In a handout prepared by the bishops, the faithful are being called to mark the 2nd Fortnight for Freedom from June 21 to July 4, 2013.

“This 14-day period will be in celebration of the many rights we enjoy as American citizens and to patriotically pray for our nation.”

They are suggesting 14 ways to participate in this sacred event:

1.  Celebrate a memorial Mass for SS. Thomas More and John Fischer on June 21 (vigil) or June 22 (their feast day) to open the Fortnight of Freedom.

2.  Present a Catholic movie night for members of your parish, such as A Man for All Seasons about the martyrdom of St. Thomas More or For Greater Glory about the struggle for religious freedom in Mexico.

3.  Invite a local or national figure to speak to your parish about religious liberty. Alternatively, encourage parishioners to read “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty”, a document of the Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty.

4.  Host a concert with religious music and/or performing artists.

5.  Plan a “Pancakes for Patriotism” or “Fish Fry for Freedom” event to raise awareness about the Fortnight and featuring information about the plans within the parish  and diocese for the Fortnight.

6.  Organize day-long (or multi-day) Eucharistic Adoration.

7.  Sponsor a presentation on the history of Catholicism in the United States.

8.  Host a study group on Dignitatis Humanae, the groundbreaking document from the Second Vatican Council on religious liberty, using the 14-day reflection piece found at FortnightforFreedom.org.

9.  Lead a Eucharistic Procession through your community on a path that passes important government or civic buildings.

10. Host a panel discussion on important public policy issues to individuals of faith.

11. Sponsor a day of service within the community, perhaps at a town or city park, to help clean up trash or conduct routine maintenance.

12. Pray a daily rosary in your parish for the cause of religious liberty each day of the Fortnight.

13. Host a patriotic sing-along for the children of the parish and community.

14. Organize an Independence Day family picnic with a special Mass to close the Fortnight for Freedom.

Click here for more information about the Fortnight for Freedom.

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According to a press release by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Vatican has provided Latin texts of the revised prayers as well as official translations in the major western languages, including English and Spanish.

The decree, Paternas vices (Fatherly care), was issued May 1 by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and promulgated by the authority of Pope Francis. St. Joseph has been included in the first Eucharistic Prayer since Pope John XXIII inserted his name in 1962. The new decree extends the inclusion of St. Joseph to Eucharistic Prayers II, III and IV.

St. Joseph is widely venerated in the Catholic Church. In 1870, Pope Pius IX proclaimed him Patron of the Universal Church, a feast celebrated on March 19. The Vatican’s decree says that St. Joseph “stands as an exemplary model of the kindness and humility that the Christian faith raises to a great destiny, and demonstrates the ordinary and simple virtues necessary for men to be good and genuine followers of Christ.”

The revised prayers are approved to be used immediately.

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                                                -Blessed Mary of the Cross MacKillop

For Reflection:  

How can our cross be an anchor to happiness?

UCANews.com is reporting that the board of theologians of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints has approved the second miracle needed for the canonization of Blessed John Paul II.

The proclamation of his sainthood now needs only the approval of the commission of cardinals and bishops and the final signature of Pope Francis. If these approvals are forthcoming, and most expect they will be soon, the Pope could be proclaimed a saint as early as October 20 of this year – a date that would mark the 35th anniversary of his election as pope.

Details about the second miracle have been a closely guarded secret but sources say it will “amaze the world.”

The first miracle attributed to the late pontiff was the cure of a French nun of Parkinson’s disease, the same affliction the pope suffered with during the last years of his life.

Thus far, the Vatican has made no official statement about this latest step in the process.

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According to The Daily Caller, the House passed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act by a margin of 228 to 196. The bill will allow exceptions for rape, incest and when the life of the mother is in danger.

“Passage of today’s landmark bill marks the first time in history, in either chamber of the U.S. Congress, that affirmative protection has been extended to unborn children,” said Rep. Trent Franks, the bill’s sponsor. “It is my prayer that today also marks a day when America finally opens her eyes to the humanity of these little victims and the inhumanity of what is being done to them.”

Pro life groups were ecstatic at the passage.

“Today, women led the vote and the lobbying on a monumental bill. After the Kermit Gosnell trial, the American people were horrified and demanded action and, today, the House answered by passing the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” Concerned Women for America president and CEO Penny Nance said.

