Category: News

WASHINGTON (CNS) — Although the Supreme Court began its new term Oct. 5, it is hardly business as usual since the court only has eight members on the bench and it is continuing to hear oral arguments by teleconference due to heath concerns.

The nation’s high court moves right into action though with two high profile cases in November: a religious freedom exception to anti-discrimination laws and a review, for the third time, of the Affordable Care Act, the nation’s health care law.

The court also could be called upon to decide election disputes if the presidential race is close.

And hovering over all of its current work is the ongoing Senate preparation to move forward with President Donald Trump’s nomination of federal appeals court Judge Amy Coney Barrett to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Sept. 18.

Cases not on the docket this term also have the court’s attention. For example, the court has been asked by the Trump administration and several states to issue an emergency stay of a federal district court ruling this summer that suspended the in-person requirement during the pandemic for women who want to receive the abortion-inducing drug, mifepristone.

And the court also has gained some notice for what it isn’t taking up.

On the first day of its new term, the justices declined to take a case from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples. The court’s decision lets the lower court ruling stand, allowing a lawsuit filed against her to proceed.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, agreed with the court’s decision but also showed displeasure saying: “Davis may have been one of the first victims of this court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision, but she will not be the last.” Obergefell was the court’s 2015 decision that struck down state bans on same-sex marriage.

Back to the court’s fall schedule, on Nov. 4, it will hear oral arguments in Fulton v. Philadelphia, a religious freedom case that centers on a Catholic social services agency that had been excluded from Philadelphia’s foster care program for not accepting same-sex couples as foster parents.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference and a few Catholic Charities agencies joined more than 30 other religious groups, states and a group of Congress members filed amicus briefs urging the court to protect the faith-based foster care program under its First Amendment religious exercise rights.

At a September webinar sponsored by Georgetown University’s law school, Paul Clementi, a partner at the Washington law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, who was solicitor general of the United States from 2005 to 2008, said the court has a lot of “off ramps” with this case, allowing it to address parts of the issue.

He pointed out that Catholic Social Services of the Philadelphia Archdiocese was not seeking damages but simply wanted to take part in the program on its own terms. He also said the court may find a way for Philadelphia to give the faith-based agency an exemption to the anti-discrimination law.

A decision that looms over the court here is the 1990 Employment Division v Smith decision, which involved two American Indians denied unemployment benefits in Oregon after they were fired for using peyote, a hallucinogenic drug, in a religious ceremony.

The court ruled in favor of Oregon, saying its right to legislate against drug use superseded a religious group’s right to use a drug as part of a spiritual ritual. The ruling has been interpreted as giving state and local governments broad powers over religious practices.

Clementi said he would be shocked if the Smith decision would be overruled in this case.

In its petition, Catholic Social Services urged the court to overturn Smith, saying that even though the agency’s program should be allowed under that ruling, the decision “has confused rather than clarified the law and should be reconsidered.”

Six days after the foster parent case, the court will hear oral arguments challenging the nation’s health care law in a case brought by 18 Republican state attorneys general and supported by the Trump administration.

The ACA, which became law in 2010 and was fully implemented in 2015, has been before the nation’s high court twice before, in 2012 and 2015, and survived, but this time its fate is more uncertain particularly with the possible confirmation of Barrett.

This case goes back to the court’s 2012 decision that upheld the law’s individual coverage requirement under Congress’ taxing power and the 2017 tax law that zeroed out that tax penalty. Without that tax in place the state leaders claim the ACA’s coverage requirement is unconstitutional.

As a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, Barrett has not heard any cases dealing with the ACA. But court watchers have been quick to bring up her 2017 paper in the Notre Dame Law School journal where she criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in the 2012 ruling, saying he “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.”

Although the article has raised red flags for those concerned that Barrett could vote to dismantle the law — if she is confirmed to the court in time to hear the case — some legal scholars have said this doesn’t necessarily reveal how she would vote since this case centers on a different legal question.

The Catholic Church has had a complicated relationship with the health care law. Catholic hospitals have long emphasized the poor and vulnerable must have access to health care, but church leaders have objected to the law’s contraceptive mandate, requiring that employee health insurance plans provide contraceptive coverage.

WASHINGTON (CNS) — Father Patrick Peyton may have been a child of God, but he also was a force of nature.

His relentless quest to encourage family prayer, which became the hallmark of his priestly ministry and led to the formation of Family Theater Productions, is highlighted in a new documentary of his life titled, simply, “Pray.”

“I’m for prayer, for peace, for mercy, for justice, for faith, for truth, for love. I’m for racial harmony,” the Irish-born Father Peyton — who popularized the adage “The family that prays together stays together” — told one interviewer. “The things I’m for crowd out the things I’m against. But first of all I’m for prayer,” he added. “The world hasn’t got a prayer without yours.”

“We’re really excited about it finally getting out to the world,” said Holy Cross Father David Guffey, the current executive director of Family Theater Productions.

