Social

Bishop Barron critiques New York Mayor Mamdani’s embrace of ‘collectivism’ #Catholic Democratic Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani speaks to members of the media during a press conference after voting on Nov. 4, 2025. | Credit: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images Jan 5, 2026 / 17:32 pm (CNA). Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry, criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for promising constituents “the warmth of collectivism” in his Jan. 1 inaugural address.Mamdani, who defeated two candidates with nearly 51% of the vote in the November election, won on a democratic socialist platform. His plans include free buses, city-owned grocery stores, no-cost child care, raising the minimum wage to per hour, and freezing the rent for people in rent-stabilized apartments.“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” Mamdani said in his inaugural address.“If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it,” he said. “Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from — the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers.”Barron, bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, said in a post on X that this line “took my breath away.”“Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people in the last century,” Barron said.“Socialist and communist forms of government around the world today — Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, etc. — are disastrous,” he added. “Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy, which people like Mayor Mamdani caricature as ‘rugged individualism.’ In fact, it is the economic system that is based upon the rights, freedom, and dignity of the human person.”“For God’s sake, spare me the ‘warmth of collectivism,’” Barron concluded.Catholic teaching on socialismBoth socialism and communism have been condemned by many popes, first by Pope Pius IX in his 1849 encyclical Nostis et Nobiscum, just one year after Karl Marx published “ The Communist Manifesto.”The foundation of Catholic social teaching rests on Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.In the encyclical, Leo denounced socialism and communism, and also condemned poor labor conditions for the working class and employers “who use human beings as mere instruments for moneymaking.”“Each needs the other: Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital,” the 19th century pontiff wrote. “Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity.”Pope Pius XI, in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, wrote of the importance of private property, that man must be able to “fully cultivate and develop all his faculties unto the praise and glory of his Creator; and that by faithfully fulfilling the duties of his craft or other calling he may obtain for himself temporal and at the same time eternal happiness.”Socialism, he said, is “wholly ignoring and indifferent to this sublime end of both man and society, affirms that human association has been instituted for the sake of material advantage alone.”“Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist,” Pius XI wrote.Pope Benedict XVI differentiated socialism and democratic socialism. In 2006, he wrote: “In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”Though, in his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI wrote that government should not control everything but that society needs a state that, “in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.”Pope Francis has criticized Marxist ideology but also “radical individualism,” which he said in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti “makes us believe that everything consists in giving free rein to our own ambitions, as if by pursuing ever greater ambitions and creating safety nets we would somehow be serving the common good.”In 2024, Francis encouraged cooperation and dialogue between Marxists and Christians. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with ‘communism’ or ‘socialism.’ She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of ‘capitalism,’ individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor.”
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Bishop Barron critiques New York Mayor Mamdani’s embrace of ‘collectivism’ #Catholic Democratic Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani speaks to members of the media during a press conference after voting on Nov. 4, 2025. | Credit: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images Jan 5, 2026 / 17:32 pm (CNA). Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry, criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for promising constituents “the warmth of collectivism” in his Jan. 1 inaugural address.Mamdani, who defeated two candidates with nearly 51% of the vote in the November election, won on a democratic socialist platform. His plans include free buses, city-owned grocery stores, no-cost child care, raising the minimum wage to $30 per hour, and freezing the rent for people in rent-stabilized apartments.“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” Mamdani said in his inaugural address.“If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it,” he said. “Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from — the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers.”Barron, bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, said in a post on X that this line “took my breath away.”“Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people in the last century,” Barron said.“Socialist and communist forms of government around the world today — Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, etc. — are disastrous,” he added. “Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy, which people like Mayor Mamdani caricature as ‘rugged individualism.’ In fact, it is the economic system that is based upon the rights, freedom, and dignity of the human person.”“For God’s sake, spare me the ‘warmth of collectivism,’” Barron concluded.Catholic teaching on socialismBoth socialism and communism have been condemned by many popes, first by Pope Pius IX in his 1849 encyclical Nostis et Nobiscum, just one year after Karl Marx published “ The Communist Manifesto.”The foundation of Catholic social teaching rests on Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.In the encyclical, Leo denounced socialism and communism, and also condemned poor labor conditions for the working class and employers “who use human beings as mere instruments for moneymaking.”“Each needs the other: Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital,” the 19th century pontiff wrote. “Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity.”Pope Pius XI, in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, wrote of the importance of private property, that man must be able to “fully cultivate and develop all his faculties unto the praise and glory of his Creator; and that by faithfully fulfilling the duties of his craft or other calling he may obtain for himself temporal and at the same time eternal happiness.”Socialism, he said, is “wholly ignoring and indifferent to this sublime end of both man and society, affirms that human association has been instituted for the sake of material advantage alone.”“Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist,” Pius XI wrote.Pope Benedict XVI differentiated socialism and democratic socialism. In 2006, he wrote: “In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”Though, in his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI wrote that government should not control everything but that society needs a state that, “in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.”Pope Francis has criticized Marxist ideology but also “radical individualism,” which he said in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti “makes us believe that everything consists in giving free rein to our own ambitions, as if by pursuing ever greater ambitions and creating safety nets we would somehow be serving the common good.”In 2024, Francis encouraged cooperation and dialogue between Marxists and Christians. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with ‘communism’ or ‘socialism.’ She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of ‘capitalism,’ individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor.”

unitedyam

Democratic Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani speaks to members of the media during a press conference after voting on Nov. 4, 2025. | Credit: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Jan 5, 2026 / 17:32 pm (CNA).

Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry, criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for promising constituents “the warmth of collectivism” in his Jan. 1 inaugural address.

Mamdani, who defeated two candidates with nearly 51% of the vote in the November election, won on a democratic socialist platform. His plans include free buses, city-owned grocery stores, no-cost child care, raising the minimum wage to $30 per hour, and freezing the rent for people in rent-stabilized apartments.

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” Mamdani said in his inaugural address.

“If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it,” he said. “Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from — the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers.”

Barron, bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, said in a post on X that this line “took my breath away.”

“Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people in the last century,” Barron said.

“Socialist and communist forms of government around the world today — Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, etc. — are disastrous,” he added. “Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy, which people like Mayor Mamdani caricature as ‘rugged individualism.’ In fact, it is the economic system that is based upon the rights, freedom, and dignity of the human person.”

“For God’s sake, spare me the ‘warmth of collectivism,’” Barron concluded.

Catholic teaching on socialism

Both socialism and communism have been condemned by many popes, first by Pope Pius IX in his 1849 encyclical Nostis et Nobiscum, just one year after Karl Marx published “ The Communist Manifesto.”

The foundation of Catholic social teaching rests on Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.

In the encyclical, Leo denounced socialism and communism, and also condemned poor labor conditions for the working class and employers “who use human beings as mere instruments for moneymaking.”

“Each needs the other: Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital,” the 19th century pontiff wrote. “Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity.”

Pope Pius XI, in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, wrote of the importance of private property, that man must be able to “fully cultivate and develop all his faculties unto the praise and glory of his Creator; and that by faithfully fulfilling the duties of his craft or other calling he may obtain for himself temporal and at the same time eternal happiness.”

Socialism, he said, is “wholly ignoring and indifferent to this sublime end of both man and society, affirms that human association has been instituted for the sake of material advantage alone.”

“Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist,” Pius XI wrote.

Pope Benedict XVI differentiated socialism and democratic socialism. In 2006, he wrote: “In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”

Though, in his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI wrote that government should not control everything but that society needs a state that, “in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.”

Pope Francis has criticized Marxist ideology but also “radical individualism,” which he said in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti “makes us believe that everything consists in giving free rein to our own ambitions, as if by pursuing ever greater ambitions and creating safety nets we would somehow be serving the common good.”

In 2024, Francis encouraged cooperation and dialogue between Marxists and Christians.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with ‘communism’ or ‘socialism.’ She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of ‘capitalism,’ individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor.”

