With a tip of the biretta to Catholic Fire, this quote is from His Excellency Most Reverend Robert Vasa, Bishop of Santa Rosa in California.
“Any government leader, particularly those who claim to be Christian, who claims to be pro-choice, is unworthy of public office.”
Remember Catholic Healthcare West?
Catholic Healthcare West now Dignity Health; Dominican Hospital to remain Catholic, hospital president says
By JONDI GUMZ – Santa Cruz Sentinel
SANTA CRUZ – Dominican Hospital officials announced Monday that they remain wedded to the Catholic mission, despite an announcement by the hospital’s parent company, Catholic Healthcare West, to split from the Catholic Church and adopt a new name, Dignity Health.
“We will remain a Catholic hospital, sponsored by the Adrian Dominican Sisters, following the ethical and religious directives for Catholic health care services,” Dr. Nanette Mickiewicz, Dominican Hospital president, said in a brief statement Monday. “In the rapidly changing health care environment, this new name and structure position the entire organization for growth and success.”
Beverly Grova, who heads the Dominican Hospital Foundation, reiterated that message.
[…]
In mid-December, the privately-run company was designated by Medicare as one of 26 “hospital engagement centers,” accepting a mission to change practices to reduce injuries and complications 40 percent and hospital readmissions 20 percent over three years. That initiative is funded by the federal health care reform legislation.
Catholic Healthcare West had three layers of management. Nuns from six religious orders served as corporate board members who appointed the 18-member board of directors; together they selected the executive management.
Dignity has a single board that retains nine members from Catholic Healthcare West. They include Sister Julie Hyer, a member of the Adrian Sisters who preceded Mickiewicz as Dominican Hospital president. She did not return a call seeking comment Monday.
The Diocese of Monterey had little comment on Catholic Healthcare West’s decision.
“Dignity is an independent organization that operates within the boundaries of the Diocese, but is not a part of the Diocese,” said Dean Warren Hoy, spokesman for the bishop. “Therefore, we can’t appropriately comment on their actions.”
Dignity operates three hospitals in the Diocese, Dominican in Santa Cruz, Arroyo Grande in Arroyo Grande, and French Hospital in San Luis Obispo, he said, adding, “We do not anticipate any significant changes in these three hospitals’ operations as a result of the change to Dignity Health.”
Deck pointed out Dominican’s Catholic affiliation prevents doctors there from doing a tubal ligation, a procedure to prevent future pregnancies, at the time of a Caesarean section, or an abortion.
Those who want a tubal ligation must go to Sutter Maternity & Surgery Center or Watsonville Community Hospital, he said noting abortions usually are performed at a freestanding outpatient center rather than at a hospital.
“I don’t think Dominican Hospital will start doing abortions right away,” Deck said, but he expects there will be pressure to perform that service, perhaps by setting up a separate unit.
[…]
Meanwhile,
We have seen this movie before, and it ain’t The Bells of St. Mary’s.
I note with interest at the National Catholic Register (the Catholic one) that the bishops of New Jersey have issued a statement about same-sex “marriage”.
New Jersey Bishops Release New Statement on Marriage
Same-sex ‘marriage’ ‘is not marriage and should not be treated as marriage,’ they say.[…]
As citizens, we must protect marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Same-sex unions may represent a new and a different type of institution, but it is not marriage and should not be treated as marriage.
What can you do to help protect marriage? Today, we ask all people of good will to do three simple things. First, pray for all married couples and all families. Second, reflect on this important question, “How can I help my family and the families I touch to grow in hope, love, peace and joy.” Third, we ask everyone to reach out to your neighbors, your legislators and the governor with a simple message: “Preserve the definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman.”
To help everyone understand why marriage can only be a union between one man and one woman, we offer the following facts:
[…]
Be sure to read the whole thing over there.
I think there is a political/social war brewing. Our bishops deserve our strong support.
There will be all manner of bullying and intimidation applied to dioceses, bishops, priests. They need your prayers and support. People who hate the Church and her message about the dignity of human life in all aspects will try to silence bishops and priests. They are bullies and their threats and attacks must be resisted.
