Archive for

2010

  • Vatican: Pope’s words on condoms do not mark change in church teaching

    By John Thavis

    VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Benedict XVI’s recent comments on condom use in AIDS prevention do not signify a change in the Church’s moral teaching or its pastoral practice, a note from the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation said.

    The note, released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Dec. 21, said the pope’s remarks do not represent a break with the Church’s doctrine on birth control, and cannot be construed to legitimize the use of condoms to prevent pregnancy.

    It said that when Pope Benedict said condom use to reduce the risk of infection might be a first step toward moral awakening, he was referring specifically to prostitution, which is already considered gravely immoral by the church.

    In that situation, it said, use of a condom is not a “solution” because it does not address the mistaken behavior that is the root cause of the problem. However, it added, “it cannot be denied that anyone who uses a condom in order to diminish the risk posed to another person is intending to reduce the evil connected with his or her immoral activity.”

    The note was published following widespread discussion of Pope Benedict’s comments in a book-length interview, “Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times.”

    The doctrinal congregation said the pope’s words had in some cases been misunderstood, erroneously interpreted and manipulated to make it seem that his statement represented a break with the Church’s teaching against contraception.

    In the book, the pope was asked whether it was “madness to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms” in view of the AIDS epidemic.

    “There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward discovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality,” the pope said.

    The doctrinal congregation’s note said it should be clear that the pope “was talking neither about conjugal morality nor about the moral norm concerning contraception.”

    “The idea that anyone could deduce from the words of Benedict XVI that it is somehow legitimate, in certain situations, to use condoms to avoid an unwanted pregnancy is completely arbitrary and is in no way justified either by his words or in his thought,” it said.

    The note said the pope was referring to “the completely different case of prostitution,” an immoral practice which has been made even more serious by the spread of HIV/AIDS.

    “Those who know themselves to be infected with HIV and who therefore run the risk of infecting others, apart from committing a sin against the Sixth Commandment are also committing a sin against the Fifth Commandment — because they are consciously putting the lives of others at risk through behavior which has repercussions on public health,” it said.

    The pope’s affirmation that using a condom with the intent of reducing infection could be a “first step” toward moral awakening is clearly compatible with his previous statement that condoms are not the way to deal with the AIDS epidemic, the note said.

    Neither the doctrinal note nor the pope’s book specifically addressed the situation of condom use by a married couple in which one spouse has HIV.

    The doctrinal congregation said some have mistakenly interpreted the pope’s words as an endorsement of the argument that, because of the lethal consequences of AIDS, condom use may be tolerated as a “lesser evil.” It said the “lesser evil” theory is susceptible to “proportionalistic misinterpretation.”

    “The Holy Father did not say — as some people have claimed — that prostitution with the use of a condom can be chosen as a lesser evil. The Church teaches that prostitution is immoral and should be shunned,” it said.

    “However, those involved in prostitution who are HIV positive and who seek to diminish the risk of contagion by the use of a condom may be taking the first step in respecting the life of another — even if the evil of prostitution remains in all its gravity. This understanding is in full conformity with the moral theological tradition of the church,” it said.

    Posted on December 22, 2010, to:

  • DREAM Act dies in Senate; immigrant advocates remain determine

    By Mark Pattison

    WASHINGTON (CNS) — The Senate’s inability to overcome a threatened filibuster Dec. 18 scuttled passage of the DREAM Act, prompting immigrant advocates to pledge to push forward on immigration reform next year with a new Congress and fight for what one immigrant leader termed the “respect we deserve.”

    The bill would have given young people brought to the United States as children by their undocumented parents a path to citizenship under a strict set of requirements. Under the measure, an estimated 2.1 million children of undocumented parents would have had an opportunity to go to college or join the military and legalize their status.

    The U.S. bishops had long been supporters of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, which passed the House Dec. 9. Four U.S. bishops, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, took part in a Dec. 17 conference call with reporters to argue for passage in the Senate.

    “With the passage of the DREAM Act in the House of Representatives and with a majority of the U.S. Senate voting in favor, it is clear that a majority of Congress and of the American public support this common-sense humanitarian measure,” said a Dec. 21 statement from Coadjutor Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Migration.

    “I am confident that one day — sooner rather than later — the DREAM Act will become the law of the land,” he said, adding the filibuster vote was “a setback, not a defeat.”

    The Senate needed 60 votes to break the filibuster, but fell five short, with 55 against it and 41 for it.

    “More education is needed to ensure that Catholics, as well as all Americans, fully understand the humanitarian consequences of a broken immigration system, especially on families,” Archbishop Gomez said.

