“We need Catholic education,” she said. “We need to know what we believe in and why we believe it.”

Sister John Sheila, a professor of theology at Immaculata University in Philadelphia, was the keynote speaker at the annual Community of Faith Gathering May 6 at the Radisson Hotel in Green Tree.

Sponsored by the Secretariat for Education, the gathering celebrates Total Catholic Education with pastors, presidents and principals, catechetical administrators, youth ministers, high school ministry teams and diocesan staff.

Sister John Sheila pointed out that schools and instructors must not be preoccupied with the general culture, but with the Catholic culture.

If we live it out fully, she noted, the general culture will be affected and transformed.

There is a tendency, she said, to “short-circuit” the power of the Gospel and offer judgment in the light of secular values. The result is a bland Christianity that is non-threatening.

“God is not nice,” she said. “God is good. And goodness is different than niceness.”

She spoke of the need to remove “nice” from our vocabulary.

Sister John Sheila said Catholics must be ready to give a reason for why they believe in what they do, and be ready to live the truth.

By living the truth, she noted, many others will see them as different. She pointed to author Flannery O’Connor, who said, “The truth will make you odd.”

She asked those at the gathering to ask themselves how they are different, how they judge and how they can wake up society.

If they are proud and trust in the faith, she said, they will know what they believe in and why they do. They will be able to respond to the Spirit and elicit enthusiasm to those they meet.

Father Kris Stubna, secretary for education, highlighted the importance of bringing many priests and parish catechetical leaders together.

“It is a real sign of how much our parishes value the importance of Catholic education and the many ways that we try to pass on the faith to our young people and adults in the church,” he said.

“Sister John Sheila was able to remind us of our fundamental call to hand on the truth of Jesus Christ, but do it with enthusiasm and joy, and a desire to lead those we teach to a living, transforming encounter with the person of Jesus.”

The gathering also included a Mass and dinner.

In his homily during the liturgy, Father Stubna reminded the gathering of the “noble and privileged” task of being able to hand on the faith.

He told them that they celebrate the real and lasting bond that comes from a life in Christ.

The strength of their work for Jesus Christ and the church, he noted, is measured in their willingness to carry on truth in unselfish love.

Father Stubna said the best description of Catholic education involves a total dying to self, and a call to sacrifice all one has in service to others.

He spoke of the challenges to the faith – the growing cultural hostility and moral relativism. Other issues such as the poor economy, he noted, can overwhelm us and diminish the presence of Christ in our lives and the world around us.

But the greatest dangers, he said, are often internal rather than external.

“Catholic educators are called to be courageous apostles of the truth,” he said.

If they are to be successful, Father Stubna noted, they must be firmly rooted in prayer and draw strength from the sacramental life of the church. They must show great joy and enthusiasm for what they preach.

While joy is ultimately contagious, he added, it can only come from an intimate relationship with Jesus.

“Do we share joy or diminish God’s presence by our lack of energy and spirit?” he asked.

He reminded the educators of the importance of creating a community of faith in parishes. It involves upholding the authority of the church and respecting the dignity of all people.

Their acts of faith, love, charity and kindness will hold them together, he said, and ultimately lead them to the heart of Christ.

By JOHN FRANKO, Staff Writer.  This article appeared in the May 15, 2009, issue of the Pittsburgh Catholic.

The regulations in question prohibit recipients of federal funds from coercing professionals to perform abortions or sterilizations. They require those who accept federal dollars to certify that they do not discriminate against these professionals of conscience.

The need for such regulations became evident over the last two years in response to various attempts to override freedom of religion and conscience and to compel health care professionals to offer procedures that violated their moral principles.

Late in 2007, for example, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued Ethics Opinion No. 385, calling on OB-GYNs to disregard their moral or religious objections to abortion, instructing them to perform or refer for abortions, or risk having their certification to practice revoked. In a perverse twist of logic, a physician who chooses to obey his moral conscience risks being found guilty of “unethical” conduct. Approximately 2,000 OB-GYNs in the United States have identified themselves as pro-life and face penalties for following their conscience.

Threats against religiously affiliated hospitals, notably Catholic hospitals, that refuse to permit abortion and sterilization have also been occurring. The Catholic Church is the largest nonprofit provider of health care services in the United States. One in six patients is served in a Catholic hospital. The church’s stance on abortion and sterilization is clear.

Still, the California attorney general ruled that hospitals in that state have a “duty” to perform abortions, while legislators in California and New York have entertained bills to strip hospitals of their licenses if they fail to meet standards for “women’s health services.” Abortion is redefined as “basic health care,” and, as a result, hospitals that do not provide abortion are deemed to fail “health care” standards. HHS Provider Conscience regulations were enacted in late 2008 precisely to counteract these types of attacks on freedom of conscience in the health care industry.

The ancient Hippocratic oath has provided the basic ethical standard of the medical profession for more than 2,000 years. Its first admonition is to “do no harm,” but the oath goes further to express an unequivocal prohibition against abortion, too. By repealing conscience protection regulations, the Obama administration signals that the politics of abortion-on-demand trumps the medical profession’s ancient Hippocratic oath, as well as constitutional principles of freedom of religion and conscience.

Some ethicists in health care have also pointed out that, if a physician can be forced to perform abortion as a matter of professional “ethics,” then there is no logical reason why health care professionals cannot also be required to provide assisted-suicide “services,” questionable fertility treatments and the like.

In a letter dated March 16, Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, urged Catholics in the United States to tell the Obama administration to retain HHS regulations that preserve the conscience rights of doctors, nurses and all health care professionals.

“I ask you please to let the government know that you want conscience protections to remain strongly in place,” wrote the cardinal. “In particular, let the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington know that you stand for protection of conscience.”