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At SEEK 2026, young Catholics urged to use technology intentionally, as a tool #Catholic Andrew Laubacher, executive director of Humanality, ahead of his talk at SEEK 2026 in Denver, Colorado on Jan. 2, 2026. Credit: Francesca Fenton/EWTN News Jan 3, 2026 / 17:56 pm (CNA). In 2018, Andrew Laubacher, a touring Catholic musician at the time, decided to quit social media completely. Despite his recording label telling him that he was making a terrible decision, he was exhausted from the impact it was having on his life and felt God calling him to make this change.Fast-forward to today and Laubacher is now the executive director of Humanality, a nonprofit organization that “exists to help people discover freedom through an intentional relationship with technology” and offers individuals help to break their digital addiction through a 12-week digital detox program.Speaking to hundreds of young Catholics at SEEK 2026 in Denver, Colorado, on Jan. 2, he explained how social media can become addictive and have negative effects on the human person – including depression, anxiety, and body image issues – and offered tips on how individuals can use technology practically and intentionally.Laubacher began by highlighting data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which showed that the average U.S. life expectancy decreased for the first time between 2017 and 2019 and that “Americans are 10 times more likely to have a depressive illness than they were 60 years ago."Citing the federal data as well as research in Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book “The Anxious Generation,” Laubacher explained that in 2010 a new feature was introduced on smartphones which led to “drastic increases in anxiety and depression.”What was this feature? The front-facing camera.“When that front-facing camera came out, all of a sudden our lives became self-defining,” he argued.Laubacher shared how he saw this play out in his own life – constantly comparing himself and his life to others, experiencing lust, feeling lonely, and wasting his time mindlessly scrolling through his feeds.“These technologies affected me in many different ways,” he said, “And when I made that leap [off social media] everything got better. My friendships got better, my purity, my productivity, my prayer got better. Everything started to improve.”“So you guys, the way that you've grown up with these technologies has literally changed everything… It's changed the way you think. It's changed the way you behave. It's changed the way you relate to one another. It's changed the way you sleep. It's changed the way you perceive reality,” Laubacher told those gathered. “You have to understand algorithms are literally shaping your perception of what is true. And if you are living your life scrolling and getting stuck into these platforms like me you're not necessarily as you want to be.”Laubacher said that the average 18-year-old in 2025 is on pace to have a 90-year life span. He then broke this down into how many months one might spend doing different activities such as eating, sleeping, going to school or work, and driving. Over the course of one's life, the average person is left with “334 months of free time – this is where you fall in love. This is where you create music, this is where you write that book, this is where you go on the trip with your loved ones. This is where you discover your vocation,” Laubacher said.“Right now, of those 334 months, 93% of that time is going to be spent on the screen,” he said. “At the end of your lives, you in this crowd will have looked at the screen for 27 years of your life." "And friends, my mission is to help you get that time back into your life. So you can invest that time and attention into the things that matter most.”Offering those gathered practical tools to gain more freedom from digital media, Laubacher highlighted three of the 11 ways Humanality’s digital detox program aims to help individuals gain a more human way to be – be light, be giving, and be present.“Be light” focuses on individuals stopping the nighttime scrolling and beginning to acknowledge the difference between daytime and nighttime. Laubacher explained that people spend 90% of their time indoors versus 100 years ago when people spent 90% of their time outdoors. Additionally, when people scroll on their phones at nighttime, the light from the screen tells the brain it’s daytime.“So, our separation from light in the daytime — and you scrolling yourself to sleep in the nighttime — is a huge reason for our mental health slash sleep disorder slash fatigue and exhaustion,” he said.“Be giving” turns the self-centered nature of social media to one where you “start to think outside of yourself,” which leads a person to be “more happy and more healthy when you live a life that is giving,” Laubacher explained.The last way Laubacher highlighted was “be present,” which aims to simply teach people how to be present with themselves, with others, and with God. “Friends, I want to tell you right now, the scariest, best, most amazing adventure in your life is going to be learning to love God, your neighbor, and yourself,” Laubacher said. “And if I'm honest, I can love people pretty easily, but it's really hard for me to love myself most of the time. And I found that my technologies were not allowing me to get to know the person that God has created me to be.”“These three ways – there's a lot more – but these three ways I think if you start to implement in your day today you'll start to use technology as a tool and get out of these addictions.”
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At SEEK 2026, young Catholics urged to use technology intentionally, as a tool #Catholic Andrew Laubacher, executive director of Humanality, ahead of his talk at SEEK 2026 in Denver, Colorado on Jan. 2, 2026. Credit: Francesca Fenton/EWTN News Jan 3, 2026 / 17:56 pm (CNA). In 2018, Andrew Laubacher, a touring Catholic musician at the time, decided to quit social media completely. Despite his recording label telling him that he was making a terrible decision, he was exhausted from the impact it was having on his life and felt God calling him to make this change.Fast-forward to today and Laubacher is now the executive director of Humanality, a nonprofit organization that “exists to help people discover freedom through an intentional relationship with technology” and offers individuals help to break their digital addiction through a 12-week digital detox program.Speaking to hundreds of young Catholics at SEEK 2026 in Denver, Colorado, on Jan. 2, he explained how social media can become addictive and have negative effects on the human person – including depression, anxiety, and body image issues – and offered tips on how individuals can use technology practically and intentionally.Laubacher began by highlighting data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which showed that the average U.S. life expectancy decreased for the first time between 2017 and 2019 and that “Americans are 10 times more likely to have a depressive illness than they were 60 years ago."Citing the federal data as well as research in Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book “The Anxious Generation,” Laubacher explained that in 2010 a new feature was introduced on smartphones which led to “drastic increases in anxiety and depression.”What was this feature? The front-facing camera.“When that front-facing camera came out, all of a sudden our lives became self-defining,” he argued.Laubacher shared how he saw this play out in his own life – constantly comparing himself and his life to others, experiencing lust, feeling lonely, and wasting his time mindlessly scrolling through his feeds.“These technologies affected me in many different ways,” he said, “And when I made that leap [off social media] everything got better. My friendships got better, my purity, my productivity, my prayer got better. Everything started to improve.”“So you guys, the way that you've grown up with these technologies has literally changed everything… It's changed the way you think. It's changed the way you behave. It's changed the way you relate to one another. It's changed the way you sleep. It's changed the way you perceive reality,” Laubacher told those gathered. “You have to understand algorithms are literally shaping your perception of what is true. And if you are living your life scrolling and getting stuck into these platforms like me you're not necessarily as you want to be.”Laubacher said that the average 18-year-old in 2025 is on pace to have a 90-year life span. He then broke this down into how many months one might spend doing different activities such as eating, sleeping, going to school or work, and driving. Over the course of one's life, the average person is left with “334 months of free time – this is where you fall in love. This is where you create music, this is where you write that book, this is where you go on the trip with your loved ones. This is where you discover your vocation,” Laubacher said.“Right now, of those 334 months, 93% of that time is going to be spent on the screen,” he said. “At the end of your lives, you in this crowd will have looked at the screen for 27 years of your life." "And friends, my mission is to help you get that time back into your life. So you can invest that time and attention into the things that matter most.”Offering those gathered practical tools to gain more freedom from digital media, Laubacher highlighted three of the 11 ways Humanality’s digital detox program aims to help individuals gain a more human way to be – be light, be giving, and be present.“Be light” focuses on individuals stopping the nighttime scrolling and beginning to acknowledge the difference between daytime and nighttime. Laubacher explained that people spend 90% of their time indoors versus 100 years ago when people spent 90% of their time outdoors. Additionally, when people scroll on their phones at nighttime, the light from the screen tells the brain it’s daytime.“So, our separation from light in the daytime — and you scrolling yourself to sleep in the nighttime — is a huge reason for our mental health slash sleep disorder slash fatigue and exhaustion,” he said.“Be giving” turns the self-centered nature of social media to one where you “start to think outside of yourself,” which leads a person to be “more happy and more healthy when you live a life that is giving,” Laubacher explained.The last way Laubacher highlighted was “be present,” which aims to simply teach people how to be present with themselves, with others, and with God. “Friends, I want to tell you right now, the scariest, best, most amazing adventure in your life is going to be learning to love God, your neighbor, and yourself,” Laubacher said. “And if I'm honest, I can love people pretty easily, but it's really hard for me to love myself most of the time. And I found that my technologies were not allowing me to get to know the person that God has created me to be.”“These three ways – there's a lot more – but these three ways I think if you start to implement in your day today you'll start to use technology as a tool and get out of these addictions.”

unitedyam

Andrew Laubacher, executive director of Humanality, ahead of his talk at SEEK 2026 in Denver, Colorado on Jan. 2, 2026. Credit: Francesca Fenton/EWTN News

Jan 3, 2026 / 17:56 pm (CNA).

In 2018, Andrew Laubacher, a touring Catholic musician at the time, decided to quit social media completely. Despite his recording label telling him that he was making a terrible decision, he was exhausted from the impact it was having on his life and felt God calling him to make this change.

Fast-forward to today and Laubacher is now the executive director of Humanality, a nonprofit organization that “exists to help people discover freedom through an intentional relationship with technology” and offers individuals help to break their digital addiction through a 12-week digital detox program.

Speaking to hundreds of young Catholics at SEEK 2026 in Denver, Colorado, on Jan. 2, he explained how social media can become addictive and have negative effects on the human person – including depression, anxiety, and body image issues – and offered tips on how individuals can use technology practically and intentionally.

Laubacher began by highlighting data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which showed that the average U.S. life expectancy decreased for the first time between 2017 and 2019 and that “Americans are 10 times more likely to have a depressive illness than they were 60 years ago."

Citing the federal data as well as research in Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book “The Anxious Generation,” Laubacher explained that in 2010 a new feature was introduced on smartphones which led to “drastic increases in anxiety and depression.”

What was this feature? The front-facing camera.

“When that front-facing camera came out, all of a sudden our lives became self-defining,” he argued.

Laubacher shared how he saw this play out in his own life – constantly comparing himself and his life to others, experiencing lust, feeling lonely, and wasting his time mindlessly scrolling through his feeds.

“These technologies affected me in many different ways,” he said, “And when I made that leap [off social media] everything got better. My friendships got better, my purity, my productivity, my prayer got better. Everything started to improve.”

“So you guys, the way that you've grown up with these technologies has literally changed everything… It's changed the way you think. It's changed the way you behave. It's changed the way you relate to one another. It's changed the way you sleep. It's changed the way you perceive reality,” Laubacher told those gathered.

“You have to understand algorithms are literally shaping your perception of what is true. And if you are living your life scrolling and getting stuck into these platforms like me you're not necessarily as you want to be.”

Laubacher said that the average 18-year-old in 2025 is on pace to have a 90-year life span. He then broke this down into how many months one might spend doing different activities such as eating, sleeping, going to school or work, and driving.

