No one is beyond conversion, Abby Johnson tells Georgetown students

By Matt Hadro

Washington D.C., Apr 21, 2016 / 04:54 pm MT (CNA).- No matter how deeply someone may be entrenched in the culture of death, they are never beyond the loving reach of Christ, said former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson to a group of Georgetown University students on Wednesday.

“I’m standing in front of you today as a testament to the power of conversion,” Johnson, a former Texas Planned Parenthood clinic director who later converted to Catholicism, said in a talk scheduled the same day as Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards’ address to students on Georgetown’s campus.

Reflecting later on Richards addressing students earlier in the afternoon, Johnson said, “I just kept thinking you know, I believe that one day – I have faith – that one day it won’t be me standing here speaking and defending the sanctity of human life.”

“I believe that one day it will be Cecile Richards standing here.”

Johnson’s speech was part of Life Week 2016 at Georgetown. A pro-life panel led by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), chair of the Select Investigative Panel on Planned Parenthood, spoke on campus Tuesday evening. The group Students for Life organized a protest of Cecile Richards’ speech on Wednesday, before Johnson’s pro-life talk that evening.

Cardinal Wuerl was scheduled to say a pro-life mass at Epiphany Catholic Church near Georgetown’s campus on Thursday evening.

Richards’ invite to speak on campus by the student group Lecture Fund – and the subsequent support that the university gave the group – drew biting criticism from the Archdiocese of Washington for its “unawareness of those pushing the violence of abortion.” Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider, performing well over 300,000 abortions per year.

“The Jesuit community on campus clearly has its work cut out for it and a long way to go as it tries to instill at Georgetown some of the values of Pope Francis,” the archdiocese stated.

In 2012, the university also ignited controversy by inviting then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to speak at its graduation ceremonies. Many Catholic organizations were being ordered by the HHS, under threat of heavy fines, to violate Church teaching by providing coverage for birth control to employees, and bishops were speaking out against the mandate.  

Johnson focused her Wednesday speech on her conversion away from being a Planned Parenthood clinic director and ultimately to the Catholic faith. She emphasized the importance of prayer, perseverance, and trust in God in overcoming the evil of abortion.

“No one is beyond the power of conversion because no one is beyond the power of Christ,” she stated. “And we can make all the most beautiful arguments in the world for why we should be pro-life, but at the heart of life is Christ.”

She exhorted the students to be hopeful for the conversion of more clinic workers and pro-choice leaders. “And if we are people of faith, we better believe that,” she said. “We better believe in that type of goodness, that type of kindness, that type of faithfulness from our God.”

She pointed to her organization And Then There Were None, dedicated to helping abortion clinic workers and doctors leave the industry, as an example of success. She initially thought 10 workers a year leaving the industry would be a great total, but there have been 218 workers leaving the industry in three years, including 6 full-time abortionists.

“Being pro-life is not just about saving the baby. Because if it was, then we would just be pro-baby,” she said. “We are pro-life, and we believe in the dignity and the inherent worth of that woman who’s walking in to that abortion facility and we know that she deserves better than anything she can receive inside those abortion facility walls.”

“My goal is not just to make abortion illegal, my goal is to make abortion unthinkable so that a woman never even darkens the door of an abortion facility, that she never even thinks that taking the life of an innocent human being is acceptable,” she continued.

“We can grow weary. We can grow tired. We can become angry. We can become frustrated. But in those times, it is then that we have to remember the goodness of God,” she said.

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/no-one-is-beyond-conversion-abby-johnson-tells-georgetown-students-45578

Cardinal Sarah says West must wake up to threat of Islamism after three killed at French Catholic church

CNA Staff, Oct 29, 2020 / 05:36 am MT (CNA).- Vatican Cardinal Robert Sarah said Thursday that the West must wake up to the threat of Islamism after three people were killed at a French church by an attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

The Guinean cardinal wrote on Twitter Oct. 29 that “Islamism is a monstrous fanaticism which must be fought with force and determination.”

“It will not stop its war. Unfortunately, we Africans know this all too well. The barbarians are always the enemies of peace,” the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments wrote.

“The West, today France, must understand this. Let us pray.” 

L’islamisme est un fanatisme monstrueux qui doit être combattu avec force et détermination. Il n’arrêtera pas sa guerre. Nous africains le savons hélas trop bien. Les barbares sont toujours les ennemis de la paix. L’Occident, aujourd’hui la France, doit le comprendre. Prions. +RS

— Cardinal R. Sarah (@Card_R_Sarah) October 29, 2020

An attacker armed with a knife killed three people at a church in Nice and wounded others, the mayor of the French city said Thursday. 

The incident took place at the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Nice Oct. 29 at around 9am local time, according to French media. 

Christian Estrosi, Nice’s mayor, said that the perpetrator, who was armed with a knife, was shot and arrested by the municipal police. He described the incident as a terrorist attack.

He said in a video posted to Twitter that the attacker repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” during and after the attack.

Estrosi wrote on Twitter that two of the victims were killed inside the basilica. He paid tribute to the church’s guardian who he said was “so appreciated by the parishioners.”

The attack in Nice follows the beheading of a Paris school teacher, Samuel Paty, in an Islamist terror attack earlier this month. 

The day after the murder in Paris, Sarah tweeted that he was praying in Rome “for martyred France.”

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/cardinal-sarah-says-west-must-wake-up-to-threat-of-islamism-after-three-killed-at-french-catholic-church-32659

Some 2016 Trump critics say record on abortion, religious liberty changed their minds

By Matt Hadro

Washington D.C., Oct 28, 2020 (CNA).-  

During the 2016 Republican primaries, some prominent conservative Catholics warned about Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. Four years later, some say they now support his reelection, while one Catholic scholar told CNA his focus is on the future of American political discourse.

