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Archdiocese of Baltimore ministers to victims’ families, stranded crew of bridge collapse

Workers continue to investigate and search for victims after the cargo ship Dali collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge causing it to collapse yesterday, on March 27, 2024, in Baltimore. / Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Mar 27, 2024 / 17:50 pm (CNA).

In the wake of the Francis Scott Key Bridge’s collapse on Tuesday, the Archdiocese of Baltimore has been at the forefront of efforts to help the victims.

Archbishop William Lori called for prayer and held a special Mass for the victims Tuesday evening at Baltimore’s Cathedral of Mary, Our Queen. Among the victims are two injured and six missing construction workers, who are presumed dead, and 22 who were stranded aboard the Singaporean ship that crashed into the bridge.

Father Ako Walker, pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Highlandtown, Maryland, has been visiting with the missing victims’ families, offering spiritual and emotional comfort. He told CNA that the six missing men have families who are now heartbroken and in shock over the loss of their loved ones.

“They were fathers, they were breadwinners, they were sons,” he said.

As authorities have yet to recover six of the victims, Walker said he has been ministering to their families by simply giving them his “accompaniment and presence.”

“It’s very, very difficult to receive the news of the possibility that you may not see your loved one alive again,” Walker said. “They have been struggling to come to terms. They have been asking questions and of course, it being very early on, it’s difficult to give very definite responses to the questions that they have.”  

“For many of them, it’s been a waiting game. My role is to wait with them, to journey with them until they get some definitive news as regards to their loved ones,” he explained.

Andrew Middleton, who leads the archdiocese’s Apostleship of the Sea ministry, was one of the first people to communicate with the crew of the ship, called the “Dali,” just hours after its catastrophic electrical failure and collision with the Key Bridge.

After losing power on Tuesday morning, the Dali hit one of the bridge’s beams, causing much of the 1.6-mile-long bridge to collapse into the Patapsco River by downtown Baltimore.  

Middleton had been with the ship’s captain and some of the crew members days before to help them shop for supplies. After hearing the news, he quickly messaged a crew member who responded confirming that everyone onboard had survived and was safe.

For now, the 22 crew members of the ship, who are from India, remain stranded aboard the Dali amid the wreckage in the Patapsco.

Middleton explained that as foreign nationals, the crew may face legal complications if they try to return to land, as U.S. Customs and Border Patrol would have to grant them special permission. Middleton said the crew is currently communicating with crew members via WhatsApp. He said he has offered to help them with supplies and assured them of his ministry’s prayer.

“Throughout the day yesterday I would just periodically check in, make sure everybody was still doing okay, remind them that we were available for them and that we were praying for them and to not hesitate to reach out to me if they needed anything,” he explained.

Middleton said that when the Dali is eventually allowed to dock, Apostleship of Sea will be ready with food and basic necessities for the crew.

As part of the archdiocese’s ministry to seafarers, Middleton explained that he and other ministry members focus their efforts on the corporal works of mercy: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the poor.

Middleton said he wants to ensure “we’re reminding seafarers of their God-given human dignity.”

According to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, crew members were able to send a distress signal after losing power so that police officers were able to close the bridge in time to prevent further casualties.

However, eight construction workers, immigrants from Latin America, were unable to escape and were on the impacted portion of the bridge. They had been working to fill potholes on the bridge when the Dali collided with it, sending the men into the icy river below. 

Two were rescued and survived but after searching much of Tuesday, the U.S. Coast Guard ended its active rescue efforts and the six remaining victims are now presumed dead, according to local news station WBAL-TV

Watch “EWTN News Nightly’”s coverage of the Key Bridge collapse. 

One missing victim has been identified by the migrant aid group CASA as Miguel Luna, an El Salvadoran immigrant, husband, and father of three. According to CASA, Luna had been a resident of Maryland for the last 19 years.

Another missing victim has been identified as Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, a Honduran national, husband, and father of two who had been in the U.S. for 18 years, according to CNN.

The governments of Mexico and Guatemala have also confirmed some of their nationals were victims of the bridge’s collapse, per CNN.

Father Walker told CNA that the families of the missing, among them some who have small children, are in “immediate need.”

The Archdiocese of Baltimore’s Esperanza Center is working to coordinate aid for the victims’ families in the wake of their loss, he said.

Besides considering financial contributions to help the victims’ families, Walker also asked for the faithful across the country to pray.

“While this is an earthly thing and it’s physical, it’s also spiritual,” he said. “Some of them are having a difficult time and they are outwardly expressing their grief, tears, and so on, and others are just quiet, so I don’t know if the quietness is acceptance or just numbness.”

“My suggestion,” he went on, “is that we entrust all of this to Mary, Our Mother of Perpetual Help, she who accompanied Jesus on the journey and she who observed that her son was maligned, was not treated properly, that suffered.”

“As the victims themselves go through their own suffering and as all of us look on, because all of us are suffering, too, whether indirectly or directly, we [should] remember that we have our Mother Mary who knows very well how to journey with us and who knows how to comfort us in this very, very difficult situation,” he said.

“I commend and entrust all this entire situation to our Mother Mary, who knows fully well that with God, all things are possible.”

Trump touts ‘God Bless the USA’ King James Bible ahead of Easter

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference at 40 Wall Street on March 25, 2024, in New York City. / Credit: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

CNA Staff, Mar 27, 2024 / 11:30 am (CNA).

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump this week is advertising United States-themed Bibles ahead of Easter, urging supporters to purchase a copy of the holy book and help “make America pray again.”

Trump announced the commemorative Bible offering on social media this week, saying he partnered with country singer Lee Greenwood on the initiative. Greenwood’s 1984 song “God Bless the USA” is traditionally played before Trump's campaign rally and event speeches.  

“This Bible is the King James Version and also includes our Founding Father documents,” Trump said. 

The book contains the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance, the former president noted.

“It’s just very important and very important to me,” Trump said in the announcement. “I want to have a lot of people have it. You have to have it for your heart, for your soul.”

The former president, who is Joe Biden’s presumed challenger in the 2024 election, said the United States is “going haywire” because “we’ve lost religion in our country.”

“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book. It’s a lot of people’s favorite book,” Trump said, urging supporters to “stand up, speak out, and pray that God will bless America again.”

The website offering the Bibles for sale notes that it also comes transcribed with a “handwritten chorus to ‘God Bless the USA’ by Lee Greenwood.” It is touted as “the only Bible endorsed by President Trump.”

The book, which is retailing for $59.99, “is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign,” the website says. 

The King James Bible has traditionally been used by Anglicans and other Protestant denominations. It is distinct from the version of the Bible approved by the Catholic Church, which in the U.S. includes the New American Bible among other approved translations.

Local Adaptations

Local Adaptations

Gary Bass’s Judgment at Tokyo assesses the trials of Japanese leaders conducted by the Allied powers after World War II—a lesser known and, in Bass’s view, less successful counterpart to the Nuremberg trials in Germany. It will surely become the standard account. Bass and his research team have plowed through more than two years of complex legal proceedings and press coverage in multiple languages. The result is unfailingly lucid and intelligent, if perhaps overly detailed. (“This a long book,” Bass warns us, “necessarily so.”) It is Bass’s third deeply researched book in the past fifteen years. His first book controversially located the origins of modern ideas of human rights in the independence movements of the nineteenth century. His second book described how the Cold War machinations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger included permitting the Pakistani military to slaughter tens of thousands of Bengalis in 1971. 

Now Bass tackles the Tokyo trials. Twelve judges from eleven different countries, including three from Asia, supervised the proceedings. Topics adjudicated included the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, the 1940 invasion of French Indochina, the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the subsequent invasions of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and the Philippines. Much of the testimony indicted the Japanese for their treatment of Allied prisoners of war. Nine American pilots, for example, bailed out of their planes during the bombing of Chichi Jima, an island off the Japanese coast. Eight were tortured and executed; four were partially eaten. The ninth pilot, rescued by the Americans, was a twenty-one-year-old from Connecticut named George H. W. Bush.

As Bass shrewdly emphasizes, judges whose own countries had not yet abandoned Asian empires were unlikely to be viewed as making impartial assessments of Japanese colonialism. This undermined the credibility of the trials. The most famous defendant at the trial, former prime minister Tojo Hideki, declared the Pacific war “justified and righteous” because of Japan’s efforts to elevate “all the races of the Greater Asiatic powers.” Given Japan’s own colonial record, Tojo’s cynicism was breathtaking, but the delayed independence of Indonesia (from the Dutch), Vietnam (from the French), and India (from the British) made his arguments plausible. So did the legal racial segregation still marking much of the United States in the 1940s and the more general disparagement of “inferior” Asian races widespread in Europe and North America. Tojo’s animus toward the United States was spurred, at least in part, by racially motivated congressional legislation banning most immigration from Japan and other parts of Asia in 1917. The United States allowed Filipino independence in 1946, but the American firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant that charges of victor’s justice had far greater potency in a defeated Japan than in a defeated Germany.

Because many Japanese contested the convictions of their leaders at the trials, and still do, Bass suggests that the liberal international order in Asia was stillborn. His subtitle—World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia—reflects this emphasis. Yes, Bass concedes, the trials themselves reflected newfound interest in human rights after the Holocaust and the Second World War. And yes, the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is inconceivable without that interest. But his final sentence wistfully invokes a “more and more rare” capacity to invoke “conscience over nationalism.”

This seems too stern. After 1945, Japan became an essential part—not an antagonist—of the liberal international order. The origins and consequences of World War II still occasion intense debate across East Asia, in contrast to Germany, but if General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman had been offered the bargain of close to eighty years of a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic Japan, they surely would have taken it.