“Pray,” subtitled “The Story of Patrick Peyton,” will make its debut on a limited number of movie screens Oct. 9; for those who can’t catch it at their local multiplex, it will be available for streaming in January.

Father Guffey, in a Sept. 25 phone interview with Catholic News Service, said he started digitizing material from old Family Theater footage 10 years ago, and that work on “Pray” began in earnest in 2017.

Like any film production, there are the inevitable stumbling blocks. But in the case of “Pray,” it was “picking which parts of the story” to include. “There are so many stories that people had told us.”

One of those stories features Mike Sweeney, a former first baseman and catcher who spent 13 of his 16 big-league seasons with baseball’s Kansas City Royals, and his wife, Shara. When they experienced difficulties in their marriage, they decided to give daily family prayer a try. And it has worked.

“Without prayer,” Mike Sweeney said in the documentary, “we would be like empty shells.” Other first-person testimonials adorn the movie.

The story of Father Peyton, who was declared venerable by Pope Francis in 2017, is itself remarkable. He was the sixth of nine children — four girls and five boys. A working-class Irish family, the Peytons engaged in family prayer every night. Young Patrick Peyton felt he had a vocation to the priesthood, but at a time when Ireland had a surplus of vocations, his poor grades kept him from being accepted as a seminarian.

Patrick convinced his brother Tom to head for the United States, where three of their sisters preceded them. Getting a job as the janitor at the cathedral in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Patrick felt the call to a vocation grow — and both he and his brother were accepted into the Holy Cross order’s seminary on the campus of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

While still a seminarian, Father Peyton was hospitalized with tuberculosis. His favorite seminary professor told him to pray for Mary’s intercession: “If you’re a 50 percenter, she’ll be a 50 percenter. If you’re a 100 percenter, she’ll be a 100 percenter.”

After continuous prayer, he felt a change within his body, and had to convince the doctors he had been cured. After they conducted further tests, according to Holy Cross Father Willy Raymond, Father Guffey’s predecessor at Family Theater Productions, and found their young patient’s claims to be true, they told him: “Nobody should be living after what you’ve been through.”

After being ordained, along with his brother Tom, in 1941, Father Peyton kept looking for ways to repay Mary. At his first assignment in Albany, New York, he started the Crusade for Family Prayer and started a letter-writing campaign that resulted in 20,000 “circular letters” being written — that era’s equivalent to reply-all email — on the crusade’s behalf.

He also secured an hour on an Albany radio station to pray the rosary, which received a favorable response among listeners. This led to interviews with executives at the nation’s second-largest radio network at the time, the Mutual Broadcasting System, in New York City. But to get network radio time, he had to think big. So on Good Friday 1945, he cold-called one of the entertainment world’s biggest stars, Bing Crosby, asking him to lead a family prayer broadcast.

Crosby agreed, and the resultant program on Mother’s Day that year “was celebrated for the emotional impact on the whole country,” Father Raymond says in “Pray.”

But to get more top-caliber stars, Father Peyton had to go to Hollywood, where most of them worked and lived. His success rate was tremendous, and the number of “Family Theater” radio, TV and film episodes in the ensuing years totaled more than 1,000.

When entertainment wasn’t enough, Father Peyton himself led family-rosary crusades that drew hundreds of thousands. Father Peyton did more than 500 crusades himself during his life, Father Guffey said.

“It’s more difficult to imagine the massiveness of them,” he told CNS. “You cannot imagine what 2 million (people) look like in Manila when you get them together, and 500,000 in Golden Gate Park (in San Francisco) when you get them together. It’s mind-blowing.”

Father Peyton led such a public life that few things would seem to have been overlooked. But in the Family Theater’s vaults lie episodes of a talk show called “A Matter of Faith” in which Father Peyton had guests the likes of Rose Kennedy, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, plus Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens and other figures of the Second Vatican Council.

“We think of Father Peyton as someone who was quite pious,” Father Guffey said, “but there was an intellectual foundation to what he did.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Calling all people of goodwill to care for one another as brothers and sisters, Pope Francis urged people not to despair of making the world a better place, but to start creating the world they want through personal action and political lobbying.

Pope Francis signed his new social encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti, on Fraternity and Social Friendship,” at the end of Mass Oct. 3 in Assisi. The Vatican released the text the following day.

“A worldwide tragedy like the COVID-19 pandemic momentarily revived the sense that we are a global community, all in the same boat, where one person’s problems are the problems of all,” the pope said. “Once more we realized that no one is saved alone; we can only be saved together.”

At the same time, he said, responses to the pandemic, and especially to its economic devastation, shined a light on the inequalities existing within nations and among nations.

“For all our hyperconnectivity, we witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all,” he said. “Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.”

“Fratelli Tutti,” which literally means “all brothers and sisters” or “all brothers,” are the words with which St. Francis “addressed his brothers and sisters

and proposed to them a way of life marked by the flavor of the Gospel,” the pope wrote.

