Tag: vatican
Vatican Defrocks Pavone, Trump Supporter And Anti-Abortion Activist

Vatican Defrocks Pavone, Trump Supporter And Anti-Abortion Activist

The conservative pro-life movement devolved into bedlam after the Vatican defrocked a controversial anti-abortion priest who placed an aborted fetus on an altar and posted a nearly-hour-long video of it online for his “blasphemous communications on social media.”

Frank Pavone, leader of the pro-life group Priests for Life and former Trump religious adviser, is a highly-contentious anti-abortion activist renowned in the MAGA sphere for his incendiary lexicon and provocative brand of anti-abortion and political activism in church and on social media.

In a letter circulated to bishops in the U.S. — first reported by the Catholic News Agency — the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S., Archbishop Christophe Pierre, said the Vatican booted Pavone from priesthood on November 9 and that there was “no possibility of appeal.”

“This action was taken after Father Pavone was found guilty in canonical proceedings of blasphemous communications on social media, and of persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop,” the letter stated, according to the New York Times.

Although the letter didn’t elucidate Pavone’s offenses further, it noted that the far-right priest had been “given ample opportunity to defend himself in the canonical proceedings, and he was also given multiple opportunities to submit himself to the authority of his diocesan bishop.”

Pavone, an indefatigable Trump supporter, has questioned the results of the 2020 presidential elections, repeatedly clashed with bishops, incessantly assailed Democratic pols with expletives, and disseminated fringe anti-abortion lexicon in support of the 45th U.S. president and the GOP’s anti-abortion crusade.

In November 2016, Pavone drew collective outrage when, in a bizarre attempt to stump for Trump, the priest laid the remains of an aborted baby on an altar on a Sunday and posted a live video of the incident on Facebook.

“We have to decide if we will allow this child killing to continue in America or not. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform says yes, let the child-killing continue (and you pay for it); Donald Trump and the Republican platform says no, the child should be protected,” Pavon wrote in a post accompanying the video.

Pavone’s then-diocese in Amarillo, Texas, promised to investigate the outlandish incident, which it denounced as “against the dignity of human life” and “a desecration of the altar” and vowed to investigate.

The bishop of that diocese, Most Reverend Patrick J. Zurek, suspended Pavone in 2011 over concerns regarding how the right-wing Priests for Life spent its donations, but the Vatican later overruled the suspension.

The Vatican’s newest decision has stoked further chaos within the anti-abortion community in the wake of the Supreme Court’s high-charged decision to eliminate to overturn its Roe v Wade abortion rights ruling, reports the Washington Post.

Pavone slammed the decision in a storm of unhinged tweets in which he blamed Democrats for his removal, assailed President Biden and outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and repeatedly evoked the pronoun “You” typically used by Republican provocateurs and agitators.

Pavone also falsely claimed that the Democratic leaders had professed “#God approves of the shedding of innocent blood” and urged his followers not to wait for bishops or the pope to address this. We all need to do so.”

Pavone’s supporters have also denounced the Vatican, including pro-Trump conservative lawyer Jenna Ellis, who testified before a Georgia grand jury investigating the ex-president’s efforts to 2020 presidential election results in the state, and QAnon conspiracy theory-peddling Texas bishop Joseph Strickland.

In a Saturday statement on his website, Pavone vowed to pursue legal action, stating that he’d take “all appropriate canonical and civil action as well as public communications to the Faithful” to address what he called a “travesty” orchestrated by “some of the bishops for many years.”

Defiantly calling himself “Father” despite his removal from priesthood, Pavone promised to continue pushing his “fulltime ministry on behalf of the unborn.”

The Real Lesson Of The Alfie Evans Tragedy

The Real Lesson Of The Alfie Evans Tragedy

The baby Alfie Evans has died. Born in Liverpool with a degenerative brain condition, Alfie had been in a semi-vegetative state for over a year. Against his parents’ wishes, the hospital took Alfie off ventilation.

The parents had wanted to move him to a Vatican hospital in Rome that would have kept him on life-support. But the British hospital refused to release the baby, deeming further treatment “futile.”

Foes of national health care in this country latched on to this tragic case for political purposes. A Heritage Foundation headline called it “A Sordid Lesson in Government-Controlled Health Care.”

Actually, it was the opposite. It was an inspiring example. Britain’s government-run health care system had given this working family’s baby nearly two years of intensive First World medical care at no charge to the parents. It desperately tried to save Alfie.

In a crashing irony, conservatives in the U.S. called for keeping Alfie on life-support while pushing to dismantle what little health coverage many Americans have. Under President Trump’s leadership, they work tirelessly to drain the Affordable Care Act of the funds it needs to stay afloat. They have no plausible replacement.

Britain’s National Health Service is truly socialized medicine. Unlike the Canadian system, where the government picks up the bills but doctors work for themselves, medical professionals in Britain are public employees.

NHS critics make valid points. But if Britain’s leaders ever attempted to replace their government-run program with a system like ours, there would be riots in the streets. British Prime Minister Theresa May, a Conservative, noted that many of the people protesting with Alfie’s parents were also demanding more funding for the NHS.

The folks at Heritage routinely try to weasel out of their opposition to universal coverage by implying that there are ways to get there other than by “total government control” of health care. This is true. Obamacare was one of those ways. Many countries do it through multi-payer systems mixing government and private insurance.

What they all have in common, however, is guaranteed coverage for everyone. And that’s not going to happen without a strong government hand at the levers.

