in Pennsylvania's First Congressional District
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania's_1st_congressional_district http://archphila.org/pastplan/MAPS/Arch.pdf
and the Central Garden State

Saturday, December 29, 2018

Free to Serve (USCCB Religious Liberty, 12/28/18)


Non datur libertas sine veritate.
Vol. IV, No. 11
Dear brothers and sisters,
 
Merry Christmas, and may the light of Jesus Christ shine on you!
 
During Christmastide, Christians revel in the mercy of a God who brings light and life to a world longing for truth. After singing "O Wisdom from on high...to us the path of knowledge show" during Advent, we celebrate, both on the Solemnity of the Nativity and the Solemnity of the Epiphany, that God has revealed His light to the nations, and this light is the Word of God made flesh. We long for truth, and it is that desire for truth that undergirds the Church's promotion of religious liberty.
 
As we enter 2019, may all of us seek to serve the truth and so to reflect the light of Christ in a world that longs for the path of knowledge.
 
With prayerful best wishes, I am
 
                                                              Sincerely yours in the Lord,
                                                              Most Reverend Joseph Kurtz
                                                              Archbishop of Louisville
                                                              Chair, Committee for Religious Liberty
Archbishop Kurtz and Bishop Dewane Express Relief at Modifications to "Parking Lot Tax" But Seek Full Repeal

CNS photos/Tyler Orsburn(left) &  Bob Roller (right)
"We appreciate the Administration's effort to alleviate the 'parking lot tax' by allowing employers, including many non-profits, to retroactively reduce their nondeductible parking expenses. But full relief is needed from Congress to fix this unjust tax."



As our Church and communities face difficult issues such as racism, inequality, and political polarization, we are called to not only dialogue but also to begin the difficult work of restoring justice and reconciliation. Join the discussion and be part of the solution by participating in the Catholic Social Ministry Gathering, February 2-5, 2019.  To register or for more information, visit www.CatholicSocialMinistryGathering.org.
First Freedom Podcast


On Episode 20 of the First Freedom Podcast, hosts Aaron Weldon and Mary McClusky hear from Danielle Brown, Associate Director for the Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, about the bishops' efforts to promote racial reconciliation.  Check it out!
God's Servant First Blog: Advent and the Bladensburg Cross
By Aaron Matthew Weldon

(CNS/Chaz Muth)


Faith and hope, a desire to reach towards something that one does not yet comprehend, impels people, all people, to strive for and to achieve great things.  It is an impulse to sacrifice and to do good.  Read more.
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Twitter!

For up-to-date religious freedom news, follow @USCCBFreedom today!



Made for Love (MUR e-news) January 2019

January 2019
January 2019
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Continuing the U.S. Bishops' work of promoting and defending marriage.
The Dating Podcast: January 2019


To kick off 2019, January's "Made for Love" episodes are all about Catholics in the dating world. It is ROUGH out there, people! Here's the schedule:

January 1: The Dating Podcast: Young Adults
This episode focuses on young adults and college students, featuring Dr. Kerry Cronin of "The Dating Project" fame. (Check out the trailer below!)

January 4: The Dating Podcast: Healthy Habits
This episode focuses on approaching dating in a healthy way.

January 11: The Dating Podcast: Stories
This episode features stories about dating-- successes and failures.
December Episodes
In December, the podcast looked at Big Catholic Families (families with 8, 10, and 14 children, respectively!) and how families observe Advent and celebrate Christmas in Holidays: Family Festivities.

We also have a flyer that you could download, print, and put up at your parish or in your office to help spread the word!

REMINDER: If you listen to "Made for Love" through iTunes, the podcast is now available under its own name (not only through USCCB Clips) and it would help a lot if you would leave a review! This should make it much easier for people to find, subscribe, and tell their friends.

We also continue to be on Soundcloud and podbean.
iTunes Reminder

REMINDER: If you listen to "Made for Love" through iTunes, the podcast is now available under its own name (not only through USCCB Clips) and it would help a lot if you would leave a review! This should make it much easier for people to find, subscribe, and tell their friends.

We also continue to be on Soundcloud and podbean.
USCCB Action Center
All the USCCB's action alerts for legislative priorities are available at one website. There you can contact your representatives and make your voice heard. Check it out!
Legal/ Policy Updates
Military "Transgender Ban" – On December 13, the Dept. of Justice, which in November had asked the Supreme Court to bypass the normal appeals process, again approached the Supreme Court and, this time, asked for temporary stays against three lower courts' adverse preliminary rulings. These rulings have denied the Trump Administration's ability to not implement the "transgender" service and care policies that were launched in mid-2016 by the Obama Administration.