    “Catholic Charities USA is deeply disappointed that the Senate rejected the vote on this important piece of legislation,” said a Dec. 20 statement from Father Larry Snyder, Catholic Charities’ president and CEO.

    “Honor students, class presidents, athletes and responsible community members who desire a brighter future by continuing their education came up short this past weekend. Now, having entered our country as small children, they will continue to be cast into the shadows until, as a nation, we can find a way to address our broken immigration system,” Father Snyder said.

    “Today’s vote on the DREAM Act, which ironically was held on the very day in which migrant communities around the world commemorate international migrant’s day, represents the latest example of a failed political and legislative strategy when it comes to immigrant rights and immigration policy,” said Oscar Chacon, executive director of the National Alliance for Latin American and Caribbean Communities, in a Dec. 18 statement.

    “In particular, Latino immigrant communities must be creative and effective when it comes to our own organizing, empowerment and alliance building capacity in order to achieve the respect we deserve, but that so far has been denied to us,” Chacon said.

    Republican opponents of the DREAM Act saw the measure was a backdoor into granting amnesty for all illegal immigrants. “Treating the symptoms of the problem might make us feel better … but it can allow the underlying problem to metastasize. Unfortunately, that’s what’s happening at our border,” Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz, said in a statement.

    But Kjersten Forseth, executive director of ProgressNow Colorado, said: “The DREAM Act is a sensible and compassionate solution to a major problem in American immigration law, which has been routinely held hostage by the right wing and used in their campaign to demonize their political opponents.”

    “Fixing unintended problems in the law with regard to children in America, so they can attend college or serve our country, is good for our economy,” Forseth said in a Dec. 18 statement.

    The 55-41 Senate vote was largely along party lines. Five Democrats voted to support the filibuster, and three Republicans voted to block it.

    AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka called the filibuster “a disappointing endorsement of injustice and inequality.”

    Posted on December 22, 2010, to:

  • Bishop Olmsted revokes Phoenix hospital’s status as Catholic facility

    By J.D. Long-Garcia

    PHOENIX (CNS) — St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix can no longer identify itself as “Catholic,” Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted announced during a Dec. 21 news conference in Phoenix at the Diocesan Pastoral Center.

    The Phoenix bishop issued a decree revoking the 115-year-old hospital’s affiliation with the Catholic Church. In the decree, the bishop wrote that he could not verify that the hospital provides health care consistent with “authentic Catholic moral teaching.”

    “I really want to have Catholic health care,” Bishop Olmsted said during the news conference. “We should be working together, not against each other.”

    Still, he said it was his duty to strip St. Joseph’s Hospital of its Catholic identity because its leadership, as well as that of its parent organization, San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West, is not committed to “following the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

    To demonstrate that the hospital is no longer Catholic, Bishop Olmsted is prohibiting the celebration of Mass on the hospital’s campus and will have the Blessed Sacrament removed from the hospital’s chapel.

    Linda Hunt, president of St. Joseph’s, said in a statement after the bishop’s news conference that the hospital was “deeply disappointed” by the action but would “continue through our words and deeds to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus.”

    In May, officials at St. Joseph’s publicly acknowledged that an abortion occurred at the hospital in late 2009. The Arizona Republic, in its initial story on the matter, also revealed that Mercy Sister Margaret McBride had incurred an automatic excommunication because of her role on the ethics committee that sanctioned the abortion.

    “Consistent with our values of dignity and justice, if we are presented with a situation in which a pregnancy threatens a woman’s life, our first priority is to save both patients,” Hunt said in her statement. “If that is not possible, we will always save the life we can save, and that is what we did in this case.

    “We continue to stand by the decision, which was made in collaboration with the patient, her family, her caregivers and our ethics committee,” she added. “Morally, ethically and legally we simply cannot stand by and let someone die whose life we might be able to save.”

    The public scandal resulting from the 2009 abortion isn’t the first time Bishop Olmsted took issue with Catholic Healthcare West’s adherence to the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services,” to which all Catholic hospitals in the United States are required to adhere.

    Seven years ago, the bishop learned that Catholic Healthcare West did not comply with these directives at Chandler Regional Hospital.

    “I have continued to insist that this scandalous situation needed to change,” the bishop said. “Sadly, over the course of these years, CHW has chosen not to comply.”

    During the news conference, Bishop Olmsted detailed other Catholic Healthcare West facility violations of the U.S. bishops’ directives.

