Guidance from the Church and news items....

• Guidance from the Church (and the Pa Family Institute) on advocacy concerns and upcoming elections (aka, "Go and teach all nations, says the Lord; I am with you always, until the end of the world.")

• Pope Francis' Spring 2015 Catechesis on Man and Woman and Marriage

•  "Encouraging procreation in stable households headed by a mother and father is not only a rational governmental decision, but serves an interest of the highest order. No institution other than marriage joins a man and a woman together in a permanent and exclusive way and unites them to any children born of their union. No other institution ensures that children will have the opportunity to be raised by both a mother and father. The devaluation and loss of such families as the primary environment for raising children is a significant societal ill. Laws that strongly encourage and promote the union of one man and one woman in marriage are an important part of the remedy for this national problem. It would be a grave disservice to the Nation, and a serious misreading of the Constitution, to strike down such laws" (USCCB to the Supreme Court, 4/2/15).

• "Catholic schools have a responsibility to bear authentic witness to the faith and be noticeably different from secular schools, said Bishop David O’Connell of Trenton, N.J.....'The Catholic school environment, to be authentic and real, demands' that teachers be witnesses to the Catholic faith, said Bishop O’Connell....'Teachers in Catholic schools should be recognizably different from their secular counterparts'....Bishop O’Connell stressed the important role that Catholic teachers play as witnesses to the faith. 'Catholic teachers in a Catholic school should be faithful Catholics. Non-Catholics should respect the Church’s teachings and the Catholic environment. No one should publicly advocate contrary to those teachings or the Catholic identity/environment of the Catholic school,' he affirmed"  (Cardinal Newman Society, 5/13/15).  Bishop Bootkoski of Metuchen, Are You Listening?

• "I know that many of us have had the wind knocked out of our sails a bit by the fairly grim news about the state of American Catholicism revealed in the Pew Forum’s 2014 US Religious Study....

there are 47 million former adult Christians in the US and 67% are former Catholics....
6.5 Americans leave the Catholic Church for every one who enters....
cultural Catholicism is dead as a retention strategy....

"The great Catholic revival and the generation of saints in early 17th-century France emerged from circumstances vastly grimmer than our own....Thanks be to God, a new and absolutely crucial American  – and increasingly global – conversation on the necessity of calling the already baptized to intentional discipleship has already begun" (Sherry Weddell, 5/13/15).

• "While the battle rages over assisted suicide, many forget that in 1990, the United States Supreme Court allowed involuntary euthanasia by dehydration and starvation. First, by declaring artificially-administered food and water (ANH) as a form of 'life support' and then, granting third parties the ability to remove ANH (feeding tubes) from persons with disabilities, it became effectively legal to deny a human being food and water against their will in the United States....Anyone requiring only a feeding tube is not brain dead, but often brain injured....Even fully-conscious people may require tube feeding" (Dr Jacqueline C. Harvey)

•  "If more people were aware of the dark and troubled history of sex-reassignment surgery, perhaps we wouldn’t be so quick to push people toward it" (Public Discourse, 4/27/15)

• re: Immigration

• "Making Differences Disappear"

• "Tell PA Lawmakers: Don't Take Away My Right to Vote for Judges"