Connections with Justice Organizations
In working for peace and justice, LCWR collaborates with other organizations, and has a particular partner relationship with the following:
- Catholic Campaign for Immigration Reform
- Catholic Charities
- Catholic Coalition Against Human Trafficking
- Catholic Coalition on Climate Change
- Catholic Health Association
- Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good
- Catholic Mission Association
- Faithful Security: National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger
- Jubilee USA
- NETWORK
- SHARE
- School of the Americas Watch
- Save Darfur Coalition
- Voting for the Common Good
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Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good closes offices, ceases 'most operations'
Updated September 5, 11:15 a.m.
.- A member of the advisory board for the group Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG) confirmed to CNA on Friday that the organization had closed its offices, ceased the majority of its activities and that staff members had moved on to other jobs.
Catholics in Alliance was accused by bishops and laity of identifying Catholic social teaching with the concerns and agenda of a single political party, and criticized for neglecting the importance of issues such as abortion.
Dr. Liza Cahill of Boston University, a member of CACG's advisory board, explained to CNA in a e-mail that the group "did not cease to exist but did close its offices and most operations. It is in a holding pattern and staff have gone into positions at similar organizations."
CNA confirmed that the group's phone number has been disconnected, with “no further information” provided by the phone company. CACG's former executive director, Alexia Kelley, was named to a position at the Department of Health and Human Services in June 2009. The group's spokesman John Gehring also recently left CACG, according to his current employer Faith in Public Life.
Attempts by CNA to contact CACG's interim executive director, Vicky Kovari, did not result in any response. Although Catholics in Alliance's website remains online, it lists no current staff, and its last blog entry is from June.
CACG became embroiled in a number of controversies that surrounded the 2008 election of Barack Obama and his subsequent presidency. The group strongly supported the passage of national health care legislation that was criticized by the nation's Catholic bishops for lacking conscience provisions and possibly opening the door to federal funding of abortion.
Archbishop Charles Chaput criticized CACG and similar groups in a 2008 speech, saying that in spite of their concerns for social justice, these groups had ultimately harmed both society and the Church.
Such groups, the archbishop explained, typically “seek to 'get beyond' abortion” as a politically divisive issue, “or economically reduce the number of abortions, or create a better society where abortion won’t be necessary.” But these strategies, the archbishop charged, “involve a misuse of the seamless garment imagery in Catholic social teaching,” demoting the issue of an individual's right to life in favor of “other important but less foundational social issues.”
CNA encountered some difficulties in attempting to ascertain the present status of CACG, particularly in seeking clarification from Chris Korzen, Executive Director of Catholics United.
CNA approached Korzen because he not only co-authored a book with the founder of Catholics in Alliance, but was on the group's payroll as a full-time employee in 2007.
Korzen, however, would not answer questions about the status of Catholics in Alliance, and instead chose to respond to inquiries by asking CNA a series of unrelated questions.
“Can you tell me what the relationship is between CNA and EWTN?” he asked, ignoring a direct question as to whether Catholics in Alliance was now defunct. “What is the relationship between CNA and the Archdiocese of Denver?”
Eventually, Korzen explained his refusal to answer questions about Catholics in Alliance by saying: "It occurs to me that we've never exactly been clear on who you guys are and what your real motivations are. So we're not going to be able to answer any questions until we get some more clarity.”
The director of Catholics United also insisted he was “separate from Catholics in Alliance, so I really can't speak for them anyway.” Korzen received $84,821 in compensation for full-time work for CACG in 2007. In 2008, he explained to Anne Hendershott in a piece for the Catholic Advocate that Catholics United does the “edgier” work.
Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good's current president, Morna Murray, will make an appearance this Sunday on "This Is America With Dennis Wholey." The program runs on WHUT, a Washington D.C. public television station, and will air at 6 p.m. Eastern. Murray will be accompanied by the National Education Association's Dennis Van Roekel and American Federation of Teachers' Randi Weingarten.
