Bishop defends St. Michael’s prayer at Mass: ‘The devil has no influence’

Washington D.C., Jun 19, 2017 / 02:59 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As a new administration takes form, human rights advocates have showed concern over a possible de-emphasis on human rights and religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy.

“Freedom of religion is the foundational freedom upon which our nation was founded. Because this is a core American value, the U.S. cannot simply ignore the cries of oppressed sufferers abroad,” Dr. Randel Everett, president and founder of the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, stated May 23.

“Our foreign policy must reflect this essential component of global security,” he continued.

In a May 3 speech to State Department employees by new Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, he said that U.S. foreign policy cannot always be contingent on “values” like religious freedom and human rights.  

“Now, I think it’s important to also remember that guiding all of our foreign policy actions are our fundamental values: our values around freedom, human dignity, the way people are treated,” Tillerson said.

“Those are our values. Those are not our policies; they’re values,” he continued, explaining that “policies can change,” while “our values never change. They’re constant throughout all of this.”

Yet Tillerson went on to say that “in some circumstances, if you condition our national security efforts on someone adopting our values, we probably can’t achieve our national security goals or our national security interests.”

The U.S. took a long time to fundamentally adopt these “values,” he added, and cannot expect other countries to adopt them overnight.

“If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests,” he said.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) responded with a May 8 op-ed in the New York Times, insisting that “we are a country with a conscience. We have long believed moral concerns must be an essential part of our foreign policy, not a departure from it.”

“To view foreign policy as simply transactional is more dangerous than its proponents realize,” he continued. “Depriving the oppressed of a beacon of hope could lose us the world we have built and thrived in.”

Tillerson’s speech was not the only signal from the State Department that concerned human rights advocates.

Back in March, the agency held a somewhat muted release of its annual reports on human rights in foreign countries. Tillerson was not present at a public release of the report, something that reporters pointed out was a break with long-standing precedent.

Instead, the report was discussed in an on-background conference call with reporters by a “senior administration official.”

Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.), co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, noted this in his April statement on the administration’s record in promoting human rights.

“I am concerned at the muted attention the administration has given so far on human rights,” he said, noting “the downplayed release of the State Department’s human rights report.”

“Promoting trade and economic and military cooperation are all essential to America’s future – but these mean little if we ignore the people in countries around the world who are suffering at the hands of their own governments and their rights are being abused,” he continued, in a statement made weeks before Tillerson’s May 4 speech.

The concerns come at a time when some are trying to ratchet up international attention on human rights abuses. The bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, for instance, launched its Prisoners of Conscience Project earlier this spring, drawing attention to the plight of those detained, tortured, or killed by foreign governments because of their religious beliefs.

The commission hopes that the project will attract the attention of the public, but also of lawmakers who can ask to visit these prisoners when they travel abroad. “Public inattention can often lead to more persecution,” the commission’s chair, Fr. Thomas Reese, stated at the launch of the project.

Yet religious freedom advocates are also worried about the direction of the State Department. Everett issued a response to Tillerson’s speech on May 23, explaining how important the promotion of international religious freedom is to U.S. national security interests.

“When we disregard the brutality of religious persecution, the world becomes more dangerous for all,” he said.

As an example of this, he pointed out that “fifteen of the nineteen terrorists on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia. All were Islamist extremists who believed violence is an acceptable tool to achieve their goals of global adherence to their strict religious laws.”

“Is it a coincidence that these men came from a nation where there is no religious freedom?” he asked.

Not all State Department actions have received criticism from human rights advocates. On April 4, the administration announced it would stop supporting the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) because of its support for China’s coercive two-child policy, which was for years a one-child policy until 2015.

China’s forced family-planning policy has resulted in massive human rights abuses like forced abortions and sterilizations of women. The UNFPA “gave China’s brutally enforced population control policies the international stamp of approval,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), chair of the House panel on global human rights, stated.

Smith applauded the administration’s decision to stop funding the UNFPA.