For many Britons siding with Alfie’s mother and father, the issue was parents’ right to make medical decisions for their children. Under British law, parents can be overruled when their preference on care risks harm to a child. They can take the matter to various courts. Alfie’s parents did, to no avail.

Heritage’s Robert Moffit tried to swing the discussion back to the imagined evils of government-run health care. “If you reduce medical judgments to political or bureaucratic decisions,” he wrote, “you can expect arrogant and cruel, often heartless and incompetent, decisions.”

But the medical judgments in Alfie’s case were made by medical professionals. Doctors at the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital had scans showing “catastrophic degradation of (Alfie’s) brain tissue.” They determined that leaving the baby tied to wires and tubes with no hope of improvement would have been “unkind and inhumane.”

When death came, the tide went out on the naked politicizing of this tragedy. Alfie’s father thanked the hospital staff “at every level for their dignity and professionalism during what must be an incredibly difficult time for them too.”

Although Pope Francis had joined Christian activists in supporting the parents’ case, Catholic bishops in England and Wales did not join him. The health care system was doing God’s work, too.

Both sides in the Alfie Evans story were heartfelt in their concerns. And in the end, both sides had to acknowledge how much medical care their government bestowed on a grievously brain-damaged baby.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London, Britain January 22, 2017. REUTERS/Neil Hall

Bernie Sanders Calls For Global Social Justice At The Vatican

Bernie Sanders Calls For Global Social Justice At The Vatican

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders made a highly-anticipated visit to the Vatican today to deliver a familiar message to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences: that the global economic and political system must work for more than the top one percent of earners.

“Rather than an economy aimed at the common good, we have been left with an economy operated for the top one percent, who get richer and richer as the working class, the young and the poor fall further and further behind,” he said. “And the billionaires and banks have reaped the returns of their campaign investments, in the form of special tax privileges, imbalanced trade agreements that favor investors over workers, and that even give multinational companies extra-judicial power over governments that are trying to regulate them.”

He presented his criticisms of the current state of the global economy at the 25th anniversary of Centesimus Annus, a social justice encyclical created by Pope John Paul II in the aftermath of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

The Vermont senator repeatedly pointed to the social and economic critiques offered by Pope Francis, who has defined his papacy in large part by denouncing the excesses of greed and capitalism, as a way of showing the two are fighting on the same side of a battle between the winners and losers in a globalized world economy:

Pope” Francis has given the most powerful name to the predicament of modern society: the Globalization of Indifference. ‘Almost without being aware of it,’ he noted, ‘we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.’ We have seen on Wall Street that financial fraud became not only the norm but in many ways the new business model. Top bankers have shown no shame for their bad behavior and have made no apologies to the public. The billions and billions of dollars of fines they have paid for financial fraud are just another cost of doing business, another short cut to unjust profits.”

Prior to the his visit to the U.S. last year, Pope Francis gave a speech in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, in which he denounced the greed displayed by an increasingly small group of powerful people, and hinted that it was not a sustainable model. “Even within that ever smaller minority which believes that the present system is beneficial, there is a widespread sense of dissatisfaction and even despondency,” he said. The pope has repeated that same message many times since, making him one of the most active voices for dramatic wealth redistribution in the world today.

On the back of his visit to the Vatican, Sanders annotated a copy of that speech, adding his own commentary to Pope Francis’s. In one section, in which Pope Francis denounces the “unfettered pursuit of money,” Sanders notes that the vision being presented is more than just societal reformation.

“He is asking us to create a new form of society where the economy works for all, and not just the wealthy and the powerful,” Sanders wrote. “He is asking us to become a different kind of person, where our happiness and well-being comes from serving others and being part of the human community — not by spending our lives accumulating more and more wealth and power while oppressing others.”

Photo: AP Video screenshot. 
Sanders Was Invited To Rome By Vatican Academy, Not Pope Francis

Sanders Was Invited To Rome By Vatican Academy, Not Pope Francis

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders was invited to the Vatican, but not by Pope Francis. The Vermont senator was invited to speak at a conference held by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, an academy founded by the Vatican.

“The invitation was made on behalf of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, not by Pope Francis,” said Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi to The Daily Beast on Sunday. “There is no expectation that the pope will meet Mr. Sanders.”

But even within the academy, there is disagreement over who invited Sanders. The academy’s chancellor, Sanchez Sorondo, explained why he invited Sanders to a conference where some 30 academics would be present.

“We are interested in having him because we have two presidents coming from Latin America. I thought it would be good to have an authoritative voice from North America,” Sorondo told Bloomberg. He said the decision to reach to Sanders was made “quite some time ago.” A copy of the invitation obtained by The National Catholic Review is dated March 30.

In a subsequent interview with the publication, Sorondo defended the invitation by noting that both Bolivian President Evo Morales and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa were attending the conference. “I don’t know what is the problem,” he said. “We have two presidents from Latin America, and we don’t have a problem. And we have a problem because we invited one candidate to the White House of your country? It’s a little impossible to understand.”

But Margaret Archer, the academy’s president, said that Sanders had effectively invited himself. “Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons,” Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. “He may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly — not that he will.”

Sanders trip will take place just four days before the New York primary, a crucial race in which he must perform well to stay a serious contender for the Democratic nomination. A third of the state’s population are Catholics, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

Regardless of how Sanders was invited, much of his rhetoric has involved championing the cause of the poor, fighting racism and bigotry, and criticizing capitalism as it is practiced today — just like the pope, Sanders frequently points out.