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Facts and Darfur
[...]
As to the number of deaths in Darfur: last year, a member of the Save Darfur coalition ran full-page ads in British newspapers that claimed that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir had unleashed “vicious armed militias to slaughter entire villages of his own citizens. After three years, 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed.”
The ads, virtually identical to ones run by the group here, were challenged by the European Sudanese Public Affairs Council (ESPAC), which is close to the government in Khartoum and funded by companies that do business in Sudan. Earlier this year, the British Advertising Standards Authority ruled in ESPAC’s favor, saying studies did not support the 400,000 figure, which it deemed to be a disputed “opinion,” not a fact.
Aid groups, too, have been angered by Save Darfur, especially its calls for UN intervention in Darfur and the imposition of a “no-fly” zone there. In an email to Save Darfur sent earlier this year, Samuel Worthington, head of an aid group called InterAction, wrote, “I want to privately convey to you our strongest objection to the wording used in your current Save Darfur media and e-mail campaign. As someone who like you is a strong advocate for human rights and the protection of populations who do not have a voice I am deeply concerned by the inability of Save Darfur to be informed by realities on the ground and to understand the consequences of your proposed actions.” The email accused Save Darfur of “misstating the facts” and said that the policy recommendations offered up in its ads “would set into motion a series of events that could easily result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals.”
The decision by the Advertising Standards Authority received little attention in the British media, nor has it been covered much in the American media. Indeed, Save Darfur continues to cite the figure of 400,000 in its advocacy work.
Alex de Waal, program director at the Social Science Research Council and author with Julie Flint of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War, has dissected the issue. The “figures for mortality in Darfur had become politicized,” he writes, “with many advocates speaking about extremely high death rates that were not, in fact, supported by systematic evidence.” De Waal reviewed a number of studies and concluded that the “best guess” is approximately 200,000 deaths, of which roughly one-quarter resulted from direct military attacks. He criticizes the
implication that the deaths [in Darfur] are wholly ‘slaughter’ by the Sudan government and its militias, rather than predominantly due to hunger and disease. While such famine deaths may have their ultimate cause in the war, and especially the government’s conduct of the war during the extreme phase of 2003-04, there is an important difference between violent killing and death by these other causes.
De Waal says that “the death of an estimated 200,000 people in Darfur, from massacre and man-made humanitarian disaster, is a crime of the first order,” but that “inflating the estimates can cheapen the currency of suffering” and discredits advocates.
Also worth reading is an essay by Brendan O’Neill called “Darfur: pornography for the chattering classes.” He writes:
‘Save Darfur’ activism–from Hollywood celebs calling for Western military action to the growth of campaigning commentary on the conflict–has not really been about Darfur. Rather, it has been about creating a new moralistic and simplistic generational mission for campaigners and journalists in America and Europe . . . If this only meant that they have distorted public understanding and debate about Darfur, that would be bad enough. But it’s far worse than that. The narcissistic campaigning of the Save Darfur Coalition and others has helped to prolong and even intensify violent clashes in the region. The good-and-evil presentation of the conflict has warped its dynamics. State Department officials claim that, during the height of the conflict, some Darfuri rebels ‘let the village burnings go on, let the killing go on, because the more international pressure that’s brought to bear on Khartoum, the stronger their position grows’.
[...]
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School of the Americas Watch
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School of the Americas Watch Founder Dissents from Catholic Teaching
- Created on August 22, 2008
- Written by Michael Whitcraft
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| Father Bourgeois speaking at the 2007 School of the Americas Watch rally at Fort Benning. |
On November 16, 2007, the American TFP published a paid advertisement in Columbus, Georgia’s Ledger-Inquirer, titled: To SOA Watch Protesters: Be Consistent! To the Military: Be Proud! The statement condemned leftist protesters that had gathered at the gates of Fort Benning that weekend to demonstrate against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), which replaced the US School of the Americas.