The cardinal’s plea to U.S. Catholics can be viewed on YouTube at www.usccb.org/conscience protection.

The public has a right to comment on rescission of conscience regulations by April 9, 2009. For further information, or to submit your comments, go to the NCHLA Action Alert at: http://nchla.org/actiondisplay.asp?ID=271.

This article appeared in the March 27, 2009, issue of the Pittsburgh Catholic.

What are stem cells? Is the Catholic Church opposed to stem cell research?

Stems cells are relatively unspecialized cells that can divide and make more stem cells or any number of cells with more specialized functions. A stem cell in our blood can make new red blood cells, for example, or white blood cells or other kinds of cells, depending on what the body needs.

The church is not at all opposed to stem cell research using cells obtained from adult tissue, umbilical cord blood or other sources that pose no moral problem. Useful stem cells have been derived from bone marrow, blood, muscle, fat, nerves and even teeth. Some of these cells have already been used to treat a wide variety of diseases. Thousands of lives have been saved by adult stem cells, most often in the form of “bone marrow transplants” for leukemia and other conditions, where the active ingredient in the bone marrow is stem cells.

Adult stem cells have been used already to help people with Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injuries, lupus, multiple sclerosis, heart damage, sickle cell anemia and dozens of other conditions. Research on adult stem cells shows the most promise. Advances in deriving stem cells from adult tissue – so-called induced pluripotent stem cells – may actually make embryonic stem-cell research obsolete before long.

Why is the church opposed to embryonic stem-cell research?

The church will always raise a prophetic voice to defend the sanctity of human life, and to oppose the destruction of innocent human life for any reason. Embryonic stem cells generally come from embryos that are five to seven days old. The process of extracting stem cells located in the inner mass of the embryo necessarily kills the newly formed human being.

Those who propose to harvest stem cells by destroying human life in the embryo would like us to think that human embryos do not merit the same respectful treatment that society accords to human life at later stages. Early embryos do not have faces or eyes, though they are precisely as human as the rest of us. The science of embryology makes it clear that human embryos are human beings, not plants or other animals. Each of us was once an embryo – a small cluster of cells sitting on the point of a sewing pin. Because human life in embryonic form is different in size and appearance from life in later stages, advocates of embryonic research are eager to portray this human life as different from the rest of us, and hence fair game for destruction at the hands of other humans who are no longer embryos themselves.

By contrast, the church insists that all human beings should be treated with respect for their life. It is not moral to destroy some human lives in the interests of others. With good reason our society reacted with horror at stories of live human experimentation in the Nazi camps years ago. Instinctively, most of us know that it is gravely immoral to mutilate or destroy human life in order to pursue scientific research.

The advancement of science is a noble goal, but science without ethics can become a threat to the dignity of the human person. The choice is not between science and “ideology,” as some claim, but between science that is ethically responsible and science that is not.

Some frozen embryos will die anyway. Why is it wrong to try to get something good out of them?

We will all die anyway, but that gives no one the right to kill us first. Some embryos are left over from in vitro techniques and unable to survive, but one bad choice does not justify another wrong choice to kill them for research, or to make taxpayers pay for such destruction. Trying to justify experiments on human beings who will die anyway poses a threat to death row prisoners, terminally ill patients and others. If it is legitimate to harvest cells from embryos that will die anyway, why isn’t it legitimate to harvest organs from those in hospice care, for example? Do we have the right to accelerate another person’s death because we have good uses for their body parts?

Doesn’t a ban on embryonic stem-cell research impede the discovery of new cures? Is the church telling us to choose the lives of embryos over the lives of suffering patients?

The church is calling us to respect the interests of both. We must help those who are suffering, but we may not use a good end to justify an evil means. Actually this is a false dichotomy. The claim that embryonic research will lead to new cures is largely speculation. Embryonic stem cells have never treated a human patient. Trials suggest that they are too genetically unstable and too likely to form lethal tumors to be used for treatment anytime soon. Yet, supporters are wedded to this approach, having invested a great deal of money and effort.

More than a few in the research community fear that federal money may now be diverted from adult stem-cell research with its proven successes to an avenue of research that has yet to produce one useful therapy, and one that may become obsolete before long anyhow. Scientists as well as moralists have asked whether the president’s decision to make federal funds available for embryonic research is a wise choice. It more likely reflects a triumph of money and politics over both scientific judgment and morality.

How is human cloning related to stem cell research?

In human cloning, the DNA from the nucleus of a person’s body cell is inserted into an egg whose own genetic material has been removed. The egg is then stimulated to begin to develop into an embryo. The cloned embryo would genetically be an almost twin to the person who supplied the body cell. It is a way of manufacturing a human being according to pre-set laboratory specifications. The cloned embryo can then be killed to harvest its stem cells, perhaps to treat the original cell donor with less likelihood of rejection. This is the ultimate reduction of a fellow human being to a mere means or instrument of other people’s goals.

Fortunately President (Barack) Obama has stated that he will not support human cloning. Many secular and religious groups, including some who disagree with the Catholic Church about abortion, have also raised serious moral concerns about cloning and embryonic stem cell usage.

Are Catholics alone in this fight?

Ultimately, the question of research on early and defenseless human life is not a concern of Catholics alone. Opposition to the treatment of early human life as a mere object or commodity in the laboratory transcends religious and political divisions. All people of good will understand that a civilization is defined by how it treats its most poor and vulnerable members, including the most vulnerable human life of all – the early child in its mother’s womb.

Catholics would add that human life is created, loved and redeemed by God. It is priceless at every stage. A human being in embryo form is no less precious to God than an elderly person taking her last breath.

This article appeared in the March 13, 2009, issue of the Pittsburgh Catholic.