Admittedly, controversies surrounding so-called “comfort women”—Koreans forced to work as prostitutes in service to the Japanese army during the war—continue to unsettle relations between South Korea and Japan. Leaders outside Japan still use the Tokyo trials for propaganda purposes. Even as his armies invade Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has defended the Tokyo trials in an effort to ally Russia with China, claiming a shared status as victims of German and Japanese aggression.

The Yasukuni Shinto shrine in Tokyo remains a flashpoint, because venerating the war dead there means venerating some of the men convicted of war crimes. The government moved the remains of Tojo Hideki, executed in 1948 after his conviction, to Yasukuni thirty years later, cementing its association with right-wing Japanese politics. One of the most visited statues at Yasukuni is of the Indian judge Satyabrata Pal, who, while denouncing Western powers, refused to convict Japanese leaders for what he said was the normal give-and-take of power politics. If colonialism was a war crime, Pal added, “the entire international community would be a community of criminal races.”

 

Controversy over the Yasukuni shrine should be of special interest to Catholics. An incident there in 1932, described by scholars such as Klaus Schatz, SJ, and others, provides a footnote to Bass’s grand themes of human rights and international law. It can also be understood as yet another variation on the political and cultural decolonization so evident since the retreat of European empires in the mid-twentieth century.

The incident began when the colonel in charge of the military-cadet program at the Jesuit-run Sophia University in central Tokyo announced that the cadets would walk to the Yasukuni shrine. As they marched across the campus, some of the Catholic cadets encountered the university’s rector, Fr. Hermann Hoffmann, a German Jesuit. They queried Hoffmann: Should they participate in ceremonies at the shrine?

It was not a simple question. Visits to Shinto shrines had long been forbidden for Japanese Catholics, for the same reason that Catholics in the rest of the world were nominally prohibited from attending worship services—even funerals and weddings—in Protestant or Orthodox churches or Jewish synagogues. At best, they could participate “passively,” out of respect for the deceased or the engaged couple. Better not to show up at all. Even being present, according to strict canon lawyers and theologians, signaled that Catholicism was one among many equally valid religions, not the true faith. In 1928, Pope Pius XI had issued an encyclical declaring that ecumenical discussions between Catholics and Protestants would proceed only after recognition of the “authority and supremacy of Peter and his legitimate successor.”

Questions about participation in the larger society were never theoretical for Japanese Catholics. Roughly ninety thousand Catholics lived in Japan in 1930, less than one percent of the population. It was one thing to forbid attendance at a Protestant wedding in, say, Milan, where such occasions were rare. Quite another to resist appearing at Shinto shrines in Tokyo. Evading opportunities to venerate Japanese war dead was even more fraught. In 1931, the Japanese army had invaded northern China, or Manchuria, and installed a puppet government. The cadets at Sophia knew they could soon be drafted into active duty. They also knew that a militarist Japanese government had begun a process of firmly tying Shintoism to the state, and restricting the rights of Buddhists, Christians, and other religious minorities.

Fr. Hoffmann told the cadets they did not have to participate in Shinto ceremonies. A handful of cadets took him at his word, and although precise accounts of what happened vary, two cadets seem to have refused to salute the shrine during the presentation of arms. Two or three cadets also declined to bow their heads. These modest defiant gestures unsettled the officers in charge. Just two days after the cadets visited the shrine, the colonel in charge of the cadets officially complained to Fr. Hoffmann, who tried to explain the Catholic viewpoint. The dissatisfied colonel then contacted high government officials. The vice minister of the Ministry of War personally called Fr. Hoffmann and told him to close the Sophia cadet program because “the spirit of the University [Sophia] does not correspond to the principles of national education.” Given this expression of government displeasure, the future of the university now seemed shaky. Enrollment at Sophia dropped precipitously.

When reports from Catholic leaders in Japan reached Rome, Vatican officials joined university leaders at Sophia and government bureaucrats at the war ministry in pondering just what obligations Sophia students owed the nation-state. They did so in a volatile context. The intense nationalism of the 1920s and ’30s disoriented Catholic leaders far beyond East Asia. Vatican officials signed treaties or concordats with Mussolini’s Italy (1929) and Hitler’s Germany (1934), although neither document protected Catholic institutions in the ways these officials had hoped. More broadly, Catholics in both Europe and Asia aimed to demonstrate that even as members of an international Church, they would remain loyal to their native homelands. 

To the relief of administrators at Sophia, local Catholic leaders and Vatican officials eventually changed course and ruled that Japanese Catholics could pay their respects to Japanese war dead at Yasukuni as a civic, and not religious, obligation. Even more significantly, in 1939, the same Vatican officials reexamined a famous 1742 ruling on Chinese rites and allowed Chinese Catholics to venerate ancestors according to Confucian tradition, again defining such veneration as civic and cultural, not religious.

In the cauldron of the 1930s, these adaptations to nationalism in Japan and China seemed sensible. Both decisions—allowing Japanese Catholics to participate in ceremonies at Shinto shrines and reassessing the Chinese rites controversy—are now understood by theologians as victories for inculturation, the idea that Catholics must build Indigenous churches, not simply transplant European Catholic practices. These issues were especially acute in Japan and China. Outsider status in these complex civilizations inhibited evangelization. Lourdes grottoes, the Latin Mass, and neo-Gothic churches could no longer constitute a Catholic vernacular. Rather, Indigenous devotions, languages, and architectural forms offered a strategy for shedding the stigma of a foreign import. Vietnamese Catholics appalled by French colonialism destroyed French-made Catholic statues in local churches in the late 1940s. A leading Filipino Jesuit wrote as early as 1952 that Catholicism must no longer be viewed as a Western import, but instead belonged “fully as much to Asia as to Europe.”

 

Here is where Gary Bass’s yearning for international human rights and norms, as well as his emphasis on individual conscience, intersects with the challenges faced by religious minorities such as Japanese Catholics. Even as Japanese intellectuals denounced Western modernity for its corrupt individualism and liberalism in the 1930s, so, too, did many Catholics—and not only in Japan. Japan’s leading Catholic intellectual fit snugly within both the Catholic and the Japanese milieus when he lamented a Western focus on the “isolated and abstract individual” and urged a “new East Asian spiritual civilization.” 

Inculturation in Tokyo in the 1930s, then, could mean inculturation to a nationalist, antiliberal, and authoritarian military government. Inculturation in Germany and Italy was equally fraught. Over time, reform-minded Catholics would challenge this instinct to conform to the demands of the nation-state. The French Jesuit Henri de Lubac published one of his first essays on the distinction between patriotism (good) and nationalism (troubling). During World War II, de Lubac played a role in the French resistance and wrote against anti-Semitism and racism. He helped draft some of the documents at the Second Vatican Council, and his influence may be evident in the distinction made in Gaudium et spes (1965) between a “generous and loyal” patriotism and a “narrow-mindedness” that foreclosed identification with the “whole human family.” Bishops at the Council invoked—and Vatican officials later beatified—the Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler and who, as a result, was beheaded in the last months of the war. Jäggerstätter’s witness was deemed admirable because he would not sacrifice his conscience in service to nationalist aims.

Now nationalism seems again ascendant. Pope Francis resists this impulse at every turn, as suggested by his focus on migration issues (which cross national borders) and the environment (which knows no borders). At the same time, he also favors liturgical and cultural inculturation, in part because of his long experience with and sympathy for Indigenous peoples in Latin America.

The trick is to figure out what kind of inculturation makes sense, and when. Those Catholics now dismissive of liberalism should be wary of tying themselves, as in the 1930s, to regimes incompatible with a universal Church. Those eager to diminish distance between Catholic practices and local customs might also tread carefully. After all, too successful an absorption into any one local milieu—Japan in the 1930s or the United States in 2024—could diminish the Church’s capacity to challenge, not simply accept, the ambient culture. 

Judgment at Tokyo
World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
Gary J. Bass
Alfred A. Knopf
$46 | 912 pp.

John T. McGreevy

What Comes Next

What Comes Next

Social democracy might well be the most successful economic project in history. During its heyday—the three decades following the Second World War on both sides of the Atlantic—it led to high productivity, economic growth, full employment, low inequality, and very few financial crises. Political and economic institutions made sure that rising prosperity benefitted all classes in society. The time has come to rehabilitate this economic model for our era. And just as in the middle of the twentieth century, Catholic social teaching can help provide a moral framework for this model.

What do I mean by social democracy? I mean an economic system predicated on the belief that an economy must be underpinned not only by property rights but also by economic rights. More concretely, in a social democracy, the government supplies public goods, uses the welfare state to protect people from adverse economic circumstances, and promotes unions to make sure that workers can bargain for their fair share of economic progress.

One could say that social democracy seeks, however imperfectly, to make operational Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That Article spells out the economic rights that should be afforded to all people: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” In this, social democracy guarantees a standard of living sufficient for all to be able to participate in the economic and social life of the nation. Recognizing that market income is often inadequate for that purpose, social democracy insists on an active role for government.

This expansive rights-based approach can be contrasted with the approach of free-market economics or economic libertarianism. Under those two systems, the only rights recognized are property rights. A free-market system might allow for a minimal social safety net to prevent outright destitution, but nothing more than that. There is certainly no sense of a common obligation to support the well-being of all. And there is no “right” to an adequate standard of living. Free market theorists such as Friedrich Hayek were quite clear about that.

In one sense, free-market ideology harks back to Adam Smith’s key insight that the “invisible hand” of the market would harness the power of self-interest, market competition, and the division of labor to produce ever-increasing prosperity—“the wealth of nations.” This ideology can also be traced back to the political philosophy of John Locke, who held that property rights were the only rights that mattered, and that the proper role of government was just to protect those rights.