Over the course of one's life, the average person is left with “334 months of free time – this is where you fall in love. This is where you create music, this is where you write that book, this is where you go on the trip with your loved ones. This is where you discover your vocation,” Laubacher said.

“Right now, of those 334 months, 93% of that time is going to be spent on the screen,” he said. “At the end of your lives, you in this crowd will have looked at the screen for 27 years of your life."

"And friends, my mission is to help you get that time back into your life. So you can invest that time and attention into the things that matter most.”

Offering those gathered practical tools to gain more freedom from digital media, Laubacher highlighted three of the 11 ways Humanality’s digital detox program aims to help individuals gain a more human way to be – be light, be giving, and be present.

“Be light” focuses on individuals stopping the nighttime scrolling and beginning to acknowledge the difference between daytime and nighttime. Laubacher explained that people spend 90% of their time indoors versus 100 years ago when people spent 90% of their time outdoors.

Additionally, when people scroll on their phones at nighttime, the light from the screen tells the brain it’s daytime.

“So, our separation from light in the daytime — and you scrolling yourself to sleep in the nighttime — is a huge reason for our mental health slash sleep disorder slash fatigue and exhaustion,” he said.

“Be giving” turns the self-centered nature of social media to one where you “start to think outside of yourself,” which leads a person to be “more happy and more healthy when you live a life that is giving,” Laubacher explained.

The last way Laubacher highlighted was “be present,” which aims to simply teach people how to be present with themselves, with others, and with God.
“Friends, I want to tell you right now, the scariest, best, most amazing adventure in your life is going to be learning to love God, your neighbor, and yourself,” Laubacher said.

“And if I'm honest, I can love people pretty easily, but it's really hard for me to love myself most of the time. And I found that my technologies were not allowing me to get to know the person that God has created me to be.”

“These three ways – there's a lot more – but these three ways I think if you start to implement in your day today you'll start to use technology as a tool and get out of these addictions.”

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5-year-old son of Catholic speaker Paul Kim passes away #Catholic Micah Kim, the 5-year-old son of Catholic speaker and influencer Paul Kim, passed away Dec. 31, 2025. | Credit: Screenshot of Paul Kim’s Facebook page, last visited Jan. 1, 2026 Jan 1, 2026 / 16:24 pm (CNA). Micah Kim, the 5-year-old son of popular Catholic speaker Paul Kim, has passed away, Kim announced in a tearful social media post Thursday afternoon.Micah died on Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2025, after more than a week on life support following a rare medical emergency brought on by a severe case of the flu.“Micah Joseph is beginning the new year basking in the never-ending glory, love, and peace of God,” Kim wrote in the post, which was accompanied by a two-part video. “Micah has been very busy already, as I see the Lord using him and sending him on missions to bring millions of people closer to God.”Kim asked for privacy for his family as they grieve but said he felt he had to provide an update to the millions of people praying for Micah and his family throughout the ordeal. He shared that over the last week and a half, his social media account has been viewed more than 50 million times by people from all over the world offering prayers for the situation.Micah was rushed to the hospital a week and a half ago after experiencing severe internal bleeding and other complications. Kim, a devoted husband and father of six known for his engaging talks on faith and family at Catholic conferences, first alerted followers via social media on Dec. 22: “My son Micah is having a medical emergency right now and headed to the hospital in an ambulance.”By Dec. 24, Micah underwent emergency chest surgery to address the bleeding, which successfully stabilized his heart function. Kim shared on social media that after the surgery, his son’s heart began beating independently and his vital signs remained steady.Doctors gradually reduced life support, with Micah’s lungs showing slow improvement on a ventilator. However, a subsequent MRI revealed severe brain damage, leading physicians to conclude there is “no medical possibility” of recovery.“I couldn’t be a prouder father,” Kim said in his Jan. 1 post. “This reality gives me great joy and hope in the midst of sorrow. Our hearts are broken; but we trust in the Lord. Please pray for my family and me as we learn how to live by faith and not by sight.”Cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, and laypeople — including many well-known Catholic media personalities — had messaged Kim and told him they were praying for his son, he said. Kim had prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet live with followers during the ordeal, and the family had asked for a miracle through the intercession of Venerable Fulton Sheen.In addition to an outpouring of prayer for Micah, a GoFundMe campaign was begun to support the family amid mounting medical costs.“Thank you for all the love, prayers, and compassion that a countless number of you have showed us,” Kim wrote. “May God truly bless you. Your prayers for Micah were answered, but in a different way than what we had all hoped for. God healed and welcomed him into eternal life. He is where we all want to be.”Amira Abuzeid contributed to this story.
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5-year-old son of Catholic speaker Paul Kim passes away #Catholic Micah Kim, the 5-year-old son of Catholic speaker and influencer Paul Kim, passed away Dec. 31, 2025. | Credit: Screenshot of Paul Kim’s Facebook page, last visited Jan. 1, 2026 Jan 1, 2026 / 16:24 pm (CNA). Micah Kim, the 5-year-old son of popular Catholic speaker Paul Kim, has passed away, Kim announced in a tearful social media post Thursday afternoon.Micah died on Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2025, after more than a week on life support following a rare medical emergency brought on by a severe case of the flu.“Micah Joseph is beginning the new year basking in the never-ending glory, love, and peace of God,” Kim wrote in the post, which was accompanied by a two-part video. “Micah has been very busy already, as I see the Lord using him and sending him on missions to bring millions of people closer to God.”Kim asked for privacy for his family as they grieve but said he felt he had to provide an update to the millions of people praying for Micah and his family throughout the ordeal. He shared that over the last week and a half, his social media account has been viewed more than 50 million times by people from all over the world offering prayers for the situation.Micah was rushed to the hospital a week and a half ago after experiencing severe internal bleeding and other complications. Kim, a devoted husband and father of six known for his engaging talks on faith and family at Catholic conferences, first alerted followers via social media on Dec. 22: “My son Micah is having a medical emergency right now and headed to the hospital in an ambulance.”By Dec. 24, Micah underwent emergency chest surgery to address the bleeding, which successfully stabilized his heart function. Kim shared on social media that after the surgery, his son’s heart began beating independently and his vital signs remained steady.Doctors gradually reduced life support, with Micah’s lungs showing slow improvement on a ventilator. However, a subsequent MRI revealed severe brain damage, leading physicians to conclude there is “no medical possibility” of recovery.“I couldn’t be a prouder father,” Kim said in his Jan. 1 post. “This reality gives me great joy and hope in the midst of sorrow. Our hearts are broken; but we trust in the Lord. Please pray for my family and me as we learn how to live by faith and not by sight.”Cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, and laypeople — including many well-known Catholic media personalities — had messaged Kim and told him they were praying for his son, he said. Kim had prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet live with followers during the ordeal, and the family had asked for a miracle through the intercession of Venerable Fulton Sheen.In addition to an outpouring of prayer for Micah, a GoFundMe campaign was begun to support the family amid mounting medical costs.“Thank you for all the love, prayers, and compassion that a countless number of you have showed us,” Kim wrote. “May God truly bless you. Your prayers for Micah were answered, but in a different way than what we had all hoped for. God healed and welcomed him into eternal life. He is where we all want to be.”Amira Abuzeid contributed to this story.

unitedyam

Micah Kim, the 5-year-old son of Catholic speaker and influencer Paul Kim, passed away Dec. 31, 2025. | Credit: Screenshot of Paul Kim’s Facebook page, last visited Jan. 1, 2026

Jan 1, 2026 / 16:24 pm (CNA).

Micah Kim, the 5-year-old son of popular Catholic speaker Paul Kim, has passed away, Kim announced in a tearful social media post Thursday afternoon.

Micah died on Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2025, after more than a week on life support following a rare medical emergency brought on by a severe case of the flu.

“Micah Joseph is beginning the new year basking in the never-ending glory, love, and peace of God,” Kim wrote in the post, which was accompanied by a two-part video. “Micah has been very busy already, as I see the Lord using him and sending him on missions to bring millions of people closer to God.”

Kim asked for privacy for his family as they grieve but said he felt he had to provide an update to the millions of people praying for Micah and his family throughout the ordeal. He shared that over the last week and a half, his social media account has been viewed more than 50 million times by people from all over the world offering prayers for the situation.

Micah was rushed to the hospital a week and a half ago after experiencing severe internal bleeding and other complications. Kim, a devoted husband and father of six known for his engaging talks on faith and family at Catholic conferences, first alerted followers via social media on Dec. 22: “My son Micah is having a medical emergency right now and headed to the hospital in an ambulance.”

By Dec. 24, Micah underwent emergency chest surgery to address the bleeding, which successfully stabilized his heart function. Kim shared on social media that after the surgery, his son’s heart began beating independently and his vital signs remained steady.

Doctors gradually reduced life support, with Micah’s lungs showing slow improvement on a ventilator. However, a subsequent MRI revealed severe brain damage, leading physicians to conclude there is “no medical possibility” of recovery.

“I couldn’t be a prouder father,” Kim said in his Jan. 1 post. “This reality gives me great joy and hope in the midst of sorrow. Our hearts are broken; but we trust in the Lord. Please pray for my family and me as we learn how to live by faith and not by sight.”

Cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, and laypeople — including many well-known Catholic media personalities — had messaged Kim and told him they were praying for his son, he said. Kim had prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet live with followers during the ordeal, and the family had asked for a miracle through the intercession of Venerable Fulton Sheen.

