Posted on 06/5/2025 18:21 PM (CNA Daily News - US)
Al Pacino as Father Theophilus Riesinger in “The Ritual.” / Credit: XYZ Films
CNA Staff, Jun 5, 2025 / 15:21 pm (CNA).
In 1928, Father Joseph Steiger, a priest at St. Joseph’s in Earling, Iowa, was approached with an urgent concern. A 46-year-old woman named Emma Schmidt was experiencing blackouts, aversions to holy objects, and other terrible afflictions. After years of extensive psychiatric treatment provided no relief, Schmidt’s priest suggested an exorcism.
Father Theophilus Riesinger, a Capuchin friar, was assigned to perform the exorcism while Steiger would be the stenographer. After a 23-day battle, Schmidt was freed from her affliction and able to live the rest of her life in peace.
The exorcism of Schmidt remains the most thoroughly documented and widely publicized exorcism in American history and now a new movie has been made to tell the story. “The Ritual,” starring Al Pacino, Dan Stevens, Ashley Greene, and Patricia Heaton, will be released in theaters on June 6.
Father Aaron Williams, pastor and rector of St. Mary’s Basilica in Natchez, Mississippi, served as the consultant on the film and spoke to CNA about his experience on set, what his role entailed, and why Catholics should consider watching the movie.
Williams explained that the filmmakers first approached him to ask if they could receive permission to film in St. Mary’s Basilica.
“Sometimes as a priest I get nervous about people’s particular sort of fanatic obsession with exorcisms because it can be spiritually dangerous and we don’t want to be walking down that path,” he told CNA. “But, at the same time, it is real and people need to know it’s real.”
“So when the script was shown to me when they were proposing filming here, that’s what really opened my mind to it because what I started to see was they were taking this with the level of severity that I appreciated,” Williams said.
After giving them permission to film in the basilica, Williams was approached by the filmmakers to serve as a consultant who could advise on the spiritual aspects of the film. Williams accepted the invitation because he “wanted to be involved with helping to convey a true story in a really accurate way.”
The priest, who has a master’s degree in liturgical studies and is currently pursuing a doctorate, said that the film’s director, David Midell, was very willing to take his advice. Williams said on multiple occasions he made suggestions to Midell that would then be immediately changed in the script.
“He [Midell] told me over and over again that he wasn’t trying to film a religious movie so to say, but he did want religious people, especially Catholics, who would view the film to feel like they had been respected,” Williams said.
He also pointed out that all of the crew “were very respectful of the spaces. The Blessed Sacrament was always removed from the church for any takes inside. There was never any vulgarity anywhere in the church. And every instruction I gave them — they never questioned anything.”
The cast and crew filmed at the basilica for three months. During this time, Williams shared that he came to see them as his parishioners and made sure to minister to them. He offered Mass weekly — with several non-Catholic cast and crew members attending — blessed the set daily, and even helped guide a crew member to find information about becoming Catholic.
One of the Catholics on set was well-known actress Patricia Heaton, who portrays Mother Superior in the film.
In an interview with CNA, Heaton shared that she was drawn to the role because the filmmakers “treated the subject matter seriously and not really sensationally.”
Heaton spoke about the film’s portrayal of religious men and women and that while the exorcism itself is the major plotline, the film also focuses on the individuals taking part in the ritual and their own personal struggles.
“Priests and nuns are human beings and they’re often portrayed in Hollywood as sort of silly or there’s a lot of caricatures of the religious in Hollywood. And I feel like this movie makes them fleshed-out human beings,” Heaton said.
When describing how the Church is portrayed in the movie, Williams referred to the late Pope Francis’ message of the Church being a “field hospital.”
“You have all of these sort of broken people, and the priests and the sisters in this movie are themselves broken people, but they’re all coming together as the Church, as the body of Christ, and ministering to one of their own who’s suffering,” he said.
Both Williams and Heaton agreed on the importance of Catholics being aware that demonic possession is real but that it’s also important not to become overly interested in it. Williams used the metaphor of a wound to describe possession. If a significant spiritual wound is left untreated it will start to get infected and can become “spiritually devastating to us.”
“How do we avoid possessions? We don’t avoid possessions by spending all our time on Google finding out what causes possessions, right? … No. The way you avoid these things, rather than filling your head with knowledge about what causes it, is you go and live a spiritually good life — you frequent the sacraments,” he said.
Williams said he believes Catholics should watch the film in order to inform themselves as well as to see “how the Church functions — you have this lost sheep and the Church puts all her resources together to go and save this one person. And I think that’s a really great message that Catholics need to hear. It’s the love of God, it’s the love of the Church, and I think it’s worth watching if you approach it through that lens.”
“I want them [Catholics] to take away the sense that this is actually how the Church cares for us and how God cares for us and his mercy is so much more powerful than anything the enemy can do,” he said.
Heaton said she hopes Catholics will watch the movie because she believes it is “a way to reaffirm the importance of the Church here on Earth” and hopes that the film will encourage viewers “to pursue personal sanctification.”