It’s true that markets are quite good at creating wealth. The problem is that they are quite poor at distributing it. Smith wasn’t much interested in questions about poverty or the distribution of income; he merely assumed that the market economy would lift all boats. But this simply isn’t the case. As Pope Francis has reminded us, a market economy is compatible with vast amounts of inequality and exclusion. 

 

The Catholic social tradition starts with this key recognition. Beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum in 1891, it condemned the excesses of economic liberalism during the Industrial Revolution. It called for the state to protect the poor and workers. It called for just wages, and insisted that workers should be able to form labor unions that could bargain on their behalf.

From its earliest days, Catholic social teaching forged a middle path between free-market libertarianism and socialist collectivism. Pope Pius XI condemned these two extremes as the “twin rocks of shipwreck” in his encyclical Quadragesimo anno. It’s important to note that when Catholic social teaching condemns socialism, it is referring to the collective ownership of the means of production and the total abolition of private property. But Pius also condemned an economic system based on a “free competition of forces.” Such a system, he claimed, reflected the “errors of individualist economic thinking.” Accordingly, economic life must be “subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle.” By this, he clearly meant the state.

We should not infer from this condemnation that early Catholic social teaching favored social democracy. What Leo XIII and Pius XI leaned toward were systems known as distributism and corporatism. Distributism is based on the dispersed ownership of private property. For Leo, if every person held a small amount of property, this would ensure harmony between the classes and promote material sufficiency. Corporatism, which was favored by Pius, is based on the division of society into functional groups comprising both employers and workers. The assumption was that these groups would together pursue the common good under the general direction of the state.

The problem with both distributism and corporatism is that, despite their nostalgic appeal, they are no longer practical. Distributism looks back to a world of smallholder farmers, increasingly anachronistic in the industrial age. Corporatism appeals to the medieval guild system, which also seems hopelessly out of date. There were some experiments with corporatism in a number of Catholic countries in the interwar years, including Austria, Italy, and Portugal. The general consensus is that they were not successful. And corporatism was forever tainted by its association with authoritarian regimes.

As James Chappel shows in his book Catholic Modern, the intellectual ground began to shift decisively in the 1930s. During that period, Catholics became more comfortable with both democracy and state involvement in the economy. The shift began with a movement Chappel calls “paternal Catholicism,” which sought to protect families and assumed they would have a single breadwinner. “Paternal Catholicism” supported such policies as the provision of family benefits and the promotion of industrial unions. It was fiercely opposed to Communism, while recognizing that Communism was offering something to workers, and that the offer needed to be countered. Along with “paternal Catholicism,” Chappel documents a parallel movement that he refers to as “fraternal Catholicism.” This was more left-wing, more supportive of larger welfare states, and more open to tactical alliances with socialists and secular social democrats. In the early postwar years, “paternal Catholicism” was ascendent, but “fraternal Catholicism” also exerted an influence. By the 1950s, both movements had come together with the goal of supporting what Chappel calls the “consuming family” in a new age of affluence. 

That was the golden era of postwar Christian democracy. And in the domain of economics, it aligned with secular social democracy. But the sources of these economic models were different. Christian democracy derived from Catholic social teaching. It was especially influenced by thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and the “personalists,” with their emphasis on human dignity. Secular social democracy, on the other hand, had its roots in revisionary socialism. Theorists like Eduard Bernstein sought to replace the Marxist insistence on the inevitability of revolution with an emphasis on social reforms within the democratic system. Apart from their origins, there were other notable differences between Christian and social democracy. Christian democracy was concerned with protecting and promoting the traditional family as the basic unit of society, whereas secular social democracy—especially in Scandinavia—focused on the provision of universal social benefits. But there was also a significant overlap: both Christian democracy and social democracy built large welfare states and empowered unions as bulwarks against excessive corporate power. It is for this reason that I use “social democracy” as an encompassing term that includes Christian democracy.

It is commonly believed that the twin pillars of social democracy—the welfare state and strong unions—were more solid under secular social democracy than under the more conservative Christian democracy. But this assumption is wrong. Over this period, social spending—in such areas as education, health care, old-age pensions, incapacity-related benefits, family support, unemployment benefits, active labor-market policies, and housing support—was just as high in the Christian-democratic heartland of France, Germany, Italy, and Austria as in classic secular social democracies such as Sweden and Denmark. This social spending was paid for with high taxes, which sharply increased during the postwar years. 

The same holds true for labor: unions became as dominant in countries like France and Germany as in Scandinavia. This can be measured in collective-bargaining coverage—the percentage of workers under a collective-bargaining agreement (whether or not they’re union members). Coverage reached 98 percent in France and Austria, and 90 percent in Sweden. This highlights the role played by sectoral bargaining, whereby collective bargaining agreements are extended to all workers in a particular sector or industry. Countries like Germany and Austria went even further in promoting workers’ rights by putting in place systems of codetermination, whereby workers are given a share in the governance and management of the companies they work for.

The United States never had this kind of Christian- or social-democratic tradition, but the New Deal order mirrored some of its elements. The New Deal order encompasses the original New Deal instituted by Franklin Roosevelt as well as its extension by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. This order limited the excesses of the market, sought just and harmonious industrial relations, and protected people from a variety of market risks. The broad contours of the New Deal order were accepted by both political parties during the postwar years, and they even informed the settlement imposed on Germany and Japan after their defeat in the Second World War.

Nonetheless, social democracy in the United States always had a more limited range than in Europe. Here, the welfare state was less generous. When it came to organized labor, the United States never really embraced sectoral bargaining; labor negotiations took place primarily at the level of the individual employer. Even so, in 1950, the famous Treaty of Detroit secured autoworkers a share in the country’s rising prosperity. Since then, however, American corporations have become notably more hostile to worker interests, and today, only six percent of private-sector workers belong to a union, down from a postwar high of almost a third. 

 

The alignment between Catholic social teaching and social democracy would never have happened without significant developments within Catholicism itself—especially the Second Vatican Council and its pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et spes. It was in the Council that the Church finally made peace with the liberal democratic state.

I would argue that, in keeping with this relatively new acceptance of democracy, the key principles of Catholic social teaching now point toward social democracy in the economic order. These principles include the common good, integral human development, solidarity, subsidiarity, reciprocity and gratuitousness, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, economic rights, and norms of justice.

The “common good” is the most important concept in Catholic social teaching. In his encyclical Laudato si’, Pope Francis calls it a “central and unifying principle of social ethics.” The common good is the good of “all of us,” a reflection of our nature as social animals. Gaudium et spes defines it as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” This has clear relevance for the role of the state in economic life. In his encyclical Mater et magistra, Pope John XXIII stressed that the state’s purpose was the realization of the common good, which meant that it sometimes had to intervene in economic affairs. Contrary to free-market ideology, the Church teaches that nobody can be excluded from the common good.

The common good is closely related to another key principle of Catholic social teaching: integral human development. This concept is associated with Pope Paul VI and his encyclical Populorum progressio. Integral human development means the development of the whole person and of all people. It entails a broader notion of human development than the merely material, seeking the fullest development of each person’s capabilities. Thus, the idea of integral human development is more expansive than social democracy, but social democracy is certainly nested within it. This is because the fullest development of human capabilities depends on certain material conditions—physical and economic security; access to food, housing, health care, and education; opportunities for decent and rewarding work; and a sustainable natural environment. 

Solidarity, another key principle of Catholic social teaching, is defined by Pope John Paul II in Sollicitudo rei socialis as “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.” A welfare state embodies this collective responsibility for furthering the well-being of all, especially the weak and vulnerable. Unions are another expression of solidarity.

The principle of subsidiarity is often paired with solidarity. Some Catholics have argued that subsidiarity requires that the state take a hands-off approach to economic life. This isn’t quite right. Subsidiarity means that higher-level associations like the state must actively help and support lower-level associations like families, unions, and civil-society organizations. As Pope Francis puts it, subsidiarity means that “when single individuals, families, small associations and local communities are not capable of achieving primary objectives, it is right that the highest levels of society, such as the State, should intervene to provide the resources necessary to progress.” This is why unions, for example, are—as Pope John Paul II put it in his encyclical Laborem exercens—indispensable elements of social life. But there are still things that only a state can do to help individuals and families.

Obviously, the state should not provide this help in a demeaning or overly bureaucratic manner, or in a way that hinders the agency of the people being helped. Pope John Paul II warned about “malfunctions and defects” of the welfare state when subsidiarity is not respected. There are a number of ways to avoid this pitfall. One is to resist onerous and intrusive conditions for welfare that stigmatize the beneficiary. Another is to avoid “poverty traps,” where workers are actually discouraged from taking a job or working more hours because of the loss of benefits. Hence, the advantage of universal benefits as a right of citizenship, supplemented but not replaced by cash transfers for those who need them. Another way the welfare state can respect subsidiarity is the so-called “Ghent system,” whereby unions are in charge of dispersing social insurance (even if the funding ultimately comes from the government). 

That brings us to reciprocity and gratuitousness, principles most associated with Pope Benedict XVI and his encyclical Caritas in veritate. Benedict thought that fraternity, not self-interest, should be at the heart of economic activity, and that real fraternity required a willingness to give to others without expecting anything in return—gratuitousness. As for reciprocity, it turns out that selfishness is not the only important motivator in human psychology. In contrast to transactional relationships—what you give me, now or soon, in return for what I give you—reciprocity involves and fosters social trust by extending our relationship into the future: what I give you now is what I may need from you later. Or: what you give me now is what I may one day need to give someone else. This is the bedrock of any successful welfare state: everyone contributes (through taxes or social-security contributions) and everyone gets benefits (health care, education, or pensions). But what one gets back from the state may not always be the same as what one contributed. Instead, one gets what one needs.