Jack is Back – The Christian Baker, Jack Phillips, continues to persevere in his third case opposite the State of Colorado, which already lost in the US Supreme Court in June on account of its hostility to his beliefs in declining to make a custom cake for a same-sex wedding. On December 18, the federal district court held an initial hearing in his suit to stop the state from forcing him to bake a cake to celebrate a "gender transition."
Colorado has been quite busy on this front. On November 30, the State began issuing driver's licenses with "X" and "I" sex options. On December 19, the Board of Health, as part of a lawsuit settlement, voted to allow people to change the sex on their birth certificates without surgery; and, on the same day, a committee of the Denver City Council began debating a ban on "conversion therapy" for minors.
New York Adoption Case – To prevent being shut down or forced to surrender its tenets by the State, for not placing children in the care of same-sex or cohabiting couples, a privately-funded pregnancy center and adoption agency, New Hope Family Services of Syracuse, NY, sued State officials on December 6.


Idaho – On December 13, 2018, a federal court ordered Idaho to provide "gender confirmation" surgery to a male who had lived for years as a woman in a men's prison.
Made for Love | USCCB | (202) 541-3000 | defenseofmarriage@usccb.org| www.marriageuniqueforareason.org


"Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" (Henry II) *

How is it possible that today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents and that
ABORTIFACIENTS are allowed in Catholic hospitals? (12/28/18)


Free to Serve (USCCB Religious Liberty, 12/28/18

What Saint Joseph NEVER Needed to Worry About (12/30/18)

Made for Love (MUR e-news) January 2019


"Henry II (5 March 1133 – 6 July 1189)...ruled as King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and Lord of Ireland; at various times, he also partially controlled Scotland, Wales and the Duchy of Brittany. Before he was 40 he controlled England, large parts of Wales, the eastern half of Ireland and the western half of France—an area that would later come to be called the Angevin Empire" (Wikipedia).

Becket is "The 12th-century saga...of the deep friendship and later conflict between...Henry II...and his friend, Sir Thomas a Becket..., and how their days of drinking and womanizing came to an end when the monarch decided to appoint Becket archbishop of Canterbury. Much to Henry's surprise, Becket was transformed into a deeply spiritual man of God, who took his new responsibilities very seriously....Becket went head-to-head with the king over the vigilante murder of an erring priest by one of Henry's knights. Henry's famous despairing cry, `Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?' -- leads to Becket's martyrdom in his cathedral" (USCCB) [It should be noted that the Catholic Encyclopedia suggests that Thomas' conversion was less dramatic, says nothing about Henry's famous line* and indicates that Henry's culpability for Thomas' murder is unclear.].
    "Many people who venerate the name of Thomas Becket (and/or love the movie with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole that carries his name) likely do not understand the cause for which he was martyred, and if they did learn it, would likely be scandalized given our current presuppositions concerning the prerogatives of the omnipotent State as opposed to those of the relatively impotent Church.

    "For you see, one of the major points-of-contention between King Henry II and Archbishop Becket was the attempt by the king to bring 'criminous clerics' under the immediate jurisdiction of the royal courts rather than the ecclesiastical courts. Becket himself had no desire to be lenient with these priests—quite the contrary—but he suspected (rightly, as it turns out) that the king would use the coercive power of the royal courts to threaten church officials with punishment in order to bring them more and more under his control.

    “'St. Thomas seems all along to have suspected Henry of a design to strike at the independence of what the king regarded as a too powerful Church,' the Catholic Encyclopedia tells us....

    "The secular powers of the state begin a juridical process saying they merely want to punish 'criminous clerics'—and of course, who could be opposed in principle to that? But as events unfold, the same laws are eventually used to dispossess the Church of its money, property, and traditional rights and privileges....

    "In an earlier article..., in which I argued that we needed more well-trained canon lawyers and staff to work on diocesan tribunals, I made the following comment:

      'It is not sufficiently appreciated, for example, that the scandal of pedophile priests was in many ways a failure of bishops to use their tribunals properly. There were canonically prescribed processes in place to have each of those cases adjudicated before a tribunal. But many bishops chose instead to replace centuries of pastoral wisdom and canon law with the latest fads coming out of the psychological schools. Talk about selling one’s birthright for a mess of pottage. If each of those accusations of priestly misconduct had been properly adjudicated before a tribunal, as they were supposed to have been, rather than bypassing the process so that the bishop could handle things ''quietly,'' ''on the down-low,'' ''unofficially,'' we may have seen a very different outcome.'

    "….I am going to suggest below that bishops should not simply 'wash their hands of the problem' in either of two ways: by passing the judgment off to a psychological therapist (as was done before) or by passing the judgment off to a secular tribunal (as is being done now)….

    "the current appeal to secular authorities arose precisely because certain bishops in the past acted not only irresponsibly, but also contrary to canon law. The result was that a later generation of bishops has been left scrambling trying to restore their credibility even though most of them did not cause the problem. And yet doubts remain that current bishops can be trusted either. This is unfortunate, but understandable. Actions speak louder than words.

    "The right approach now should be: 'Let’s learn from the mistakes of the past and get back on the right track by establishing an ecclesiastical court system that can be trusted.' Restoring the proper role of the tribunals would clearly and publically separate these judgments from any personal animus or bias on the part of the bishop either in favor or in opposition to the accused, while not simply turning our priests immediately over to the whims of the secular court system with its politically ambitious prosecutors and highly-paid litigators who push for every-higher damages to line their own pockets....

    "The question we must ask now is whether some bishops in the U.S. and elsewhere have under the current pressures from the secular authorities become like those who gave in to England’s King Henry II, assuming (as did their predecessors) that all legal functions properly belong to the state, and given this view, who are increasingly willing to turn over to secular authorities all determinations not only about guilt or innocence, but about, say, whether a couple is married or not, whether things like abortion and euthanasia are wrong, and whether marriage is something between a man and a woman. Too many in the Church seem to assume that if the state says something is a marriage, it is, and if the state dissolves it, it’s dissolved.

    "Perhaps some need to be reminded who was given the power 'to bind and to loosen.' And then they need to spend some time in prayer at the shrine of Thomas Becket, considering very seriously the cause for which he was willing to sacrifice his life. (Professor Randall Smith, 6/5/14)

What Saint Joseph NEVER Needed to Worry About....

How is it possible that today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents and that
ABORTIFACIENTS are allowed in Catholic hospitals? (12/28/18)


Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph (12/30/18)
 
  • The ‘12 Days of Christmas’: An ‘underground’ catechism for persecuted Catholics (Catholic News Herald, 12/21/16)

Our Supposedly Pro Life U.S. House and U.S. Senate Seems to Be Letting the Clock Run Out on Pro Life Majorities
- Are They Really That Cowardly?

  •  Call the White House at 202-456-1414: 
    • “I ask the president to veto any final government funding bill that does not explicitly defund Planned Parenthood before the new Congress takes over in January.” Post and tweet at President Trump with a message similar to this: “Please keep your campaign promise, @realDonaldTrump, and defund Planned Parenthood NOW.” (cf., LiveAction email, 12/4/18). 
    • As per the USCCB, I "support...the proposed rule to enforce the Affordable Care Act's provision requiring health insurance issuers with plans that cover abortions to collect and keep separate the portion of any premium attributable to abortion coverage. I applaud the Administration for taking this action which will allow consumers to know what they are paying for and, armed with this information, to seek a plan that does not cover elective abortions, consistent with their conscience....I respectfully urge you to go one step further in these regulations by making it clear that insurers may allow people to opt out of coverage that forces them to fund the killing of unborn children" (USCCB)
    • Urge President Trump to Veto Legislation that Weakens Pro-Life Policy (March for Life Action, 11/15/18)
    • Please replace Dr. Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health with someone truly respectful of the sanctity of all human life. As per Greg Schleppenbach of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Research using fetal tissue from aborted babies is unethical and should not continue under his leadership.”
    • New Trump-Supported Law Enshrines Obama-Era Gender Language (C-Fam, 12/21/18)

  • We must NOT forget the Life at Conception, Sanctity of Human Life, (federal) Heartbeat Protection, Child Welfare Provider Inclusion, First Amendment Defense, and Conscience Protection Acts! On the right side of the home page are links to email Pa's and NJ's delegations in D.C.  Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell need to hear from us IMMEDIATELY! 
  • On the right side of the home page are links to email Bucks County's delegation in Harrisburg on Pa state issues (See update.) and Central NJ's delegation in Trenton on NJ state issues (See update.).  

home page links

The 10 Commandments

The Beatitudes (from "Jesus of Nazareth")