Washington D.C., Nov 7, 2014 / 05:16 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Defense of marriage advocates lauded a major 2-1 decision by a federal appeals court that noted the importance of children and sexual complementarity in upholding state laws defining marriage. “We are particularly heartened by the Court’s acknowledgment of the reasonable arguments for preserving the true definition of marriage and by the Court’s respect for the self-determination of states on this issue,” said Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco, chair of the U.S Bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage. On Nov. 6, the Sixth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals upheld state laws in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee that defined marriage as the unique relationship of a man and a woman. The ruling is the first big victory for marriage defenders at the federal circuit court level. It comes after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear cases involving marriage laws in five states early in October. The ACLU, representing the plaintiffs, has said it will ask the Supreme Court to review the case, and the National Organization for Marriage has also called on the Court to hear the case and uphold the marriage laws. “We have been awaiting this decision for some time and welcome it not only as a tremendous victory, but as a common sense recognition that it is not for the federal courts to substitute their judgment about whether same-sex 'marriage' is a good idea or not, but to leave it to the people to make the decision about this fundamental institution,” the organization’s president Brian Brown stated. The circuit court judges ruled that they did not have the constitutional authority to overturn a legal definition of marriage as determined by the citizens of a state. The majority opinion, authored by Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton and joined by Judge Deborah Cook, ruled that the state has the valid authority to regulate or define marriage, and that a fundamental right to marriage for every person does not exist in the Constitution. “Of all the ways to resolve this question, one option is not available: a poll of the three judges on this panel, or for that matter all federal judges, about whether gay marriage is a good idea,” they stated. Such a determination would make a “vital policy call for the thirty-two million citizens” of the circuit. “Better in this instance, we think, to allow change through the customary political processes, in which the people, gay and straight alike, become the heroes of their own stories by meeting each other not as adversaries in a court system but as fellow citizens seeking to resolve a new social issue in a fair-minded way,” the opinion concluded. Archbishop Cordileone’s statement, issued through the U.S. Bishops Conference, singled out one passage from the decision as worthy of particular praise, grounding the state’s authority to define marriage as between a man and a woman in the natural law. That passage stated, “It is not society’s laws or for that matter any one religion’s laws, but nature’s laws (that men and women complement each other biologically), that created the policy imperative.” In addition, the ruling noted the role of government in encouraging people “to create and maintain stable relationships within which children may flourish.” “By creating a status (marriage) and by subsidizing it (e.g., with tax-filing privileges and deductions), the States created an incentive for two people who procreate together to stay together for purposes of rearing offspring. That does not convict the States of irrationality, only of awareness of the biological reality that couples of the same sex do not have children in the same way as couples of opposite sexes and that couples of the same sex do not run the risk of unintended offspring. That explanation, still relevant today, suffices to allow the States to retain authority over an issue they have regulated from the beginning.” The states taking their time to consider the redefinition of marriage is not a violation of 14th Amendment rights of same-sex couples wishing to marry, the judges added.   “A Burkean sense of caution does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, least of all when measured by a timeline less than a dozen years long and when assessed by a system of government designed to foster step-by-step, not sudden winner-take-all, innovations to policy problems.” Not everyone has the fundamental right to marry, they stated. “But the right to marry in general, and the right to gay marriage in particular, nowhere appear in the Constitution. That route for recognizing a fundamental right to same-sex marriage does not exist.” Another organization praising the decision was the legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief alongside state legislators or pro-marriage groups upholding the state marriage laws in Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky. “The people of every state should remain free to affirm marriage as the union of a man and a woman in their laws. As the 6th Circuit rightly concluded, the Constitution does not demand that one irreversible view of marriage be judicially imposed on everyone,” Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Brian Babione responded to the decision.   Read more