The annual protest is run by an organization called “School of the Americas Watch,” founded and run by Maryknoll priest, Father Roy Bourgeois. Although the group claims to be pacifist and dedicated to closing the army school, its true scope is much larger than that and many of its adherents are not pacifists at all.
The TFP statement highlighted the fact in the following way:
The annual protest is run by an organization called “School of the Americas Watch,” founded and run by Maryknoll priest, Father Roy Bourgeois. Although the group claims to be pacifist and dedicated to closing the army school, its true scope is much larger than that and many of its adherents are not pacifists at all.
The TFP statement highlighted the fact in the following way:
This is more than a protest; it is a gathering of the religious and cultural left who come to attack more than just the former School of the Americas.
Dissident Catholics, especially elderly priests and nuns, students and teachers of Catholic (mostly Jesuit) universities are the most impassioned demonstrators.[1]
That same year, two TFP journalists covered the event. They found in attendance representatives of almost every Catholic fringe group from homosexual activists, to liberation theologians, to pro-abortion “Catholics,” to proponents of the socialist-structured “Base Christian Communities.” They also found many women dressed as priests and proponents of women’s ordination. However, Father Burgeois was careful not to officially associate with the dissidents, although he welcomed them at his protest.
On August 9, he took one step further by attending the pseudo-ordination of a woman named Janice Sevre-Duszynska in Lexington, Kentucky. Father Bourgeois concelebrated a “Mass” and gave the sermon at the service, against the expressed will of the local ordinary, Bishop Ronald W. Gainer, who requested that Catholics have nothing to do with the ceremony. In a statement on the diocesan website, Bishop Gainer said:
On August 9, he took one step further by attending the pseudo-ordination of a woman named Janice Sevre-Duszynska in Lexington, Kentucky. Father Bourgeois concelebrated a “Mass” and gave the sermon at the service, against the expressed will of the local ordinary, Bishop Ronald W. Gainer, who requested that Catholics have nothing to do with the ceremony. In a statement on the diocesan website, Bishop Gainer said:
What will take place on Saturday, August 9, 2008, has no connection to Roman Catholic Liturgy or Sacraments and cannot in any way be recognized as a valid reception of Sacred Orders. Simulation of a sacrament carries with it very serious penal sanctions in Church Law. Members of the Catholic Faithful should not support or participate in Saturday’s event.[2]
Father Bourgeois’ association with Janice began years ago when she started participating in School of the Americas Watch rallies. She was imprisoned for three months for trespassing on the Fort during one such protest.
After the pseudo-ordination, Father Bourgeois’ Maryknoll superiors summoned him. Although, he escaped the meeting with a mere “canonical warning” from his superiors, a Maryknoll press release claims that: “An investigation has been carried out as to the true facts of the August 9 event in Lexington, Ky. A report of that investigation will be sent to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in Rome.”[3]
As for now, Fr. Bourgeois is comfortable with his decision. When asked to recant his actions, he simply responded: “No way.”
Hopefully, Rome will mete out a stiffer punishment for his blatant disregard for Church teaching. In face of that perspective, Father Bourgeois is implacable. When asked what he would do if Rome decides to excommunicate him, he responded: “I would be very, very sad. I’ve been a Maryknoll priest for 36 years. But if Rome came down with the ax? I’d have to embrace it.”
After the pseudo-ordination, Father Bourgeois’ Maryknoll superiors summoned him. Although, he escaped the meeting with a mere “canonical warning” from his superiors, a Maryknoll press release claims that: “An investigation has been carried out as to the true facts of the August 9 event in Lexington, Ky. A report of that investigation will be sent to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in Rome.”[3]
As for now, Fr. Bourgeois is comfortable with his decision. When asked to recant his actions, he simply responded: “No way.”
Hopefully, Rome will mete out a stiffer punishment for his blatant disregard for Church teaching. In face of that perspective, Father Bourgeois is implacable. When asked what he would do if Rome decides to excommunicate him, he responded: “I would be very, very sad. I’ve been a Maryknoll priest for 36 years. But if Rome came down with the ax? I’d have to embrace it.”