“I am heartened by the Trump Administration’s early action to apply Kemp-Kasten and end U.S. support for this most egregious human rights violation,” Smith said of the action. The Kemp-Kasten Amendment allows the President to decide not to fund entities that engage in forced abortions or sterilizations.

Others are trying to inform and push the administration to recognize the importance of religious freedom to U.S. diplomacy. The Religious Freedom Institute released a March report with recommendations for the U.S. government.

“The President should state clearly and often that U.S. IRF policy will be a national security and minority rights priority for his administration,” the report stated.

It also asked the President to nominate an Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom soon, and for Congress to support the new ambassador by making sure he or she has the proper resources and staff within the State Department.

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An illustration by Fabiola Garza (left) and the cover of Ascension Press’ book, “Catholic Princess Saint Stories, Volume I.” / Images courtesy of Fabiola Garza and Ascension Press

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 22, 2022 / 17:30 pm (CNA).

A major Catholic publishing house is pulling a book on Catholic princess saints days after an illustrator took to social media saying that the company had published the book based on her ideas and illustrations. 

Ascension, a publisher of Catholic books and digital media, including Father Mike Schmitz’s “Bible in a Year” podcast, emailed a statement to CNA Tuesday announcing that it would no longer be selling the book, “Catholic Princess Saint Stories, Volume I,” which was released earlier this month.

Fabiola Garza, the illustrator who is at odds with Ascension, posted on social media that she had spent months talking with the publisher about plans for a book on princess saints. When those talks did not lead to a contract, she decided to shop her idea around, and eventually signed a contract with Word on Fire to publish a book on princess saints. 

Garza, who works as an illustrator for the Disney Design Group in Orlando, Florida, published an account of her dealings with Ascension on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter following the publication of the publisher’s book on princess saints.

“PLEASE SHARE Hold Ascension accountable,” Garza wrote. “MY EXPERIENCE WITH ASCENSION HAS BEEN THE MOST AWFUL OF MY CAREER. I like many artists cannot afford a lawyer, and my hope is that by making this known no other Catholic creative will have to go through this,” she wrote.

In her social media post, Garza said that in 2019 she was approached by an editor at Ascension about a book on saints who were princesses.

“Ascension contacted me because he heard me speaking on Leah Darrow’s Podcast about my idea to do a PRINCESS SAINTS BOOK,” she wrote, adding that she signed a mutual non-disclosure agreement with the publisher.

“In the end, I decided not to sign with ASCENSION,” she wrote in the social media post.

In its statement, Ascension said it had decided to pull the book after Garza went public with her story.

“An illustrator Ascension worked with several years ago recently posted on social media about her experience working with us. We strongly disagree with the allegations in her post and we are confident that our approach was consistent with the law and industry standards,” the statement said. 

“Nevertheless, as a leader in Catholic publishing, Ascension aspires to hold itself to a higher standard and we will therefore be voluntarily discontinuing sales of the book in question,” the statement said.

‘Different creative visions’

In its statement Ascension said that after Garza told the publisher that she had decided not to work with the company it went ahead with plans to come out with a book about princess saints by a different author and illustrator. Ascension maintains that the book it published was different from the one it had discussed with Garza.

Over the eight months Ascension had discussed the project Garza had provided one illustration of St. Joan of Arc, and when it went with a new illustrator, it chose different saints to highlight, Ascension said.

“As we each had different creative visions for the project, we continued our vision with a new illustrator. We chose different saints for our book alongside a different storytelling style and different illustrations,” Ascension said.

“For background on the project, we provided the new illustrator with the single image of St. Joan of Arc that Fabiola had shared publicly. Our new illustrator went on to create illustrations for 80 pages of stories about St. Margaret of Scotland, St. Bathild of France, and St. Jadwiga of Poland,” read the statement.

Garza posted photos of her illustration of St. Joan of Arc alongside an illustration from Ascension’s book, noting the similarities between the two. Both illustrations feature blue ribbons and banners surrounding the drawings of the saints.