That flavor, explained throughout the document, involves welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, listening to and giving a hand up to the poor, defending the rights of all and ensuring that each person, at every stage of life, is valued and invited to contribute to the community, he said. It also means supporting public policies that do so on a larger scale.

At the heart of the new encyclical’s appeal to Catholics is a meditation on Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan and particularly on how Jesus takes a legal scholar’s question, “Who is my neighbor,” and turns it into a lesson on being called not to identify one’s neighbors but to become a neighbor to all, especially those most in need of aid.

“The parable eloquently presents the basic decision we need to make in order to rebuild our wounded world. In the face of so much pain and suffering, our only course is to imitate the good Samaritan,” he said. “Any other decision would make us either one of the robbers or one of those who walked by without showing compassion for the sufferings of the man on the roadside.”

“The parable,” he continued, “shows us how a community can be rebuilt by men and women who identify with the vulnerability of others, who reject the creation of a society of exclusion, and act instead as neighbors, lifting up and rehabilitating the fallen for the sake of the common good.”

Doing that, he said, would mean recognizing and taking concrete action against “certain trends in our world that hinder the development of universal fraternity” and acting as a neighbor to one another, including racism, extremism, “aggressive nationalism,” closing borders to migrants and refugees, polarization, politics as a power grab rather than a service to the common good, mistreatment of women, modern slavery and economic policies that allow the rich to get richer but do not create jobs and do not help the poor.

By Junno Arocho Esteves, Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — In an apostolic letter dedicated to Sacred Scripture, Pope Francis said that even today, Christians can learn new things from the countless translations of the Bible that exist.

The variety of translations of the Bible in the world today “teaches us that the values and positive forms of every culture represent an enrichment for the whole church,” the pope said in his apostolic letter, “Scripturae Sacrae affectus” (“Devotion to Sacred Scripture”).

“The different ways by which the word of God is proclaimed, understood and experienced in each new translation enrich Scripture itself since, according to the well-known expression of Gregory the Great, Scripture grows with the reader, taking on new accents and new resonance throughout the centuries,” he wrote in the letter released by the Vatican Sept. 30.

Earlier in the day, before concluding his weekly general audience, the pope told pilgrims he had signed the document to coincide with the 16th centenary of St. Jerome’s death.

“May the example of this great doctor and father of the church, who placed the Bible at the center of his life, awaken in us a renewed love for the Sacred Scripture and the desire to live in a personal dialogue with the word of God,” he said.

The letter itself said that marking the 16th centenary of St. Jerome’s death is “a summons to love what Jerome loved, to rediscover his writings and to let ourselves be touched by his robust spirituality, which can be described in essence as a restless and impassioned desire for a greater knowledge of the God who chose to reveal himself.”

Catholics today, he said, must heed “the advice that Jerome unceasingly gave to his contemporaries: ‘Read the divine Scriptures constantly; never let the sacred volume fall from your hand.'”

In his apostolic letter, the pope delved into the history of St. Jerome’s life and his love of Scripture. His “monumental work” of translating the Old Testament from Hebrew, as well as his commentary on the Psalms and St. Paul’s letters, are an example for Catholics today, he said.

“As an enterprise carried out within the community and at the service of the community, Jerome’s scholarly activity can serve as an example of synodality for us and for our own time,” the pope said.

“It can also serve as a model for the church’s various cultural institutions, called to be ‘places where knowledge becomes service, for no genuine and integral human development can occur without a body of knowledge that is the fruit of cooperation and leads to greater cooperation,'” he said, quoting a speech he gave in 2019 to the pontifical academies.

St. Jerome’s life and work also highlight the need for true witnesses of Christ who can faithfully interpret Scripture which often seems as if it is “‘sealed,’ hermetically closed to interpretation.”

“Many, even among practicing Christians, say openly that they are not able to read it, not because of illiteracy, but because they are unprepared for the biblical language, its modes of expression and its ancient cultural traditions,” he said. “As a result, the biblical text becomes indecipherable, as if it were written in an unknown alphabet and an esoteric tongue.”

The pope said that “the richness of Scripture is neglected or minimized by many because they were not afforded a solid grounding in this area,” not even from their families, who often seem unable “to introduce their children to the word of the Lord in all its beauty and spiritual power.”

Nevertheless, the celebration of the 16th centenary of St. Jerome’s death, is a reminder of “the extraordinary missionary vitality” throughout the centuries that has led to the Bible’s translation in more than 3,000 languages, he said.

“To how many missionaries do we owe the invaluable publication of grammars, dictionaries and other linguistic tools that enable greater communication and become vehicles for the missionary aspiration of reaching everyone,” Pope Francis said.

“We need to support this work and invest in it, helping to overcome limits in communication and lost opportunities for encounter. Much remains to be done. It has been said that without translation there can be no understanding: we would understand neither ourselves nor others,” he said.