In addition to an outpouring of prayer for Micah, a GoFundMe campaign was begun to support the family amid mounting medical costs.

“Thank you for all the love, prayers, and compassion that a countless number of you have showed us,” Kim wrote. “May God truly bless you. Your prayers for Micah were answered, but in a different way than what we had all hoped for. God healed and welcomed him into eternal life. He is where we all want to be.”

Amira Abuzeid contributed to this story.

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Popular Catholic speaker pleads for a miracle amid son’s medical emergency #Catholic Micah Kim, 5, son of popular Catholic speaker Paul Kim, is anointed by a priest on Dec. 26, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Paul Kim's Facebook page / null Dec 29, 2025 / 17:51 pm (CNA). Paul Kim, a highly popular Catholic youth and young adult speaker, continues to share updates on his 5-year-old son, Micah, who remains on life support following a sudden medical emergency just days before Christmas.Entering his ninth day in the hospital, Micah’s condition has sparked an outpouring of prayers across the globe, with the family invoking the intercession of Venerable Fulton Sheen for a miracle amid grim medical prognoses.The ordeal began when Micah was rushed to the hospital last week after experiencing severe internal bleeding and other complications. Kim, a devoted husband and father of six known for his engaging talks on faith and family at Catholic conferences, first alerted followers via social media on Dec. 22: “My son Micah is having a medical emergency right now and headed to the hospital in an ambulance.”By Dec. 24, Micah underwent emergency chest surgery to address the bleeding, which successfully stabilized his heart function. Kim shared on social media that after the surgery, his son’s heart began beating independently and his vital signs remained steady.Doctors gradually reduced life support, with Micah’s lungs showing slow improvement on a ventilator. However, a subsequent MRI revealed severe brain damage, leading physicians to conclude there is “no medical possibility” of recovery.“Micah is fighting for his life,” Kim said in a Dec. 29 update on Instagram. “We’re waiting on the Lord, and we don’t give up trust.”Micah received the sacrament of anointing of the sick on Dec. 23 at 3 p.m., “when divine mercy redeemed us all,” and Kim invited all Catholics to join with his family in praying the Divine Mercy Chaplet, humbly requesting a miracle “through the intercession of Archbishop Fulton Sheen.”In addition to an outpouring of prayer for Micah, a GoFundMe campaign was begun to support the family amid mounting medical costs.“Praying that all is stable and the parents are resting,” one supporter posted on social media platform X, echoing widespread sentiment.As of Dec. 29, Micah’s kidney function remains a concern, but the family is holding fast to hope. “Please keep praying! God has the ultimate say. He is the Divine Physician,” Kim noted on Instagram.
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Popular Catholic speaker pleads for a miracle amid son’s medical emergency #Catholic Micah Kim, 5, son of popular Catholic speaker Paul Kim, is anointed by a priest on Dec. 26, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Paul Kim's Facebook page / null Dec 29, 2025 / 17:51 pm (CNA). Paul Kim, a highly popular Catholic youth and young adult speaker, continues to share updates on his 5-year-old son, Micah, who remains on life support following a sudden medical emergency just days before Christmas.Entering his ninth day in the hospital, Micah’s condition has sparked an outpouring of prayers across the globe, with the family invoking the intercession of Venerable Fulton Sheen for a miracle amid grim medical prognoses.The ordeal began when Micah was rushed to the hospital last week after experiencing severe internal bleeding and other complications. Kim, a devoted husband and father of six known for his engaging talks on faith and family at Catholic conferences, first alerted followers via social media on Dec. 22: “My son Micah is having a medical emergency right now and headed to the hospital in an ambulance.”By Dec. 24, Micah underwent emergency chest surgery to address the bleeding, which successfully stabilized his heart function. Kim shared on social media that after the surgery, his son’s heart began beating independently and his vital signs remained steady.Doctors gradually reduced life support, with Micah’s lungs showing slow improvement on a ventilator. However, a subsequent MRI revealed severe brain damage, leading physicians to conclude there is “no medical possibility” of recovery.“Micah is fighting for his life,” Kim said in a Dec. 29 update on Instagram. “We’re waiting on the Lord, and we don’t give up trust.”Micah received the sacrament of anointing of the sick on Dec. 23 at 3 p.m., “when divine mercy redeemed us all,” and Kim invited all Catholics to join with his family in praying the Divine Mercy Chaplet, humbly requesting a miracle “through the intercession of Archbishop Fulton Sheen.”In addition to an outpouring of prayer for Micah, a GoFundMe campaign was begun to support the family amid mounting medical costs.“Praying that all is stable and the parents are resting,” one supporter posted on social media platform X, echoing widespread sentiment.As of Dec. 29, Micah’s kidney function remains a concern, but the family is holding fast to hope. “Please keep praying! God has the ultimate say. He is the Divine Physician,” Kim noted on Instagram.

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Micah Kim, 5, son of popular Catholic speaker Paul Kim, is anointed by a priest on Dec. 26, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Paul Kim's Facebook page / null

Dec 29, 2025 / 17:51 pm (CNA).

Paul Kim, a highly popular Catholic youth and young adult speaker, continues to share updates on his 5-year-old son, Micah, who remains on life support following a sudden medical emergency just days before Christmas.

Entering his ninth day in the hospital, Micah’s condition has sparked an outpouring of prayers across the globe, with the family invoking the intercession of Venerable Fulton Sheen for a miracle amid grim medical prognoses.

The ordeal began when Micah was rushed to the hospital last week after experiencing severe internal bleeding and other complications. Kim, a devoted husband and father of six known for his engaging talks on faith and family at Catholic conferences, first alerted followers via social media on Dec. 22: “My son Micah is having a medical emergency right now and headed to the hospital in an ambulance.”

By Dec. 24, Micah underwent emergency chest surgery to address the bleeding, which successfully stabilized his heart function. Kim shared on social media that after the surgery, his son’s heart began beating independently and his vital signs remained steady.

Doctors gradually reduced life support, with Micah’s lungs showing slow improvement on a ventilator. However, a subsequent MRI revealed severe brain damage, leading physicians to conclude there is “no medical possibility” of recovery.

“Micah is fighting for his life,” Kim said in a Dec. 29 update on Instagram. “We’re waiting on the Lord, and we don’t give up trust.”

Micah received the sacrament of anointing of the sick on Dec. 23 at 3 p.m., “when divine mercy redeemed us all,” and Kim invited all Catholics to join with his family in praying the Divine Mercy Chaplet, humbly requesting a miracle “through the intercession of Archbishop Fulton Sheen.”

In addition to an outpouring of prayer for Micah, a GoFundMe campaign was begun to support the family amid mounting medical costs.

“Praying that all is stable and the parents are resting,” one supporter posted on social media platform X, echoing widespread sentiment.

As of Dec. 29, Micah’s kidney function remains a concern, but the family is holding fast to hope. “Please keep praying! God has the ultimate say. He is the Divine Physician,” Kim noted on Instagram.