Posted on 06/5/2025 15:35 PM (CNA Daily News - US)
The Archdiocese of New York superintendent of schools announced the launch of a school renewal plan and the final results of a school viability study on June 4, 2025. / Credit: alexkich/Shutterstock
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 5, 2025 / 12:35 pm (CNA).
Archdiocese of New York Superintendent of Schools Sister Mary Grace Walsh, ASCJ, announced this week the launch of a school renewal plan and the final results of a school viability study.
On June 3, the archdiocese laid out the first part of the Elementary School Renewal Plan based on the results of the School Viability Study (SVS), which assessed every elementary school in the archdiocese between October 2024 and January 2025 in order “to ensure the long-term sustainability and effectiveness of Catholic education within the community.”
The two-part school renewal plan, according to a press release, will evaluate four key areas for each school: mission and Catholic identity, governance and leadership, academic excellence, and operational vitality. The second part of the plan will be released in September.
“All schools, whether strong or in need of additional support, will work together with the archdiocese to implement these renewal efforts,” Walsh said.
Schools will address each of the four focus points of the renewal plan by engaging in reflection and planning throughout the fall. If needed, schools will receive direct support from external consultants to help with future planning and will receive feedback and approval.
“The renewal process is not always easy, but it brings with it the promise of transformation and growth,” Walsh said.
“Let us hold onto the promise of Revelation 21:5, trusting that God’s continual work of renewal and transformation is at the heart of everything we do,” she said. “Together, we will continue to nurture faith, knowledge, and community in our students, confident that God is with us as we move forward in this time of renewal.”
The SVS was conducted “across 77 parish and regional elementary schools along with two Archdiocese of New York Initiative campuses to assess their alignment with the National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools (NSBECS).”
Eighteen staff members from the Superintendent of Schools Office in the archdiocese visited the schools to hold conversations with each principal, gather data, observe, and then report on their findings.
The study found that Catholic schools in the Bronx present a “diverse educational landscape, with schools experiencing varying levels of sustainability.”
While “several schools are thriving, supported by strong finances, academic excellence, and active parish partnerships,” some other schools “were determined to be unsustainable and recommended for closure.”
In February, the archdiocese announced that Our Lady of Refuge and St. Lucy School in the Bronx and St. Mark the Evangelist in Manhattan would close at the end of the 2024-2025 school year. In May, the archdiocese shared that Mt. Carmel-Holy Rosary School in Manhattan would close at the same time.
“Parish-based schools are a particular strength in Manhattan,” the study reported. The area was found to have some of the highest-performing schools in the archdiocese.
Ultimately, however, the two Manhattan schools were recommended for closure due to enrollment and financial considerations.
“We understand the emotional impact these closures have on the students, families, and communities, and we trust in God’s providence to guide us to new opportunities,” Walsh said.
Posted on 06/5/2025 15:05 PM (CNA Daily News - US)
The Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion on Thursday, June 5, 2025, saying Wisconsin violated the First Amendment protections of Catholic Charities. / Credit: Wolfgang Schaller|Shutterstock
CNA Staff, Jun 5, 2025 / 12:05 pm (CNA).
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously held that the state of Wisconsin had violated the First Amendment when it denied a tax exemption to a Catholic charity after claiming that the group’s charitable undertakings were not “primarily” religious.
The high court said in its Thursday decision that the First Amendment “mandates government neutrality between religions” and that the state had run afoul of that principle when it refused to extend the tax break to the Catholic Charities bureau operated out of the Diocese of Superior.
The state allows organizations “operated primarily for religious purposes” to be exempt from paying into the state’s unemployment system. But the Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission had claimed that the Catholic charity was not operated primarily for a religious purpose because it offers charitable services to people of all faiths and does not focus its efforts on converting the people it serves to Catholicism.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court had ruled last March against the Catholic charity. On Thursday, however, the Supreme Court reversed that order in a unanimous ruling.
“It is fundamental to our constitutional order that the government maintain ‘neutrality between religion and religion,’” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the decision. “There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule, but this is not one.”
“When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny,” she said.
“Because Wisconsin has transgressed that principle without the tailoring necessary to survive such scrutiny, the judgment of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is reversed,” she said.
The case “is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion,” Sotomayor added.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said the Catholic charity is not a “distinct organization” separate from the Diocese of Superior where it is chartered.
The charity and its affiliates “are corporate entities that the diocese has created to carry out its religious mission,” Thomas wrote.
“Both the basic principles of church autonomy and the history of religious corporations establish that religious institutions are more than the corporate entities that they form,” he said.
“It follows that the government may not use such entities as a means of regulating the internal governance of religious institutions,” he wrote.
Diocese of Superior Bishop James Powers on Thursday said the “heart of Catholic Charities’ ministry is Christ’s call to care for the least of our brothers and sisters, without condition and without exception.”
“We’re grateful the court unanimously recognized that improving the human condition by serving the poor is part of our religious exercise and has allowed us to continue serving those in need throughout our diocese and beyond,” the bishop said.
Posted on 06/5/2025 13:00 PM (CNA Daily News - US)
South loop area of Chicago. / Credit: Sea Cow, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 5, 2025 / 10:00 am (CNA).
Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago is using a lobbying firm that supports pro-abortion political candidates and lobbies for abortion providers, raising concerns that the relationship could amount to cooperation with evil by the charitable entity.
Since 2022, Catholic Charities of Chicago has contracted with Cozen O’Connor Public Strategies to lobby on its behalf before the State of Illinois. Cozen O’Connor is a national lobbying firm with offices in major cities across the country, including New York; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago.
According to the Illinois State Board of Elections, Cozen O’Connor donated $3,500 in 2024 to Personal PAC, a political action committee in Illinois that supports pro-choice candidates at the state and local levels. The firm donated $3,000 in 2023 and $3,500 in 2024, while an individual employee of the firm donated $1,000 in 2024 and an additional $1,000 in 2025 to the pro-abortion organization.
Cozen O’Connor also gave $1,500 to Preckwinkle for President, the campaign fund for Cook County Board of Commissioners president and vocal abortion supporter Toni Preckwinkle. The firm also lobbies the state government on behalf of Rush University Medical Center, which performs abortions, according to a May 12 report by the Chicago Sun Times.
Catholic Charities of Chicago, the Archdiocese of Chicago, and Cozen O’Connor all declined to comment about the arrangement.
According to Cozen O’Connor’s website, the firm’s lobbyist assigned to the Catholic Charities of Chicago account is Patrick G. Martin, who is also a member of the Catholic Charities of Chicago Mercy Society and on its government advisory committee. According to public records, Martin himself does not appear to do any pro-abortion lobbying work.
Prior to hiring Cozen O’Connor, from 2016 to 2022, Catholic Charities of Chicago had employed Illinois lobbyist Nancy Kimme of Advantage Government Strategies. In 2019, Kimme, a pro-life Republican, brought on former Illinois Rep. Lou Lang, a Democrat, as a partner in the firm. While serving in the state Legislature, in 2017 Lang co-sponsored a bill that, among other things, removed language from state law describing an unborn child as a human being and allowed abortion to be covered by the state’s Medicaid program.
According to public records over the past five years, Lang also made multiple donations to Personal PAC.
Catholic Charities of Chicago is the official charitable arm of the Catholic Church in the third-largest city in the U.S., which is home to more than 2 million Catholics and is the birthplace of Pope Leo XIV. It operates with a budget of $180 million, according to its website, and has more than 1,200 employees, providing critical services that support children, families, and immigrants.
Catholic moral theology and the Church’s definitive teaching that human life is sacred from conception to natural death raise the question about whether it is considered cooperation with evil, and subsequently ethically problematic, for Catholic Charities to contract with a lobbying firm that supports abortion.
Catholic moral theology distinguishes between formal and material cooperation with evil. Formal cooperation is when someone who participates in an immoral act intends the same evil as the main person carrying it out. Material cooperation, however, is when a person participates in an evil act without intending the evil. The Church teaches that formal cooperation is always wrong, while some forms of material cooperation may be considered permissible.
The Church further distinguishes between immediate and mediate material cooperation. Immediate cooperation is when a person is involved in the essence of the act, even though he or she does not intend it, and is not permissible. Mediate cooperation is when a person’s actions are not necessary to the sinful act and which can be either remote or proximate to the act. The Church teaches that some forms of mediate cooperation can be permissible if the intended good outweighs the evil.
“The first thing you have to ask is whether it is the intention of Catholic Charities to promote abortion,” Benedictine College moral theology professor John Rziha told CNA.
“If the intention is to promote abortion, it is formal cooperation and evil, and it’s always wrong,” he continued. “I don’t think that’s the case here.”
The partnership between Catholic Charities and Cozen O’Connor, according to Rziha, is remote mediate material cooperation because Catholic Charities does not directly give its money to support abortion. In the context of the arrangement, Catholic Charities is significantly removed from the act of abortion itself.
“But that’s not the end of the diagnosis,” he said.
According to Rziha, in this case the level of cooperation with evil is “pretty low,” and therefore “it wouldn’t take a huge good to outweigh it, even though it is a bad action.”
However, he continued, “it’s a legitimate question whether Catholic Charities is actually undermining what they’re doing by contributing to a culture which goes against what the Church teaches.”
The Catholic University of America moral theology professor John Grabowski told CNA that some cases of material cooperation can be morally permissible “if there is a proportionally grave reason to tolerate the cooperation with evil.”
One factor Grabowski said could be “morally relevant” in terms of Catholic Charities of Chicago’s decision to engage Cozen O’Connor is that the Illinois state government is Democrat-controlled.
“They might make a prudential judgment and say, ‘This firm has a much better chance of being effective in its lobbying because they have definite connections to the people who are in positions of power in state government,’” he explained.
Because Catholic Charities provides many health-care-related services, Rziha pointed to the USCCB’s Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, in which U.S. bishops call on Catholic health care providers to consider whether particular collaborative arrangements with non-Catholic institutions entail material collaboration with evil that would give rise to scandal or undermine the Church’s witness.