In its statement, Ascension denied any wrongdoing but said it regretted showing the new illustrator Garza’s original drawing.

“Any similarities between Fabiola’s St. Joan of Arc drawing and our illustrator’s depiction of St. Margaret of Scotland (such as a banner, ribbons, a crown, and a blue garment) are incidental and common in portraits of princesses in works by other artists,” the company said.

“Nevertheless, we understand and respect that Fabiola is deeply invested in her artwork, and we acknowledge that a better course of action would have been to use other public sources rather than her drawing as a reference for our illustrator.”

Garza posted emails she had exchanged with Ascension. In their correspondence, she says that on Oct. 7, 2020, she decided to discontinue talks on the book because no contract had been signed.  

Garza wrote to Ascension explaining her reason for looking for another publisher. 

She said she had asked for “some details on contract and compensation before I continued to work.” She said she was told “that we hadn’t got to the contract stage because we didn’t yet have a complete sample chapter.” She said she was told that the firm was “contemplating bringing in another author entirely, who I would have no ability to vet, interview, or apparently control in any way.”

In an email to CNA, Ascension said that it never signed a contract in part because Garza “wanted to be both the author and illustrator.”

“This creative difference was one of the key reasons that Fabiola and Ascension never signed a contract together,” Ascension said in its statement.

Garza told CNA that she decided to break off talks with the publisher because she began to get nervous when no contract was proposed.

After emailing Ascension earlier this month to express her disappointment that it had published a book on princess saints, the publishing house offered to compensate her for the time spent on the project.

Garza then took to social media because, she told CNA, she could not afford to get legal help. She explained that she felt that by going public she could help other “Catholic creatives” facing similar situations.

“So many people have emailed me with similar stories, and nobody has ever talked about it publicly. I could see that I’m in a position to do this, and perhaps I owe it to the community to start a conversation on it,” she said. “But if everything has always been treated in a very hush hush way, I was like, ‘There’s never going to be any change.’”

Upon being informed by CNA that Ascension had pulled its book, Garza said she was relieved.

“Oh, my gosh, I’m gonna cry,” she said after reading Ascension’s statement. “I know that it’s not a direct apology. I mean, it’s corporate speak, you know. I understand that they have to protect themselves as much as possible. I would have loved a direct apology,” she said. 

“But even the fact that because of people helping this is able to happen without having to go to court is amazing, because that sounded awful. Yeah, that sounded awful,” Garza said. Later, Garza thanked Ascension for pulling the book.

Her book with Word on Fire is written but still being edited and won’t be published for over a year, adding that she works full-time.

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CNA Staff, May 25, 2020 / 10:54 am (CNA).- As Catholics celebrate Memorial Day this year, they should keep in mind not only the sacrifice of the men and women who gave their lives in service to the country, but also Christ’s sacrifice, which is at the heart of our faith, said Bishop David O’Connell of Trenton.

In a message to the faithful of his diocese, O’Connell noted that Memorial Day is often celebrated with cookouts, swimming, and parades, as well as visits to military cemeteries to honor veterans who have died in service to the country. He called on Catholics to remember the memory and sacrifices of those who have fallen.

“Memorial Day honors those brave women and men who proudly wore the uniform of our armed forces and made the ultimate sacrifices that have become the lifeblood of our republic,” he said. “It is entirely fitting that we remember them with gratitude and pride.”

The faithful can also see in the sacrifice of fallen veterans a reminder of the sacrifice of Christ, and a call to lay down their own lives in service to others, O’Connell said.

“For Catholics, sacrifice and dying for others is the very root of our faith,” he said. “We need look no further than the Crucifix that is the central symbol of our religious consciousness to remember how the Lord Jesus redeemed us through his death and freed us from sin.”

The bishop recalled Christ’s words that “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

“The sacrifices made by our countrymen and women throughout American history are a reminder of Christ’s message,” he said.
 

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