Luis Marquez was teaching at New Jersey City University several years ago when he came across a young woman in tears in the university library. It was a vulnerable time in her life, as she had just learned she was pregnant. At the moment Marquez encountered her, she was thinking about getting an abortion.
While expressing disappointment that a New York State Court of Appeals has upheld a state mandate that requires employers to cover abortion in their employee health insurance plans, the New York State Catholic Conference is confident an appeal to the Supreme Court will be successful.
I believe in sharing. It’s customary for me to give an update of events I have attended and my experiences attending said events with my friends, my family, my children, fellow parishioners, and anyone who would listen.
Several Catholic professional women, as well as an order of women religious, have challenged a controversial graduation speech by NFL player Harrison Butker, during which the Kansas City Chiefs placekicker and devout Catholic opined on (among other topics) the role of women in society, and the church’s teaching on natural family planning.
In what the head of the American bishops’ conference is calling a “gift,” Filipino Cardinal Luis Tagle will serve as Pope Francis’ special envoy to the National Eucharistic Congress this summer.
“Access to safe drinkable water,” Pope Francis said in his milestone 2015 ecological encyclical “Laudato Si’,” “is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights.”
The Vatican-Vietnam joint working group held its first meeting since last year’s important agreement allowing for a papal representative to reside in Vietnam and the establishment of an office there to support Vietnam’s estimated 6.5 million Catholics.
On Friday, the Vatican rolled out a new expedited procedure for vetting alleged Marian apparitions or other spiritual phenomena, ruling that they will no longer be deemed supernatural but simply that nothing stands in the way of encouraging devotion.
Sports have great potential to bring people together, to help them stay healthy and even to help them dream, Pope Francis said, which is why the pastoral care of sports is so important.
Anyone who reads this weekly column regularly knows that I am very interested in films, theater, and what I refer to as “Catholic Novels.” Recently my attention was called again to Shisaku Endo’s wonderful novel “Silence” and the cinematic masterpiece based on the novel.