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Should Catholics use AI to re-create deceased loved ones? Experts weigh in #Catholic A child holds a phone with the Replika app open and an image of an AI companion. Apps that promise to help recreate digital versions of deceased family members using AI pose a “spiritual danger” to Catholics and others who may use the technology in place of healthy grief, experts say. / Credit: Generated by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system on Shutterstock CNA Staff, Dec 27, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA). Apps that promise to help re-create digital versions of deceased family members using AI pose a “spiritual danger” to Catholics and others who may use the technology in place of healthy grief, experts say.The AI company 2wai ignited a controversy on social media in November after it revealed its eponymous app, which will allow users to fabricate digital versions of their loved ones using video and audio footage.App co-founder Calum Worthy said in a viral X post that the tech could permit “loved ones we’ve lost [to] be part of our future.” The accompanying video shows a family continuously interacting with the digital projection of a deceased mother and grandmother even years after she died.What if the loved ones we've lost could be part of our future? pic.twitter.com/oFBGekVo1R— Calum Worthy (@CalumWorthy) November 11, 2025 The reveal of the app brought praise from some tech commentators, though there was also considerable negative reaction. Many critics denounced it as “vile,” “demonic,” and “terrifying,” with others predicting that the app would be used to ghoulish ends such as using dead relatives to promote internet advertisements. Tech ‘could disrupt the grieving process’2wai did not respond to requests for comment on the controversy, though company CEO Mason Geyser told the Independent that the ad was deliberately meant to be “controversial” in order to “spark this kind of online debate.” Geyser himself said he views the app as a tool to be used with his children to help preserve the memories of earlier generations rather than as a means to having a relationship with an AI avatar. “I see it … as a way to just kind of pass on some of those really good memories that I had with my grandparents,” he said. Whether or not such an app is compatible with the Catholic understanding of death — and of more diffuse, esoteric topics like grief — is unclear. Father Michael Baggot, LC, an associate professor of bioethics at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, acknowledged that AI avatars “could potentially remind us of certain aspects of our loved ones and help us learn from their examples.”But such digital replicas “cannot capture the full richness of the embodied human being,” he said, and they risk “distorting the dead’s legacy” by fabricating conversations and interactions beyond the dead’s control. Catholic leaders have regularly remarked on both the heavy burden of grief and its redemptive power. Pope Francis in 2020 acknowledged that grief is ”a bitter path,” but it can “serve to open our eyes to life and the sacred and irreplaceable value of each person,” while helping one realize “how short time is.”In October, meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV told a grieving father that those mourning the death of a loved one must “remain connected to the Lord, going through the greatest pain with the help of his grace.” The Resurrection, he said, “knows no discouragement or pain that imprisons us in the extreme difficulty of not finding meaning in our existence.”Brett Robinson, the associate director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, warned that there is “spiritual danger” in technology that outwardly appears to bring loved ones back from the dead. Technology is not a neutral product, he said, but one that “has a profound ability to shape our perception of reality, regardless of the content being displayed.”“In the case of re-presenting dead loved ones we meet one such case where prior conceptions about identity, vitality, and presence are being reshaped along technological lines,” he said.  “If someone who no longer exists in human form, body and soul, can be ‘resurrected’ from an archive of the digital traces of their life, who or what are we actually engaging with?” he said. Robinson argued that present modes of technology have echoes of earlier centuries “when the cosmos was filled with presence — the presence of God, of angels, of demons, and of magic.” The problem at hand, he said, is that the “new magic” of modern technology “is divorced from the hierarchical, ordered cosmos of creation and the spiritual realm.”Donna MacLeod has worked in grief ministry for decades. She first became involved in Catholic grief counseling after the death of her youngest daughter in 1988. The funeral ministry evolved into Seasons of Hope, a grief support program for Catholics that “focuses on the spiritual side of grieving the death of a loved one.”MacLeod said the program is one of “hospitality and spirituality” that arises in an intensive community of individuals suffering from grief. “It builds parish communities,” she said. “People discover they’re not alone. That’s a big deal to grieving people — a lot of people feel very alone in their loss.” “And society expects everybody to move on,” she continued. “But grief has its own timetable. Those who are grieving start to understand that the Lord is with them and that he really cares about them. There’s hope and healing at the end of it.” “It’s doing what Christ asks us to do — walking with each other in hard times,” she said. Regarding the AI avatar technology, MacLeod acknowledged that those who have lost a loved one make it a “very high priority” to “seek connection” with the deceased. “People will say, ‘I’m not taking my loved one’s voice off of my answering machine,’” she said. “Or we have people taking out videos of family gatherings so they can see their loved ones again.”“Everyone seeks to still be connected with their loved ones,” she said. “It’s related to our Catholic faith and the communion of saints — people feel this spiritual connection with their loved ones.”MacLeod described herself as “on the fence” about how people could be affected by AI avatar apps. There could be “emotional and psychological risks interacting with AI versions of loved ones,” she admitted, though she said that many users “might look at it, but not get hung up on it,” unless they have underlying mental health issues. But “where the difficulty arises is that some people get stuck in the denial stage,” she said. Those suffering from grief can get desperate in such circumstances, she said, and sometimes resort to means such as mediums or psychics, which MacLeod pointed out the Church explicitly forbids. Whether or not AI avatars fall under that forbidden category is unclear. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expressly outlaws any efforts at “conjuring up the dead.” The use of mediums or clairvoyants “all conceal[s] a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings,” the Church says. Baggot said apps like 2wai’s “assemble data about the deceased without preserving the person.” He further argued that AI avatars “could also disrupt the grieving process by sending ambiguous signals about the survival of the departed person.”Robinson, meanwhile, acknowledged that it is “good to want to connect to deceased loved ones,” which he pointed out we do “liturgically through prayer and memorials that honor those souls that are dear to us.” He warned, however, against “technocratic creators of complex computational machines that are becoming indistinguishable from magic.”Such technology, he said, alters “the spiritual order” in ways “that are disordered and disembodied from the ritual forms that sustain religion and our belief that our eternal destiny rests with God in heaven and not in a database.”
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Should Catholics use AI to re-create deceased loved ones? Experts weigh in #Catholic A child holds a phone with the Replika app open and an image of an AI companion. Apps that promise to help recreate digital versions of deceased family members using AI pose a “spiritual danger” to Catholics and others who may use the technology in place of healthy grief, experts say. / Credit: Generated by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system on Shutterstock CNA Staff, Dec 27, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA). Apps that promise to help re-create digital versions of deceased family members using AI pose a “spiritual danger” to Catholics and others who may use the technology in place of healthy grief, experts say.The AI company 2wai ignited a controversy on social media in November after it revealed its eponymous app, which will allow users to fabricate digital versions of their loved ones using video and audio footage.App co-founder Calum Worthy said in a viral X post that the tech could permit “loved ones we’ve lost [to] be part of our future.” The accompanying video shows a family continuously interacting with the digital projection of a deceased mother and grandmother even years after she died.What if the loved ones we’ve lost could be part of our future? pic.twitter.com/oFBGekVo1R— Calum Worthy (@CalumWorthy) November 11, 2025 The reveal of the app brought praise from some tech commentators, though there was also considerable negative reaction. Many critics denounced it as “vile,” “demonic,” and “terrifying,” with others predicting that the app would be used to ghoulish ends such as using dead relatives to promote internet advertisements. Tech ‘could disrupt the grieving process’2wai did not respond to requests for comment on the controversy, though company CEO Mason Geyser told the Independent that the ad was deliberately meant to be “controversial” in order to “spark this kind of online debate.” Geyser himself said he views the app as a tool to be used with his children to help preserve the memories of earlier generations rather than as a means to having a relationship with an AI avatar. “I see it … as a way to just kind of pass on some of those really good memories that I had with my grandparents,” he said. Whether or not such an app is compatible with the Catholic understanding of death — and of more diffuse, esoteric topics like grief — is unclear. Father Michael Baggot, LC, an associate professor of bioethics at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, acknowledged that AI avatars “could potentially remind us of certain aspects of our loved ones and help us learn from their examples.”But such digital replicas “cannot capture the full richness of the embodied human being,” he said, and they risk “distorting the dead’s legacy” by fabricating conversations and interactions beyond the dead’s control. Catholic leaders have regularly remarked on both the heavy burden of grief and its redemptive power. Pope Francis in 2020 acknowledged that grief is ”a bitter path,” but it can “serve to open our eyes to life and the sacred and irreplaceable value of each person,” while helping one realize “how short time is.”In October, meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV told a grieving father that those mourning the death of a loved one must “remain connected to the Lord, going through the greatest pain with the help of his grace.” The Resurrection, he said, “knows no discouragement or pain that imprisons us in the extreme difficulty of not finding meaning in our existence.”Brett Robinson, the associate director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, warned that there is “spiritual danger” in technology that outwardly appears to bring loved ones back from the dead. Technology is not a neutral product, he said, but one that “has a profound ability to shape our perception of reality, regardless of the content being displayed.”“In the case of re-presenting dead loved ones we meet one such case where prior conceptions about identity, vitality, and presence are being reshaped along technological lines,” he said.  “If someone who no longer exists in human form, body and soul, can be ‘resurrected’ from an archive of the digital traces of their life, who or what are we actually engaging with?” he said. Robinson argued that present modes of technology have echoes of earlier centuries “when the cosmos was filled with presence — the presence of God, of angels, of demons, and of magic.” The problem at hand, he said, is that the “new magic” of modern technology “is divorced from the hierarchical, ordered cosmos of creation and the spiritual realm.”Donna MacLeod has worked in grief ministry for decades. She first became involved in Catholic grief counseling after the death of her youngest daughter in 1988. The funeral ministry evolved into Seasons of Hope, a grief support program for Catholics that “focuses on the spiritual side of grieving the death of a loved one.”MacLeod said the program is one of “hospitality and spirituality” that arises in an intensive community of individuals suffering from grief. “It builds parish communities,” she said. “People discover they’re not alone. That’s a big deal to grieving people — a lot of people feel very alone in their loss.” “And society expects everybody to move on,” she continued. “But grief has its own timetable. Those who are grieving start to understand that the Lord is with them and that he really cares about them. There’s hope and healing at the end of it.” “It’s doing what Christ asks us to do — walking with each other in hard times,” she said. Regarding the AI avatar technology, MacLeod acknowledged that those who have lost a loved one make it a “very high priority” to “seek connection” with the deceased. “People will say, ‘I’m not taking my loved one’s voice off of my answering machine,’” she said. “Or we have people taking out videos of family gatherings so they can see their loved ones again.”“Everyone seeks to still be connected with their loved ones,” she said. “It’s related to our Catholic faith and the communion of saints — people feel this spiritual connection with their loved ones.”MacLeod described herself as “on the fence” about how people could be affected by AI avatar apps. There could be “emotional and psychological risks interacting with AI versions of loved ones,” she admitted, though she said that many users “might look at it, but not get hung up on it,” unless they have underlying mental health issues. But “where the difficulty arises is that some people get stuck in the denial stage,” she said. Those suffering from grief can get desperate in such circumstances, she said, and sometimes resort to means such as mediums or psychics, which MacLeod pointed out the Church explicitly forbids. Whether or not AI avatars fall under that forbidden category is unclear. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expressly outlaws any efforts at “conjuring up the dead.” The use of mediums or clairvoyants “all conceal[s] a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings,” the Church says. Baggot said apps like 2wai’s “assemble data about the deceased without preserving the person.” He further argued that AI avatars “could also disrupt the grieving process by sending ambiguous signals about the survival of the departed person.”Robinson, meanwhile, acknowledged that it is “good to want to connect to deceased loved ones,” which he pointed out we do “liturgically through prayer and memorials that honor those souls that are dear to us.” He warned, however, against “technocratic creators of complex computational machines that are becoming indistinguishable from magic.”Such technology, he said, alters “the spiritual order” in ways “that are disordered and disembodied from the ritual forms that sustain religion and our belief that our eternal destiny rests with God in heaven and not in a database.”

unitedyam

A child holds a phone with the Replika app open and an image of an AI companion. Apps that promise to help recreate digital versions of deceased family members using AI pose a “spiritual danger” to Catholics and others who may use the technology in place of healthy grief, experts say. / Credit: Generated by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system on Shutterstock

CNA Staff, Dec 27, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).

Apps that promise to help re-create digital versions of deceased family members using AI pose a “spiritual danger” to Catholics and others who may use the technology in place of healthy grief, experts say.

The AI company 2wai ignited a controversy on social media in November after it revealed its eponymous app, which will allow users to fabricate digital versions of their loved ones using video and audio footage.

App co-founder Calum Worthy said in a viral X post that the tech could permit “loved ones we’ve lost [to] be part of our future.” The accompanying video shows a family continuously interacting with the digital projection of a deceased mother and grandmother even years after she died.

The reveal of the app brought praise from some tech commentators, though there was also considerable negative reaction. Many critics denounced it as “vile,” “demonic,” and “terrifying,” with others predicting that the app would be used to ghoulish ends such as using dead relatives to promote internet advertisements. 

Tech ‘could disrupt the grieving process’

2wai did not respond to requests for comment on the controversy, though company CEO Mason Geyser told the Independent that the ad was deliberately meant to be “controversial” in order to “spark this kind of online debate.” 

Geyser himself said he views the app as a tool to be used with his children to help preserve the memories of earlier generations rather than as a means to having a relationship with an AI avatar. “I see it … as a way to just kind of pass on some of those really good memories that I had with my grandparents,” he said. 

Whether or not such an app is compatible with the Catholic understanding of death — and of more diffuse, esoteric topics like grief — is unclear. Father Michael Baggot, LC, an associate professor of bioethics at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, acknowledged that AI avatars “could potentially remind us of certain aspects of our loved ones and help us learn from their examples.”

But such digital replicas “cannot capture the full richness of the embodied human being,” he said, and they risk “distorting the dead’s legacy” by fabricating conversations and interactions beyond the dead’s control. 

Catholic leaders have regularly remarked on both the heavy burden of grief and its redemptive power. Pope Francis in 2020 acknowledged that grief is ”a bitter path,” but it can “serve to open our eyes to life and the sacred and irreplaceable value of each person,” while helping one realize “how short time is.”

In October, meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV told a grieving father that those mourning the death of a loved one must “remain connected to the Lord, going through the greatest pain with the help of his grace.” 

The Resurrection, he said, “knows no discouragement or pain that imprisons us in the extreme difficulty of not finding meaning in our existence.”

Brett Robinson, the associate director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, warned that there is “spiritual danger” in technology that outwardly appears to bring loved ones back from the dead. 

Technology is not a neutral product, he said, but one that “has a profound ability to shape our perception of reality, regardless of the content being displayed.”

“In the case of re-presenting dead loved ones we meet one such case where prior conceptions about identity, vitality, and presence are being reshaped along technological lines,” he said.  

“If someone who no longer exists in human form, body and soul, can be ‘resurrected’ from an archive of the digital traces of their life, who or what are we actually engaging with?” he said. 

Robinson argued that present modes of technology have echoes of earlier centuries “when the cosmos was filled with presence — the presence of God, of angels, of demons, and of magic.” 

The problem at hand, he said, is that the “new magic” of modern technology “is divorced from the hierarchical, ordered cosmos of creation and the spiritual realm.”

Donna MacLeod has worked in grief ministry for decades. She first became involved in Catholic grief counseling after the death of her youngest daughter in 1988. The funeral ministry evolved into Seasons of Hope, a grief support program for Catholics that “focuses on the spiritual side of grieving the death of a loved one.”

MacLeod said the program is one of “hospitality and spirituality” that arises in an intensive community of individuals suffering from grief. 

“It builds parish communities,” she said. “People discover they’re not alone. That’s a big deal to grieving people — a lot of people feel very alone in their loss.” 

“And society expects everybody to move on,” she continued. “But grief has its own timetable. Those who are grieving start to understand that the Lord is with them and that he really cares about them. There’s hope and healing at the end of it.” 

“It’s doing what Christ asks us to do — walking with each other in hard times,” she said. 

Regarding the AI avatar technology, MacLeod acknowledged that those who have lost a loved one make it a “very high priority” to “seek connection” with the deceased. 

“People will say, ‘I’m not taking my loved one’s voice off of my answering machine,’” she said. “Or we have people taking out videos of family gatherings so they can see their loved ones again.”

“Everyone seeks to still be connected with their loved ones,” she said. “It’s related to our Catholic faith and the communion of saints — people feel this spiritual connection with their loved ones.”

MacLeod described herself as “on the fence” about how people could be affected by AI avatar apps. There could be “emotional and psychological risks interacting with AI versions of loved ones,” she admitted, though she said that many users “might look at it, but not get hung up on it,” unless they have underlying mental health issues. 

But “where the difficulty arises is that some people get stuck in the denial stage,” she said. Those suffering from grief can get desperate in such circumstances, she said, and sometimes resort to means such as mediums or psychics, which MacLeod pointed out the Church explicitly forbids. 

Whether or not AI avatars fall under that forbidden category is unclear. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expressly outlaws any efforts at “conjuring up the dead.” The use of mediums or clairvoyants “all conceal[s] a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings,” the Church says. 

Baggot said apps like 2wai’s “assemble data about the deceased without preserving the person.” 

He further argued that AI avatars “could also disrupt the grieving process by sending ambiguous signals about the survival of the departed person.”

Robinson, meanwhile, acknowledged that it is “good to want to connect to deceased loved ones,” which he pointed out we do “liturgically through prayer and memorials that honor those souls that are dear to us.” 

He warned, however, against “technocratic creators of complex computational machines that are becoming indistinguishable from magic.”

Such technology, he said, alters “the spiritual order” in ways “that are disordered and disembodied from the ritual forms that sustain religion and our belief that our eternal destiny rests with God in heaven and not in a database.”

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Vice President Vance presents a Christian vision of politics #Catholic U.S. Vice President JD Vance. / Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons CNA Staff, Dec 23, 2025 / 14:27 pm (CNA). U.S. Vice President JD Vance, America’s second Catholic vice president, laid out a distinctly Christian vision for American politics in a speech this week, declaring that “the only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been and, by the grace of God, we always will be a Christian nation.”Speaking to more than 30,000 young conservatives at Turning Point USA’s AmFest 2025 some three months after the death of its founder Charlie Kirk, Vance called for a politics rooted in a Christian faith that honors the family, protects the weak, and rejects what he described as a decades-long “war” on Christianity in public life.The Christian faith has provided a “shared moral language” since the nation’s founding, the Yale-trained lawyer argued, which led to “our understanding of natural law and rights, our sense of duty to one’s neighbor, the conviction that the strong must protect the weak, and the belief in individual conscience.”“Christianity is America’s creed,” the vice president said to loud cheers, while acknowledging that not everyone needs to be a Christian and “we must respect each individual’s pathway” to God. Even so, he said, “even our famously American idea of religious liberty is a Christian concept.” Vance described how, over the past several decades, “freedom of religion transformed into freedom from religion” as a result of the cultural assault on Christian faith from those on “the left” who have “labored to push Christianity out of national life. They’ve kicked it out of the schools, out of the workplace, out of the fundamental parts of the public square.”He continued: “And in a public square devoid of God, we got a vacuum. And the ideas that filled that void preyed on the very worst of human nature rather than uplifting it.”Vance said cultural voices opposed to Christian faith “told us not that we were children of God, but children of this or that identity group. They replaced God’s beautiful design for the family that men and women could rely on … with the idea that men could turn into women so long as they bought the right bunch of pills from Big Pharma.” The former U.S. senator and Catholic convert credited President Donald Trump for ending the cultural “war that has been waged on Christians and Christianity in the United States of America,” touting the administration’s policy priorities as the fruit of Christian motivation.“We help older Americans in retirement, including by ending taxes on Social Security, because we believe in honoring your father and mother rather than shipping all of their money off to Ukraine,” he said. “We believe in taking care of the poor, which is why we have Medicaid, so that the least among us can afford their prescriptions or to take their kids to see a doctor.”Speaking of the despair he felt after the assassination of his friend Kirk, he said: “What saved me was realizing that the story of the Christian faith … is one of immense loss followed by even bigger victory. It’s a story of very dark nights followed by very bright dawns. What saved me was remembering the inherent goodness of God and that his grace overflows when we least expect it.”Of masculinity, Vance said: “The fruits of true Christianity are good husbands, patient fathers, builders of great things, and slayers of dragons. And yes, men who are willing to die for a principle if that’s what God asked them to do.”He described how he saw the fruits of Christian men living out their faith during a recent visit to a men’s ministry that aids those who struggle with addiction and homelessness: “They feed them. They clothe them. They give them shelter and financial advice. They live out the very best part of Christ’s commission.”After eating lunch with some of the men who were “all back on their feet” after receiving help, Vance said he saw that the answer to “What saved them?” was not “racial commonality or grievance … a DEI prep course” or “a welfare check.”“It was the fact that a carpenter died 2,000 years ago and changed the world in the process.” “A true Christian politics,” he said, “cannot just be about the protection of the unborn or the promotion of the family. As important as those things absolutely are, it must be at the heart of our full understanding of government.” On immigration policy, Vance has challenged U.S. bishops, popesThe vice president has publicly disagreed with the U.S. bishops on their reaction to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, as well as with Pope Leo XIV and the late Pope Francis, who seemed to criticize Vance in a letter the pontiff penned to the U.S. bishops last winter. In defense of the administration’s approach to immigration, Vance had in a late January interview invoked an “old school … Christian concept” he later identified as the “ordo amoris,” or “rightly ordered love.” He said that according to the concept, one’s “compassion belongs first” to one’s family and fellow citizens, “and then after that” to the rest of the world.After Pope Leo on Nov. 18 asked Americans to listen to U.S. bishops’ message opposing “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and urging the humane treatment of migrants, Vance countered: “Border security is not just good for American citizens. It is the humanitarian thing to do for the entire world.”Vance continued: “Open borders” do not promote “[human] dignity, even of the illegal migrants themselves,” citing drug and sex trafficking.“When you empower the cartels and when you empower the human traffickers, whether in the United States or anywhere else, you’re empowering the very worst people in the world,” Vance said.In this week’s AmFest speech, he touted the administration’s successes regarding immigration: “December marks seven months straight of zero releases at the southern border. More than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the United States. The first time in over 50 years that we have had negative net migration.”At the end of the speech, Vance told the thousands of young people that while “only God can promise you salvation in heaven” if they have faith in God, “I promise you closed borders and safe communities. I promise you good jobs and a dignified life … together, we can fulfill the promise of the greatest nation in the history of the earth.”
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Vice President Vance presents a Christian vision of politics #Catholic U.S. Vice President JD Vance. / Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons CNA Staff, Dec 23, 2025 / 14:27 pm (CNA). U.S. Vice President JD Vance, America’s second Catholic vice president, laid out a distinctly Christian vision for American politics in a speech this week, declaring that “the only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been and, by the grace of God, we always will be a Christian nation.”Speaking to more than 30,000 young conservatives at Turning Point USA’s AmFest 2025 some three months after the death of its founder Charlie Kirk, Vance called for a politics rooted in a Christian faith that honors the family, protects the weak, and rejects what he described as a decades-long “war” on Christianity in public life.The Christian faith has provided a “shared moral language” since the nation’s founding, the Yale-trained lawyer argued, which led to “our understanding of natural law and rights, our sense of duty to one’s neighbor, the conviction that the strong must protect the weak, and the belief in individual conscience.”“Christianity is America’s creed,” the vice president said to loud cheers, while acknowledging that not everyone needs to be a Christian and “we must respect each individual’s pathway” to God. Even so, he said, “even our famously American idea of religious liberty is a Christian concept.” Vance described how, over the past several decades, “freedom of religion transformed into freedom from religion” as a result of the cultural assault on Christian faith from those on “the left” who have “labored to push Christianity out of national life. They’ve kicked it out of the schools, out of the workplace, out of the fundamental parts of the public square.”He continued: “And in a public square devoid of God, we got a vacuum. And the ideas that filled that void preyed on the very worst of human nature rather than uplifting it.”Vance said cultural voices opposed to Christian faith “told us not that we were children of God, but children of this or that identity group. They replaced God’s beautiful design for the family that men and women could rely on … with the idea that men could turn into women so long as they bought the right bunch of pills from Big Pharma.” The former U.S. senator and Catholic convert credited President Donald Trump for ending the cultural “war that has been waged on Christians and Christianity in the United States of America,” touting the administration’s policy priorities as the fruit of Christian motivation.“We help older Americans in retirement, including by ending taxes on Social Security, because we believe in honoring your father and mother rather than shipping all of their money off to Ukraine,” he said. “We believe in taking care of the poor, which is why we have Medicaid, so that the least among us can afford their prescriptions or to take their kids to see a doctor.”Speaking of the despair he felt after the assassination of his friend Kirk, he said: “What saved me was realizing that the story of the Christian faith … is one of immense loss followed by even bigger victory. It’s a story of very dark nights followed by very bright dawns. What saved me was remembering the inherent goodness of God and that his grace overflows when we least expect it.”Of masculinity, Vance said: “The fruits of true Christianity are good husbands, patient fathers, builders of great things, and slayers of dragons. And yes, men who are willing to die for a principle if that’s what God asked them to do.”He described how he saw the fruits of Christian men living out their faith during a recent visit to a men’s ministry that aids those who struggle with addiction and homelessness: “They feed them. They clothe them. They give them shelter and financial advice. They live out the very best part of Christ’s commission.”After eating lunch with some of the men who were “all back on their feet” after receiving help, Vance said he saw that the answer to “What saved them?” was not “racial commonality or grievance … a DEI prep course” or “a welfare check.”“It was the fact that a carpenter died 2,000 years ago and changed the world in the process.” “A true Christian politics,” he said, “cannot just be about the protection of the unborn or the promotion of the family. As important as those things absolutely are, it must be at the heart of our full understanding of government.” On immigration policy, Vance has challenged U.S. bishops, popesThe vice president has publicly disagreed with the U.S. bishops on their reaction to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, as well as with Pope Leo XIV and the late Pope Francis, who seemed to criticize Vance in a letter the pontiff penned to the U.S. bishops last winter. In defense of the administration’s approach to immigration, Vance had in a late January interview invoked an “old school … Christian concept” he later identified as the “ordo amoris,” or “rightly ordered love.” He said that according to the concept, one’s “compassion belongs first” to one’s family and fellow citizens, “and then after that” to the rest of the world.After Pope Leo on Nov. 18 asked Americans to listen to U.S. bishops’ message opposing “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and urging the humane treatment of migrants, Vance countered: “Border security is not just good for American citizens. It is the humanitarian thing to do for the entire world.”Vance continued: “Open borders” do not promote “[human] dignity, even of the illegal migrants themselves,” citing drug and sex trafficking.“When you empower the cartels and when you empower the human traffickers, whether in the United States or anywhere else, you’re empowering the very worst people in the world,” Vance said.In this week’s AmFest speech, he touted the administration’s successes regarding immigration: “December marks seven months straight of zero releases at the southern border. More than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the United States. The first time in over 50 years that we have had negative net migration.”At the end of the speech, Vance told the thousands of young people that while “only God can promise you salvation in heaven” if they have faith in God, “I promise you closed borders and safe communities. I promise you good jobs and a dignified life … together, we can fulfill the promise of the greatest nation in the history of the earth.”

unitedyam

U.S. Vice President JD Vance. / Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

CNA Staff, Dec 23, 2025 / 14:27 pm (CNA).

U.S. Vice President JD Vance, America’s second Catholic vice president, laid out a distinctly Christian vision for American politics in a speech this week, declaring that “the only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been and, by the grace of God, we always will be a Christian nation.”

Speaking to more than 30,000 young conservatives at Turning Point USA’s AmFest 2025 some three months after the death of its founder Charlie Kirk, Vance called for a politics rooted in a Christian faith that honors the family, protects the weak, and rejects what he described as a decades-long “war” on Christianity in public life.

The Christian faith has provided a “shared moral language” since the nation’s founding, the Yale-trained lawyer argued, which led to “our understanding of natural law and rights, our sense of duty to one’s neighbor, the conviction that the strong must protect the weak, and the belief in individual conscience.”

“Christianity is America’s creed,” the vice president said to loud cheers, while acknowledging that not everyone needs to be a Christian and “we must respect each individual’s pathway” to God. Even so, he said, “even our famously American idea of religious liberty is a Christian concept.” 

Vance described how, over the past several decades, “freedom of religion transformed into freedom from religion” as a result of the cultural assault on Christian faith from those on “the left” who have “labored to push Christianity out of national life. They’ve kicked it out of the schools, out of the workplace, out of the fundamental parts of the public square.”

He continued: “And in a public square devoid of God, we got a vacuum. And the ideas that filled that void preyed on the very worst of human nature rather than uplifting it.”

Vance said cultural voices opposed to Christian faith “told us not that we were children of God, but children of this or that identity group. They replaced God’s beautiful design for the family that men and women could rely on … with the idea that men could turn into women so long as they bought the right bunch of pills from Big Pharma.” 

The former U.S. senator and Catholic convert credited President Donald Trump for ending the cultural “war that has been waged on Christians and Christianity in the United States of America,” touting the administration’s policy priorities as the fruit of Christian motivation.

“We help older Americans in retirement, including by ending taxes on Social Security, because we believe in honoring your father and mother rather than shipping all of their money off to Ukraine,” he said. “We believe in taking care of the poor, which is why we have Medicaid, so that the least among us can afford their prescriptions or to take their kids to see a doctor.”

Speaking of the despair he felt after the assassination of his friend Kirk, he said: “What saved me was realizing that the story of the Christian faith … is one of immense loss followed by even bigger victory. It’s a story of very dark nights followed by very bright dawns. What saved me was remembering the inherent goodness of God and that his grace overflows when we least expect it.”

Of masculinity, Vance said: “The fruits of true Christianity are good husbands, patient fathers, builders of great things, and slayers of dragons. And yes, men who are willing to die for a principle if that’s what God asked them to do.”

He described how he saw the fruits of Christian men living out their faith during a recent visit to a men’s ministry that aids those who struggle with addiction and homelessness: “They feed them. They clothe them. They give them shelter and financial advice. They live out the very best part of Christ’s commission.”