“I have never been more happy about being wrong,” Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote.org, told CNA about Trump.

In January 2016, Burch issued a warning that Trump, who was by then the Republican front-runner, would not uphold Catholic principles as president. Burch exhorted Catholics to support another candidate, saying that Trump would “sell out everyone and anyone when it benefits him.” In the general election, CatholicVote.org did not endorse Trump.

But four years later, Burch told CNA that Trump has delivered “far more than we ever thought possible” on pro-life issues and religious freedom.

In September, CatholicVote launched a nearly $10 million campaign to target Catholic voters, highlighting Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s record “on issues of fundamental importance to Catholics including the sanctity of life, religious liberty, judges, education, the dignity of work, and other core issues.”

Trump has been widely praised by pro-life advocates for his appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic, to the Supreme Court. The president said in 2016 that he would fully defund abortion providers, and sign laws to ban abortions after 20 weeks and make the Hyde Amendment permanent, actions which have not been completed during his term in office.

Burch noted those moves depend upon Congressional action.  “The president’s done what he can via executive order, but he had an unwilling Congress,” he told CNA.

Other Catholics also told CNA last week that Trump’s White House support for life and religious freedom causes has surprised them. They recalled that, early in the 2016 election, his record did not evince a deep grasp of social conservatism.

Trump was on the record in 1999 saying that he was “very pro-choice.” He had been criticized for making crude, sexually-explicit comments about women on host Howard Stern’s radio show and in other contexts.

Looking at those factors in 2016, some critics thought the president’s pledges on abortion would not have much follow through.

“I did not believe his promises on behalf of the unborn, or on judges, or on foreign policy. I thought he would start wars,” Chad Pecknold, a theology professor at the Catholic University of America, told CNA this month. “I was wrong.”

Pecknold added that he has not endorsed Trump, but he thinks a case can be made for supporting him in the 2020 election.

Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie did not believe that Trump would defend life and religious freedom causes, but voted for him reluctantly in 2016 because she thought his opponent Hillary Clinton would “expand” attacks on those causes.

When President Trump dramatically expanded a policy that prevents federal funding of foreign groups that provide or promote abortions—known as the “Mexico City Policy”— Christie said her doubts about him subsided.

As someone who grew up in Latin America, Christie saw Trump’s policy as a victory against “ideological colonization” of groups that promote abortions in developing countries.

“I know that he [Trump] has surrounded himself with really good people,” she said, “who really understand in a deeply philosophical way the issues of human dignity, marriage, and family.”

Nina Shea, an expert in religious freedom at the Hudson Institute, also warned about Trump’s candidacy in 2016. She recalled thinking that he did not have the foreign policy background required to promote religious freedom and defend persecuted religious minorities overseas.

A year later, Shea watched Vice President Mike Pence promise a summit on international Christian persecution that promoting religious freedom would be a priority for the administration.

The direct assurance was a departure from earlier administrations’ seeming reluctance to promote religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy, Shea said. Since then, she noted that Trump’s “speeches, initiatives, and directives” on religious freedom “have set the high water mark” for the issue.

Not all conservative Catholics who opposed Trump in 2016 support his re-election four years later.

Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review and a Catholic, wrote an Oct. 15 column he said was “a case for principled abstention.”

Ponnuru wrote that in his view, Trump’s “character flaws” are bad enough to “keep him from meeting the threshold conditions to be entrusted with the presidency.”

The president is “deficient” in “judgment, honesty, and self-control,” Ponnuru wrote, lamenting “a more degraded and less honest political culture, the cheapening of the president’s word, and a decline in trust.”

But in the same column, Ponnuru said he would also not be voting for Biden.

Biden “says he now favors taxpayer funding of abortion. He may seek to enlarge the Supreme Court to make room for more justices who won’t make room in American law for unborn children,” Ponnuru wrote.

“If there’s a persuasive case for recognizing abortion as a grave injustice and voting for Biden anyway, I haven’t seen it,” the columnist said, while explaining why he will abstain from voting for a presidential candidate.

George Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, helped in March 2016 to initiate a petition urging Catholics to support alternative candidates to Trump during the Republican primary.

Weigel told CNA that he is grateful the Trump administration has defended religious freedom “at home and internationally” and has been “firmly pro-life.”

But the author lamented “continued coarsening of public debate, the deliberate polarization of opinion and sentiment, and the lack of any magnanimity toward opponents.”

Weigel said his focus is on the future. The author said that in his view both Trump and Biden are “seriously flawed in numerous ways.”

“My primary focus now is on building a political culture that doesn’t, in the future, produce two such distasteful options. America can and must do better than this,” Weigel told CNA.

In an Oct. 28 column, Weigel pointed to the U.S. Senate as a critical aspect of the 2020 election.

American cultural renewal “will be more difficult if the Democratic party wins the presidency, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives—and is thus able to enforce the agenda of lifestyle libertinism and intolerant ‘tolerance’ to which its platform commits it, especially in matters of the sanctity of life and the conscience rights of believers,” Weigel wrote.

“As the House will certainly have a Democratic majority in 2021-2022, prudence dictates maintaining a Republican Senate, irrespective of who is elected president,” he added.

Supporters told CNA that after reviewing his record, they think Trump’s policies are a more important consideration than his personal behavior.

“I’m happy with his policies. I don’t plan to have him over for dinner,” Christie said.

Pecknold acknowledged the importance of character in a president, but cautioned that character should not be “reduced to table manners.”

Political leaders, he said, “should be judged by whether their laws help a society to live in greater accord with virtue.”

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/some-2016-trump-critics-say-record-on-abortion-religious-liberty-changed-their-minds-72063