Catholic Media Report - Opinion

Yesterday, the Matthew25 Network had a conference call with reporters to unveil their plans for the general election. The group is composed of believers who are Democrats and who are "inspired by the Gospel mandate to put our faith into action to care for our neighbor." The group is the brainchild of Mara Vanderslice, who held the thankless job of religious outreach director for the religiously challenged Kerry campaign in 2004, but whose talents at organizing religiously motivated voters has gained the attention of leading Democrats since Kerry's loss.

Last Monday, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, made history by charging the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan el-Bashir, with genocide in Darfur. The pundits argue that el-Bashir will show his anger at the charges by retaliating against civilians, aid workers, and the small, helpless contingent of international troops in Darfur. The result will be, as some members of el-Bashir's regime have menacingly predicted, "more violence," as well as starvation after aid flights are blocked. The displaced populations of Darfur and those trying to help them are certainly vulnerable. Although the killings, rapes, and expulsions that produced 2.5 million refugees in 2003 and 2004 have tapered off, Khartoum's agents are still doing damage, still attacking villages.

Humanae Vitae was a sensitively written expression about the sanctity of marital love and the need to nurture life in marriage written in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But whatever else it stated, it has been remembered for only one thing: the upholding of the Catholic church's ban on birth control. Less than a decade after the encyclical's promulgation, polls showed it was overwhelmingly rejected by Catholics. Eight out of 10 adult U.S. Catholics simply disregarded it. While bishops were largely upholding the document, many priests in pastoral settings, including confessionals, were saying it was a matter for individual conscience.

Sweeping legislation that offers help for every group battered by the mortgage foreclosure crisis will be voted on in coming days. The bill also includes something for almost everyone to hate. But Congress and President Bush should act quickly to make it law because it should give the nation some needed reassurance and the tools to help stabilize home values. The legislation promises a steady flow of affordable money to encourage banks to offer new mortgages, which are essential to any recovery. And it provides lenders that are willing to take a loss on mortgages they hold a way to avoid financial disaster.

Most health insurance companies exist to make a profit for their shareholders. Profit motives are great when applied to commodities, but health care is not a commodity, and the health insurance market is not good for the health and well-being of Americans. Medicare was established as our taxpayer-supported health care financing system for senior citizens, and it has been a resounding success. The establishment of Medicare HMOs was a perfect experiment to test the hypothesis that the private market could do better. The results are clear: Medicare HMOs cost more and deliver less care than traditional Medicare. It is time to start expanding rather than assaulting Medicare.

The world is in deepening crisis. Food prices are soaring. Oil prices are at historic highs. The leading economies are entering a recession. Climate change negotiations are going around in circles. Aid to the poorest countries is stagnant, despite years of promised increases. And yet in this gathering storm it was hard to find a single real accomplishment by the world's leaders. The world needs global solutions for global problems, but the G-8 leaders clearly cannot provide them. Because virtually all of the political leaders who went to the summit are deeply unpopular at home, few offer any global leadership. They are weak individually and even weaker when they get together and display to the world their inability to mobilize real action.

What dreams do we have for our children? What future do we seek to chart for them? What supports do we endeavor to give them as they transition into adulthood? When we address these straightforward questions for our own children, all of the complexities of reforming the nation's beleaguered foster care system disappear. The answers are self-evident. We want our children to have a good education, a stable, loving environment, and the opportunity to grow into healthy young adults. Our nation's foster children deserve no less.

The next U.S. president needs to urgently rethink America's relationship to Africa. In the past, America has often treated Africa as a backward "Dark Continent," a place bedeviled with poverty, tribalism, AIDS and post-colonial conflicts. Africa is and should be a concern for all Americans- and for the next U.S. president. To be sure, not all of Africa's post-colonial problems have vanished. Poverty is still a serious burden, as are AIDS and malaria in many African nations. But in the U.S., Africa is still often viewed through the lens of the exceptions: Yes, Darfur is a gruesome tragedy, but the conflict there is no longer typical of Africa. In much the same manner, Zimbabwe's faulty election hardly proves that Africa is unprepared for democracy. In fact, Africa is far more democratic today than ever before.

For two weeks in May, Erik Camayd-Freixas, a Spanish interpreter with 23 years of experience and federal court certification, worked nearly round the clock as a translator for almost 400 illegal immigrants snatched in a raid on an Iowa meatpacking plant. His firsthand account describes in shocking detail how prosecutors trampled the immigrants' right to due process and made a mockery of justice. The immigrants, wrote Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, were charged with serious criminal offenses instead of civil immigration offenses. The harsh, mandatory sentences for the offenses railroaded the immigrants, many Guatemalan peasants illiterate in English and Spanish, into pleading guilty to crimes they could not have been guilty of.

In March President Bush wrongly vetoed a law that would have banned any use of waterboarding. So while the CIA says it has not used waterboarding since 2003, it remains an option. Supporters euphemistically call it an "alternative interrogation technique" but by any reasonable definition it is a form of torture. How can restraining someone and then stimulating a gag reflex via suffocation from a water-soaked cloth be considered anything else? Nor is there evidence that waterboarding is effective at obtaining information, according to many interrogation experts. As with other torture, the desperate victims simply start saying whatever they believe the interrogators want to hear. Yet former Attorney General John Ashcroft apparently remains a fan.