“The bishops, and I think they’re right about this, would say … Catholic Charities should come out and attempt to explain what’s going on if this is becoming scandalous,” he said. “Because if they’re not witnessing to the faith and transforming culture as Catholic Charities, then they’re actually not doing nearly as much good as they think they are.”
Considering the issue, Rziha distinguished between direct scandal, when a person’s actions directly lead somebody else to do evil, and indirect scandal, when a person’s actions “contribute to a culture which is anti-Catholic or anti-Christian by its nature.”
Ultimately, Catholic Charities engaging a pro-abortion firm can be justified, according to Rziha, so long as the organization can overcome the issue of scandal and ensure that it is not undermining its pro-life witness. “I could understand,” he said, echoing Grabowski, that “this is a liberal state government: If [Catholic Charities] trusts this particular lobby firm, this may be the most effective way for it to lobby.”
However, he added, “I think that to address the issue of scandal, Catholic Charities should explain why they are choosing this firm and say that they are equivocally against abortion: ‘We work against it, and we’re trying to transform our culture by helping women to be empowered within the confines of Church teachings.’”
As Illinois Right to Life President Mary Kate Zander sees it, however, Catholic Charities of Chicago has “a responsibility to due diligence” in selecting a lobbying firm that is aligned with the pro-life cause.
Zander told CNA that Catholic Charities of Chicago CEO Sally Blount had personally assured her of her commitment to life issues when they met several years ago. “If I had the chance, I would encourage her to consider what that commitment looks like in action,” she added.
“Catholic Charities serves pregnant women in need every day,” Zander said, adding: “We are failing them if we are contributing to the proliferation of abortion in our state in any capacity.”
Posted on 06/5/2025 11:54 AM (CNA Daily News - US)
Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux Bishop-elect Simon Peter Engurait. / Credit: Courtesy of the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux
Vatican City, Jun 5, 2025 / 08:54 am (CNA).
Pope Leo XIV on Thursday named Uganda-born Father Simon Peter Engurait, a former business analyst who became a priest at age 41, to lead the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux in southeastern Louisiana.
The 53-year-old priest, ordained for the diocese in 2013, has acted as diocesan administrator since the death of Bishop Mario Dorsonville in January 2024.
“While I am still shocked by the news that the Lord has asked me to be a bishop, I must admit that knowing the people of this diocese brings me great comfort in saying yes,” the bishop-elect said in a statement published to the Houma-Thibodaux Diocese’s website on June 5.
“South Louisiana is home, and I love the people here. It is a privilege to say yes to you as much as I am saying yes to God. I love you, and I consider it a great honor to serve you as your bishop,” he added.
Engurait, who was also the diocesan vicar general and served as pastor of St. Bridget Parish since 2017, was ordained a priest on May 25, 2013, after entering seminary in the diocese in 2007 at the age of 36.
The Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux in southeastern Louisiana has an estimated 90,000 Catholics, around 38% of the total population of the territory.
The diocese has many foreign-born priests. The diocese’s most recent bishop, the late Dorsonville, was also born outside of the U.S., in Bogotá, Colombia.
Bishop-elect Engurait was born in Ngora in the eastern region of Uganda on Aug. 28, 1971. He is the seventh of 14 children, one of whom is a female religious in the Franciscan order and another a diocesan priest.
He was raised Catholic and attended both junior high and high school minor seminaries. He started major seminary before dropping out midway to pursue a bachelor’s degree in political science and public administration at Makerere University in Kampala.
After graduation, Engurait worked for 11 years for the government of Uganda in the department for the reform and divestiture of public enterprises. He later pursued a graduate degree in business administration in the Netherlands and went on to work in human resources, procurement, and business analysis, holding positions from entry level to management.
While in major seminary as a young man in Uganda, he had a life-changing encounter with the Catholic charismatic renewal, leading him to get involved and hold leadership positions in the movement.
Through the charismatic renewal, he met Bishop Sam Jacobs, then the bishop of Houma-Thibodaux (bishop emeritus since 2013), in 2003. After years of prayer and discernment, Engurait was accepted into seminary in the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux by Jacobs in 2007.
Since his ordination in 2013, he has served as associate pastor in several parishes, including St. Bridget since 2017.
His various diocesan roles have included moderator of the curia and coordinator of Christian formation, vicar general for administration, and vicar general and moderator of the curia. He has also been a board member for Catholic Charities.
After the sudden death of Dorsonville on Jan. 19, 2024, Engurait was elected to administer the diocese until the appointment of a bishop. Bishop-elect Engurait will succeed Dorsonville as the diocese’s sixth bishop.
Posted on 06/4/2025 20:35 PM (CNA Daily News - US)
The J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters building in Washington, D.C. / Credit: Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 4, 2025 / 17:35 pm (CNA).
A report from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that the 2023 anti-Catholic Richmond FBI memo involved coordination with field offices around the country and that similar disparaging language about certain Catholics was found in at least 13 separate documents.
In February 2023, the FBI retracted a memo from the Richmond, Virginia, field office that detailed an investigation into so-called “radical traditionalist” Catholics after the internal document was leaked to the public and prompted heavy pushback.