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Catholic Health Association defies Phoenix bishop over abortion case
By Benjamin Mann, Staff Writer
.- The Catholic Health Association has once again found itself at odds with Church authority– this time, over Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted's decision to revoke the Catholic status of a hospital that admitted to serious ethics violations, including a highly-publicized abortion.
“Catholic Healthcare West and its system hospitals are valued members of the Catholic Health Association,” said that group's president, Sister Carol Keehan. Her remarks came less than 24 hours after the Bishop of Phoenix stripped one of those hospitals, St. Joseph's in Phoenix, of its Catholic affiliation.
The Bishop of Phoenix announced his decision on Dec. 21, after negotiations with St. Joseph's hospital, and its parent company Catholic Healthcare West, ended without an agreement. Their main dispute concerned a November 2009 incident, in which medical ethics advisers at St. Joseph's authorized an abortion for a pregnant woman who was seriously ill.
Bishop Olmsted, in consultation with his own diocesan medical board, concluded that the abortion was a direct violation of the Church's ethical health care guidelines. He also accused the hospital and its parent company of “formally cooperating” in the management and administration of a government program that offers abortion, birth control, and sterilization procedures at other hospitals.
Sr. Keehan, however, opined that Catholic Healthcare West facilities were “well-known” for a “long and stellar history in the protection of life at all stages.” Her brief statement did not address the company's alleged cooperation with government-funded abortion and sterilization.
But she did defend St. Joseph's decision to perform the abortion. “They had been confronted with a heartbreaking situation,” she stated. “They carefully evaluated the patient's situation and correctly applied the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services to it, saving the only life that was possible to save.”
Sr. Keehan is not a physician, although her official biography mentions “more than 35 years” in “administrative and governance positions at hospitals,” as well as her bachelor's degree in Nursing.
However, two obstetrician-gynecologists from the Diocese of Phoenix's Medical Ethics Department said Sr. Keehan was misrepresenting both the facts of the St. Joseph's Hospital case, and the ethical principles of Catholic health care.
According to those principles, doctors may perform a necessary and non-abortive medical procedure in order to treat a serious illness, even if it has the secondary effect of harming or killing an unborn child. However, the pregnancy itself can never be regarded as an “disease,” nor may a doctor perform an abortion as a means of treating a different condition.
“It goes back to the basic issue that you can never do an evil, to achieve a good,” Dr. William Chavira told CNA on Dec. 22. “The act is inherently evil.”
Dr. Chavira is a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist who also serves on the Phoenix Diocese's medical ethics committee.
Although the hospital maintains that the abortion occurred as part of a “placentectomy” – the removal of the placenta that connects a developing fetus to the mother's uterus – Dr. Chavira explained that the placenta of the woman in the St. Joseph's case “was not diseased,” though it may have been producing hormones that aggravated the woman's heart and lung condition.
“If something's not diseased,” he explained, “then we can't act on it – as opposed to a cancerous uterus, or an infected placenta.”
Nevertheless, Dr. Chavira stated, the “placentectomy” – which killed the woman's child– could not be regarded as a necessary medical treatment. The medical condition threatening her life was not the pregnancy, but the preexisting heart and lung condition.
The removal of the placenta, he explained, could not have been intended to treat that condition. Rather, it was intended to mitigate the effects of the woman's heart and lung disease – by ending her pregnancy through an abortion.
As such, he said, the abortion was direct and intentional, and could not be compared to other necessary medical procedures that might cause the death of an unborn child.
Dr. Clinton Leonard, another OB-GYN who belongs to the medical ethics board in Bishop Olmsted's diocese, stated to CNA on Dec. 22 that Sr. Keehan and other defenders of St. Joseph's were attempting to distract the public from a fundamental moral principle.