“Gosnell was not an aberration, and we praise the legislators who acted to prevent future babies from the same fate. Now the battle moves to the Senate.”

President Obama has already threatened to veto the bill and the U.S. Senate is not expected to vote on it, but passage in the House guarantees that the abortion issue will be front and center in the upcoming midterm elections.

According to LifeNews, yesterday’s vote will be used as an election tool in 2014 to win control of the Senate away from pro-abortion forces by wresting the argument away from the “War on Women” mantra to the gruesome abortion facts that the sensational Kermit Gosnell trial exposed to the public.

“The brutality of severing the spines of defenseless babies—euphemistically called “snipping” by Gosnell—has finally peeled away the benign façade of the billion dollar abortion industry” said Rep. Chris Smith, head of the pro-life caucus in the House.

“Like Gosnell, abortionists all over America decapitate, dismember and chemically poison babies to death each and every day. That’s what they do. Americans are connecting the dots and asking whether what Gosnell did is really any different than what other abortionists do. A D&E abortion—a common method after 14 weeks—is a gruesome, pain-filled act that literally rips and tears to pieces the body parts of a child,” he added.

“The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act is a modest but necessary attempt to at least protect babies who are 20 weeks old—and pain-capable—from having to suffer and die from abortion.”

Pro-abortion forces responded by trotting out the usual “War on Women” language, focusing on how the bill imposes restrictions on women’s access to abortion rather than on sparing babies from pain.

“No amount of softening rhetoric or moderate posturing will change the harsh reality that today’s GOP is out of step and out of touch when it comes to women,” said National Organization for Women (NOW) president Terry O’Neill. “We at NOW are not fooled, and neither are women voters.”

That may no longer be true after the bad publicity the abortion debate received during the long trial of Kermit Gosnell, a late term abortionist who is now serving three consecutive life sentences for murdering viable infants after abortion.

As House Speaker John Boehner said at his weekly news conference: “After this Kermit Gosnell trial and some of the horrific acts that were going on, a vast majority of the American people believe in the substance of this bill and so do I.”

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Bionews.org is reporting that “Baby R”, who is now three weeks old, is the daughter of a man who died six years ago from cancer. Although PAR is no longer a new idea, the way this child was brought about is being called a “new frontier.”

“The baby girl is the result of his parents’ desire to create a genetic grandchild, which they perceive as the dying wish of their deceased son,” explains bioethicists Hila Rimon-Greenspan and Vardit Ravitsky.

They explain that the young man decided to store his sperm while undergoing cancer treatment, which can render a person sterile, because he might want to become a parent someday. Unfortunately, the man, age 30, did not survive the treatment.

“Following his death, his parents felt that this statement, coupled with his frozen sperm, constituted a ‘biological will’, and that it was now their responsibility to make his wish come true,” Rimon-Greenspan and Ravitsky write.

The young man’s parents began searching for a mother for their potential child and found a single woman in their thirties who wanted to have a child but didn’t want to use an anonymous sperm donation. She agreed to their proposal, and the three parties entered into a contract to help them outline their future relationship, which they did with the help of Attorney Irit Rozenblum, the executive director of New Family, an NGO in biological wills.

Even though the parents did not have the son’s wishes in writing, a court allowed the insemination to take place.

The mother, known only as “A”, soon became pregnant. ”

“The excitement was tremendous,” Rosenblum told ynetnews.com. “These are people whose world collapsed six years ago, and now they get this ray of light into their lives. No psychologist could restore their lives in the way this baby did. This girl would not bear the onus of the family’s past; she paves the path into the future.”

“A” keeps photos of the child’s dead father in the living room and says that the presence of his parents in her life is “as close as it gets to the real thing.”

Karen Capato

PAR has been gaining ground in recent years with cases popping up all over the world of family members who use the sperm or eggs of deceased loved ones to bring their children to life after their death.

Just this year a western Australian judge granted a newly widowed woman the right to retrieve and store sperm from her dead husband after he took his own life. The couple had been trying to have children and had recently started IVF treatments at the time of his death.

One of the most famous U.S. cases was put to rest last month when the Supreme Court ruled that Karen Capato, the mother of twins born 18 months after the death of their biological father are not eligible or survivor benefits under Social Security.

In addition to a myriad of legal issues concerning the offspring of children conceived via PAR, the ethical problems are even more compelling.