Arlington, Va., Nov 7, 2014 / 05:09 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The newspaper USA Today has corrected an erroneous report that claimed Archbishop Charles Chaput criticized the recent extraordinary Synod on the Family, rather than misleading media coverage of the event. A correction to a USA Today story said that the Nov. 2 article erroneously reported that Philadelphia’s Archbishop Chaput said October’s synod caused “confusion.” “The story did not include that Chaput said he believed confusion stemmed from news reports on the conference, not the conference itself,” the USA Today correction read. The Nov. 2 newspaper story, titled “Pope Francis agitates conservative U.S. Catholics,” suggested that the archbishop was among those Catholics for whom Francis' papacy “seems to be infuriating, worrying or just plain puzzling.” Archbishop Chaput’s original comments came after he delivered an Oct. 20 lecture in New York City hosted by the interreligious journal First Things. The lecture itself did not discuss the synod, but on the role of religious believers in modern America. Archbishop Chaput's comments about media coverage of the synod came in response to an attendee’s question about the synod. “To get your information from the press is a mistake because they don’t know well enough how to understand it so they can tell people what happened,” the archbishop said. “I don’t think the press deliberately distorts, they just don’t have any background to be able to evaluate things. In some cases they’re certainly the enemy and they want to distort the Church.” “Now, having said all that, I was very disturbed by what happened. I think confusion is of the devil, and I think the public image that came across was of confusion. Now, I don’t think that was the real thing there.” The archbishop said the Church has a “clear position” on matters of marriage and Holy Communion, a topic of discussion at the synod. Archbishop Chaput said, “I’m not fundamentally worried because I believe the Holy Spirit guides the Church.” Other reports that have been called "misleading" appeared in Religion News Service and in the National Catholic Reporter-hosted blog “Distinctly Catholic,” authored by Michael Sean Winters. Religion News Service’s Oct. 21 story was originally titled “Archbishop Chaput Blasts Vatican Debate on Family, says ‘Confusion is of the Devil’.” The title was later changed to “Archbishop Chaput ‘disturbed’ by Synod Debate, Says ‘Confusion is of the Devil’.” Kenneth Gavin, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, said the Religion News Service headlines for its report inaccurately presented the archbishop as critical of the Vatican, when he was in fact criticizing “those who used the draft report from the Synod out of context to reinforce their own opinions and agendas.” Read more

Chicago, Ill., Nov 7, 2014 / 02:24 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Archdiocese of Chicago released new documents involving 36 priests with substantiated allegations of sexual misconduct involving minors with most of the instances occurring prior to 1988. I... Read more

Denver, Colo., Nov 7, 2014 / 04:02 am (Aid to the Church in Need).- By now, the world recognizes Brittany Maynard as the media darling of right-to-die advocacy.   After receiving a grim prognosis of six months to live due to an aggressive brain tumor, Maynard and her husband relocated to Oregon in order to take advantage of the Death with Dignity law, which legalized physician-assisted suicide in the state. Compassion and Choices, an advocacy group for right-to-die causes, latched on to Maynard’s youth and beauty after she approached them, asking how she could advocate for rights to assisted suicide for other people. They produced a video featuring Brittany and her family, complete with soothing music and beautiful photos, in which she calmly explains her situation and choice to die on Nov. 1. She's been hailed as heroic, a brave woman who looked terminal illness in the face and ended her life on her own terms. As writer Lisa Miller put it in a recent article for New York Magazine: “she has risen to the status of a martyr-saint.” “On my Facebook feed and on Twitter, in articles passed around friend-to-friend, I've watched Maynard be called courageous, inspirational, an angel; she is resting with the stars, her admirers say.” But the circumstances of her death have several experts and others questioning: exactly how free was Brittany in her decision, with a major advocacy group packaging her image and story for their own purposes? “(Compassion and Choices) might have in some way encouraged her or helped her, to make it a much more public event, in order to pressure the society to have the laws change,” said Rev. Dr. Joseph Tham, the Dean of Bioethics with the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome. “I wouldn’t say they exploited her, but in some way there must have been some kind of push in that direction,” he said. “These groups are active in terms of finding people who are vulnerable in some way, and in making the case public to push an agenda.” Andrea Virdis, doctor of philosophy and doctor of research in bioethics at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome, said the first video released by Maynard seemed like a marketing ploy. “The choice of Brittany was represented through a video which was tailored in a specific way. Watching this video, there was a notion of a sort of profound serenity, as if the choose to death had to be encouraged and praised,” he observed. “The video was almost a model for claiming this choice, in order to advance the request that these choices (of assisted suicide) may be carried forward also in States where the legislation still does not consent it.” A second video was released by Maynard as her Nov. 1st date drew closer. In the raw and heart-wrenching clip, Maynard reconsiders her decision, or at least the timing of it. “I still feel good enough, and I still have enough joy, and I still laugh and smile with my friends and family enough that it doesn’t seem like the right time,” Maynard said. “But it will come, because I feel myself getting sicker. It's happening each week.” November 1st came and went, and the news came out Nov. 2nd – Maynard had ended her