The memo called for the FBI to develop sources within parishes that offer the Latin Mass and online Catholic communities for the purpose of “threat mitigation.” Relying almost entirely on designations from the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the memo expressed concerns about a potential link between “radical-traditionalist” Catholics and racially motivated violent extremism.
Although the FBI removed the document from its systems and asserted the issue was isolated to one product from one field office, the new report found that multiple field offices were involved in producing the memo and that it was distributed to more than 1,000 FBI employees throughout the country.
The report reveals that analysts at the Richmond field office had consulted with the offices in Louisville, Kentucky; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee to gather information about “radical traditionalist” Catholics in preparation for the Richmond office’s report.
Conversations with the Louisville office reportedly helped Richmond analysts conclude that the beliefs of “radical-traditional Catholicism” are “comparable to Islamist theology.” Less is known about what was discussed with the Portland and Milwaukee field offices, but the report found that Richmond’s analysts had phone conversations with them about the subject.
After the Richmond field office produced the memo, the report found that it was sent to other field offices throughout the country.
The report cites an email exchange from the Richmond office to the office in Buffalo, New York, which notes that two “radical traditionalist” Catholic groups are in Buffalo’s area of responsibility.
Some FBI officials in the Milwaukee and Phoenix field offices were concerned about the memo, according to email exchanges. The report notes, however, it’s unclear whether the concerns were shared with the Richmond field office.
One official questioned: “Is anyone really asking for a product like this?” and complained that “apparently we are at the behest of the SPLC” and another responded: “Yeah, our overreliance on the SPLC hate designations is … problematic.”
According to the report, the Richmond FBI had produced a draft of a second memo on the same subject, which was intended to be distributed to the entire FBI. This was shelved following the backlash to the initial leaked memo.
The draft contained similar assertions of a link between “radical traditionalist” Catholics and racially motivated violent extremism and called for source development within parishes that celebrate the Latin Mass and within Catholic online communities. The draft, which was being written in 2023, asserted that the threat of violence will likely increase during the election cycle.
Although the second draft expressed similar concerns, one noticeable difference is that it did not reference the SPLC.
The report also revealed an internal FBI email, which acknowledged that the phrase “radical traditionalist Catholic” appeared in 13 separate FBI documents and five attachments throughout the agency.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley is requesting that the new FBI director under President Donald Trump — Kash Patel — provide the committee with those documents and any other documents that “purport to tie religious groups to violent extremism based on SPLC and other biased sources.”
The report also chastises former FBI Director Christopher Wray, accusing him of “misleading testimony on the scope of the memo’s distribution” when he classified the memo as “a single product by a single field office.”
“I and other members had already expressed concern as to whether the memo’s production was isolated to Richmond or part of a larger problem,” Grassley wrote. “Testimony calling it the work of a single field office was misleading at best and appears to be part of a pattern of intentional deception.”
Grassley further notes that internal emails demonstrate that FBI leadership was aware that the scope of the issue extended beyond the Richmond office and accuses the agency under Wray’s leadership of “[obstructing] my investigation by not providing these answers for many months.”
He told Patel he is “determined to get to the bottom of the Richmond memo, and of the FBI’s contempt for oversight in the last administration.”
“I look forward to continuing to work with you to restore the FBI to excellence and prove once again that justice can and must be fairly and evenly administered, blind to whether we are Democrats or Republicans, believers or nonbelievers,” Grassley added.
Posted on 06/4/2025 19:59 PM (CNA Daily News - US)
null / Credit: Orhan Cam/Shutterstock
CNA Staff, Jun 4, 2025 / 16:59 pm (CNA).
The Trump administration on Tuesday nixed a Biden-era requirement that forced emergency room doctors to perform abortions.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced on June 3 that it would rescind the July 2022 guidelines issued under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA).
That law, originally passed in 1986, was designed to prevent “patient dumping” by requiring Medicare-participating hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment to patients who can’t pay for treatment rather than transferring them. The Biden administration expanded the requirements in the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, requiring hospitals to perform abortions as “stabilizing treatment” in emergency situations.
The government will “continue to enforce” EMTALA “including for identified emergency medical conditions that place the health of a pregnant woman or her unborn child in serious jeopardy,” CMS said this week.
In its announcement, the government noted that it “will work to rectify any perceived legal confusion and instability created by the former administration’s actions.”
Major pro-life voices celebrated the decision, arguing that the Biden-era guidelines promoted abortion and spread pro-abortion disinformation.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, called the Tuesday decision “another win for life and truth — stopping Biden’s attack on emergency care for both pregnant moms and their unborn children.”
The Biden administration’s guidelines were the subject of a lawsuit by the Catholic Medical Association, a national network that promotes Catholic ethics in the medical industry. The group argued that the mandate unlawfully violated conscience rights.
Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal nonprofit arguing on behalf of the Catholic Medical Association, celebrated the decision, saying that doctors can now “perform their life-giving duties without fear of government officials forcing them to end life and violate their beliefs.”
