Groups organized protests outside the homes of three pro-life Supreme Court justices: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Brett Kavanaugh, and Samuel Alito.
The Biden administration initially refused to condemn the protests. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that protests should be peaceful and respect privacy but that she didn’t “have an official U.S. government position on where people should protest.”
On Monday morning, she tweeted that President Joe Biden supports the right to protest without “violence, threats or vandalism.”
“Judges perform an incredibly important function in our society, and they must be able to do their jobs without concern for their personal safety,” she said.
Meanwhile, protestors also engaged in a wave of protests and acts of vandalism and violence targeting Catholic churches and pro-life organizations.
This included disrupting a Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, California.
Catholic bishops have told worshippers to return to church because “virtual viewing of Mass does not fulfil the Sunday obligation”.
The leaders of the English and Welsh Catholic church want worshippers to return to the pews in time for Pentecost on the first Sunday in June.
The obligation had been suspended for almost 26 months since March 2020 because of the pandemic. Those who are unable to attend in person due to ill health or because they are caring for the sick will continue to have bishops’ blessing to tune in remotely.
However, the lifting of Covid restrictions means that for other worshippers “the reasons which have prevented Catholics from attending Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation no longer apply”.
By contrast, the Church of England has encouraged its parishes to continue streaming services. While it is hoping to nudge worshippers to return to church for worship, no decree has been issued telling them that they are obliged to attend services in church rather than watch online.
The European Parliament has condemned the reproductive exploitation of Ukrainian women by surrogacy companies.
In a non-binding resolution last week on the impact of the war against Ukraine on women, it cites human trafficking for sexual exploitation and other purposes as among the biggest risks for women and children fleeing the country.
In particular § 12 recalls that “sexual exploitation for surrogacy and reproduction is unacceptable and a violation of human dignity and human rights”.
It continues in § 13 by condemning “the practice of surrogacy, which can expose women around the world to exploitation, in particular those who are poorer and are in situations of vulnerability, such as in the context of war”.
In § 14 the resolution “Underlines the serious impact of surrogacy on women, their rights and their health, the negative consequences for gender equality and the challenges stemming from the crossborder implications of this practice, as has been the case for the women and children affected by the war against Ukraine”.
In point V., the role played by some private companies is recognised, noting that “some surrogacy agencies have asked surrogate mothers not to flee Ukraine before the birth”.
Almost half of South Koreans in their 20s now say they would prefer to be part of a couple that does not have children after marriage. This is a jump from 2015, when only 3 in 10 Koreans backed the idea, a local think tank said Monday. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world.
Last year, South Korea’s fertility rate — the average number of children a woman carries in her lifetime — hit a record low for four straight years as the rate had remained below 1 percent.
The number of Roman Catholics in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), most of whom are ethnic Croats, has more than halved compared to 30 years ago, dwindling to a mere 350,000, BiH’s bishops warned in a document carried by the Croatian news agency Hina.
“During the last 30 years, more than a half of Catholics, which means Croats, have disappeared, more precisely around 54.6%,” the document said.
The bishops said the situation was particularly difficult in Republika Srpska, one of BiH’s two autonomous entities created by the 1995 Dayton peace accord, populated mostly by ethnic Serbs. The other is the Bosniak-Croat federation.
“Before the war, there were 220,000 Catholics in Republika Srpska, and now they number only 15,000, or about 2.4% of RS’s total population,” the bishops said.
In the federation, “Croats represent only 22.4% of the population,” the document writes. Among the reasons, the bishops listed the slow and difficult return of refugees from the 1991-95 war, low birth rates, emigration, high unemployment and corruption, but also political reasons.
A course on recognising sexual assault or harassment and how to safely intervene teaches students about right and wrong, according to teachers who offer it.
Professor Louise Crowley, a law lecturer at UCC, rolled out her bystander intervention programme for transition year students.
Over the past month, Prof Crowley has trained 140 teachers throughout Ireland to deliver the course, which teaches students how to recognise and safely intervene if they see an incident of sexual assault or harassment.
At Maria Immaculata Community College in Dunmanway, Co Cork, school chaplain Elaine O’Sullivan and Sinead Meade, the first year head, have both been trained to deliver the course.
“I think we teach them about right and wrong. We teach them about dignity and respect. It is all about helping them to intervene when they witness wrongdoing in a safe way. I thought that was very powerful,” Ms Meade said.
“I suppose what we feel here is that we have to prepare them for life.
Large numbers of Americans favour certain restrictions on access to abortions, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
The study was conducted in March – after the US Supreme Court’s oral arguments on a Mississippi case that largely banned abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, but before it was reported the court had decided to over-turn Roe Vs Wade, something that has not yet been officially declared. Roe Vs Wade was a 1973 decision that imposed a very liberal abortion law on all 50 US states.
The survey found “nearly two-thirds of the public thinks abortion either should be entirely illegal at every stage of a pregnancy or should become illegal, at least in some cases, at some point during the course of a pregnancy”.
The survey data shows that as pregnancy progresses, opposition to legal abortion grows and support for legal abortion declines. Americans are about twice as likely to say abortion should be legal at six weeks than to say it should be illegal at this stage of a pregnancy. 44% of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal at six weeks, 21% say it should be illegal at six weeks, and another 19% say whether it should be legal or not at six weeks “depends.” (An additional 14% say the stage of pregnancy shouldn’t factor into determining whether abortion is legal or illegal)
But “at 14 weeks, the share saying abortion should be legal declines to 34%, while 27% say illegal and 22% say ‘it depends’.”
A study purporting to show that non-religious teachers in faith-based schools are hiding their identity to preserve their career prospects lacks adequate evidence to force a change in policy, according to a leading educationalist.
In a letter to the Irish Times, Professor Eamonn Conway, Head of Theology and Religious Studies, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, said the cross-Border study consulted only 15 teachers in Ireland, five from the North and 10 from the South. Moreover, he added, all 15 were all recruited through “snowballing” or “chain-referral”, a method whereby one respondent recommends another, very often of like mind.
“Therefore, contrary to what the study contends, the findings are far from generalisable and provide no basis for advocating changes to law or policy”, he wrote.
He also said that teachers may hide their identity for a multiplicity of reasons, including hiding their faith, even in nominally faith-based schools. Citing a recent meeting of Catholic educators at Mary Immaculate, several teachers reported how challenging it can be “to acknowledge their religious convictions openly and sincerely, whether in the classroom or the staffroom, and this even in schools which purport to have a religious ethos”.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin has branded as “short-sighted” a recommendation by Dublin City Council chief executive Owen Keegan against zoning church lands for housing.
The archdiocese earlier this year made submissions on the city development plan seeking residential zoning for more than 30 churches sites across the city.
Mr Keegan has recommended city councillors reject the majority of these submissions. In most cases, any residential development on the site was likely to require church demolition, while a number of the churches were protected structures which would limit development in their grounds, he said.
In a strongly worded statement, the archdiocese said Mr Keegan’s recommendation was “short-sighted and unnecessarily restricts the diocese’s efforts to assist in meeting the city’s housing needs”.
The archdiocese said the requested rezoning would “more robustly support our stated objective regarding the delivery of much-needed housing” and it was “disappointed that the flexibility available under the status quo will no longer exist”.
Last March, the Government asked the Church to co-operate in addressing the housing crisis by making surplus land and buildings available for housing development.
The ethos of schools must not be allowed to prevent pupils’ access to education on sex and relationships, Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris has said.
Under the Education Act (1998), schools are free to determine what they consider to be appropriate sex education in line with the “characteristic spirit of the school”.
Speaking at the Oireachtas committee on gender equality, Mr Harris said access to sex education “can’t be down to the luck of the draw, the ethos of the school or where you live”.
“I worry that in the absence of proper, factual information being accessible in a school setting that young people may develop attitudes to sex and expectations around sex from social media. We’ve got to call this out. We’ve got to get real on this and get on with it,” he said.
He said he was undecided about whether legislation was needed to oblige all schools to provide this information, but said it was vital that children have access to ‘impartial’ education on sex and relationships.
“I defend to the death the right of a parent to decide the ethos of the school [they send their child to] … but it is a separate and distinct issue to be able to access age-appropriate, impartial, fact-based information on sex and consent,” he said.