“They're making it too complex,” he said. “It's really a simple issue: the ends never justify the means. And the means that they used was a direct abortion,”
Dr. Leonard stated. “That's not a treatment for pulmonary hypertension.”
“I would do everything possible to offer her cardiac support,” Dr. Leonard said, when asked what he would regard as an appropriate treatment under the circumstances. “If it's pulmonary hypertension, generally you use medications that are going to reduce the work that the heart has to do.”
In response to the assertion of Sr. Keehan and others, who regard the woman as having been on the brink of death, Dr. Leonard said it was “in debate, whether or not her life was at that point.”
But, he clarified, even under those circumstances, authoritative Catholic teaching would not have permitted the hospital to consider abortion as a form of necessary medical treatment. Pope John Paul II's encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” stated that “the deliberate decision to deprive an innocent human being of his life is always morally evil and can never be licit ... (even) as a means to a good end.”
Previously, Sr. Keehan and the Catholic Health Association sparred with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the question of health care reform, which the bishops criticized for funding abortion. Some observers have noted the critical role that she played, along with a social justice lobby of sisters called Network, in the bill's eventual passage.
In his farewell address before resigning the presidency of the U.S. Bishops' conference this fall, Cardinal Francis George – who directly opposed the health care bill, for its abortion funding – spoke of unnamed groups he said wanted to “remake the Church according to their own designs or discredit her as a voice in ... public discussions” such as the debate over abortion and health care reform.
As for who truly “speaks for the Catholic Church,” the cardinal left no room for doubt: “The bishops in apostolic communion and in union with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, speak for the Church in matters of faith and in moral issues and the laws surrounding them.”
Staff Writer Marianne Medlin contributed to this report.
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Catholic Charities hired firm founded by gay activist, accused of support for homosexual group
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 25, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As Catholic Charities agencies across the country are fighting government efforts to shut down their adoption services, the group’s national office in Washington has employed a firm founded by a homosexual activist to lobby for them on Capitol Hill, the Washington Blade, a homosexual newspaper, reported recently.
A spokesman for Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA) confirmed to LifeSiteNews that they hired the Sheridan Group, a lobbying firm founded by Tom Sheridan. A self-professed “gay Catholic,” Sheridan began his lobbying career with the AIDS Action Council in the 1980s, and his firm has since represented numerous AIDS advocacy groups.
At the same time, the dissident New Ways Ministry, which purports to support “LGBT” Catholics, claimed to the Blade that CCUSA and some local Catholic Charities agencies have been backing them “behind-the-scenes.”
“Catholic Charities in general have been the most progressive wing of the church other than the nuns,” said Sister Jeannine Gramick, one of the founders of New Ways, which has been condemned by both the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “In some cases, Catholic Charities USA has supported our events. I feel they personally are pro-gay but they can’t do this publicly.”
Francis DeBernardo, New Ways’ executive director, said that while “the homophobia” is still present in Catholic Charities agencies, he believes it is “due mostly to the bishops, who have an immense amount of power over Catholic Charities [on the local level].”
However, Roger Conner, CCUSA’s communications director, told LifeSiteNews on Monday that they have “no affiliation” with New Ways Ministry, “nor are they authorized to speak on our behalf.”
Fr. Larry Snyder, CCUSA’s president, said in a statement that they hired Sheridan’s lobbying firm to promote their anti-poverty initiatives in Congress.
Specifically, he said Sheridan is promoting their Centennial project, which aims to “celebrate our first 100 years of service by imagining a better way to serve those in need throughout the next 100 years.” According to the Blade, CCUSA paid Sheridan’s company $476,750 between April 2010 and April 2011.
Sheridan told the Washington Blade that he had no issue representing CCUSA because it is independent from the local Catholic Charities agencies that are fighting government promotion of homosexualism.
“They’re only together as service providers on poverty issues, which is why I have no problem representing them,” he said. “And I’m proud to represent them because they do such outstanding work.”
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