Another central principle of Catholic social teaching is the universal destination of goods. Harking back to Scripture, the Church fathers, and St. Thomas Aquinas, this principle implies that the goods of the earth are destined for all people, not just the rich. Here is how Gaudium et spes explains it: “Man should regard the external things that he legitimately possesses not only as his own but also as common in the sense that they should be able to benefit not only him but also others.” This has direct relevance for economic life. Under a free-market system, what matters most is the right to private property. But as Pope Francis reminds us in Fratelli tutti, this is a secondary natural right, and it comes with what Pope John Paul II calls a “social mortgage.” Some have argued that the universal destination of goods is to be achieved only by means of private charity. People are called upon to voluntarily use their surplus to relieve the suffering of the less fortunate. This is not wrong, but it ignores the importance of institutions. Gaudium et spes states explicitly that it is the role of social institutions, not only individuals, to bring about the universal destination of goods in developed countries. And Pope Paul VI taught that when private-property rights clash with the needs of the community, it is up to public authorities to resolve the conflict. Thus, the universal destination of goods is compatible with the broad approach of social democracy, which treats the material resources of society as, in some sense, common. Ownership rights are provisional, not absolute or sacred, and taxation is not theft.

A related principle is the preferential option for the poor, which is utterly essential to the Christian worldview. It implies that public policies should be judged first and foremost by how they affect the poor and the excluded. Again, this is a marked departure from free-market economics, which favors those with the most resources. In this, the preferential option for the poor is closely related to John Rawls’s difference principle, which calls for the position of the least well-off to be maximized. Thus, the preferential option for the poor supports the efforts of a social democracy to relieve the plight of those in greatest need.

Catholic social teaching also makes room for economic rights (and does not reduce these to property rights). As we have seen, these economic rights are spelled out explicitly in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the Church goes further, treating economic rights as the central rights, even before civil and political rights. Here is how Pope John XXIII describes these central rights in his 1963 encyclical, Pacem in terris

Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services. In consequence, he has the right to be looked after in the event of ill health; disability stemming from his work; widowhood; old age; enforced unemployment; or whenever through no fault of his own he is deprived of the means of livelihood.

Pope John enumerates further economic rights, including the right to be given the opportunity to work, the right to just wages and a standard of living consistent with human dignity, and, yes, the right to private property—subject to the universal destination of goods. These rights mirror those listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and they can be regarded as the core rights of social democracy.

This New Deal–era mural by Julius Woeltz, The Bauxite Mines, was originally installed in the Benton, Arkansas, post office in 1942 (Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons).

Finally, justice—which means giving people their due—is central to both Catholic social teaching and social democracy. John Rawls, for example, argued that justice was achieved through fairness, which means prioritizing the position of the least well-off. In Catholic social teaching, justice is regarded as a cardinal virtue and oriented toward the common good. There are various forms of justice. Commutative justice is the justice between two individuals. In economic life, it is the justice of contracts, agreements, and promises—and, as such, is accepted by all, including libertarians. Distributive justice is different. It refers to what the community owes the individual. This is the justice embedded in social democracy—and not accepted by libertarians. Finally, contributive justice refers to what the individual owes to the community. In Catholic social teaching, every right is attached to a corresponding duty. It is worth noting that the concept of duty, as opposed to mere contractual obligation, has no role to play in free-market economics.

Given this close alignment between the principles of Catholic social teaching and social democracy, it should come as no surprise when Pope Francis claims that the Church supports what he calls the “social market economy”:

I do not condemn capitalism in the way some attribute to me. Nor am I against the market [economy]. Rather, I am in favor of what John Paul II defined as a social economy of the market. This implies the presence of a regulatory authority, that is the state, which should mediate between the parties. It is a table with three legs: the state, capital, and work.

Pope Benedict XVI made an even stronger claim, arguing that “in many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.” 

 

But social democracy didn’t last. It was replaced by something called neoliberalism, which sought to minimize the role of the state and organized labor in economic life and to let the private sector flourish and drive innovation. It was touted as a remedy for the economic malaise of the 1970s, a period of low growth and stubbornly high inflation. The social-democratic model seemed to have reached its expiration date, and something new was required.

But neoliberalism did not work as promised. Productivity and economic growth have both been lower in the neoliberal era than in the era of social democracy. The goal of full employment was cast aside. Inequality soared as a greater portion of the more modest economic growth went to those at the top of the income distribution. And deregulation caused global financial crises—most notably the Great Recession of 2008–2009.

We are now living with the social and political fallout from the failures of neoliberalism. In the United States, whole communities have been hollowed out, and life expectancy is actually falling among those without college degrees. On both sides of the Atlantic, economic precarity and anxiety are fueling the rise of far-right demagogues eager to burn down the last institutional vestiges of the postwar order. Hovering over everything is an environmental crisis for which there seem to be no adequate political solutions. The common good is the great casualty of the neoliberal era.

All of this calls for a return to social democracy. But the social democracy of the future can’t just be a carbon copy of the past. It must be attuned to the particular challenges and circumstances of our time, and I believe the principles of Catholic social teaching can help with that new attunement. 

The two original pillars of social democracy were the welfare state and labor power. We need to restore both of those. We need a robust welfare state—funded by taxes on income, wealth, and inheritance—to protect people from economic dislocation and guarantee their basic economic rights. And we need to boost the power of organized labor, especially in the United States. These two pillars of social democracy will need to be supplemented by two newer ones: workplace democracy and decarbonization.

The combination of the shift to a predominantly service-based economy with the deployment of advanced technologies throughout the workplace has led to less worker autonomy and more monitoring and surveillance by employers. Workers need to take back some element of control and responsibility. To that end, there has been growing interest in workplace democracy in recent years. The economist Thomas Piketty has attributed the collapse of social democracy partly to the fact that workplace democracy has failed to expand much beyond Germany and a few other countries. And in a recent book on the contemporary relevance of John Rawls titled Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?, the economist Daniel Chandler argues that Rawls’s famous “difference principle” implies that workers have the right to participate in decision-making. According to Chandler, respecting this right would lead to more meaningful work, which is a vital source of self-respect. 

The idea of workplace democracy—where workers have a share in both the ownership and the management of the companies that employ them—is deeply embedded in Catholic social teaching. This is spelled out in Gaudium et spes, which stresses that “the active sharing of all in the administration and profits of these enterprises in ways to be properly determined is to be promoted.” In his encyclical Laborem exercens, Pope John Paul II promotes what he calls the socialization (as opposed to the collectivization) of the means of production: “On the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part-owner of the great workbench at which he is working with everyone else.” 

What would workplace democracy look like in practice? One obvious model is the worker cooperative. Successful examples include Mondragon in Spain and La Lega in Italy. Yet worker cooperatives have gained surprisingly little traction beyond these famous examples. Another model is codetermination, in which workers are represented on boards of directors. Several European countries grant workers this kind of representation, but none go as far as Germany, where half of the board members at large firms are chosen by workers. In general, codetermination induces firms to place less weight on the interests of shareholders. It leads to higher productivity, lower wage inequality, and more family-friendly policies. Codetermination could also be expanded to include work councils that allow workers and management to make joint decisions on day-to-day issues. The right to bargain over wages would remain with unions, however. There could also be more profit-sharing arrangements, based on clear and transparent formulae. In France, half of all private-sector workers have access to such profit-sharing systems. Alternatively, the employees of a company could own more of its shares. Such a system could ultimately lead to majority worker ownership.

The second new pillar of social democracy must be decarbonization. This is the great challenge of our time. The massive amount of energy produced by burning fossil fuels has powered the Industrial Revolution and the tremendous economic progress of the past few centuries. But we now know that burning fossil fuels is undermining the conditions for human flourishing by causing global temperatures to rise to dangerous levels. Unless we find a way to stop it, climate change will have devastating consequences for the economy, especially among the world’s poor. Indeed, low-income countries, especially in Africa, are already facing some of the worst effects of climate change: droughts, floods, and lower crop yields. This was not a central concern for social democracy in the twentieth century, but it must be in the twenty-first.

Keeping the rise in global temperatures below the danger zone—no more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—will require a complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050. This is consistent with the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Instead of burning oil, coal, and gas, the global economy will need to be powered entirely by renewable energy. This will amount to the largest economic transformation in human history over the shortest period of time. It is a daunting task. The reason I include decarbonization as one of the new pillars of social democracy is that it will not be accomplished by the free market. Rather, it will require the guiding hand of government—through large-scale public investment and public–private partnerships. It will require extensive industrial policy, whereby the government subsidizes entire sectors of the economy.

The original social-democratic era did indeed engage in this kind of planning and industrial policy. The experience of the postwar United States is instructive here. Government investment stimulated many technological advances, including the development of the internet and the human genome project. Consider the space industry. In 1961, John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. At the time he said that, only one American astronaut had gone to space and only for a few minutes. But eight years later, that goal was accomplished. It is precisely this kind of goal-based development, backed by the immense resources of both government and private industry, that is needed to decarbonize the global economy by the middle of this century. Technological and financial resources will need to be guided in directions different from those determined only by the free market.

Catholic social teaching can help us develop the moral capital to make this difficult transition. It is no accident that Pope Francis has made climate change one of the priorities of his papacy. His encyclical Laudato si’ helped guide the global community toward the Paris Agreement. Last fall, he issued an unprecedented follow-up to this encyclical, an apostolic exhortation titled Laudate Deum. In Laudato si’, Pope Francis formulated the newest principle of Catholic social teaching—integral ecology. This principle reminds us that the relationships between human beings and the natural world are interconnected and part of a larger whole. Accordingly, if we upset the balance of nature, we upset the conditions for human flourishing, especially for the poor. Climate change is not just an environmental problem, but also a social one. And it is a mistake to assume that all social problems will be solved for us by the free market.

