a very helpful development for many people currently on the waitlist for an organ,” Pacholczyk explained.

“The aim is to make one species grow an organ of the other, rather than seeking to somehow ‘combine’ two species into a new, third species.”

That being said, however, Pacholczyk warned that if such research must be done, it should not include the creation or destruction of human embryos.

In general, he said, research destructive of human embryos is always morally unacceptable, because it involves “the purposeful destruction of younger humans to serve the interests of older and more wealthy humans.”

The Pontifical Academy for Life stated its 2000 Declaration on the production and the scientific and therapeutic use of human embryonic stem cells that “on the basis of a complete biological analysis, the living human embryo is – from the moment of the union of the gametes – a human subject with a well-defined identity,” and that as “a human individual it has the right to its own life; and therefore every intervention which is not in favor of the embryo is an act which violates that right.”

These will not be the first experiments done involving human-animal hybrid embryos, but it is the first to receive official support from a government. The National Institutes of Health in the US has had a moratorium on funding such work since 2015, according to Nature.

Nakauchi is the director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Tokyo and team leader at Stanford’s Nakauchi Lab. He is still awaiting final approval from the Japanese government to begin his research.

Nakauchi told Tech Explorist that he plans to inject animal embryos, which have been engineered to lack a specific organ such as the pancreas, with human stem cells in order to see if they can grow the missing organ using those cells.

Rather than embryonic stem cells, Pacholczyk said, the researchers should consider using adult stem cells— typically harvested from the bone marrow consenting adults— or what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells, which are adult cells that have been genetically reprogrammed to an embryonic stem cell–like state.

“These kinds of experiments require very careful ethical discernment, and the scientific community, with ethical input from the Church and appropriate outside regulatory control, must adhere to clear moral lines, meaning they need to agree that there are practices they will not do,” Pacholczyk said.

“This kind of research has the potential to be done in an ethical way, and to produce solid scientific advances, or in various unethical ways and to result in harmful and controversial scientific practices.”

Japanese scientists were previously forbidden from allowing human cells to grow within other animals past a 14-day period, but in March the government relaxed the rules on embryonic stem-cell research aimed at creating human-animal hybrids, allowing such creations to be brought to term.

Bioethicists have raised the possibility that human cells might stray beyond development of the targeted organ, travel to the developing animal’s brain and potentially affect its cognition, Nature reports.

To that end, Pacholczyk said that for any chimeras— third, hybrid animals— produced, care must be exercised to avoid the replication of major pillars of human identity in animals, such as the brain system.

In addition, chimeras which produce human sperm or human eggs should never be generated, he said, to avoid the production of the basic building blocks of human reproduction.

The Japanese scientist plans to begin with mice and rats, experimenting for two years, and said it is his hope to eventually apply for government approval to grow human-pig hybrid embryos for up to 70 days.

“Human cells generally do not grow very well in pigs or sheep, likely due [to] the evolutionary distance between us and them, so additional ‘tricks’ and genetic manipulations may be needed to help the human cells grow,” Pacholczyk commented.

“There is also a chance of transmitting new viruses from, say, pigs into the human organs that the pigs are growing, so this will have to be carefully addressed to be sure that if such organs were ever used in transplants, humans would not become susceptible to new infections.”

In the US, the NIH proposed in 2016 federal funding of projects to possibly create a human-animal hybrid, prompting serious moral and legal concerns from Catholic ethicists.

In comments submitted to NIH at the time, the National Catholic Bioethics Center stated that using human embryonic stem cells for research is wrong because “human beings at these vulnerable stages must be safeguarded, not exploited, in both clinical and research settings.”

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CNA Staff, Mar 27, 2020 / 12:01 pm (CNA).- Texas has said that elective surgeries, including abortions, must halt to free up medical supplies for the response to the coronavirus, but pro-abortion rights groups have filed a lawsuit challenging the order on behalf of the state’s abortion clinics.

“It is unconscionable that abortion providers are fighting against the health of Texans and withholding desperately needed supplies and personal protective equipment in favor of a procedure that they refer to as a ‘choice’,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said on Twitter March 25.

“My office will tirelessly defend Governor Abbott’s Order to ensure that necessary supplies reach the medical professionals combating this national health crisis,” he said.

There are over 1,200 cases of coronavirus in Texas, and at least a dozen people have died. While the infection is not deadly for most people, and requires hospitalization only in a minority of cases, there is still a danger of hospitals exceeding their capacity to care for new patients. Supplies are already short.

Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statewide order March 22 barring non-essential surgeries through April 21. The attorney general later said elective abortions would not be considered essential surgeries. Failure to comply with the Texas executive order could mean fines of up to $1,000 or 180 days in jail.