    St. Joseph’s Hospital is involved with the Mercy Care Plan — an organization that provides health care through Arizona’s Medicaid program. By virtue of its involvement in the plan, the hospital has been “formally cooperating with a number of medical procedures” against Catholic teaching — a fact that the bishop said he learned about in the past few weeks.

    This cooperation included setting up a structure through which patients receive procedures — such as abortions and sterilizations — which are against church teaching, according to Father John Ehrich, director of medical ethics for the Phoenix Diocese.

    Learning about the Mercy Care Plan was the “tipping point” in Bishop Olmsted’s relationship with the hospital, Father Ehrich said.

    The Mercy Care Plan, the largest provider of Medicaid in Arizona, has been in existence for 26 years. In meetings with diocesan leadership, the hospital said it had learned of Mercy Care Plan’s cooperation with unethical procedures 16 months ago.

    “They hid it from the bishop for a year and a half,” Father Ehrich said. The hospital, he said, promised to address the issue but had signed contracts good through 2013.

    “It’s a systemic problem,” Father Ehrich said. “We’re not talking about one isolated incident.”

    Through its involvement in the Mercy Care Plan, the bishop said Catholic Healthcare West has been responsible for a litany of practices in direct conflict with Catholic teaching. These include: contraceptive counseling, provision of various forms of contraception, voluntary sterilization and abortions “due to the mental or physical health of the mother or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.”

    “The Catholic faithful are free to seek care or to offer care at St. Joseph’s Hospital,” the bishop said. “But I cannot guarantee that the care provided will be in full accord with the teachings of the church.”

    Bishop Olmsted, explaining his authority to revoke the Catholic identity of St. Joseph’s Hospital, cited Canon 216, which states: “No undertaking is to claim the name Catholic without the consent of competent ecclesiastical authority.”

    “I have hoped and prayed that this day would not come,” the bishop said. “However, the faithful of the diocese have a right to know whether institutions of this importance are indeed Catholic in identity and practice.”

    After learning about the abortion earlier in the year, Bishop Olmsted met with hospital officials to learn more about the particular case, he said at the news conference.

    “It became clear that, in their decision to abort, the equal dignity of mother and her baby were not both upheld,” he said. The baby “was directly killed,” which is a violation of the ethical and religious directives.

    Throughout the process, St. Joseph’s Hospital and Catholic Healthcare West have maintained that the intention was to save “the only life that could be saved,” the mother’s, according to the hospital.

    The bishop responded to the claim in a May 14 statement, reiterating that “the direct killing of an unborn child is always immoral, no matter the circumstances, and it cannot be permitted in any institution that claims to be authentically Catholic.”

    The U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine also weighed in on the issue with a June 23 statement.

    “No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself and proclaimed by the church,” the committee said.

    The withdrawal of a hospital’s Catholic identification is not without precedent.

    Bishop Robert F. Vasa of Baker, Ore., announced in February that St. Charles Medical Center in Bend had “gradually moved away” from the church’s ethical directives and can no longer be called Catholic.

    As a result of that decision, Mass is no longer celebrated in the hospital’s chapel and all items considered Catholic were removed from the hospital and returned to the church. The hospital retained the St. Charles name and a cross remains atop the building.

    Posted on December 22, 2010, to:

  • Amid frenetic holiday preparations, don’t forget Christ, pope says

    By Carol Glatz

    VATICAN CITY (CNS) — In the hectic days before Christmas as people get ready for the holidays, may no one forget to prepare internally for the coming of Christ, Pope Benedict XVI said.

    He asked that people dedicate the same kind of energy and care they pour into making their homes and neighborhoods more beautiful for the holidays into preparing their hearts for meeting Christ and making their lives pure and holy.

    With just a few days left before Christmas, the pope dedicated his weekly general audience to the importance of the mystery of Christ’s birth and the tradition of the Nativity scene.

    He told about 3,000 pilgrims gathered in the Vatican’s Paul VI audience hall Dec. 22 to not be caught unprepared, “busy only with making things on the outside more beautiful.”

    “Let’s purify our consciences and our lives from that which is contrary to this coming,” he said.

    The pontiff asked those in attendance to cultivate “thoughts, words, behaviors and actions encouraging us to carry out the good and contribute toward bringing about peace and justice for everyone in this world.”

    The traditional Nativity scene, he said, is “an eloquent sign of our expectation of the Lord who comes” to dwell among humanity and is a show of thanks that “he decided to share our human condition, in poverty and simplicity.”

    The tradition of setting up a Christmas crib, which is still very much alive, he said, should also be rediscovered in homes, at work and at “gathering places.”