First, there are typically many questions surrounding consent of donors who often don’t put their desires to have their sperm or eggs frozen in writing. This results in many clinicians refusing to perform the procedure if no written or clear proof of consent of the deceased is available.

And what about the rights of the child? As the Capato case proved, this unnatural way of bringing children into the world too often strips them of their rights. For instance, because PAR usually takes place months or even years after the parent’s death, it becomes difficult to prove paternity of the child, which could abnegate the child’s rights to inheritance.

Most important of all are the moral issues surrounding this kind of assisted reproduction. In Donum Vitae, issued in 1987 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Catholics are instructed on the vital importance of marital union and the act of sexual intercourse in the procreation of offspring. The absence of these two conditions make it wrong to seek artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer, surrogate motherhood and cryopreservation which is the freezing of gametes for future use. All of these practices violate the dignity of the person.

The Catholic Church is not the only major religion to forbid this morbid practice. As Rimon-Greenspan and Ravitsky write, Judaism also forbids PAR based on its halakhic prohibition which prevents someone from deriving personal benefit from a corpse.

Even the secular world calls for great caution in the use of PAR.

“It is clear that we have little real understanding of the motivating factors behind PAR, which will for generations attract interest and curiosity because they lead to a blurring of the very boundaries between life and death, says the authors of this article appearing in the Oxford Journal on Human Reproduction.

“This unique topic is riddled with complex and sometimes conflicting legal, ethical and moral issues, which should be carefully—and above all sensitively—taken into account.”

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NY Governor Andrew Cuomo

Bloomberg is reporting that a group of Democrats who run the senate along with Republicans introduced nine of the 10 Women’s Equality Agenda measures proposed by Catholic governor Andrew Cuomo. These included enhanced penalties for human traffickers and legal damages for women who are not paid equally.

The one item left off the Agenda was the abortion plank which would have decriminalized abortion after 24 weeks when a woman’s “health”, not just her life, was at risk.

Cuomo, who is considered a potential presidential candidate in 2016, said he wanted this measure in the bill because it would protect women if the U.S. Supreme Court ever decides to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal in the U.S.

Cuomo called the failure of the senate to introduce the measure “a mistake” because this would be something that would come back to haunt the lawmakers in the next election.

As Life News reports, it might hurt lawmakers in the future, but it will save a lot of babies in a city where approximately 40 percent of pregnancies ends in abortion. Among African Americans in New York City, the number climbs to 60 percent.

“The governor’s Women’s Equality Act is nothing more than a Trojan Horse— a beautifully gift-wrapped package of death and destruction,” says Lori Kehoe of the New York State Right to Life Committee.

“The Governor’s newly released abortion agenda involves enshrining a barbaric federal law from the last century. Under Roe v. Wade, abortionists like Kermit Gosnell can kill babies with a heartbeat, babies capable of feeling pain, babies who are full term and waiting to be born. Instead of protecting these children, the governor is dragging New York in the wrong direction. Current law states that only a duly licensed physician may perform an abortion. This bill repeals that section and allows anyone to perform an abortion.”

Pro-lifers had plenty of reason to cheer the death of this bill which would, among other things, allow non-physicians to perform abortions; remove criminal penalties from unlawful abortions; prevent an unborn child who was the intended victim of a crime from being recognized as a victim; prevent any limitation on the use of taxpayer-supported Medicaid funds to pay for abortion; and redefine pregnancy as beginning at the time of implantation rather than at fertilization as all medical school textbooks define.

Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, told LifeNews the measure, had it passed, would have protected grisly late-term abortion practitioners like Kermit Gosnell.

“As the inhuman details of Kermit Gosnell’s ‘house of horrors’ trial continue to resonate, it is irresponsible for Governor Cuomo to advance a ‘Back-Alley Abortionist Empowerment Act’ seeking to remove all medically and legally appropriate protections for women and girls considering abortion,” Yoest said. “Why should women die through the misdeeds of New York abortionists unregulated, unmonitored and free to provide horrific care?”

The current legislative session ends tomorrow, which means there is no chance that this radical abortion bill will be passing anytime soon.

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The Houston Chronicle is reporting that Presley “Rhonda” Gridley has been ordered by a Dallas county judge to pay up after telling a local sheriff that a grave containing dismembered bodies could be found in the backyard of a home owned by Joe Bankston and Gene Charlton. Her “tip” touched off a media storm that brought all kinds of ill-will toward the couple whose rural backyard was torn apart along with their reputations.

Apparently, Gridley, a 50 year-old grandmother who went by the name of “Angel” at the time, made a call to the Hays County Sheriff’s Department in which she told the dispatcher that she was a “reverend and a psychic”, the Dallas Observer reports. She suggested that officers visit the rural farmhouse where they would “find the bones of dozens of missing children in the walls and ‘stuff written all over the walls in blood’.”

The sheriff’s office then repeated the false statements to various news media organizations, going so far as to provide the couple’s name and address.

“Over the course of the day, media defendants began to exaggerate and eventually make up facts about Plaintiffs, including that a mass grave existed on the property, including the bodies of children,” the suit states.

By the time everyone realized there was no grave and no dismembered bodies, the couple’s reputation was ruined and they were all being sued – including the media outlets.

Although the other cases were eventually dismissed, the cause of this libelous fiasco, “Angel”, seemed to have disappeared. The plaintiffs managed to track her down, however, and discovered that “Angel” was really Presley Gridley, who also goes by the name of “Rhonda,” and lives in Stanton, Texas, about 800 miles away from their farmhouse.

Gridley was promptly summoned to court but failed to appear for a May 7 bench trial before Judge Carl Ginsberg in the 193rd State District Court, records stated. But that didn’t stop Ginsberg from ordering her to pay $6.8 million in damages to Bankston and Charlton.

“Whether it will be collectible, we’re going to pursue that,” said the couple’s attorney Andrew Sommerman.

Good luck. Most psychics in my neck-of-the-woods don’t live in the best part of town and can’t even afford to replace the burned-out letters in their neon signs (I guess they’re not able to predict the next winning number in the lottery).

For more about the dismal track record of psychic crime fighters, click here.

                                                                        -St. Frumentius, Bishop

For Reflection:             

Is my soul journeying in the light and the truth of the Faith or have I let “false lights” cast their shadow on my journey? What is my resolution today?

Charles Richard Jennings, Jr.

The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that James Evans is in critical condition at McDay-Dee Hospital in Ogden after being shot in the head by his son-in-law. Dr. Barbara Kerwin, director of the intensive care unit at the hospital said the bullet just missed Evans’ brain. His wife, Tara, said he “turned his head at just the right time” and avoided what could have been a lethal injury. He is expected to fully recover.

Police say the shooter was Evans’ son-in-law, Charles Richard Jennings, Jr., 35, who is married to Evans daughter, Cheryl. Known as “Ricky” to his family, he and Cheryl have a history of domestic disputes and policy suspect he may have been using drugs or alcohol at the time of the shooting.

According to the pastor of the parish, Father Erik Richtsteig, Jennings had made threats before but he would not elaborate on the details.

There were about 300 people at Mass at the time of the shooting, which took place while the congregation was lining up for Communion. When the shot was fired, parishioners hit the floor and Richsteig ducked behind the altar.

Jennings then fled the building and several parishioners ran after him while others tended to the injured Evans, putting pressure on the wound and keeping his airway clear.

The shooter stole a truck at gunpoint from a nearby house and tried to elude police. He was later caught on foot when the truck ran out of gas. He was booked on suspicion of attempted aggravated criminal homicide, aggravated robbery and possession of a firearm by a restricted user. The Weber County District Attorney is expected to file formal charges today.

No charges have been filed against Evans’ daughter.

Father Richtseig said the parish is offering psychological counseling to those who were in the church at the time of the shooting.

Although Sunday evening Mass had to be called off to allow police to do crime scene work, the Mass was said on schedule the following morning.

Richtseig said he wanted to stick to the usual schedule to keep the focus on the kindness and bravery exhibited inside the church after the shooting — not the shooter.

“I really didn’t want evil to win, so we had Mass at 8:30,” he said.

On his blog, Orthometer, Father Eric posted the following announcement about the shooting:

“Many of you know that there was a shooting at my church this Sunday. I am not going to comment on the events in particular. I do want to say that I am very proud of how the parishioners reacted. They prayed, remained calm, helped the victim, made sure the shooter was away from the church. That was God’s grace at work. Jim, the victim, came through surgery and is going to be OK. That too was God’s grace. The shooter was caught without hurting anyone else. God’s grace. When I think of today, I am not going to think about the act of one evil man. I am going to think about the many acts of goodness, kindness, and bravery of many good people. I feel blessed. ”

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