 

Building a new kind of social democracy will require an agreement on the basics between the Right and Left. That, after all, was the secret of the original social-democratic moment in the postwar era. It is worth noting that the politics of early postwar years in countries such as France, Germany, and Italy were dominated by center-right parties. The political Left had little influence there. Yet, these center-right parties built up the economic edifice of Christian democracy—welfare states, strong unions, and codetermination. (The Left did hold power in Scandinavia, which developed its own, more ambitious kind of social democracy.) In any case, there was a strong alignment between Christian democrats and social democrats on economics in those early postwar years. In the United States, too, the basic contours of the New Deal order were accepted and endorsed by Republican presidents such as Eisenhower and Nixon.

Can this model be restored and adapted in our own time—a time marked by deep partisanship and rancor? I believe it is possible. The political Left would need to return to its working-class roots, moving away from the politics of culture and identity—the politics favored by educated elites. The political Right, meanwhile, would need to rediscover the successes of Christian democracy, and turn away from neoliberalism and climate-change denialism. Despite growing polarization on culture-war issues, there are a few hopeful signs of this kind of right-left alliance in the domain of economic policy, a few green shoots amid the ashes of our burnt-out political culture. Given the challenges we and the planet face, it is no exaggeration to say that the future may depend on these shoots growing into something more. 

Anthony Annett

Hijacking St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Hijacking St. Patrick’s Cathedral

On Thursday, February 15, a group of gay, lesbian, and transgender activists briefly hijacked a funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. They filled the front pews costumed in carefully chosen funeral garb: the skimpy, the glitzy, the gaudy, and the drag. One eulogist led the congregation in repeated chants of “Cecilia, Cecilia,” the deceased’s name; another celebrated her as “St. Cecilia, mother of all whores”; and one woman interrupted the “Ave Maria” by twirling down the aisle with the refrain of “Ave Cecilia.”

The subject of this sudden canonization was Cecilia Gentili, a transgender activist, former prostitute, and accomplished lobbyist for the rights of streetwalkers and the decriminalization of prostitution. She was a sometime actress and writer and an inveterate performer—in sum, a prominent member of the high-glamor wing of trans and queer New York society. (Her fullest obituary appeared in Vogue online, punctuated by Gucci ads.)

The St. Patrick’s funeral was a stellar example of what, in 1961, Daniel J. Boorstin, called a “pseudo-event.” For Boorstin, a conservative American historian and later Librarian of Congress, a pseudo-event is an event that might have the appearance of a genuine news event but is in fact staged and orchestrated mainly to generate publicity.

Provoking publicity may not have been the only objective behind the staging of the Gentili funeral, but it was surely a major one. The day before the funeral, a clearly alerted New York Times reporter called the archdiocese for comment on St. Patrick’s holding such a rite for a transgender activist. The Times story on the funeral ran for two columns, filled with colorful details, for example, about the “daring outfits—glittery miniskirts and halter tops, fishnet stockings, sumptuous fur stoles and at least one boa sewed from what appeared to be $100 bills.”

In line with the familiar culture-wars script for covering things Catholic, the story proposed that the funeral might be a landmark event. Was the notoriously repressive Catholic Church catching up to the enlightened, progressive worldview of, say, Vogue or the New York Times? Surely that possibility was worth two columns—the space that in my time as the Times’s senior religion reporter might have been allotted for a major papal decree.

The story pinged everywhere. Outrage duly followed. Some Catholics fell ill at the very thought of a priest blessing the casket and commending to God the soul of a transgender person. Others managed to blame Pope Francis. But the common, overriding reaction was indignation and pain at a sacred rite in a sacred space denatured into street theater—and reported as though this were an unambiguously positive thing.

That was certainly my initial reaction. It was magnified by disappointment in the paper where I had prized my own decade as a religion reporter and my two decades as a biweekly columnist. The Times story contrasted the present welcome for Gentili’s funeral with the December 10, 1989 ACT UP protest at Cardinal John O’Connor’s opposition to publicly supported, condom-based “same sex” programs, especially ones mandated for Catholic schools. The article accurately described the massive 1989 protest as “a touchstone in the city’s gay history.” It did not mention that the protest had involved the disruption of a liturgy and the desecration of a consecrated host—and was widely condemned by public officials, media editorials (including in the New York Times itself), and many in the LGBTQ community.

Most disappointing was that the Gentili funeral story, though written by a newly appointed metropolitan-area religion reporter, was religiously tone-deaf. That the event might have abused a religious ritual and setting was apparently not worth even a hint of attention.

My immediate mortification was quickly eased. Hadn’t Jesus warned his followers to anticipate abuse and persecution, indeed in forms far more severe than this? And hadn’t the cathedral been clearly ambushed—and hadn’t it acquitted itself well? The Times reported that the person requesting the funeral had kept Gentili’s transgender identity “under wraps.” One can understand a cathedral official not being aware of Gentili’s identity, whether gender or sexual or political or, for that matter, religious. (She was a self-proclaimed atheist with, it seems, a vague and perhaps growing openness to faith.) The cathedral later explained that it does not do “background checks” on those for whom a funeral was requested, though one wonders whether it will feel compelled to do so now. But Ms. Gentili’s gender status was not really the point. Indeed, when the Times reporter raised the question of that status in his call to the archdiocese before the funeral, Joe Zwilling, an archdiocesan spokesman, refused the bait. The funeral was routine: burying the dead “is one of the corporal works of mercy,” he said; it demonstrated the way “we should treat all others, as if they were Christ in disguise.”

That was the right answer. And once the funeral was scheduled, any backing off would have provoked more public controversy. Imagine refusing entrance to the garishly or inappropriately dressed, or censoring the petition for gender-affirming health care, or confiscating the “mother of whores” imagery, or cutting off the microphone when eulogies turned offensive, or ushering away the “Ave Cecilia” dancer. The event would have gone from provocation to eruption.

Days later, Cardinal Timothy Dolan said on the radio, “I think that our cathedral acted extraordinarily well.” He might want to modify that, at least a little. Are the cathedral’s procedures for accepting and overseeing funerals so bureaucratized or understaffed that the hijackers had free rein? Arrangements are apparently turned over to a funeral home chosen by the person requesting the funeral—in this case, one that had worked with LGBTQ groups. Indeed, what was scheduled appears to have been an actual funeral Mass, which would have raised still more fraught issues about the distribution and reception of Communion. Much like a quarterback switching a play at the line of scrimmage, the soundtrack of the service contains a last-minute “audible”—a cathedral official telling (or reminding) the celebrant to conduct only a funeral service without a Mass.

Then there were the eulogists. One of them, identified as Gentili’s longtime partner, was personal and genuine in his loss. The other two were deliberately provocative and disruptive. Were they vetted? Many dioceses have regulations regarding the always sensitive issue of family requests for “words of remembrance,” as they are properly called. In the Archdiocese of New York, certain standards are recommended while actual policies and practices are left to the discretion of parish pastors, admittedly often a delicate task. In this case, however, the cathedral parish can probably be faulted for being completely missing in action.

Still, having watched the entire film of the service days before the cardinal’s remarks, I had to agree with his basic conclusion. Despite everything, at the service for Cecilia Gentili, the Gospel was proclaimed and preached, the meaning of death explained, God’s love and mercy invoked. Rather than a defeat for Catholicism, it was a victory. 

 

Whether it was a victory or defeat for the memory and causes of Ms. Gentili is another question. A native of Argentina, she was sexually abused as a child and then trafficked. She came to the United States illegally, and survived homelessness and heroin addiction as a prostitute before advocating for people with HIV and becoming an effective organizer, fundraiser, and lobbyist. By all accounts, she was fiercely generous and dedicated to others in similarly marginalized or criminalized circumstances. True, much of this remarkable life story rests on the testimony of Ms. Gentili herself—a “born storyteller,” according to friends and admirers. Was it the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Enough is on the public record—her overcoming of obstacles, her gifts for friendship, her pursuit of housing and health care for those in need—to elicit compassion, awe, and gratitude despite deeds and convictions to which some might take grave exception.

At the funeral the celebrant wisely steered clear of all this. At moments he looked like an aging high school teacher bewildered by the hijinks of unruly students, but he soldiered on. He proclaimed the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. In words he had obviously spoken many times before, he preached the good news of dying and rising in Christ. He added a reflection from an Anglican woman priest about love of life, hatred of death, and hope of resurrection.

At the end of the service, he blessed the casket and commended Gentili to the “Father of mercies in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, she will rise with him on the last day…. Open the gates of paradise to your servant, and help us who remain to comfort one another with assurances of faith until we all meet in Christ and are with you and with our sister forever.”

Was such a prayer inappropriate or even blasphemous? Some may feel so. But to me it was profoundly moving, the triumph of our liturgy over provocation.

Of course, the hour-long film I watched kept the camera on the cathedral’s sanctuary, celebrant, cantor, lectors, petitioner, eulogists, and front pews. Was there snickering elsewhere? Or contempt? Or tears? Or boredom? I wasn’t there to know. When the camera followed the casket up and down the main aisle, glimpses of the congregation showed many dressed like ordinary funeral-goers. Seen and heard from afar, many also appeared unfamiliar with a Catholic rite; perhaps they could be forgiven for mistaking a Catholic service for more exuberant ones found elsewhere or for a rally or a theatrical memorial, where applause and cheering might have been appropriate. (The organizer of the funeral said that if St. Patrick’s had been unwilling, she would have sought a theater space.) At the same time, it was not hard to believe that a significant number of these mourners might have been deeply touched by the readings, the homily, and the prayers.