    “This genuine testimony of Christian faith can still today offer all people of goodwill a suggestive icon of God the father’s infinite love for all of us.”

    “May the hearts of children and adults alike still be amazed” by the mystery of Jesus’ birth, Pope Benedict said, as he offered everyone his Christmas greetings.

    “Amid all the frenetic activity of our lives, may this time grant us a bit of calm and joy and let us experience firsthand the goodness of our God who became a child in order to save us and give new courage and new light to our journey,” he said.

    - – -

    Editor’s Note: The text of the pope’s audience remarks in English will be posted online at: www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20101222_en.html.

    The text of the pope’s audience remarks in Spanish will be posted online at: www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20101222_sp.html.

    Posted on December 22, 2010, to:

  • The new translation of the Holy Mass:

    Christmas
    Christus natus est nobis! Christ is born unto us! After our Advent time of preparation, we rejoice in Jesus Christ’s coming at Christmas. The celebration of Christmas is so sacred (it ranks second in the liturgical year after the Easter Triduum), that it is observed with an Octave — that is, eight days, symbolizing a heavenly perfection that transcends our earthly reckoning of a seven-day week. The Octave of Christmas culminates in the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God on Jan. 1.

    Although Advent of 2010 is now complete, our preparation must continue for next Advent, when we will begin using the new English translation of the holy Mass. The liturgical observance of Christmas actually provides many opportunities to reflect on the fruits of the new Missal, because the Nativity of the Lord is celebrated with four different sets of Mass texts, corresponding to different times. The Masses of Christmas are: the Vigil in the evening of Dec. 24, the Midnight Mass, the Mass at Dawn on Dec. 25, and Mass during the Day on Dec. 25. Let us examine a couple of the anticipated translations of the proper prayers for Christmas.

    The following is the current Prayer over the Offerings for the Christmas Mass at Dawn, said by the celebrant after the gifts of bread and wine are brought forward before the Eucharistic Prayer:

    Father,
    may we follow the example of your
    Son
    who became man and lived among us.
    May we receive the gift of divine life
    through these offerings here on earth.

    The new translation of this same prayer will look like this:

    May these gifts, O Lord, we pray,
    offered on this feast of our Savior’s
    birth,
    be worthy of the mystery we celebrate:
    just as he who was born a man
    shone forth also as God,
    so may these earthly gifts bring us
    gifts divine.

    The new translation makes explicit reference to the day of Christ’s birth, and the entire prayer flows much more poetically. In addition, it maintains the imagery of light that characterizes the prayers of the Christmas Mass at Dawn. Light not only corresponds to the hour of daybreak at which this Mass is celebrated, but also is a revered symbol for Christ. When the prayer says Christ “shone forth also as God,” it especially calls to mind the prologue of the Gospel of John, wherein the Word who “was God” became man “and made His dwelling among us” as the light that “shines in the darkness.”

    Another example is the Collect for Christmas Mass during the Day. This is the current translation, which this year we are hearing for the final time:

    Lord God,
    we praise you for creating man,
    and still more for restoring him in
    Christ.
    Your Son shared our weakness:
    may we share his glory.

    That prayer will be replaced by the new translation next year:

    O God,
    who wonderfully created the dignity
    of human nature
    and still more wonderfully restored it,
    grant, we pray,
    that we may partake in the divinity
    of him
    who humbled himself to share in our
    humanity.

    Once again, in fully conveying the rich content of the original Latin prayer, the new translation achieves both beauty and eloquence, while also expressing the great mystery of the Incarnation more clearly — Christ “humbled Himself (Phil. 2:8) to share in our humanity” so that we might share in the divine nature (2 Pt. 1:4) in heaven.

    Certain texts from the Order of Mass also have a special connection to the Nativity. The Gloria, which returns at Christmas after being absent for most of the Advent season, recalls the angels’ chorus of praise before the shepherds on the night of Christ’s birth: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom His favor rests.” — Lk. 2:14.

    Moreover, at Christmas and on the solemnity of the Annunciation (March 25), we genuflect during the Creed at the words that reference the Incarnation, because these two feasts are the primary liturgical celebrations of Christ’s coming as man, with Christ’s birth observed exactly nine months after the Annunciation. By touching a knee to the ground, we reverence the fact that the Son of God humbled Himself to dwell on earth.

    In the weeks to come, we will examine both the Gloria and the Creed in more detail. For now, let us welcome the holy Infant Jesus into our hearts and homes, and ask the incarnate Word to help us readily receive the words of His sacred liturgy with joy.

    Posted on December 21, 2010, to: