Catholic News 2

St. Louis, Mo., Jan 12, 2017 / 03:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Giving civil rights protection to abortion would undermine respect for life and threaten the religious freedom of Catholic institutions, the Archbishop of St. Louis has said in a strong criticism of a proposed city bill.

“City ordinances should respect all people, including women facing unplanned pregnancies, unborn children, and people who desire to live their lives in accordance with their religious convictions,” Archbishop Robert J. Carlson said Jan. 10.

“Protection and care for human life at all stages of development from conception until natural death is a fundamental moral value shared by Catholics as well as many other people of faith,” he added.

The bill would add “reproductive health decisions” to the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance concerning housing and employment. If the proposal becomes law, the city Civil Rights Enforcement Commission would be empowered to consider complaints.

Archbishop Carlson said the bill is “vague and ambiguous” and could pose “terrible consequences” for religious institutions.

“For example, a Catholic school or Catholic Charities agency could be fined by the City of St. Louis for not employing persons who publicly promote practices such as abortion,” he said. Catholic institutions could also be fined for refusing to cover abortion in employee health insurance plans.

“This proposed ordinance seeks to make St. Louis a sanctuary city for abortion, an act that kills innocent unborn children,” the archbishop added. “This is not what our city should stand for; rather, St. Louis should be a sanctuary for life and compassion, especially compassion for mothers and their developing children.”

The St. Louis Board of Aldermen’s proposed city ordinance, Board Bill 203, specifically protects decisions “related to the use or intended use of a particular drug, device or medical service, including the use or intended use of contraception or fertility control or the planned or intended initiation or termination of pregnancy.”

Archbishop Carlson charged that the bill would “force the people of St. Louis to be complicit in the profound evil of abortion.”

“This would be a flagrant violation of religious liberty and individual rights of conscience,” he said, urging St. Louis citizens to oppose the proposal.

Alderman Megan-Ellyia Green, the bill sponsor, said the amendment would clarify that women “should be free to make reproductive choices they want to make without consequences from their employer or landlord,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch says.

According to Green, the bill would not limit a religious institution from firing an employee who advocates abortion.

Archbishop Carlson, however, was adamant, saying the Archdiocese of St. Louis “cannot and will not comply with any ordinance like Board Bill 203 that attempts to force the Church and others to become unwilling participants in the abortion business.”

“There is no room for compromise on such a matter. This is a matter of fundamental religious and moral beliefs,” he said.

The archbishop added that archdiocese would help provide spiritual and material assistance to all in need, “especially the poor and those women facing crisis pregnancies who feel they have no one else to turn to for help.”

The bill is pending before the Housing Committee, though no hearing has been set.

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Boston, Mass., Jan 12, 2017 / 03:29 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- If you've been wanting to learn more about your family tree, a new online database is making the search easier with digitized Catholic parish records in the Boston area dating from 1789-1900.

Announced on Tuesday, the New England Historic Genealogical Society has partnered with the Archdiocese of Boston, collaborating their resources with the church’s sacramental records in an effort to create a mega treasury of information available to the public online.

“The whole 19th century was a time of waves of immigration to Boston, and this project will make it easier to study that era and for people to trace their family history back to Europe,” said Jean Maguire, the genealogical society’s library director, according to the Catholic Herald.

“We have a lot of parishes to cover,” Maguire said, referencing the 150 parishes that will be included in the database.

The digitizing project began when the Boston archdiocese’s archivist, Thomas Lester, noticed the wear and decay on some of the Church’s older records – some of which are over 200 years old.

“Pages are brittle and flaking, bindings are coming unstitched, some are just falling apart. Of course, we try to restore them, but we can’t do it fast enough,” Lester said.

“So we looked into scanning all of them, that way if we can’t save books we can at least save the information.”

According to the genealogical society, the project will tackle 400,000 hand-written pages and 10 million names, with plans to digitize about 5,000 volumes of the Church’s index records. The online database will also eventually include information from every parish in the Boston archdiocese, even the parishes which no longer exist.

“We work…to conserve any damaged volumes, evaluate records, decipher obscure entries, and carefully guide our transcriptionists so their work is as accurate as possible,” the NEHGS stated on their site.

“This painstaking process ensures faithful transcriptions – a critical factor for family historians and researchers.”

According to both organizations, this is the biggest parish record digitizing project within any single U.S. diocese.

Most of the documents have been recorded in Latin, although the immigration period influenced documentation in other languages, including Italian, French and Polish.

The program will also include a companion website, which will host information about the early growth of Catholicism in Boston. It also details the history of persecution, integration, and the establishment of the Church in New England, complete with a timeline, photos, and maps of the area.

As the records are uploaded onto the site, families who are curious about their ancestors will be able to find traces of their history through sacramental records, which offers information about names and dates, including marriage witnesses or baptismal godparents.

Currently, the database has published the sacramental records from four parishes online in a volume-by-volume format, which includes documents from the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Holy Trinity, Immaculate Conception, and Our Lady of Victories. These records mainly include marriage certificates, baptismal records, death census, and confirmation recordings.

To make the search easier, the site has included an instructional video to guide the users, and there are also plans to make a “search by name” feature available by the end of the year.

Looking forward, the archivists believe it will take a few years to fully complete the digitizing process.

Currently, the records online are being offered for free, but as more information becomes available, users will need a paid membership to the genealogical society.

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Austin, Texas, Jan 12, 2017 / 04:30 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Changes to divorce law are up for consideration in the Texas legislature, with supporters saying it is too easy to dissolve a civil marriage.

“There needs to be some type of due process. There needs to be some kind of mechanism to where that other spouse has a defense,” said Rep. Matt Krause, a Republican from Fort Worth.

“I think people have seen the negative effects of divorce and the breakdown of the family for a long time,” he added, saying he thought his bill would help reverse the trend.

The bill would remove insupportability, meaning “no fault,” as a grounds for divorce, the Austin-based NBC affiliate KXAN News reports. Rep. Krause had also filed the bill in the 2016 legislative session.

A spokesperson for the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops said the conference supports legislation that discourages divorce, including the proposal to end “no-fault” divorce.

“No-fault divorce laws typically ease the divorce process, rather than encouraging spouses to seek spiritual guidance or professional counseling to enrich their marriage,” the spokesperson told CNA Jan. 12.

“However, in situations of domestic abuse or violence, Church personnel and services should be focused on providing safety and protection to those who are being abused or the victims of violence. No one deserves to be hurt, especially by a supposed 'loved one.' Any laws that support marriage must also recognize the right for a person to be safe in his or her own home.”

One skeptic of the proposal was Slav Talavara, a family lawyer, who told KXAN that about 90 percent of his divorce cases invoke “no-fault” grounds. He said disallowing those grounds would add the need to blame someone to an already difficult process.

All 50 states allow some form of no-fault divorce. New York was the last state to legalize no-fault divorce, in 2010. In 17 states and the District of Columbia, divorce can be sought only on “no-fault” grounds.

Texas law recognizes six categories of “fault-based” divorces: adultery, cruelty, abandonment and a felony conviction, living apart for at least three years, or confinement to a mental hospital.

Rep. Krause has filed a separate bill to extend the waiting period for divorce from 60 days to 180 days in cases where the family includes a child under 18 years of age, a child still in high school, or an adult disabled child living in the household.

The Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops supports that bill as well. A spokesperson said it would “provide more time for counseling and other support to protect marriages.”

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