Responding to outrage at the spectacle, St. Patrick’s swiftly held a “Mass of Reparation,” and the Times promptly ran another story, suggesting that the Mass of Reparation represented backtracking on the cathedral’s willingness to host a funeral for a transgender person. Other media took the same tack. Nothing I read from archdiocesan officials suggested that they regretted allowing a service to be held for a transgender activist. Their distress, they said, was at the deception that preceded the service and, above all, at the conduct that accompanied it.

And now it was the turn of the funeral’s organizers to be outraged. The “community Ms. Gentili served,” they insisted, deserved “a public apology” from the archdiocese. Her right to the “full Catholic Mass that was agreed upon” had been violated because “she was an ex-sex worker.” The archdiocese had employed “painful and exclusionary language” in its criticism of the event, and the remarks of an archdiocesan official amounted to an incendiary “hate rant.” Then they played the inevitable sex-abuse card: “Did those priests that raped those young men get an honorable burial?”

Was this response utterly cynical, one more ploy in the orchestration of a pseudo-event? Many people, especially many Catholics, will see it that way. Because motives are always mixed, they would not be altogether wrong. Still, I see something else at work here, something sincere and for that reason all the more serious. It is a sense of entitlement common to the glossier sector of the LGBTQ world. It is the entitlement of victimhood—the entitlement of an identity that defines itself by its victimization.

“We still gonna show up as us!” said a trans eulogist at the funeral before whipping up the congregants into the initial chanting of “Cecilia, Cecilia.” Showing up “as us” seems to have meant not surrendering their identity to the Gothic arches and Catholic expectations of reverence for a rite at St. Patrick’s. Showing up “as us” meant: This is our space now, our time, and we proceed by our own norms. It meant parading one’s derision of traditional sexual or social codes and reveling in the transgressive as an expression of freedom and a path toward fulfillment. If the words “bitch” and “whore” are terms of endearment in certain trans settings, then they should be no less welcomed as part of queer culture in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as two authors argued in the National Catholic Reporter. If the Catholic Church employs the title “saint” in a very particular way and we don’t, then tough luck for the Catholic Church.

No matter that flaunting this defiant scorn for a religion and its norms both misrepresents most gay, lesbian, and transgender people and makes life harder for them. It has broader consequences as well. Is it really surprising, for instance, that so many Americans suspect the liberalism that defends and applauds Drag Queen Story Hour? Or that sympathy with pride flags and marches is fading? Or that questions about “gender-affirming” medical treatments for children, who gets to use which school bathrooms, and who can compete as male or female in athletics have escalated so quickly to the top of our cultural politics?

It would be wrong to think that the sense of entitled victimhood that rendered the organizers of the Gentili funeral insensible to the norms and feelings of millions of Catholics is in any way unique. On the contrary, variants of it are currently inflaming American life, from left to right. Everyone has an identity, and every identity is a victim of some other identity. Consequently, every identity is entitled to its own form of assertion. If that assertion is excessive or even a little false, so be it. We are, after all, the real victims, and we are entitled to fight fire with fire.

 

The “we” in this outlook is, of course, very flexible. The fundraising letter from the Republican National Committee in front of me warns of the “dismantling” of the foundations of “the American way of life we once knew.” Who is this victimized “we”? All of us? All Republicans? All who disagree with the “agenda” of “Joe Biden and his socialist allies” to “normalize gender-dysphoria, high-taxes, and…endless handouts to illegal immigrants and criminals”? This is nonsense of course, but it is part of the rhetoric of victimhood that seethes all around us. Not all versions of that rhetoric are equally plausible, not all claims of victimhood equally persuasive. But they all have a similar logic. Whenever we don’t like this kind of rhetoric, we call it self-pity and resentment; when we do, we use phrases like “showing up as us.”

For years, scholars have puzzled over the growing appeal of what is not so much sturdy conservatism as aggrieved anti-liberalism. Why does it flourish in the very small towns and rural areas that have benefitted from liberal government programs? Why do fanciful or unspecified MAGA promises (“I will fix it”) enjoy so much more trust than imperfect but solid liberal programs? Liberal pundits scratch their heads, parse the latest numbers on inflation and unemployment, and wonder why these economic factors get so little traction. In the wake of the president’s State of the Union address and its many claims about past economic achievements or future economic initiatives, the head-scratching may only redouble.

The answer might lie not in the economic factors at all but in cultural factors that create the distorting filter of distrust through which the economic factors are viewed. This is a very large topic. It could easily go back to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century making of middle-class progressivism and its two wings: the cultural and bohemian wing rebelling against the religious and sexual conventions of late-Victorian “genteel” America, and the socioeconomic wing combatting new monopoly powers, urban poverty, immigrant slums, frightful working conditions, and political corruption. The story might skip over the Roaring Twenties, when the cultural rebels were in the ascendancy, and take up with the New Deal and its economistic legacy in politics and social analysis. But its most accessible starting point might be the sixties and the profound shaking of taken-for-granted notions about race, sexuality, gender, religion, and the meaning of America.

In the ensuing “culture wars,” politicians, especially Democratic politicians, often waffled and dodged, but liberal and progressive thinkers and activists did not. They lined up on the side that viewed traditional values as obstacles to liberation and progress—and in many instances they were right. When they found themselves at a popular disadvantage, however, they went in several directions. With great success, they went to the courts. (This is now conveniently forgotten.) Or they turned to what might be called the “commanding heights of the culture”—higher education, movies, television, theater, professional organizations of everyone from doctors to teachers and librarians—to promote what remained unwinnable in legislatures. Or they hoped that the genuinely needed economic benefits of active government would soothe the pains of cultural shocks. Or they simply counted on time and demographics to win their battles for them in the long run. One thing they did not do was to treat cultural resistance as something to be engaged, conciliated, possibly learned from. Instead, all such resistance was assumed to be intransigent and unalterable—the atavistic remains of racism, sexism, homophobia, Evangelical nationalism, or xenophobia.

For many liberals and progressives, cultural factors—a.k.a.“social issues”—were to be understood as the tools that right-wing demagogues wielded on behalf of entrenched wealth to bring out backward people and fool them into voting against their own economic interests. Or, conversely, cultural issues were cheap diversions that neoliberal elites favored to distract voters from challenging corporate power. Either way, economic benefits and losses were where the political action was. The culture, at least traditional culture, was a sideshow.

It’s been over a month since the hijacking of St. Patrick’s. If any liberals have criticized it, their voices have been lost in the vast galaxy of opinion-makers. The event is already receding from view, and its details will soon be forgotten as it becomes in retrospect just one more drop in the drip, drip, drip feeding the impression that the leading edges of liberalism view Catholic convictions and customs in essentially negative terms, ranging from inexcusable ignorance and insensitivity to outright hostility.

But overstate this impression, and one sinks back into the quicksand of entitled victimization. No one was faster out of the blocks in denouncing the Gentili funeral than the MAGA-mouthpiece CatholicVote. Still, the point remains: those who would take the threat to liberal democracy seriously should lift their eyes from economic factors and register the impact of provocations like the St. Patrick’s funeral and the apparent inability of mainstream liberalism to view it as anything but a blow for inclusivity and progress. It’s a small but striking example of a large problem. 

Peter Steinfels

Here’s what the Holy Thursday Seven Churches Visitation devotion is all about

null / Credit: licesio/www.shutterstock.com

CNA Staff, Mar 27, 2024 / 08:00 am (CNA).

The Visitation to Seven Churches is a Holy Thursday devotion primarily practiced in Latin America, Italy, Poland, and the Philippines — though it is also practiced in many other places.

The devotion involves traveling to seven local churches after the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on the evening of Holy Thursday. These visits recall the final seven places Jesus went from his arrest on Holy Thursday to his death on Good Friday.

In each church, the pilgrim kneels before the altar of repose, meditates on the appropriate Scripture, and offers prayers and adoration. In this way, pilgrims seek to spiritually accompany Christ as he enters his passion.

The first church recalls Jesus going from the Cenacle, where he celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples, to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he earnestly prayed and sweat blood in his agony over what was about to take place (see Luke 22:39-46).

In the second church, the pilgrim meditates on Jesus being taken from the Garden of Gethsemane by the armed crowd to the house of Annas, the father-in-law of Caiaphas the high priest, where he was interrogated and slapped in the face (see John 18:19-22).

In the third church, the prayer focuses on Jesus being brought to the house of Caiaphas, where he was beaten, spat upon, insulted, and endured a painful night in captivity (see Matthew 26:63-68).

The focus of the reflection for the fourth church is the first time Jesus was brought before Pilate, the Roman governor of the region. There Jesus was accused by the Jewish religious authorities of being a rival king to Caesar (see John 18:35-37).

In the fifth church, the pilgrim follows the Lord as he is taken to King Herod, who along with his guards mock him (see Luke 23:8-9; 11).

The sixth church recalls Jesus being taken from Herod and brought before Pilate for the second time and then scourged, crowned with thorns, mocked, and condemned to death (see Matthew 27:22-26).

The last church commemorates Christ carrying the cross on his shoulders from the Praetorium, where Pilate yielded to the crowd’s demand for his crucifixion, to Mount Calvary where he suffered excruciating pain, died, and was laid to rest in a nearby tomb until his resurrection from the dead on Easter Sunday (see Matthew 27:27-31).

This article was originally published on April 1, 2021, and has been updated.

Why is today called Spy Wednesday?

Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss, 14th-century fresco in the Collegiata of San Gimignano, Italy. / Credit: jorisvo/Shutterstock

CNA Staff, Mar 27, 2024 / 04:00 am (CNA).