“Doctors — especially in emergency rooms — are tasked with preserving life. The Trump administration has rolled back a harmful Biden-era mandate that compelled doctors to end unborn lives, in violation of their deeply held beliefs,” stated ADF Senior Counsel Matt Bowman.
Heritage Foundation Vice President of Domestic Policy Roger Severino celebrated the move, saying that EMTALA under the Biden administration had been “inverted” to “unlawfully mandate abortion nationwide.”
“Wide majorities of Americans oppose forcing doctors and hospitals to take innocent human life and this change goes back to respecting conscience and the rule of law,” Severino said in a post on X.
“A stain on America’s conscience is now gone, and good riddance,” he said.
Pro-abortion advocates criticized the decision. Jamila Perritt, the president and CEO of the pro-abortion group Physicians for Reproductive Health, said the decision “sends a clear message: The lives and health of pregnant [women] are not worth protecting.”
But Dr. Ingrid Skop, who serves as vice president and director of medical affairs at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, called the decision “welcome news for both of my patients — a pregnant woman and her unborn child.”
In a statement, she criticized the Biden-era guidelines, calling them a “coercive effort … to subvert existing laws to promote abortion.”
“Although I do not perform elective abortions, I have always been able to provide quality care in obstetric emergencies, seeking to preserve the lives of both mother and child,” Skop noted.
Dannenfelser emphasized that “pregnant women are protected under pro-life laws” and warned that obfuscating this fact is dangerous for women across the nation.
“Democrats have created confusion on this fact to justify their extremely unpopular agenda for all-trimester abortion,” she said. “In situations where every minute counts, their lies lead to delayed care and put women in needless, unacceptable danger.”
Posted on 06/4/2025 19:29 PM (CNA Daily News - US)
Bishop Robert Barron spoke on political commentator Tucker Carlson's show on June 2, 2025. / Credit: CNA/EWTN News
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 4, 2025 / 16:29 pm (CNA).
Bishop Robert Barron sat down with conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson this week to talk about the Catholic faith and discuss some hot cultural topics. Carlson, an Episcopalian, began the June 2 interview by saying that his friends urged him to have Barron on his show.
“I don’t think I’ve ever received more texts about any guest than I did about you,” Tucker told Barron. “From Catholics I know, from non-Catholics I know.”
Barron, founder of Word on Fire Catholic ministries and bishop of the Winona-Rochester Diocese in Minnesota, and Carlson discussed a wide range of subjects, including how to find happiness, prayer, grace, persecution, technology, and the future of the Church.
The interview began with a discussion about happiness. Carlson cited falling birth rates and increased suicides as evidence of a widespread lack of happiness in the culture.
“The joy of life” comes when “you forget about yourself and you lose yourself in some great value,” Barron said.
“God is the highest good, the ‘summum bonum.’ That’s why you love the Lord your God. That’s the First Commandment. But when the culture has lost that, which ours is in danger of, you, by definition, become unhappy,” Barron said.
In order to find happiness, people must let go of their egos and pursue “the good,” he said. “The ego is like a black hole … that will draw everything into itself, suck all of life and light and energy into itself. Nothing can escape.”
People who feel unhappiness have “lost a sense of God” and therefore lost “the supreme good,” according to Barron. “The best people are those who breathe life into a room. And that happens because they’re not preoccupied with the ego. They’re captivated by some objective good, and they want to show it to you.”
The discussion turned to the topic of freedom.
If we focus too much on choices in our lives, we will “get lost,” Barron said.
“I thought the whole point of the West was choices,” Carlson responded.
“But, you have to know what your choice is for,” Barron said. “When you deify choice itself, when you say, ‘Autonomy, that’s my God.’ No, choice is for some good.”
He continued: “The idea is to order freedom. Freedom is not an end in itself. Freedom is ordered towards some good. When it’s disordered, it tends to collapse in upon itself.”
“The whole point of America, I thought, was choice and freedom for its own sake,” Carlson responded.
“Well, and I would argue it’s not for its own sake,” Barron said. “If that happens to us, something’s gone wrong.”
Of the founding fathers, Barron said they didn’t “have the full Catholic imagination as I would like it, but they certainly had a sense of the objective good, and that the purpose of life is to find that good and be ordered toward it.”
“An ordered freedom is what they were interested in, not freedom for its own sake.”
“Your freedom has to be disciplined and directed,” he continued.
“Our culture, it’s … banks to a river, the river has energy. It’s going somewhere. You knock down the banks. You say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be limited. Don’t set limits to my freedom.’ It just floods the fields.”
When asked by Carlson what are the banks that we’ve demolished, Barron said: “The life of the mind, the moral good, religious good, aesthetic … When that’s lost, the banks are knocked down.”
Barron explained: “The goal for the Bible is not autonomy, it’s theonomy.”
“God, ‘theos,’ … becomes the law of my life … When God becomes the norm of my life, I become more myself. I find who I really am. If I jettison God and I say, ‘No, I’m the leader of my own life,’ I get lost.”