Prof. Robert George, on his blog Mirror of Justice, comments about Pres. Obama’s blatant attack on the the 1st Amendment, religious liberty and the Catholic Church. My emphases and comments:
The Obama administration’s abortifacient and contraception mandate is appalling, but I cannot claim to be surprised by it. In fact, I would have been surprised—indeed stunned—had the administration done anything significant to honor or protect the rights of Catholics and others on whose consciences the mandate will impose.
In every area touching the sanctity of human life and issues of sexual morality, the Obama administration is aggressively prosecuting the agenda its critics predicted and its most ardent left-wing supporters hoped for. Those who are driving the train, including key administration officials who self-identify as members of the Catholic Church, have no regard for the ethical beliefs of Catholics and others when they are in conflict with left-liberal orthodoxy. Their task, as they perceive it, is to fortify and expand the “right to abortion” and “sexual freedom” wherever they can. [Abortion being a “sacrament” for the secularizing “religion” of liberals.] They pursue this agenda with a religious zeal because, in fact, the ideology in which abortion is a “right” and “sexual freedom” is a core value is their religion. These beliefs are integral to their worldview. If, like Kathleen Sebelius, they happen to be Catholics, you can be assured that it won’t be Catholic teaching, or the Judaeo-Christian ethic, that shapes their policies on issues of life and death and marriage and sexual morality; it will be liberal ideology—pure and simple—that does the shaping.
Interestingly, Obama and his people have been willing to break the hearts of those on the left when it comes [to] Guantanamo, rendition, basic procedural rights of detainees and those accused of supporting terrorism, targeted assassinations, drone attacks, and so forth. But they keep faith strictly with them when it comes to anything pertaining to abortion, contraception, and other central components of the ideology of lifestyle liberalism—the conscience rights of Catholics and others be damned.
Pro-life citizens, including many Catholics, who in 2008 allowed themselves to be persuaded that Obama wouldn’t, as his critics warned, push abortion hard and run roughshod over the religious liberty and rights of conscience of Catholics and other pro-life citizens and their institutions, have now gotten a rude awakening. His administration revealed its contempt for religious freedom and the rights of people and communities of faith when it embraced an extreme and utterly untenable position on the ministerial exemption in the Hosanna-Tabor case. In case anyone thought that was some sort of isolated mistake, the President’s abortifacient and contraception mandate leaves the matter in no doubt.
In 2012, it is no longer possible to sustain illusions about what Obama and his people mean to do to us. They are already doing it. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
I will add, as I wrote elsewhere, that – in light of the probability that the Supreme Court will overturn all this – Obama’s true motive seems to be a long-term goal of being able to say that he really tried to to do all this.
From SpaceWeather:
Space Weather News for Jan. 23, 2012
http://spaceweather.comINCOMING CME: Big sunspot 1402 erupted on Jan. 23rd, producing a strong M9-class solar flare and a fast-moving coronal mass ejection (CME). Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab say the CME should reach Earth on Jan. 24th at 14:18 UT (+/- 7 hr) and Mars a little more than a day later. Strong geomagnetic storms are possible when the cloud reaches Earth. Our magnetic field is still reverberating from a CME impact on Jan. 22nd, so another blow could spark impressive auroras at high latitudes. Sky watchers in northern Europe, Canada, Alaska, and northern-tier US states such as the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin should be alert for Northern Lights.
Some day one of these things is going to take out our electrical grid. Then what?
It had to happen.
Fishwrap is blaming Pres. Obama’s attack on religious freedom on the US Bishops, and their unsophisticated notion of conscience.
Bishops’ conscience model makes light of practical reason
Jan. 23, 2012
By David DeCosseCOMMENTARY
What if the clashes over conscience between the American Catholic bishops and the Obama Administration are driven in great measure not by anti-Catholicism nor by creeping totalitarianism but by the very model of conscience used by the bishops themselves? [Hey! We’ve got to be practical!]
The next year may provide a decisive answer to this question.