You might hear today referred to as “Spy Wednesday.” What does that mean and why do some people call it that?

The name actually derives from the Gospel reading for today — also called Holy Wednesday, as it is the Wednesday of Holy Week — in which Judas Iscariot betrays Jesus for 30 pieces of silver:

“One of the Twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, ‘What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?’ They paid him thirty pieces of silver, and from that time on he looked for an opportunity to hand him over” (Mt 26:14-16).

At that point, Judas “spies” on Jesus, secretly plotting the most opportune time to turn him in to the Sanhedrin, the council of Jewish elders at the time who sought to condemn Jesus.

Today’s reading follows yesterday’s account of the incident from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus says: “Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me” (Jn 13:21). Simon Peter asks John — “the one whom Jesus loved” — to ask Jesus what he means. Jesus replies:

“‘It is the one to whom I hand the morsel after I have dipped it.’ So he dipped the morsel and [took it and] handed it to Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot. After he took the morsel, Satan entered him. So Jesus said to him, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly’” (Jn 13:26-27).

Now the stage is set, so to speak, for the events of the night of the Last Supper through the Lord’s passion and death on Good Friday.

Use of the term “Spy Wednesday” for this day appears to have originated in England and Ireland in the 1800s, according to WordHistories.net. The website noted mentions of the term in Irish newspapers on several occasions throughout the century, with a clear definition given in 1881.

Pope Francis referred to the day as Spy Wednesday in his homily at a Mass on April 8, 2020.

Many use this day to discuss Judas’ betrayal, asking how and why someone who was so close to Jesus could do what he did.

“Judas gave up everything to follow Jesus for three years … Why would he betray him?” asked Dr. Edward Sri in a March 2021 podcast. “Perhaps a more important question we should all ponder is: Could something like that ever happen to me? Is it possible that I could turn away from Jesus?”

Bishop Robert Barron observed in an April 4, 2023, reflection: “Those of us who regularly gather around the table of intimacy with Christ and yet engage consistently in the works of darkness are meant to see ourselves in the betrayer.”

In his general audience catechesis on the Twelve Apostles in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI said God used Judas’ betrayal as part of his plan for salvation.

“The word ‘to betray’ is the version of a Greek word that means ‘to consign.’ Sometimes the subject is even God in person: It was he who for love ‘consigned’ Jesus for all of us (Rm 8: 32). In his mysterious salvific plan, God assumes Judas’ inexcusable gesture as the occasion for the total gift of the Son for the redemption of the world,” the pope said.

“We draw from this a final lesson,” Benedict concluded. “While there is no lack of unworthy and traitorous Christians in the Church, it is up to each of us to counterbalance the evil done by them with our clear witness to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.”

This article was originally published on April 5, 2023.

PHOTOS: Pro-life and pro-abortion activists hold dueling rallies outside Supreme Court

Hundreds of pro-life and pro-abortion demonstrators hold rallies alongside each other as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the high-stakes abortion pill case Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. Food and Drug Administration, March 26, 2024. / Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA

Washington D.C., Mar 26, 2024 / 18:15 pm (CNA).

Several hundred pro-life and pro-abortion activists held dueling rallies outside the Supreme Court building on Tuesday as the justices heard oral arguments in the high-stakes abortion pill case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. Food and Drug Administration (AHM v. FDA).

At issue in the case is whether the FDA should restore certain restrictions on the abortion drug mifepristone that were in place prior to 2016, most notably those removed by the Biden administration such as prohibiting administering the pills through the mail or via telemedicine. 

At the pro-life rally, abortion demonstrators blasted loud music in an attempt to drown out the pro-life speakers.

Many pro-abortion demonstrators wore pink and held homemade signs such as one that read: “Leave my mifepristone alone.” Other signs held by abortion activists had vulgar messages on them, with some mocking conservative Supreme Court justices.

Pro-lifers, meanwhile, held signs reading: “Chemical abortion hurts women” and “Women’s health matters,” while some prayed. 

During a few tense moments, Capitol Police officers, who lined the street, had to intervene to separate the two groups as demonstrators got into each other’s faces and shouted slogans over megaphones.

CNA spoke with some of the demonstrators to learn why they came. Here is what they said:

‘My daughter has rights’ 

Savanna Deretich (left) with Students for Life and Savannah Evans (right) with Live Action stand in front of the Supreme Court building as pro-life demonstrators, March 26, 2024. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA
Savanna Deretich (left) with Students for Life and Savannah Evans (right) with Live Action stand in front of the Supreme Court building as pro-life demonstrators, March 26, 2024. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA

Savannah Evans, a pro-life activist with Live Action, traveled from Florida to stand for life in front of the Supreme Court. Evans, who is 34 weeks pregnant, lifted her sweater to reveal her baby bump on which she had written the words “Human Too.”

“Human life begins with fertilization, and anything after that is the killing of a human being,” Evans said.

“I’m out here because I’m 34 weeks pregnant, and I believe that my daughter has rights.”

‘Force the FDA to do their job’

Ken Meekins, a student from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said he came because he believes that “the abortion pill does hurt women.”

“I’m here to stand for women’s health,” he said. “I think that it’s awful because the majority of abortions are chemical abortions. And not only that, they’re even more dangerous than surgical abortions because they’re done at home. And so, I’m out here today to ask the Supreme Court to force the FDA to do their job.”

 ‘The pope should not dictate what medications we’re allowed to take’

Ashley Wilson (left) and Kate Hoeting (right) with Catholics for Choice stand in front of the Supreme Court on March 26, 2024. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA
Ashley Wilson (left) and Kate Hoeting (right) with Catholics for Choice stand in front of the Supreme Court on March 26, 2024. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA

Ashley Wilson and Kate Hoeting, members of a group that calls itself “Catholics for Choice,” were in front of the Supreme Court building advocating for abortion. They claimed to represent what they said was the majority of Catholics who “disagree with the bishops on abortion.” Wilson called the attempt to regulate abortion pills an example of “religious overreach.”

“One in four abortion patients in this country is Catholic,” Wilson said. “So, we trust a woman’s conscience-informed decision to have an abortion if she needs one.”

Pro-abortion demonstrators cheer as Catholics for Choice President Jamie Manson gives a speech in front of the Supreme Court building, March 26, 2024. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA
Pro-abortion demonstrators cheer as Catholics for Choice President Jamie Manson gives a speech in front of the Supreme Court building, March 26, 2024. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA

 Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, was one of the speakers at the pro-abortion rally. She called the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the movement to place more restrictions on abortion “part of a coordinated long game to undermine democracy and establish a theocracy.”

“The pope should not dictate what medications we’re allowed to take in the United States,” she went on. “We want doctors, not doctrine, to shape our health care.”

‘I came to D.C. today to stand up for my patients’

There were a large number of pro-life doctors, many from the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), who rallied in front of the Supreme Court, March 26, 2024. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA
There were a large number of pro-life doctors, many from the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), who rallied in front of the Supreme Court, March 26, 2024. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA

Dr. Susan Bane, an OB-GYN from North Carolina and member of the American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs (AAPLOG), spoke at the pro-life rally. 

She told CNA that she is advocating for restrictions on mifepristone because of the life-threatening dangers the drug poses to women. She said it is especially dangerous to administer mifepristone without medical supervision. 

“I came to D.C. today to stand up for my patients as well as the thousands of pro-life members of AAPLOG to care for women,” she said.

“The FDA’s own labeling says 1 in 25 women who use abortion drugs will go to the emergency department and they show up with potentially life-threatening complications, retained tissue infections requiring antibiotics, bleeding that’s so severe that they need transfusions or emergency surgery.”

“So, women should have the ongoing care of a doctor when taking high-risk drugs. And that’s why we want to see these safeguards put back in place,” she went on. “We want the FDA to do their job, and their job is to protect our patients.”

‘Science tells us that there is a life in the womb’ 

Hayden Laye, a member of the Democrats for Life of America, traveled to D.C. from South Carolina. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA
Hayden Laye, a member of the Democrats for Life of America, traveled to D.C. from South Carolina. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA

Hayden Laye, a member of Democrats for Life of America, traveled to D.C. from South Carolina. He said that his belief in science tells him that “there is life in the womb.”

“As a Democrat, I’m against killing human beings, and that includes human beings in the womb,” he said.

He added that he felt “compelled” to come to express his support for restoring safeguards on the abortion pill out of concern for his community.

“I just want to make sure that both women and children in my state, in my community, are safe, are protected. I hope and pray that the Supreme Court upholds the safety laws for women regarding the abortion bill.”

‘We look to protect the women and children of Texas’ 

Jade and Casey Casias from Amarillo, Texas, traveled over 1,500 miles to show support for the pro-life side. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA
Jade and Casey Casias from Amarillo, Texas, traveled over 1,500 miles to show support for the pro-life side. Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA

 Jade Casias and her husband, Casey Casias, came to demonstrate for life. They flew over 1,500 miles from Amarillo, Texas, where AHM v. FDA originated.

“In Texas, we’re really big on our pro-life issue,” Jade said. “We don’t come up to Washington, D.C., regularly to protest or anything. I haven’t been here in years, and this is my husband’s first time. But because that case originated in Amarillo, we felt like it was necessary to really represent our culture.”

Despite abortion being illegal through all nine months of pregnancy in Texas, Jade said that mifepristone, which can be obtained via mail and administered without any doctor’s supervision, still threatens Texan women’s lives.

“We’re seeing that abortion pills are being mailed to our women,” she said. “We’re here to say, mifepristone, we don’t want that across state lines, but more than that, we want to have a call to say everyone needs to have some action in this.”

‘Pray, pray, pray. I think that’s the answer’ 

Joan McKee, a Catholic pro-lifer from D.C., said what we need is to "pray, pray, pray." Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA
Joan McKee, a Catholic pro-lifer from D.C., said what we need is to "pray, pray, pray." Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA

Joan McKee, a Catholic pro-lifer from D.C., said she came to “help these people stop murdering their children.”

While tensions were high between the two crowds, with people trying to out-scream one another, McKee was holding a rosary in her hand. She said she was praying for not only an end to abortion but also the conversion of those advocating for abortion.

“Pray the rosary, pray to St. Joseph, the Holy Family,” she said. “Pray, pray, pray. I think that’s the answer.”

Abortion pill opponents face Supreme Court skepticism

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on March 26, 2024, for a lawsuit brought by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), which seeks to impose more restrictions on the prescription of mifepristone. / Credit: Peter Pinedo/CNA

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Mar 26, 2024 / 15:45 pm (CNA).

United States Supreme Court justices on Tuesday pressed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone but appeared skeptical that a pro-life doctor’s group challenging the agency had any legal standing to sue. 

The justices heard oral arguments on March 26 for a lawsuit brought by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), which seeks to impose more restrictions on the prescription of mifepristone. The drug is approved to chemically abort a child up to 10 weeks into the mother’s pregnancy. 

AHM, which represents pro-life medical groups, sued the FDA in November 2022 to challenge the agency’s approval of mifepristone. The lawsuit further challenged the FDA’s subsequent deregulation of the drug, particularly its permission to prescribe the medicine without an in-person doctor’s visit and to dispense the drug through the mail. 

FDA questioned on abortion pill’s safety

During oral arguments, the court’s more conservative justices questioned the FDA’s lawyer, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, on whether the FDA followed proper protocol when deregulating mifepristone.

This Supreme Court case is the most-watched abortion-related decision since the court overturned Roe v. Wade, which allowed states to impose restrictions on abortion. Six justices voted to overturn the precedent: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch. 

Barrett, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, expressed concern that ending the in-person requirement could “lead to mistakes in gestational aging” because doctors would not be able to perform an ultrasound. She asked whether this “could increase the need for a [dilatation and curettage procedure or increase] the amount of bleeding.”

Alito questioned why the agency only studied the effects of the deregulatory actions individually rather than studying how they could pose a safety risk when taken together as a whole. 

In defending the FDA’s decisions, Prelogar told the justices that the FDA “demonstrated that these changes … were safe” through its analysis of studies and that the deregulation being safe was not reliant on “other different safeguards in place.” She also noted that ultrasounds had never been required by the FDA. 

“I don’t think you can fault the agency for not giving even more explicit attention to this issue,” she said. 

Prelogar said the FDA found that some studies suggested the deregulation would increase emergency room visits but found no evidence that it would increase adverse effects. She said the “FDA’s actions were lawful” and that AHM “just disagree[s] with the agency’s analysis of the data before it.”

“That’s a question that Congress has entrusted to the FDA,” Prelogar said.

Jessica Ellsworth, a lawyer representing mifepristone provider Danco Laboratories, similarly expressed concern about courts assuming the authority to determine how the FDA handles its protocol related to studying the safety of drugs and deregulation. 

“Courts are just not in a position to parse through [the studies] and second guess [the FDA’s conclusion],” Ellsworth said.

Erin Hawley, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is representing AHM, later countered the arguments from the FDA and Danco, saying that in-person visits would increase the likelihood of the woman receiving an ultrasound before being prescribed the drugs, rather than “to be able to order these online with a couple of screening questions.”

Does AHM have legal standing to sue? 

When Hawley was questioned about the lawsuit, the justices focused heavily on whether AHM had any legal standing to sue the FDA. 

Hawley argued that her clients, some of whom are emergency room doctors, have standing to sue because they are forced to care for women suffering from complications with the abortion pill, even if the doctors object to abortion.

“[They are] forced to manage abortion drugs’ harm,” she said.

Although federal law allows doctors to refrain from providing services that violate the doctor’s conscience, Hawley claimed that objections in these situations are not practical because of the “emergency nature of these procedures.” 

Hawley said the lack of in-person care leads to inadequate follow-ups for the women who use the drug, which leads them to seek care in emergency rooms. 

“[The FDA’s deregulations] turn emergency rooms into that follow-up visit,” Hawley said.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, said that federal law already protects their right to object and questioned why the court would need to impose “an order preventing anyone from having access to these drugs at all” to remedy these concerns. 

During the conversation, Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch similarly expressed concern about a district court’s ability to restrict access to a drug nationwide based on the legal objections from a handful of doctors.

Both Alito and Thomas pressed the FDA’s lawyer on who would be allowed to sue the FDA in this situation if not AHM. Prelogar said it would be hard to identify any person or group who would have the legal standing to file a lawsuit.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide the case by June. 

Christendom College names George Harne as next president

Christendom’s president-elect, George Harne, is currently a professor at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Before then, he served as president of Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts for nine years. / Credit: Photo courtesy of Christendom College

CNA Staff, Mar 26, 2024 / 15:15 pm (CNA).

Christendom College, a Virginia-based Catholic liberal arts college, announced on Monday that George Harne will serve as the college’s fourth president.

Currently a professor at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Harne is a music history and liberal arts scholar who formerly served as president of Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire, for nine years until 2020.

Harne will succeed Timothy O’Donnell, who has served as Christendom College president for more than 30 years, or two-thirds of the college’s lifetime. 

“On behalf of the entire college, I want to congratulate and welcome Dr. George Harne as our new president,” O’Donnell said in a March 25 press release

Christendom College’s current president, Timothy O’Donnell, will retire after 30 years. Credit: Photo courtesy of Christendom College
Christendom College’s current president, Timothy O’Donnell, will retire after 30 years. Credit: Photo courtesy of Christendom College

“Christendom will be in good hands, and we are blessed to have him as our incoming president.”

Harne earned a master’s of liberal studies in 1998 from St. John’s College and completed his graduate work in musicology at Princeton, where he earned an M.F.A. in 2000 and his Ph.D. in 2008. 

“For many years, I’ve admired Christendom College and President O’Donnell’s leadership from afar,” Harne said in a video statement. “Christendom has always been a model of what is possible for truly faithful Catholic liberal education.”

A convert to Catholicism, Harne grew up in Florida as a southern Pentecostalist. He and his wife were married in a Presbyterian church, but he became Episocopalian in graduate school. As his interest in Church history and the Catholic intellectual tradition grew, he and his family decided to become Catholic and joined the Church in 2005.

“I truly believe that Christendom will play a leading role in the renewal of the Church and Catholic higher education in the next 50 years,” Harne said in the press release.

“As the college soon moves into its fifth decade, it will stand courageously as the model of Catholic higher education in this country, providing young men and women with the education they need to become wise, serve as salt and light in our world, and renew the very foundations of our society,” he continued. 

Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington welcomed the announcement in a statement and assured Harne of his “continued prayers.”

“I look forward to working with Dr. Harne, as Christendom College is a treasure in this diocese and to the universal Church,” he stated. “Dr. Harne will be privileged to lead a faculty, staff, and student body who are committed to serving Christ and illuminating the fundamental truths of the Catholic faith for the world.”

“Dr. Harne follows a line of leaders at Christendom who have laid a strong foundation that positions it for further development and opportunity,” Burbidge added.

Harne will begin transitioning into the role in June, with his official term beginning in July.

Christendom College’s campus is in Front Royal, Virginia, which is just about an hour west of Washington, D.C. Credit: Photo courtesy of Christendom College
Christendom College’s campus is in Front Royal, Virginia, which is just about an hour west of Washington, D.C. Credit: Photo courtesy of Christendom College

“I am blessed to have known Dr. Harne for years,” O’Donnell said in the announcement. “Dr. Harne and his lovely and talented wife, Debbie, together will make an outstanding team for Christendom. He will lead this college with wisdom and courage, building upon the past and leading it into a bright future.”

O’Donnell leaves behind a legacy of campus growth at Christendom, from the new Christ the King Chapel — a Gothic-inspired chapel that seats more than 500 — to the college endowment, which grew from $200,000 to more than $28 million under his tenure.

The cornerstone of Christ the King Chapel was blessed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008. 

Drone shot of Christendom College’s Christ the King Chapel in Front Royal, Virginia. Credit: Photo courtesy of Christendom College
Drone shot of Christendom College’s Christ the King Chapel in Front Royal, Virginia. Credit: Photo courtesy of Christendom College

“I want to give thanks to Christ the King for the opportunity to have served the students, faculty, staff, alumni, and board of this college, which holds such an important place in Catholic higher education and in the work of the Church at large,” O’Donnell continued.

“Christendom College has stood as a beacon for what Catholic higher education can be in America since its founding,” Harne said. “I am honored to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Timothy O’Donnell and the other previous presidents of this institution. There is much work ahead, and I am humbled to play a part in the history of this extraordinary college.” 

“Dr. Harne will bring experience, leadership, vision, and humility to his role as president of Christendom College, thanks to his extensive background in higher education administration, fundraising, and teaching,” said chairman of the college’s board of directors, Stephen O’Keefe, in the announcement. 

“The college has never been in a stronger position, and Dr. Harne will help guide our institution into its exciting next chapter.”

O’Keefe co-chaired the special committee that led the presidential search.

“To all those who love Christendom, I pledge that I accept this role as a sacred trust. I pledge continuity and organic development, animated by fidelity to the founding,” Harne said in the video announcement. “I will seek to build wisely on the foundation that has been faithfully laid. Our Church and society, now more than ever, need Christendom graduates serving as salt and light in the world.”

This story was updated March 27, 2024, with the statement from Bishop Michael Burbidge.