New York City, N.Y., May 10, 2016 / 04:21 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The American Civil Liberties Union's claims that Catholic hospitals are denying emergency care to pregnant women in the U.S. is not about healthcare – it's about forcing religious groups to perform abortions, critics say. A recent ACLU report finds that one out of every six beds in the country's acute care hospitals is in a hospital with Catholic affiliations and that Catholic hospitals make up 15 percent, or 548, of the country's hospitals. The report claims that because these hospitals follow Church teaching in regards to reproductive care, they put women at risk. All Catholic hospitals operate under the U.S. Bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which ban abortion, sterilization, and emergency contraception or tubal ligations. Marie Hilliard, the director of public policy for the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told the Guardian that if the directives are properly followed, a woman’s life should not be at risk. “If the directives are properly applied, there should be no compromise of the wellbeing of human beings,” Hilliard said. The ACLU has long opposed Catholic hospitals operating according to Catholic teaching. The ACLU and the group the MergerWatch Project co-authored a 2013 report that claimed the growth of Catholic hospitals was a “miscarriage of medicine.” In 2015, the ACLU sued Trinity Health Corporations, one of the largest Catholic health care operations in America, located in the Detroit area, for their refusal to perform abortions and tubal ligations. The lawsuit was dismissed. Dr. Thomas Hilgers is the founder and director of the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and a clinical professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Creighton University School of Medicine. He said that the latest report from the ACLU is another attempt by the group to impose their views on Catholic hospitals, especially in regards to abortion. “They're constantly imposing their value system on the rest of us, and to me that's just unconscionable,” he told CNA/EWTN News. “What they’re trying to do in a lot of ways is get rid of the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church has been their target for a long time, even though the Catholic Church has been a leader in healthcare over the years. There’s lots of Catholic hospitals around taking care of people who can't pay their bills and really providing good medical care, but that doesn’t make any difference to (the ACLU).” The pro-abortion mentality has also skewed the way reproductive medicine and obstetrics have developed, Dr. Hilgers added. Once abortion and contraception became legal, many doctors started using them as solutions to treat symptoms, rather than looking into the the underlying problems women were experiencing, and diagnosing and treating those diseases. “We practice Catholic medicine where, if a woman is bleeding at 18 weeks of pregnancy, the first and foremost cause of bleeding like that is someone who has a subclinical infection inside the uterus,” he said. “I take patients at 18 weeks pregnant who are bleeding and I give them the right antibiotic, and within 24 hours the bleeding stops. You give them the antibiotic for 10 days, and they go full term. And yet if I were to say that to a group of say specialists in obstetrics, they would deny that, because all of these years, as a result of the pro-abortion mentality, they haven’t really look at the underlying causes except on a limited scale.” Instead, he said, they will opt to induce a woman or perform an abortion without first diagnosing the underlying cause of the bleeding. Ashley McGuire, a Senior Fellow with The Catholic Association, said that the ACLU must not be too concerned with women’s health if it is trying to attack a significant portion of healthcare services available in the United States. “If the ACLU is so concerned about women's health, then why are they constantly suing and harassing one of the largest providers of healthcare to women in America?” she told CNA/EWTN News in e-mail comments. “The ACLU has been trying to force Catholic healthcare professionals to perform abortions for a long time, which suggests that their endgame is really about forcing everyone into complicity with abortion, as opposed to actually providing women with lifesaving care, something the nation's largest non-governmental hospital system knows a thing or two about.” Ultimately, Dr. Hilgers said, this report and others from the ACLU attacking the Catholic Church are an attack on religious freedom. “The bottom line to me it seems is that if you look at the Constitution of the United States, the First Amendment of the Constitution has as its first priority, above free speech, above regressive grievances, above freedom of the press, is making no law respecting either establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” he said. “Catholics and other religions have lived that out over the years because that’s what this country was founded on, and it was established that you could freely practice your faith and your religion. And if somebody wants that kind of care (that goes against Catholic teaching) then you can always go someplace else.” Read more

Phoenix, Ariz., May 9, 2016 / 03:48 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis has named a new bishop of a Phoenix-based Eastern Catholic eparchy: Bishop John Stephen Pazak, C.Ss.R. Bishop Pazak, 69, will head the Holy Protection of Mary Byzantine Catholic Epa... Read more

Denver, Colo., Dec 29, 2016 / 02:32 pm (CNA).- What do a grilled cheese sandwich and the tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe have in common? Both bore what appeared to be images of Mary. One was determined to be authentically miraculous, the other was not. Not to spoil any secrets, but it’s not Our Lady of the Grilled Cheese that converted Mexico and continues to draw millions of people on pilgrimage every year. But have you ever wondered just how the Church determines the bogus from the divinely appointed? In his recent book, “Exploring the Miraculous,” Michael O’Neill gives readers a crash course of sorts in “Miracles 101” - including common questions about the importance of miracles, an explanation of the approval process, and descriptions of the various types of miracles found within the Catholic Church. “This is a very rare book in that it tries to cover the entire spectrum of miracles within the Catholic Church,” O’Neill told CNA. Catholics by definition are people who have to believe in at least two miracles, O’Neill said - that of Christ’s incarnation and his resurrection, two pillars on which the Catholic faith rests. For modern-day miracles, belief is never required of the faithful. The highest recognition that the Church gives to an alleged miracle is that it is “worthy of belief.” Investigations of reported miraculous events – which include extensive fact-finding, psychological examination and theological evaluation – may result in a rejection if the event is determined to be fraudulent or lacking in super natural character. Or the Church may take a middle road, declaring that there is nothing contrary to the faith in a supposed apparition, without making a determination on whether a supernatural character is present. But while official investigations can take years, the mere report of a miracle can bring Catholics from long distances, hoping to see some glimpse of the divine reaching into the human. And it’s not just the faithful who find miracles fascinating. “It's important for atheists and skeptics, those people who don’t believe, they’ve got to have an explanation for the inexplicable,” he said. “There’s something for everyone.” The universal nature of the experience of the miraculous is also what draws people from all belief spectrums to these stories, O’Neill added. “We all pray for miracles of one sort or another. They can be these really sort of small things like praying for an impossible comeback in a football game, or it can be a lost wallet or wedding ring,” he said. “But they can also be these really big things, such as our loved ones, they fall away from the faith and we want them to return, or somebody from our friends or our family is very sick and we desperately implore God’s help for them. It’s something that everybody experiences.” O’Neills own fascination with miracles started in college, when for an archeology assignment he studied the miraculous tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Marian apparition to which he’d inherited his mother’s devotion. He had heard stories about miracles associated with the image, both from within his own family and from the larger Church, and he wondered how much truth there was to the tales. He also started learning about the larger tradition of miracles within the Church, and was struck by how the Church has carefully investigated thousands of claims over the years, only to select certain ones that it eventually deems as of divine origin. “I thought that was fascinating that the Church would stick its neck out and say these things are worthy of belief,” he said. Although he continued his engineering studies throughout college, a piece of advice at graduation from Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as vice provost at Stanford University at the time, stayed with him. “She asked what we were going to do after graduation, and her advice was to become an expert in something,” he said. “And I thought about what would be a great thing to study? My mind went back to all those hours I’d spent in the library and my promise to return to it someday and I said you know what? I want to be the expert on miracles.” For a while he kept his studies private - he didn’t want to be seen as the guy who was obsessed with weird things like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. But eventually, he realized that many people were interested in miracles and found them helpful for their own faith. “It’s a way that people feel connected to God, they know that God is a loving father watching out for them, so it’s one of those things - a miracle is a universal touchstone,” he said. “No matter how strong we think our faith is or want it to be, we always want to know that God is there for us, and miracles are that sort of element that bridges the gap between our faith and our connection with God.” In his book, O’Neill provides descriptions and examples of every basic category of miracle within the Catholic Church, including healing miracles from saints in the canonization process, biblical miracles, apparitions, locutions (audible messages from God or a saint), miraculous images, Eucharistic miracles, incorrupt bodies (those that either partially or fully do not decompose after death), and stigmata (the wounds of Christ appearing on some living people). The most popular kind of miracle, and O’Neill’s personal favorite, are Marian apparitions - when Mary appears in a supernatural and corporeal way to a member of the faithful, most often with a message.   There have been about 2,500 claims of Marian apparitions throughout history, and a major one that many people are currently curious about are the alleged apparitions happening at Medjugorje, about which the Church has yet to make a definitive decision of validity. Curiosity about Marian apparitions was also a large part of what spurred O’Neill to create his website, miraclehunter.com, where he files information about miracles in their respective categories and provides information on their origin story and whether or not they have been approved by the Vatican. “The Vatican didn’t have a resource where you can find out what’s approved and what’s not, and what messages are good for our faith and what ones we should stay away from, so I tried to create a resource for the faithful for that,” he said. He’s now been running the website for 15 years. O’Neill also loves Eucharistic miracles, because unlike several other types of miracles, whose validity are largely determined by faithful and reliable witnesses, science can be applied. “They can check to see if it’s really human blood, and what type of blood, and in some cases you have heart muscle in these hosts that have turned into true flesh,” he said. One of O’Neill’s favorite Eucharistic miracles occurred in Argentina while Pope Francis was still a bishop there. It was August of 1996, and a priest in Buenos Aires, Fr. Alejandro Pezet, discovered a host in the back of his church, and so he took it and placed it in some water in the tabernacle to dissolve it. Over the next few days, days he kept an eye on it, and it grew increasingly red. The priest decided to present the case to Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio, who ordered that the host be professionally photographed and eventually examined by a scientist in the U.S., who was not told the origin of the specimen he was testing. The tests showed the sample to be heart muscle with blood type AB, the same blood type found on the Shroud of Turin. “The scientist was an atheist and he said, why did you send me this heart muscle, what was the point of this? And they said it was a consecrated host, and actually that atheist scientist converted to Catholicism as a result of that study,” O’Neill said. O’Neill also notes in his book that when considering miracles, it’s important to not go to extremes. “The question of the role of miracles in our life of faith is an important one and requires avoiding two extremes: an overemphasis and credulity regarding the supernatural on the one hand and a denial of the possibility of divine intervention and a diminishment of the role of popular devotion on the other,” he wrote. Either way, obedience to the magisterium of the Church and their teachings on particular miracles is key. Miracles are an important asset for the faith because of their ability to connect people with God, either as first-time believers or as long-time faithful who need a reminder of God’s presence. “I like to think of miracles as a great way to engage young people, to get them excited about the faith,” he said. “They shouldn’t be the centrality of anybody’s faith, but it’s a way to open the door for people...so I think miracles can play a huge role in evangelization.”  This article was originally published on CNA May 8, 2016. Read more