Author: Eric Deabill

WASHINGTON (OSV News) – The Biden administration has drawn criticism for its inclusion of abortion in a proposed rule for a bipartisan law guaranteeing protections for pregnant workers that had the support of Catholic, pro-life and Republican leaders.

The bipartisan Pregnant Workers Fairness Act was passed by Congress Dec. 27, 2022, signed into law by President Joe Biden Dec. 29 and went into effect in June. The law prohibits employment practices that discriminate against making reasonable accommodations for qualified employees due to their pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions.

A rule proposed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Aug. 7 governing the implementation of that law contains broad language including abortion among “related medical conditions,” and the potential circumstances for which employers may have to grant workplace accommodations, which can include time off or additional rest breaks.

In a statement, EEOC Chair Charlotte A. Burrows said the new law “is a step forward for workers, families and the economy. This important new civil rights law promotes the economic security and health of pregnant and postpartum workers by providing them with access to support on the job to keep working, which helps employers retain critical talent.”

Burrows said the EEOC welcomed the public “to provide meaningful feedback about how the proposal would impact workplaces and ways to assist employers and workers in understanding the law.”

The rule defines “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” as inclusive of “current pregnancy, past pregnancy, potential pregnancy, lactation (including breastfeeding and pumping), use of birth control, menstruation, infertility and fertility treatments, endometriosis, miscarriage, stillbirth, or having or choosing not to have an abortion, among other conditions.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a medical doctor who is the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and worked to pass the legislation with Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said in a statement the Biden administration “has gone rogue.”

“These regulations completely disregard legislative intent and attempt to rewrite the law by regulation,” Cassidy said. “The Biden administration has to enforce the law as passed by Congress, not how they wish it was passed. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is aimed at assisting pregnant mothers who remain in the workforce by choice or necessity as they bring their child to term and recover after childbirth. The decision to disregard the legislative process to inject a political abortion agenda is illegal and deeply concerning.”

Many pro-life advocates, including the U.S. bishops, supported the legislation, but criticized the proposed regulation.

In a statement, Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, said the bishops supported the bipartisan Pregnant Workers Fairness Act “because it enhanced the protection of pregnant mothers and their preborn children, which is something that we have encouraged Congress to prioritize.”

“The Act is pro-worker, pro-family, and pro-life,” Bishop Burbidge said. “It is a total distortion to use this law as a means for advancing abortion, and the complete opposite of needed assistance for pregnant mothers.”

Bishop Burbidge said the EEOC’s proposed interpretation of the legislation to “include accommodations for obtaining an abortion is wrong and contrary to the text, legislative history, and purpose of the Act, which is to help make it possible for working mothers to remain gainfully employed, if desired, while protecting their health and that of their preborn children.”

“We are hopeful that the EEOC will be forced to abandon its untenable position when public comments submitted on this regulation demonstrate that its interpretation would be struck down in court,” he said.

In a statement, Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Julie Marie Blake said “Congress sought to help pregnant workers, not force employers to facilitate abortions.”

“The Biden administration is hijacking a bipartisan law that doesn’t even mention abortion to forcibly require every employer in America to provide ‘reasonable accommodations’ for their workers’ elective abortions,” Blake said. “The administration’s unlawful proposal violates state laws protecting the unborn and employers’ pro-life and religious beliefs. The administration doesn’t have the legal authority to smuggle an abortion mandate into a transformational pro-life, pro-woman law. Alliance Defending Freedom stands ready to continue defending unborn lives and to oppose this egregious federal overreach.”

EEOC said the rule will be published for public comment in the Federal Register Aug. 11. Members of the public wishing to comment on the proposal will have 60 days from the date of publication to do so by visiting regulations.gov.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Signaling the Vatican’s growing engagement in efforts to ensure the ethical development of new technologies, the Vatican has announced that “Artificial Intelligence and Peace” will be the theme for the next World Day of Peace, which is scheduled for Jan. 1, 2024.

“The remarkable advances made in the field of artificial intelligence are having a rapidly increasing impact on human activity, personal and social life, politics and the economy,” the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development said in a statement released Aug. 8.

“Pope Francis calls for an open dialogue on the meaning of these new technologies, endowed with disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects,” the statement said.

The pope, it continued, “recalls the need to be vigilant and to work so that a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices, at the expense of the most fragile and excluded; injustice and inequalities fuel conflicts and antagonisms.”

