July, 2008

After the collapse of efforts to pass a national immigration reform bill last summer, more than 850 Catholic activists and service providers who work with immigrants have gathered in Washington, D.C., this week to call for what one American cardinal described as a more "fair and humane" system. The July 28-31 conference, sponsored by the U.S. bishops and titled "Renewing Hope, Seeking Justice," heralds a major push from the church on immigration heading into the 2008 elections. Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, who delivered a Monday keynote address, said the hallmarks of the "fair and humane" approach sought by the Catholic church include keeping families together, providing a path to legal status for immigrants, and promoting economic and social development in sending nations so people don't feel compelled to migrate.

Pope Benedict granted an unprecedented waiver to allow a former bishop to serve as president of Paraguay without violating church rules, a Vatican representative said on Wednesday. Although the Roman Catholic Church strongly opposes clergy taking political office, the Pope gave Paraguayan President-elect Fernando Lugo a special dispensation and downgraded him to layman's status. "It's the first time this is granted. It was accepted because the people have chosen him and ... because his clerical status is incompatible with serving as president," said Orlando Antonini, the Vatican's ambassador to Asuncion.

For weeks, Sen. John McCain's campaign has quietly resisted calls to dump one of his leading religious representatives who critics say is an inappropriate surrogate because of links to allegations of sexual impropriety. At least three religious groups have asked the McCain campaign to remove Deal W. Hudson from its national Catholic-outreach group. The groups say Hudson, who quit President Bush's political team in 2004 amid similar calls, lacks the moral authority to represent the campaign on religious issues. The controversy could hamper McCain's efforts to win over religious voters, who are wary of his candidacy.

A Bush administration proposal aimed at protecting health-care workers who object to abortion, and to birth-control methods they consider tantamount to abortion, has escalated a bitter debate over the balance between religious freedom and patients' rights. The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing a draft regulation that would deny federal funding to any hospital, clinic, health plan or other entity that does not accommodate employees who want to opt out of participating in care that runs counter to their personal convictions, including providing birth-control pills, IUDs and the Plan B emergency contraceptive. Conservative groups, abortion opponents and some members of Congress are welcoming the initiative as necessary to safeguard doctors, nurses and other health workers who, they say, are increasingly facing discrimination because of their beliefs or are being coerced into delivering services they find repugnant.

The number of Americans who have seen their full-time jobs chopped to part time because of weak business has swelled to more than 3.7 million - the largest figure since the government began tracking such data more than half a century ago. The loss of pay has become a primary source of pain for millions of American families, reinforcing the downturn gripping the economy. Paychecks are shrinking just as home prices plunge and gas prices soar, furthering the austerity across the nation.

The giant housing rescue plan President Bush signed Wednesday might help stanch the bleeding in the housing market, but experts on both sides of the political divide worry that it is, at best, only an emergency step. In addition to $300 billion in government guarantees to aid homeowners threatened by foreclosure, the administration got extraordinary new powers to backstop mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after their stocks plunged earlier this month.

Two Catholic cardinals called the current U.S. immigration situation "a terrible crisis" and "a dark moment in our nation's history" in remarks they made July 28 at the opening Mass and plenary session of the 2008 National Migration Conference. Both Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, retired archbishop of Washington, and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles urged participants to hold on to hope in their work with immigrants for local and national church agencies. Drawing from the Gospel reading of the parable of the mustard seed, Cardinal McCarrick said the story is full of optimism "that the kingdom of heaven itself can be sown in men's hearts like a seed."

If black America were a country, it would rank 16th in the world in the number of people living with the AIDS virus, the Black AIDS Institute, an advocacy group, reported yesterday. The report, financed in part by the Ford Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, provides a startling new perspective on an epidemic that was first recognized in 1981. Nearly 600,000 blacks are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and up to 30,000 are becoming infected each year. When adjusted for age, their death rate is 2 1/2 times that of infected whites, the report said. Partly as a result, the hypothetical nation of black America would rank below 104 other countries in life expectancy.