The lawsuit challenging the order was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas by the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood, and the Lawyering Project

“The Texas attorney general’s enforcement threats are a blatant effort to exploit a public health crisis to advance an extreme, anti-abortion agenda,” the lawsuit charged.

It argued that the ban on elective abortions does not free up hospital space or supplies of personal protective equipment to respond to the new coronavirus pandemic. Continued pregnancy would “impose far greater strains on an already taxed health care system, as prenatal care and delivery involve much greater exhaustion of hospital health care services and (supplies of personal protective equipment) than abortions.”

“Abortion is essential healthcare, and it is a time-sensitive service,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, president of Whole Woman´s Health, the Associated Press reports. Her organization’s three Texas abortion clinics in Austin, Fort Worth, and McAllen have been forced to cancel more than 150 appointments in the last week. This has left some women “begging for the abortions they needed,” she said.

“It is shameful that our politicians are using emergency actions during a global pandemic to push their anti-abortion agenda,” Miller told reporters, the Austin American Statesman reports.

Paxton told Texas Values March 25 that the governor’s emergency order blocking medically unnecessary procedures aimed to make clear “all medical procedures that were unnecessary should be stopped, and that definitely includes elective abortions.”

“The truth is abortion, for the most part, is an elective procedure that can be done later,” he said. While he acknowledged that limiting abortion surgeries would “save some lives,” he focused his remarks on medical resources.

“I don’t even see how people who are on the other side of this issue at this time would dispute that we need our hospitals to take care of the really sick,” Paxton said.

The pro-abortion rights groups’ lawsuit further claims the order wrongly singles out abortion providers and their patients for differential treatment, compared to other medical providers and patients. The order “effectively bans abortion in Texas for the duration of the COVID-19 public health emergency,” said the lawsuit.

Delays in securing abortion for women means “attendant risks to their health, well-being, and economic security,” said the lawsuit, which argued that women should not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against their wishes.

“COVID-19 pandemic and its fallout do not reduce patients´ needs for abortion; if anything, they make timely access to abortion even more urgent,” it said.

The lawsuit also objects to the ban on medical abortion, saying it is not surgery or a procedure. It argues that this shows the order explicitly aimed to limit abortion access.

Paxton’s initial remarks stressed the need for Texans to work together to stop the spread of the coronavirus and to “ensure that our health care professionals and facilities have all the resources they need to fight the virus at this time.”

“No one is exempt from the governor’s executive order on medically unnecessary surgeries and procedures, including abortion providers. Those who violate the governor’s order will be met with the full force of the law,” he said.

In Ohio, the state Department of Health canceled all non-essential or elective surgical abortions that use personal protective equipment. Officials said that abortion clinics were not singled out and letters of violation were also sent to a urology group that allegedly continued to perform surgeries.

Ohio’s health department asked the state attorney general to issue a cease and desist order to Preterm, a Cleveland-based abortion clinic that continues to perform elective abortions despite statewide orders against elective surgeries.

In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves said that state directives to postpone elective and non-essential medical procedures apply to abortion. He pledged support for “whatever action we need to to protect the not only the lives of unborn children, but also the lives of anyone who may contract this particular virus,” CBS News reports.

Dr. Thomas Dobbs, the State Health Officer at the Mississippi Department of Health, said he would review the situation.

In Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Washington, where pro-abortion rights support is strong, officials have said that orders halting elective surgeries do not apply to abortions.

A March 18 joint statement from eight medical groups including the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, which tends to take pro-abortion rights stands, asserted that abortion is “an essential component of comprehensive health care.”

The groups argued that abortion is “a time-sensitive service for which a delay of several weeks, or in some cases days, may increase the risks or potentially make it completely inaccessible.” Not being able to obtain an abortion has consequences that “profoundly impact a person’s life, health, and well-being.”

On March 24, the Catholic Medical Association, along with several other medical groups, issued a statement critical of the March 18 pro-abortion rights statement.

The Catholic Medical Association statement said that abortion “generates more patients to be seen in already overburdened emergency rooms.” Abortion providers themselves instruct women to go to an emergency room if they have any concerning symptoms.

“Approximately 5% of women who undergo medication abortions will require evaluation in an emergency room, most commonly for hemorrhage,” the statement said. “Surgical abortions can also result in hemorrhage. Emergency room personnel – who are already struggling to meet the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic – will be further strained to provide care to these women.”

Some abortion providers are seeking medical supplies despite the need to fight the coronavirus.

Planned Parenthood of Keystone, Pennsylvania posted social media posts March 24 soliciting donations of personal protective equipment including hand sanitizer, home sewn masks, shoe covers, and surgical hats.

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