The World Day of Peace was inaugurated by St. Paul VI in 1968 and is celebrated every Jan. 1, the feast of Mary, Mother of God. In recent editions, Pope Francis has used the world day to call for inclusive ways of overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic, creating dialogue between generations, promoting a culture of care and ecological conversion.

In March, the pope met with tech industry leaders, ethicists and theologians at the Vatican to consider the ethical development of AI, and in January he addressed industry leaders from companies such as Microsoft and IBM as well as members of the Jewish and Muslim communities during a Vatican conference on ethics in AI.

At the end of the conference, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim representatives signed a declaration calling on AI researchers to engage with ethicists and religious leaders to develop a framework for the ethical use of AI.

The Vatican’s Aug. 8 statement underscored that “the urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity and the protection of our common home, requires that ethical reflection be extended to the sphere of education and law.”

It added that human dignity and a concern for fraternity are “indispensable conditions for technological development to help contribute to the promotion of justice and peace in the world.”

In an interview with the Spanish magazine Vida Nueva released Aug. 5, the pope said, “All these issues of Artificial Intelligence go over my head because of the complexity they are reaching,” but said he is being “guided” by officials and experts working with the Dicastery for Culture and Education.

Yet, he added that “new technologies have great potential; they are a gift from God and can give good fruits, but they need to have heart, they need to be humanized.”

LISBON, Portugal (CNS) – World Youth Day is returning to Asia in 2027 and will be hosted in Seoul, South Korea.

Pope Francis announced the location Aug. 6 to some 1.5 million pilgrims who attended the closing Mass of World Youth Day 2023 in Lisbon.

“The next World Youth Day will take place in Asia. It will be in South Korea, in Seoul,” he said to cheers from the estimated 1,000 South Korean pilgrims, many of them proudly waving their country’s flag.

“In 2027, from the western border of Europe, (World Youth Day) will move to the Far East, and this is a beautiful sign of the universality of the church and the dream of unity of which you are witnesses,” the pope said.

Pope Francis prefaced his announcement by urging young people to travel to Rome in 2025 to participate in youth celebrations during the jubilee year, when Vatican officials expect more than 30 million pilgrims to flock to the Eternal City.

The pope’s decision marks the second time the international gathering of young people will take place in Asia. In 1995, an estimated 5 million people attended World Youth Day in Manila, Philippines, with St. John Paul II.

Archbishop Peter Chung Soon-taick of Seoul said at a news conference Aug. 6 that while it is unrealistic to expect millions to participate in Seoul’s World Youth Day, he anticipates many young foreigners — Catholics and not — will come to South Korea for the event drawn by their many cultural offerings, including K-pop, the popular Korean music.

Archbishop Chung said he hoped to achieve similar participation numbers as World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney — about 300,000 — which also involved a significant number of foreigners traveling to the country.

“World Youth Day is not just a Catholic event, it is a global celebration and a platform for interreligious encounters,” he said speaking through a translator. He also acknowledged the “immense challenge” of welcoming young people around the world to Seoul but said that South Korea is a highly efficient country capable of hosting the event.

The archbishop said the next World Youth Day “aspires to become a radiant beacon of unity embracing the rich culture of East Asia.”

The event would be the first time World Youth Day is held in a Christian-minority country. Catholics make up an estimated 11% of the country’s population — about 5.7 million people — according to a 2020 report from the Korean bishops’ conference.

Pope Francis traveled to South Korea in 2014 to beatify 124 Korean martyrs at a ceremony in Seoul.

LISBON, Portugal (CNS) – To end “Catholic Woodstock” – as World Youth Day has been called by the Portuguese press – Pope Francis told 1.5 million weary-eyed and sleep-deprived young people in Lisbon not to let their “great dreams” of changing the world be “stopped by fear.”

In his homily for the closing Mass of World Youth Day Aug. 6, the pope asked for “a bit of silence” from the pilgrims who, after staying overnight in Lisbon’s Tejo Park following the previous night’s vigil, at 6 a.m. were already dancing to techno music mixed by a DJ priest before the pope’s arrival.

“Let’s all repeat this phrase in our hearts: ‘Don’t be afraid,'” he told the hushed crowd. “Jesus knows the hearts of each one of you, the successes and the failures, he knows your hearts,” Pope Francis said. “And today he tells you, here in Lisbon for this World Youth Day: ‘Don’t be afraid.'”

As dawn broke over the riverside park, pilgrims emerged from tents, tarps and sleeping bags to prepare for Mass. Violeta Marovic, 19, from Chicago, told Catholic News Service that the pilgrims spent the 10 hours between the previous night’s vigil and the papal Mass “sleeping very little,” dancing, playing games and exchanging gifts with other young people from around the world; she was wearing bracelets given to her by pilgrims from Italy and Poland.

A theology major at the University of Dallas, Marovic said she normally gets “nervous” when she tells people what she studies, but she has been comforted by seeing the huge amount of people so passionate about their faith, noting that young Catholics often “feel alone” when practicing their religion in the United States.

At the front of the crowd, which extended across both banks of Lisbon’s Trancão River, 30 cardinals, 700 bishops and 10,000 priests concelebrated the Mass with Pope Francis. Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa was seated in the front row.

Cardinal Manuel do Nascimento Clemente of Lisbon thanked the pope for making World Youth Day an opportunity for young people to come together and build a better tomorrow “after a pandemic that has confined them and otherwise distanced them from each other and from the best (version) of themselves.”

Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life, which organizes World Youth Day, thanked Pope Francis for bringing together in Lisbon young people “who have been pilgrims of peace in times in which many, too many, wars are being fought in so many parts of the world.”

Before revealing the location of the next World Youth Day, Pope Francis invited young people to travel to Rome for a youth celebration during the Holy Year 2025. The next World Youth Day, to take place in 2027, he continued, “will be in South Korea, in Seoul,” he said to cheers from the sizeable groups of Koreans scattered in the crowd.

In remarks after Mass, the pope also recalled the suffering of Ukraine and asked young people if he, “an old man,” could share a dream of his: “the dream of peace, the dream that young people may pray for peace, live in peace and build a peaceful future.”

Using the Portuguese word for thank you — “obrigado” — the pope thanked the organizers of World Youth Day, the volunteers who made it possible and the city of Lisbon, which he prayed would “remain in the memory of these young people as a house of fraternity and a city of dreams.”

“And ‘obrigado’ to all of you, dear young people,” he said before praying the Angelus. “God sees all the good you are, and only he knows what he has planted in your heart. Go from here with what God put in your heart.”

The crowd dispersed after Mass, streaming through the streets of Lisbon, filling closed-down highways while waving the flags of the world.

FÁTIMA, Portugal (CNS) – Before 200,000 pilgrims at Fátima, many of them with tears in their eyes, Pope Francis called for a new Marian devotional title – “Our Lady in a Hurry” – to describe how Mary hastens to care for all her children.

“There are many Marian invocations,” told the crowd at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fátima Aug. 5, but one that is not common and should be comes from the biblical account of the visitation when Mary sets off to see her cousin who also is pregnant.

“It’s a loose translation, but where the Gospel says she set out ‘in haste,’ we would say she went out running,” he said; “she went out running with that eagerness to be present.”

“‘Our Lady in a Hurry,’ do you like that?” Pope Francis asked his fellow pilgrims. “Let’s all say it together: ‘Our Lady in a Hurry.’ She hurries to be close to us. She hurries because she is a mother.”

“Every time there is a problem, every time we invoke her, she doesn’t delay, she hurries,” the pope told the crowd, which was a mix of young people visiting Portugal for World Youth Day and thousands of locals who came from across the country to Fátima to see the pope.

From the front row of the crowd, Margarida Vieira from Portugal told Catholic News Service that her group of four arrived at 3 p.m. the previous day and spent the night to get a good spot to see the pope. Many pilgrims were sprawled out on yoga mats and in sleeping bags in the hours leading up to the pope’s arrival.

Pope Francis’ morning in Fátima, about 75 miles north of Lisbon where World Youth Day is taking place, marked his second visit to the Marian shrine. In 2017, he celebrated Mass there to mark the 100th anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fátima to three Portuguese children.

Fátima also has been connected to Pope Francis’ public prayer appeals for an end the war in Ukraine. In March 2022, just over one month after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the pope consecrated both countries to Mary’s immaculate heart, praying before a statue of Our Lady of Fátima in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Sister Lúcia dos Santos, one of the three Fátima visionaries, had said Mary requested that Russia be consecrated to her immaculate heart by a reigning pope to bring peace to the world. Previous popes had consecrated Russia to Mary’s immaculate heart in various forms but had never mentioned the country by name as Pope Francis did in 2022.

In Fátima, however, Pope Francis made no mention of war or peace in Ukraine or elsewhere, instead putting aside a prepared text to tell hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to invite Mary into their heart.