The Bush administration's embrace of a flexible timeline for pulling U.S. troops from Iraq has accelerated negotiations between Washington and Baghdad over a long-term security pact, officials from both sides said. The optimism marks a turnaround from just a month ago, when big differences seemed to have deadlocked talks over the terms of a continued American military presence in the country. In June, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the talks were at a "dead end," dimming hopes of reaching a deal by July 31 -- a goal the Bush administration has pushed hard to meet. This month, however, the White House said it had agreed to a "general time horizon" for troop withdrawals, breaking from its long-held public resistance to the notion. The change has helped overcome differences on other issues, such as immunity for U.S. troops, negotiators on both sides said.

U.S. bishops and the aid organization Catholic Relief Services welcomed the passage of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Congress passed PEPFAR last week and President George Bush said Saturday he is eager to sign it. Both the bishops' conference and the aid organization expressed appreciation at the retention of the "conscience clause," which will help assure that Catholic and other faith-based organizations are not discriminated against as HIV/AIDS service providers.

The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation's streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent- from 175,914 to 123,833- from 2005 to 2007, Bush administration officials said on Tuesday. Officials also attribute much of the decline to a policy shift promoted by Congress and the administration that has focused federal and local resources on finding stable housing for homeless people suffering from drug addiction, mental illness or physical disabilities, long deemed the hardest to help in the homeless population. Under the strategy, known as "housing first," local officials have over the last eight years increasingly placed the chronically homeless into permanent shelter- apartments, halfway houses or rooms- and provided them with services for drug addiction, mental illness and health problems.

President Bush this morning signed into law the most sweeping housing legislation in decades, aimed at calming rocky financial markets and giving mortgage relief to up to 400,000 homeowners. In an unannounced White House ceremony attended by senior administration aides shortly after 7 a.m., Bush gave his imprimatur to a law he had long vowed to veto because of objections to some aspects of the legislation. The bill signing follows months of often contentious negotiations between congressional Democrats and the White House over how best to stabilize housing markets amid plummeting home values and a damaged credit system.

When the July employment report comes out Friday, U.S. payrolls are likely to shrink by an additional 68,000, according to economists. But a substantial number of those who lose their jobs won't get unemployment benefits -- even though Congress recently took steps to bolster the program. Only 37% of the country's unemployed received benefits in 2007, down from 55% in 1958 and 44% in 2001, according to the Labor Department. The others have exhausted their benefits, haven't applied or don't qualify. Those who don't qualify include many part-time workers, people who quit or were fired, and workers who didn't earn enough money in a one-year "base period" that often excludes the most recent three to six months.

Bishop Joseph A. Galante challenged leaders of Catholic pro-life, family life and social justice offices around the country to "tear down our cubicles" and "give up our turf" in order to model collaboration for the rest of the church. The bishop of Camden, N.J. called "Life, Justice & Family: Partners in the New Evangelization." Reminding his audience that the body of Christ includes everyone, from the moment of conception to the "the last breath breathed," the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned and the homeless, the bishop asked, "How can we dishonor, dismember, destroy that body? How can we kill the unborn, bomb the Iraqis, shun the one who is different from us?

A high-profile panel examining capital punishment in Maryland began its work yesterday with a review of statistics suggesting racial and jurisdictional disparities in the application of the death penalty and dramatic testimony from the brother of the notorious Unabomber. The panel's meeting in Annapolis was the first of several planned in coming months to draft a recommendation to Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) and lawmakers on whether executions should continue in Maryland. The issue has been one of the most emotional and heavily debated in the state in recent years.

The Denver City Council voted 10-1 Monday to oppose a ballot measure aimed at taking cars from illegal immigrants. Initiative 100 would require police to impound the car of any unlicensed driver who could not prove citizenship. The inclusion of the words "illegal alien" in the initiative struck many as unfair targeting of one specific group. Opponents say current law already prohibits driving without a license. About 30 activists with We Believe Colorado, a coalition of faith groups, gathered outside the City and County Building before the council meeting to demonstrate against the initiative.

