Economy no excuse to deter solving health care crisis, CHA head says
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The nation's current economic crisis must not deter efforts to achieve health care coverage for the 47 million uninsured Americans, the president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association told a New York audience Oct. 20. Sister Carol Keehan, a Daughter of Charity, delivered the third annual lecture in Catholic health care ethics at St. Catherine of Siena Church in New York. The lecture and the annual Mass for the health care professions that preceded it are sponsored by the Dominican Friars Health Care Ministry of New York. "We can continue to do bailouts, bridge loans, interest cuts and other prop-ups, but we will not have a renewed and vibrant economy without enacting health reform that covers everyone with a reasonable, basic package," she said. The Catholic leader said it is "utterly incompatible with our pro-life agenda" that 9 million U.S. children are among the uninsured. "What child doesn't deserve health care?" she asked. "What could possibly justify not giving a child health care?"

Prelates say both social and political steps needed to protect life
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Catholics are required to oppose abortion on demand and to provide help to mothers facing challenging pregnancies, the chairmen of two committees of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said in an Oct. 21 statement. Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and Bishop William F. Murphy of Rockville Centre, N.Y., chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, also urged Catholics to study church teaching on matters pertaining to abortion rather than rely on statements and materials from outside organizations. The prelates' statement was released in response to two arguments that have surfaced in the abortion debate during the run-up to the Nov. 4 election. The first maintains that the Catholic Church should accept the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion as a "permanent fixture of constitutional law" and the only way to reduce abortions is through broader government support for pregnant women. The second holds that the church should focus solely on restoring recognition for unborn children's human rights and that proposals to provide life-affirming support for pregnant women distract from that effort. "We want to be clear that neither argument is consistent with Catholic teaching," the prelates wrote. "Our faith requires us to oppose abortion on demand and to provide help to mothers facing challenging pregnancies."

Oregon court's ruling on frozen embryos raises ethical problems
PORTLAND, Ore. (CNS) -- An Oregon divorce ruling that frozen embryos can be considered as property confirms an outcome predicted and feared by Catholic leaders decades ago. In the wake of the Oct. 8 decision by the Oregon Court of Appeals, Catholic ethicists say other technologies, like the genetic selection of infants before birth, will pose more problems soon. The court unanimously upheld a woman's decision to kill six frozen embryos by thawing, despite an appeal by the husband to keep them alive. Though the court stopped just short of actually calling embryos property, the key to the decision was a determination that embryos are to be considered under property laws. The mother, Dr. Laura Dahl, said she wanted the embryos killed because she did not want someone else raising the children if they were ever carried to term. She is a pediatrician in Lake Oswego, a Portland suburb. The father, Dr. Darrell Angle, argued that the embryos are alive and so their protection should override a pre-treatment agreement saying that the mother could decide on their fate. Angle's lawyers also contended that the destruction amounted to an unfair distribution of property.

Speaker says with more deacons, lay ministers church shows vibrancy
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (CNS) -- James Davidson, a Catholic sociologist of religion from Purdue University in Indiana, believes it's inaccurate to interpret the shrinking number of priests and a decrease in the number of men and women joining religious communities as a general decline in the Catholic Church. Instead, he said, rising numbers of deacons and lay ecclesial ministers point to a Catholic Church that is vibrant, though perhaps one that will be led in a different way in the future. Davidson presented a range of data and offered his conclusions during a workshop Oct. 9 at the National Religious Vocation Conference convocation in Louisville Oct. 9-13. "The church is being transformed as the social context of the laity is being transformed," said Davidson, during an interview with The Record, newspaper of the Louisville Archdiocese. "The strength and vitality of the Catholic Church is in its laity."

Scholars call for holding up Pope Pius XII's sainthood cause
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- A group of Christian and Jewish scholars is calling for the sainthood cause of Pope Pius XII to be put on hold. The American, Canadian and European scholars said they believe more extensive study is still needed to look into claims that Pope Pius, who headed the church from 1939 to 1958, didn't do enough during World War II to protect Jews from the Holocaust. The Vatican has asked those supporting and opposing the canonization of the wartime pope to stop pressuring Pope Benedict XVI on the issue. At a Mass Oct. 9 marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Pope Pius, Pope Benedict said the late pope had done all he could to help Jews, working quietly and in secret because he knew that was the only way "he could avoid the worst and save the greatest possible number of Jews." The scholars made their plea to the Vatican in a statement issued Oct. 21 by Servite Father John T. Pawlikowski of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and Edward Kessler, director of the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations at the Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths in Cambridge, England; it was signed by seven other academics.

U.S. bishops address abortion, '08 election in columns, statements
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- As the presidential election campaign was drawing to a close, some U.S. bishops urged Catholics not to base their votes on one issue alone, while others said no combination of issues could trump a candidate's stand on what Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan called the "premier civil rights issue of our day" -- abortion. "When we are presented with candidates whose views do not reflect the full teachings of the church, what are we to do?" asked Bishop J. Terry Steib of Memphis, Tenn., in his column for the Oct. 16 issue of The West Tennessee Catholic, the Memphis diocesan newspaper. In response he quoted from a book by Oblate Father Ronald Rolheiser: "Perhaps the first witness we must give to our world is a witness to God's nonviolence, a witness to the God revealed by Jesus Christ who opposes violence of all kinds, from war, to revenge, to capital punishment, to abortion, to euthanasia, to the attempt to use force to bring about justice and God's will in any way." In other words, Bishop Steib said, "we cannot be a one-issue people. We must recognize that God, through the church, is calling us to be prophetic in our own day. If our conscience is well-formed, then we will make the right choices about candidates who may not support the church's position in every case."

Poignant moments, some surprises in new film about late pope
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope John Paul II was lightly wounded by a knife-wielding priest in Portugal in 1982, one year after a gunman tried to kill him in St. Peter's Square, according to one of the late pope's closest aides. The disclosure came in a biographical film screened for the first time at the Vatican Oct. 16, the 30th anniversary of the Pope John Paul's election. Pope Benedict XVI and many of the world's bishops were in attendance. Titled "Testimony," the film is based on a book of memoirs by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz of Krakow, Poland, who was the late pope's personal secretary for 39 years, until the pope's death in 2005. In the film, Cardinal Dziwisz recalled that the pope went to the Marian sanctuary of Fatima, Portugal, in 1982 to thank Mary for saving his life in the 1981 shooting. During an evening ceremony, a priest carrying a large knife lunged toward the pontiff. At the time, Vatican officials said the pope was unharmed and was only informed about the incident the next day.