“What does Jesus say? ‘The one who loses himself will find it. The one who’s trying to hang on to himself is going to lose it.’ Lose your freedom in God’s greater freedom, and you become now authentically free.”
Barron spoke of prayer as a way to let go of ego. “Prayer is a conscious exercise in overcoming autonomy. It’s a conscious exercise to say, ‘I want to get out of my preoccupations. I’m placing myself in the presence of God.’”
Prayer is a way to “overcome” and “calm the mind,” Barron explained. He highlighted that the rosary is a “meditative prayer” that can really help the mind “open up to a deeper consciousness or a deeper awareness.”
When distraction occurs during prayer, Barron instructed people to “acknowledge” it. “Don’t try to fight it,” he said. “Acknowledge it and then go back.”
Related to the topic of the transcendent nature of God, Barron said: “You’re not going to find him in the world … you can’t say things like, ‘Oh, there’s no evidence for God,’ as though he’s a chemical reaction.”
“God is, at the same time, as transcendent as you can imagine, not a thing in the world, and as imminent as you can imagine. He’s higher than anything I could imagine, and he’s closer to me than I am to myself. Now, figure that one out,” Barron said.
When Carlson asked if God needs our sacrifice, Barron responded firmly: “He doesn’t require it.”
“How could the one who made the entire universe from nothing possibly need anything from it?” Barron said. “It’s just a logical contradiction.”
“He wants the openness of heart signaled by the sacrifice, because he wants us to be alive. And when we say, Lord, ‘I’m opening my heart to you. I’m ordering my life to you in this great sacrifice of praise,’ God delights because now we’re going to find the joy he wants us to have.”
God “needs nothing,” Barron said. “We eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus. We consume the sacrifice. It’s for our benefit, not for God’s.”
During the interview, Barron highlighted the fact that the 20th century has been “the worst century for Christian martyrs [in] all of Christian history.”
“Now, around the world, we are by far the most persecuted religion,” he said. “It’s a crime. It’s an outrage. We talk in a demure way about religious liberty in our country, which is indeed under threat, but you want the real threat to religious liberty? It’s in different parts of the world. People are being killed for their Christian faith.”
Barron pointed to the late-19th-century Pope Leo XIII, who believed “the devil would have a unique control over the 20th century,” so he formulated “the famous St. Michael prayer … asking for the protection of Michael, the archangel.”
“It’s hard to argue” that Leo XIII’s premonition was not real, Barron explained. “If you believe in the devil, as I do, and you see what happened in the 20th century, it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t to some degree.”
When asked if Christianity leads to violence, Barron said: “It’s one of the myths of enlightenment historiography that religion is the problem.”
There was a “careful study of all the great wars” conducted, Barron said. “And the conclusion was something like 8% could be traced to a religious cause.”
“There’s the totality of human dysfunction. God’s response to that is not to more violence. It’s to respond with forgiving love. That’s Christianity ... It’s not a religion of violence,” he said.
In the course of the more-than-hourlong interview, Barron and Carlson discussed digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence.
“We’re all addicted to [them],” Barron said in reference to smartphones. “Those machines were designed to be addictive.”
He highlighted seminary training whereby men in formation give up their phones for a whole year. Barron said the result was that “they all feel liberated.”
“They all come back saying, ‘It was the best year of my life, and I read books again, and I talked to people. I cultivated friendship. I played games. I played sports … That’s almost an illustration of Augustine’s ‘incurvatus in se,’ that I’m ‘caved in’ over my iPhone.”
Barron mentioned another study that found a “direct correlation between screen time and depression,” which he said he finds “perfectly plausible.”
“Look how unhealthy it’s making our young kids,” Barron said. “I think taking those things out of the hands of our kids would be a great idea, at least to some degree.”
Later in the interview, however, Barron said “technology is not bad in itself.” It becomes a problem when “you couple technology with a sheer celebration of autonomy or a bracketing of God.”
Artificial intelligence is “frightening” Barron said. “It [has] to be grounded in a moral vision … or it will become a Frankenstein’s monster.”
We cannot try to “become God” and “decide to dictate terms to reality. It’ll turn on us and wreck us,” Barron said.
When asked what changes Pope Leo XIV may make as the new pontiff, Barron said “I don’t know.” But he did share that he thinks the pope has “made some interesting gestures” so far.
Pope Leo’s use of Latin and his appearance in the mozzetta on the loggia after his election was a “gesture toward more traditional Catholics,” Barron said.
At the end of the interview, Carlson voiced a paid advertisement of the Catholic prayer app Hallow, a sponsor of the podcast interview, offering listeners a three-month free trial with the code “TUCKER” at Hallow.com/Tucker and promoting the app’s consecration to Jesus through St. Joseph.
Posted on 06/4/2025 16:21 PM (CNA Daily News - US)
A New Jersey former parish bookkeeper has pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $300,000 from two parishes, June 3, 2025. / Credit: Zack McCarthy via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
CNA Staff, Jun 4, 2025 / 13:21 pm (CNA).
A former parish employee in New Jersey has pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $300,000 from two parishes several months after she was accused of the thefts.