On Friday, the Federal Department of Health and Human Services announced that religious institutions would have a year before they would be required to make contraception available at no cost to all female employees. In response, the Catholic Health Association both criticized the HHS statement and called for an “effective national conversation on the appropriate conscience protections in our pluralistic country.” [That’s code for “Find a way to comply with Pres. Obama’s agenda.” Sr. Keehan, GIVE BACK THAT PEN!] Will the Church in the next year enter into such a conversation and possibly find solutions that balance the concerns of religious freedom with the respect for democratic equality? How this question is finally answered may well depend on what conceptual model of the Catholic conscience the Church brings to the table.
[…]
There is a lot more, but I think this get’s the essence of it.
If only the Bishops in the USA had a more sophisticated understanding of “conscience”!
These poor bishops still think that Catholics must conform their consciences to the teachings of the Church! Of the Magisterium of Bishops!
They still think that a Catholic’s conscience must be shaped according to the mind of the Church.
But WE are Church! And our consciences are SUPREME!
Fishwrap thinks that the Catholic Health Association can help us understand this better.
Remember, abetted by the Fishwrap, Sr. Keehan and the Magisterium of Nuns have set themselves up as the alternative teaching body over and against the authority of the bishops.
They have a track record in helping catholic dems in Congress ignore the Catholic bishops and vote in favor of a problem that must inevitably provide taxpayer money for abortions. The Magisterium of Nuns gave them cover.
Be sure to write to Archbp. Dolan, President of the USCCB, and remind him to read the Fishwrap’s suggestion that the Bishops are standing in the way of practical solutions. Urge the bishops to follow the lead of the Magisterium of Nuns!
On a completely different note, remember that USAir flight taking off from LaGuardia in Queens which hits birds, lost both engines and had to land in the Hudson River?
There is a digital reconstruction of the flight from the data in the “black box”
[wp_youtube]tE_5eiYn0D0[/wp_youtube]
Today is marked in particular by the March For Life in Washington, D.C.
The front page of the National Catholic Register is very focused on the Church’s prolife message.
Fishwrap? Zip.
At least not yet. They are probably preparing massive coverage for later in the day.
Right?
Still, it is after noon where I am and they have nothing.
Have you been following the March for Life in Washington, DC?
Is there a local event in which you are participating?
How d’ya like those Occupiers? Huh? Huh?
I read a story the other day that the rat population is exploding in the Occupiers zone in Washington DC.
Now I read in the New York Post that they trashed churches where the pastor was giving them some help.
‘God’-awful OWS mob steals sacred item from church
Churches desecrated
By CANDICE M. GIOVEThere’s no longer room at the inn at a Manhattan church that’s sheltering Occupy Wall Streeters after a holy vessel disappeared from the altar last week.
When the Rev. Bob Brashear prepared for Sunday services at West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th Street, he noticed parts of the bronze baptismal font were gone.
In a fire-and-brimstone message to occupiers later that day, he thundered, “It was like pissing on the 99 percent.”
In Brooklyn, at another church housing OWS protesters, an occupier urinated on a cross, according to Rabbi Chaim Gruber, who has angrily abandoned the OWS movement.
In a letter last week to OWS obtained by The Post, the rabbi fumed, “The Park Slope church housing occupiers was desecrated when an occupier peed inside the building and the pee came into contact with a cross.”
The pastor of the church did not return calls.
At West Park, Rev. Brashear walked into the church for a morning service to find the 18-inch-diameter bronze basin and lid missing from the baptismal font’s 800-pound base. Holy water — straight from the River Jordan — had been poured from the missing basin insert into the base’s bowl.
About 60 occupiers had rolled out their sleeping bags between the pews the night before as part of their evening ritual, Rev. Brashear recalled. When they returned to the church later, following the pastor’s discovery, he issued a stern warning: “You have 24 hours to find it and to come up with an amends and to come up with a plan.
‘I’m sorry and it won’t happen again’ won’t work,” he scolded.
The artifact vanished just three weeks after a $2,400 Apple MacBook vanished from Brashear’s office. He told the occupiers that even when the 100-year-old Upper West Side church extended help to addicts during the 1980s drug scourge, no visitors touched its $12,500 sacramental instrument.“Not even crackheads messed with that,” he said.
The pastor and a worshipper finally found the missing basin tossed into a small room connected to the church. The lid is still missing. The pastor has given protesters two weeks to vacate the church.
Coat of Arms by D Burkart
A Daily Prayer for Priests
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