But Bishop José Ornelas Carvalho of Leiria-Fátima welcomed the pope and introduced the event by turning people’s attention to “the war in Ukraine and so many other hotbeds of conflict in the world, which weigh dramatically on the lives and futures especially of children and young people.”

Those joining the pope in prayer, he said, were mindful of “the maternal concern of the mother of Jesus, revealed here to three children, simple and poor shepherd children, during a bloody war,” World War I.

Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press office, told journalists after the ceremony that when the pope prayed in front of the statue of Our Lady of Fátima “he prayed in silence and with pain for peace.” Bruni also noted that the fourth mystery of the rosary at the event was a prayer for peace.

The pope had been expected to offer a special prayer to Mary for peace after his remarks at Fátima, but instead the Vatican posted an abbreviated version of it on the pope’s Twitter account.

“To you, we consecrate the church and the world, especially those countries at war. Obtain peace for us,” the Tweet said. “You, virgin of the way, open paths where it seems that none exist. You who untie knots, loosen the tangle of self-centeredness and the snares of power.”

The day before his Fátima visit, the pope did not read two prepared speeches, instead improvising his remarks after joking that his glasses “aren’t working” and that he didn’t want to strain his vision.

Bruni told reporters, “There is no vision problem. Yesterday morning in the course of the meeting with charitable institutions there was a problem with the lighting that made a reflection on his glasses, and he wasn’t able to read.”

Speaking off the cuff “is not a vision problem,” Bruni repeated, but the “choice of a pastor in regard to the people.”

In the Chapel of the Apparitions, marking the exact spot where the three children saw Mary in 1917, Pope Francis prayed the rosary with 106 young disabled and sick people and six incarcerated youth.

The chapel, located in the center of the shrine, “is like a beautiful image of the church, welcoming, without doors, so that all can enter,” he said.

And at Fátima, too, Pope Francis noted, “we can say that all can come, because this is the house of the mother, and a mother always has her heart open to all of her children.”

LISBON, Portugal (CNS) – When feelings of suffering, anxiety and loneliness bring young people to tears, Jesus cries with them and walks alongside them on the way of the cross, Pope Francis said.

After hundreds of thousands of young people spent hours singing, dancing and chanting under the sun waiting for the pope to arrive in Lisbon’s Eduardo VII Park to pray the Stations of the Cross Aug. 4, the pope asked them to be silent.

“I’ll ask a question, but don’t answer out loud,” he said. “Do I cry from time to time? Are there things in life that make me cry?”

“All of us in life have cried, and we cry still. And there is Jesus with us, he cries with us, because he accompanies us in the darkness that leads us to tears,” he continued. “I’m going to be silent for a bit and everyone tell God what in your life makes you cry.”

While many in the crowd did not understand the pope’s Spanish, the 800,000 people gathered in Lisbon’s central park fell into silence for 10 seconds at the pope’s request.

After joking in the morning that his glasses “aren’t working” and that he couldn’t read well, the pope entirely set aside his prepared remarks for the Stations of the Cross, improvising his whole speech.

When chants broke out after Pope Francis began to speak, he smiled and lifted his hand to quiet the crowd.

“Today you are going to walk with Jesus,” he said. “Jesus is the path, and we are going to walk with him because he walked” while healing, preaching and caring for the poor, and ultimately toward the cross.

“The cross is the greatest meaning of the greatest love, the love with which Jesus wants to embrace our life,” he said gesturing to the crowd. “Jesus walks for me, we all have to say it, ‘Jesus begins this path for me, to give his life for me.'”

Before young people presented their meditations on the Stations of the Cross, the pope urged them to walk with Jesus on “the path of your suffering, the path of our anxieties, the path of our loneliness.”

Again, he asked the young people to be silent and to think about their anxieties and misfortunes, “be afraid, think of them, and think about your desire for the soul to smile again.”

“Jesus walks to the cross, dies on the cross, so our soul can smile,” he said to break the silence.

The meditations read in a different language at each station aimed to address the challenges young people face today, such as the pressures of social media, anxiety about climate change, and falling into drugs, pornography and alcohol.

Videos of young people from different countries sharing testimonies of faith were played on the video screens scattered throughout the park.

Caleb, 29, from the United States, described how he was a “lost sheep” that Jesus left the flock to find. He said that after growing up in an abusive household and living through the painful divorce of his parents, he fell into drug abuse and developed suicidal thoughts. Yet it was at his lowest point that he met his future wife who would eventually lead him back to God.