life as originally planned. Dr. Julie Masters, who teaches a course called Death and Dying at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said in an interview before Maynard’s death that when her class discusses physician-assisted suicide, she asks her students to consider whether it truly is a free choice. “The question I posed to the students: is this a choice, or is it an expectation?” she said. With names like “Death with Dignity,” right-to-die laws often claim that they offer patients more dignity by giving them an out when it comes to intense and debilitating suffering. The idea of dignity, however, begs the question of what gives life value, Masters said. “That’s the challenge of the concept of a slippery slope, and when you move to the position of physician assisted suicide, to euthanasia, who do you expect to end their lives because they no longer seem to be worthy or of value?” she said. “Then I think we have a huge problem because then we fail to see the value of life, the value of that life.” Virdis echoed this concern saying that the meaning of dignity in society has become more and more about what people can have and can offer, rather than who they are. “According to this idea, a life dignified to be lived is a life with given conditions (such) as feeling well, being happy, being sufficiently wealthy, being healthy, being healthy, being autonomous in choices, in daily life…” he said. “(But) if we look into the real meaning of 'dignity,' we become aware that dignity is much more than something you can possess or not,” he continued. “…everybody – whether he is healthy or sick, he is rich or poor, he is autonomous or dependent on others – has the value of life. And dignity is the value that characterize life itself, it is acknowledging that life is a value in itself, and it is not bound to other values.” In her column, Miller said that the idea of dignity without the ugliness and suffering that usually accompanies death, is a fairly new idea, sprung from Western society and detached from the all-too-often reality of most people’s last moments. “Jesus, bleeding, cried out in agony and loneliness on the cross, and the earliest Christians loved their martyrs burnt, starving, or torn apart and chewed,” she wrote, “but in the secular West, dignity has come to mean a kind of existential modesty, a wish not to be seen at one’s worst, at a moment when one might not have the wherewithal to retrieve an appropriate fig leaf for the indecent business that is death.” While Brittany's image and story – coupled with Compassion and Choice’s publicity – have helped gained traction for right-to-die laws, society has not always been so receptive to the idea. For years, the movement advocating for physician-assisted suicide went by the less-than pleasant sounding “Hemlock Society.” In the 1960s, the first right-to-die bill was proposed, and shot down, in Florida. It wasn't until 1997 that Oregon became the first state to implement a Death with Dignity law, and so far only four other states have followed suit. Miller speculates that this increasing acceptance of the idea of physician-assisted suicide stems from a desire to somehow “sanitize” death, which until recently had been understood to be a process naturally involving ugliness and suffering. “Please don’t think I have anything to say about Maynard’s decision to end her life, because I don’t,” she wrote. “I’m talking about a nation’s knee-jerk reverence for a young woman we never knew, a tidal wave of empathic grieving that allows us to dwell on the tragic injustice of untimely death while evading the grosser realities of death itself, which in the usual course of events involves shame, ugliness, and suffering.” Masters said that in her experience, people who choose assisted suicide are responding out of fear, which could be helped if hospice and palliative care were made to be more viable options, especially in the long-term. “It’s about fear. Be not afraid – 365 times we are told,” she said, referring to the Biblical phrase. “But people are afraid because they have examples in their mind of other people who have died a hard death, and it is helping them to see that death can be a gift, and it can be approached in a comforting way.” When people who are not terminally ill consider suicide, it is typically because they see it as their only option, the only way out, she said. “…what happens is people lose sight, they get this tunnel vision, and they only see one option that’s suicide,” she said. That’s why it is so important for the terminally ill, who often can have suicidal thoughts, to be show that suicide does not have to be their only choice. “And that is why we have these beautiful hospice and palliative care homes,” she said. “There is more than one option. You have more options, you have more.” Miller said that while she doesn’t believe that there is necessarily a right way to die, or that things were better in earlier times, she does think society has come to an unrealistic point of idealizing death as something peaceful, serene, and neatly squared away. “I am saying that there's something overly sanitized in our devotion to Maynard now,” she wrote. “'Look, she was so beautiful and, poof, now she’s gone.'” Masters said because Maynard’s case has been made so public, religious leaders should take the opportunity to talk about end of life decisions with their flock, as that is who people most often turn to with questions regarding those choices. “I hope for clergy, for rabbis, for ministers, for priests, for monsignors, to start the dialogue within a place of worship,” she said. “Because people look to their religious leaders, their clergy, to guide them, and this is an opportunity to get that conversation going. What is the right thing to do?”Jan Bentz and Ann Schneible contributed to this report Read more