Former bookkeeper Melissa Rivera admitted to taking $292,728 from parishes in Washington Township and Pompton Plains, the Morris County prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday.
The two parishes were Our Lady of the Mountain and Our Lady of Good Counsel, both located in Morris County.
Rivera was charged with multiple counts of theft and forgery after being accused earlier this year of writing herself more than 100 checks from parish accounts between May 2018 and May 2024.
The state said it would recommend probation for Rivera, 60, though she would have to serve 364 days in the Morris County Correctional Center as a condition of that deal, the prosecutor’s office said.
Rivera will also be required to repay the parishes the money she stole.
She will be sentenced on July 11, the prosecutor’s office said. The county’s financial crimes unit helped prosecute the case.
Several Catholic officials have faced prosecution and jail time in recent years over thefts from their respective parishes.
Another bookkeeper at a Florida Catholic parish was sentenced in November 2024 to more than two years of federal prison after stealing nearly $900,000 from the church at which she managed financial records.
In July 2024, meanwhile, a priest in Missouri pleaded guilty to stealing $300,000 from a church at which he was pastor for nearly a decade.
And in May 2024 a former employee at a Tampa, Florida, Catholic church pleaded guilty to stealing more than three-quarters of a million dollars from the parish while employed there.
Posted on 06/4/2025 12:39 PM (CNA Daily News - US)
null / Credit: PIGAMA/Shutterstock
National Catholic Register, Jun 4, 2025 / 09:39 am (CNA).
The bishop of Charlotte, North Carolina, has delayed his plan to restrict the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) in his diocese, pushing the date back by nearly three months after a week and a half of significant backlash in North Carolina and beyond.
Bishop Michael Martin has determined that a plan to restrict the TLM from four parish churches to a single, designated chapel will now go into effect on Oct. 2, according to a June 3 story from the Catholic News Herald, the diocese’s official newspaper. The Charlotte bishop had previously announced on May 23 that the restrictions would go into effect on July 8.
The Herald reported that Martin made the change after accepting a request from the priests of the parishes where the TLM is currently celebrated to delay the restrictions, which he said he had originally scheduled to coincide with changes in diocesan assignments.
“It made sense to start these changes in July when dozens of our priests will be moving to their new parishes and other assignments,” the bishop told his diocesan paper. “That said, I want to listen to the concerns of these parishioners and their priests, and I am willing to give them more time to absorb these changes.”
Martin also told the Herald that if the Vatican changes required restrictions of the TLM, the Diocese of Charlotte “would abide by those instructions.”
The bishop’s delay comes after his decision to restrict the TLM in Charlotte — several months ahead of a Vatican deadline — faced criticism for being premature and unnecessarily restrictive.
Critics pointed out that Martin’s restriction to a single non-parish chapel was being made months ahead of an October cutoff of an extension the Vatican had previously granted the diocese to implement Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis’ 2021 apostolic letter that called for limiting the availability of the TLM to non-parish churches and established Vatican oversight over associated permissions. Some speculated that the timing of the Charlotte moves would effectively preempt Pope Leo XIV, who may choose to regulate the TLM differently than Pope Francis.
The new target date for the Charlotte TLM restrictions now aligns with the original deadline of the Vatican’s extension, which had been requested by the previous ordinary of Charlotte, Bishop Peter Jugis, who retired in April 2024.
The controversy expanded when sweeping liturgical norms Martin had drafted — which included a ban on Latin in all diocesan liturgies and the prohibition of other traditional liturgical practices like “ad orientem” worship — were publicly leaked.
The Diocese of Charlotte told the Register at the time that the document, which would apply to all forms of the Mass, not just the TLM, was “an early draft that has gone through considerable changes over several months” and is still being discussed by the diocesan presbyteral council and Office for Divine Worship. Given references to Pope Francis, the document appears to have been drafted prior to the late pope’s April 21 death.
“It represented a starting point to update our liturgical norms and methods of catechesis for receiving the Eucharist,” said diocesan communications director Liz Chandler, adding that the norms will be “thoroughly reviewed” in accord with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM).
Although the changes have not gone into effect, critics contended that Martin’s justification for them was not consistent with Church teaching, including Vatican II’s pastoral constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium.
Others raised concerns that Martin, who marked his one-year anniversary as Charlotte’s bishop on May 29, was engaging in unnecessary micromanagement and had failed to adequately listen to people in his diocese.
In addition to allowing the affected communities more time to accept the changes to the TLM in Charlotte, Martin told diocesan priests in a June 3 email that the delay “allows more time for the transition and for renovation of a chapel designated for the TLM community,” according to the Herald.
The diocese is putting $700,000 toward renovations of the designated TLM chapel, which was formerly the home of the Freedom Christian Center, a Protestant community.
The Herald described the Mooresville chapel as “strategically located” between the diocese’s two biggest population centers, but critics have complained that it is more than a two-hour drive from St. John the Baptist in Tryon, one of the four parishes where the TLM will be prohibited starting Oct. 2.
The diocese reports that approximately 1,100 people attend the TLM in Charlotte each week.
This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.