As Pope Francis gave his blessing in Portuguese, the giant screens set up throughout the park showed close-ups of young pilgrims in tears. But just as quickly as they fell into silence to hear the pope, they cheered loudly when he waved goodbye.

LISBON, Portugal (CNS) – A Catholic Church that has grown weary in countries shaken by the clerical sexual abuse crisis and cultural trends toward secularism must look anew to Jesus to revive their “restless” enthusiasm for sharing the Gospel, Pope Francis said.

“Now is the God-given time of grace to sail boldly into the sea of evangelization and of mission,” the pope told Portuguese bishops, priests, religious and pastoral workers after praying vespers at the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon Aug. 2, the first day of his trip to Portugal.

Using a wheelchair, the pope entered the 16th-century monastery to great applause, and the cheers that erupted when he stood to greet those present resembled those echoing from the pop concert taking place across the street for World Youth Day.

Pope Francis was greeted by Bishop José Ornelas Carvalho of Leiria-Fátima, president of the country’s bishops’ conference, before leading the prayer. In his homily, the pope reflected on the passage from St. Luke’s Gospel in which Jesus gets into the disciples’ fishing boat and invites them to let their nets down in deep water for a catch.

Just as those fishermen didn’t catch anything before Jesus’ arrival, “there are moments in our ecclesial journey when we can feel a similar weariness — weariness — when we seem to be holding only empty nets,” he said, noting how such a situation is common in countries with a long-standing Christian tradition but are now experiencing a “growing detachment from the practice of the faith.”

Often, he added, the reality of waning church participation in those countries is accentuated by the disappointment and anger people feel toward the church due to “our poor witness and the scandals that have marred her face and call us to a humble and ongoing purification, starting with the anguished cry of the victims, who must always be accepted and listened to.”

The Vatican announced later that after vespers Pope Francis met at the nunciature with 13 victims of “abuse by members of the clergy, accompanied by some representatives of Portuguese church institutions in charge of the protection of minors. The meeting took place in an atmosphere of intense listening and lasted more than an hour, concluding shortly after 8:15 p.m.”

In February, an independent report commissioned by the Portuguese bishops’ conference found that at least 4,815 minors were abused by members of the church in Portugal between 1960-2022, sparking harsh criticism against the church within the country.

Brother Antão Caunan, a Hospitaller of St. John of God who attended the vespers, told Catholic News Service he was “very joyful” about Pope Francis’ visit to Portugal, but hoped the pope would talk about the abuse crisis in his homily. Brother Caunan is from Timor-Leste and for five years has been serving his religious community in Portugal, where, he said, the abuse revelations have “changed the perception of ordinary people toward the church” and eroded their trust in the institution.

The pope in his homily urged Portugal’s Catholic community to “bring those struggles and tears to the Lord, in order then to respond to pastoral and spiritual needs, together, with open hearts.”

Pope Francis said the first step is to develop a strong faith — and that cannot be done by reciting certain words, “blah, blah, blah,” or taking a nap in the sacristy, he said jokingly. He recommended partaking in silent adoration to “truly rediscover our taste and passion for evangelization” that is “without ideologies or forms of worldliness.”

With several Missionaries of Charity sitting in the front rows near the pope, he recalled how Mother Theresa always went to adoration even through her most difficult crises of faith.

The pope also urged people to “work together in offering pastoral care,” offering the synodal principles of “communion, mutual assistance and shared journey. That is the aim of the current synod.”

Looking at the crowd, he said the church must announce the Gospel to everyone — “everyone, everyone, everyone” — and insisted the church “should not be a customs office to select who passes and who doesn’t.”

Maritza Barros, a youth coordinator in Madeira, Portugal, told CNS that some of the 1,000 young people she brought to Lisbon for World Youth Day are thought to be judgmental by their non-Catholic friends for believing in God, and that they respond well to the pope’s invitation “to make their faith accessible to all.”

The pope’s visit to Portugal, coupled with World Youth Day, will “brush the dust off the pews” for young people in the church.

Pope Francis urged church workers in Portugal to continue lowering their nets and being a light in a world that has “lost a sense of enthusiasm, the courage to dream, the strength to confront challenges and to be confident about the future.”

To a roar of laughter, the pope ended his homily by entrusting the Portuguese Catholic community to Our Lady of Fátima and St. Anthony, who was born in Lisbon but “was stolen by those of Padua.”