President Bush on Monday approved the first execution by the military since 1961, upholding the death penalty of an Army private convicted of a series of rapes and murders more than two decades ago. As commander in chief, the president has the final authority to approve capital punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and he did so on Monday morning in the case of Pvt. Ronald A. Gray, convicted by court-martial for two killings and an attempted murder at Fort Bragg, N.C., the White House said in a statement. Although the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty in the military in 1996, no one has been executed since President Ronald Reagan reinstated capital punishment in 1984 for military crimes.

Sophomore Michelle Miller is the head of her university's Obama for America chapter, and she's doing everything she can to get him elected. That isn't surprising, considering the 46-year-old senator's popularity among college voters. What is surprising is Miller's college: Liberty University, the Christian school in Lynchburg, Virginia, started by Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell. It's an unlikely place for fans of a Democrat who defends abortion rights and gay civil unions.

More than 14.5 million of the world's poorest people living in five countries across East Africa need immediate help, the United Nations said, 3.6 million more than during the last food crisis of 2006. Soaring world food and fuel prices, worsening conflict and disease have intensified the effects of chronic poverty and climate change which has brought ever-more frequent droughts. In Kenya's parched far north, close to Lake Turkana, a herd of more than 200 goats yesterday fought two dozen camels for space around a withering waterhole in Kaeris village, 47 miles east of the district capital, Lokitaung. "Our livestock are dying, there is no pasture, the little money we have cannot buy anything in the market because prices are now too high," said Lukas Ingolan, 55, a Turkana tribe elder squatting in the shade.

Having learned the limits of force in Iraq and Afghanistan, US military strategists are rewriting decades-old military doctrine to place humanitarian missions on par with combat, part of a new effort to win over distrustful foreign populations and enlist new global allies, according to top commanders and Pentagon officials. The Defense Department is implementing a series of new directives to use the American arsenal for more peaceful purposes even as it prepares for war, including a little-noticed revision this year to a document called "Joint Operations," described as the "very core" of how the military branches should be organized.

About 1,000 people, including Hispanic immigrants, Catholic clergy members, rabbis and activists, marched through the center of Pottsville, Iowa on Sunday and held a rally at the entrance to a kosher meatpacking plant that was raided in May by immigration authorities. The march was called to protest working conditions in the plant, owned by Agriprocessors Inc., and to call for Congressional legislation to give legal status to illegal immigrants. The march drew a counterprotest by about 150 people, organized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposes illegal immigrants and proposals to give them legal status.

As Congress heads into its last week before August recess and political conventions, there's one big item on the must-do list: Action to ease energy costs for American families. With a gallon of gas hovering at $4, energy prices are the No. 1 issue on voters' minds. But congressional leaders are increasingly deadlocked over what to do. In response, frustrated rank-and-file members on both sides of the aisle are stepping up efforts to find common ground.

On this landscape rooted in faith, politics and the quest for the common good, 800 Catholics from around the nation gathered July 11 to 13 to refine and ratify a platform on Catholic social teaching aimed at capturing the attention of both parties during this critical election season and beyond. The platform urges candidates and elected officials to put the common good before narrow partisan agendas. It advocates Catholic social teaching on such issues as the economy, health care, immigration, environmental stewardship, war and a consistent culture of life.

For many liberal Catholics, July 25, 1968 was the day the music died. Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, published 40 years ago today, reaffirmed Catholicism's absolute ban on birth control. Coming on the heels of the Second Vatican Council's unprecedented opening of the Church to modernity three years earlier, the Vatican's decision to stand by a doctrine that ever fewer Catholics were obeying would reverberate far beyond the bedroom. This was also the year that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, began a long-running intellectual engagement with the atheist and secular forces he saw rising in the West.

Visiting Australia in July gave Pope Benedict XVI an opportunity to develop further his creation morality, which he first explained in the northern Italian Alps a year ago. While Pope John Paul II was the outdoorsman, Pope Benedict's three-year pontificate already is seen as the green papacy. But his July 12-21 trip to Australia also gave him an opportunity to demonstrate that his concern is theologically based, part of a broad moral code and is perhaps the best way to convince young people that there is such a thing as natural law -- that some actions are naturally always right or wrong.