After eating lunch with some of the men who were “all back on their feet” after receiving help, Vance said he saw that the answer to “What saved them?” was not “racial commonality or grievance … a DEI prep course” or “a welfare check.”

“It was the fact that a carpenter died 2,000 years ago and changed the world in the process.” 

“A true Christian politics,” he said, “cannot just be about the protection of the unborn or the promotion of the family. As important as those things absolutely are, it must be at the heart of our full understanding of government.” 

On immigration policy, Vance has challenged U.S. bishops, popes

The vice president has publicly disagreed with the U.S. bishops on their reaction to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, as well as with Pope Leo XIV and the late Pope Francis, who seemed to criticize Vance in a letter the pontiff penned to the U.S. bishops last winter. 

In defense of the administration’s approach to immigration, Vance had in a late January interview invoked an “old school … Christian concept” he later identified as the “ordo amoris,” or “rightly ordered love.” 

He said that according to the concept, one’s “compassion belongs first” to one’s family and fellow citizens, “and then after that” to the rest of the world.

After Pope Leo on Nov. 18 asked Americans to listen to U.S. bishops’ message opposing “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and urging the humane treatment of migrants, Vance countered: “Border security is not just good for American citizens. It is the humanitarian thing to do for the entire world.”

Vance continued: “Open borders” do not promote “[human] dignity, even of the illegal migrants themselves,” citing drug and sex trafficking.

“When you empower the cartels and when you empower the human traffickers, whether in the United States or anywhere else, you’re empowering the very worst people in the world,” Vance said.

In this week’s AmFest speech, he touted the administration’s successes regarding immigration: “December marks seven months straight of zero releases at the southern border. More than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the United States. The first time in over 50 years that we have had negative net migration.”

At the end of the speech, Vance told the thousands of young people that while “only God can promise you salvation in heaven” if they have faith in God, “I promise you closed borders and safe communities. I promise you good jobs and a dignified life … together, we can fulfill the promise of the greatest nation in the history of the earth.”

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Federal judge strikes down rules allowing schools to hide gender ‘transitions’ from parents #Catholic null / Credit: sergign/Shutterstock CNA Staff, Dec 23, 2025 / 10:07 am (CNA). A federal judge in California this week issued a permanent block against the state’s “gender secrecy policies” that have allowed schools to hide children’s so-called “gender transitions” from their parents.U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez issued the ruling in the class action lawsuit on Dec. 22, holding that parents “have a right” to the “gender information” of their children, while teachers themselves also possess the right to provide parents with that information. The order strikes down secretive policies in school districts across California that allowed schools to conceal when a child began identifying as the opposite sex or another LGBT-related identity. Benitez had allowed the legal dispute to proceed as a class action lawsuit in October. School districts in California “are ultimately state agents under state control,” the judge said at the time, and the issue of settling “statewide policy” meant the class action structure would be “superior to numerous individual actions by individual parents and teachers.” The case, Benitez said on Dec. 22, concerns “a parent’s rights to information … against a public school’s policy of secrecy when it comes to a student’s gender identification.” Parents, he said, have a right to such information on grounds of the 14th and First Amendments, he said, while teachers can assert similar First Amendment rights in sharing that information with parents. Teachers have historically informed parents of “physical injuries or questions about a student’s health and well-being,” the judge pointed out, yet lawmakers in California have enacted policies “prohibiting public school teachers from informing parents” when their child claims to have an LGBT identity. “Even if [the government] could demonstrate that excluding parents was good policy on some level, such a policy cannot be implemented at the expense of parents’ constitutional rights,” Benitez wrote. The Thomas More Society, a religious liberty legal group, said in a press release that the decision “protects all California parents, students, and teachers” and “restores sanity and common sense.”School officials in California who work to conceal “gender identity” decisions from parents “should cease all enforcement or face severe legal consequences,” attorney Paul Jonna said in the release. Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, the Christian teachers who originally brought the suit, said they were “profoundly grateful” for the decision. “This victory is not just ours. It is a win for honesty, transparency, and the fundamental rights of teachers and parents,” they said. The Thomas More Society said on Dec. 22 that California officials had gone to “extreme lengths” to “evade responsibility” for their policies, up to and including claiming that the gender secrecy rules were no longer enforced even as they were allegedly continuing to require them. Gender- and LGBT-related school policies have come under fire over the past year from the White House. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in August directed U.S. states to remove gender ideology material from their curricula or else face the loss of federal funding. In February the Department of Education launched an investigation into several Virginia school districts to determine if they violated federal orders forbidding schools from supporting the so-called “transition” of children. In December, meanwhile, a Catholic school student in Virginia forced a school district to concede a lawsuit she brought alleging that her constitutional rights had been violated when the school subjected her to “extreme social pressure” to affirm transgender ideology.
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Federal judge strikes down rules allowing schools to hide gender ‘transitions’ from parents #Catholic null / Credit: sergign/Shutterstock CNA Staff, Dec 23, 2025 / 10:07 am (CNA). A federal judge in California this week issued a permanent block against the state’s “gender secrecy policies” that have allowed schools to hide children’s so-called “gender transitions” from their parents.U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez issued the ruling in the class action lawsuit on Dec. 22, holding that parents “have a right” to the “gender information” of their children, while teachers themselves also possess the right to provide parents with that information. The order strikes down secretive policies in school districts across California that allowed schools to conceal when a child began identifying as the opposite sex or another LGBT-related identity. Benitez had allowed the legal dispute to proceed as a class action lawsuit in October. School districts in California “are ultimately state agents under state control,” the judge said at the time, and the issue of settling “statewide policy” meant the class action structure would be “superior to numerous individual actions by individual parents and teachers.” The case, Benitez said on Dec. 22, concerns “a parent’s rights to information … against a public school’s policy of secrecy when it comes to a student’s gender identification.” Parents, he said, have a right to such information on grounds of the 14th and First Amendments, he said, while teachers can assert similar First Amendment rights in sharing that information with parents. Teachers have historically informed parents of “physical injuries or questions about a student’s health and well-being,” the judge pointed out, yet lawmakers in California have enacted policies “prohibiting public school teachers from informing parents” when their child claims to have an LGBT identity. “Even if [the government] could demonstrate that excluding parents was good policy on some level, such a policy cannot be implemented at the expense of parents’ constitutional rights,” Benitez wrote. The Thomas More Society, a religious liberty legal group, said in a press release that the decision “protects all California parents, students, and teachers” and “restores sanity and common sense.”School officials in California who work to conceal “gender identity” decisions from parents “should cease all enforcement or face severe legal consequences,” attorney Paul Jonna said in the release. Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, the Christian teachers who originally brought the suit, said they were “profoundly grateful” for the decision. “This victory is not just ours. It is a win for honesty, transparency, and the fundamental rights of teachers and parents,” they said. The Thomas More Society said on Dec. 22 that California officials had gone to “extreme lengths” to “evade responsibility” for their policies, up to and including claiming that the gender secrecy rules were no longer enforced even as they were allegedly continuing to require them. Gender- and LGBT-related school policies have come under fire over the past year from the White House. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in August directed U.S. states to remove gender ideology material from their curricula or else face the loss of federal funding. In February the Department of Education launched an investigation into several Virginia school districts to determine if they violated federal orders forbidding schools from supporting the so-called “transition” of children. In December, meanwhile, a Catholic school student in Virginia forced a school district to concede a lawsuit she brought alleging that her constitutional rights had been violated when the school subjected her to “extreme social pressure” to affirm transgender ideology.

unitedyam

null / Credit: sergign/Shutterstock

CNA Staff, Dec 23, 2025 / 10:07 am (CNA).

A federal judge in California this week issued a permanent block against the state’s “gender secrecy policies” that have allowed schools to hide children’s so-called “gender transitions” from their parents.

U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez issued the ruling in the class action lawsuit on Dec. 22, holding that parents “have a right” to the “gender information” of their children, while teachers themselves also possess the right to provide parents with that information. 

The order strikes down secretive policies in school districts across California that allowed schools to conceal when a child began identifying as the opposite sex or another LGBT-related identity. 

Benitez had allowed the legal dispute to proceed as a class action lawsuit in October. School districts in California “are ultimately state agents under state control,” the judge said at the time, and the issue of settling “statewide policy” meant the class action structure would be “superior to numerous individual actions by individual parents and teachers.” 

The case, Benitez said on Dec. 22, concerns “a parent’s rights to information … against a public school’s policy of secrecy when it comes to a student’s gender identification.” 

Parents, he said, have a right to such information on grounds of the 14th and First Amendments, he said, while teachers can assert similar First Amendment rights in sharing that information with parents. 

Teachers have historically informed parents of “physical injuries or questions about a student’s health and well-being,” the judge pointed out, yet lawmakers in California have enacted policies “prohibiting public school teachers from informing parents” when their child claims to have an LGBT identity. 

“Even if [the government] could demonstrate that excluding parents was good policy on some level, such a policy cannot be implemented at the expense of parents’ constitutional rights,” Benitez wrote. 

The Thomas More Society, a religious liberty legal group, said in a press release that the decision “protects all California parents, students, and teachers” and “restores sanity and common sense.”

School officials in California who work to conceal “gender identity” decisions from parents “should cease all enforcement or face severe legal consequences,” attorney Paul Jonna said in the release. 

Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, the Christian teachers who originally brought the suit, said they were “profoundly grateful” for the decision. 

“This victory is not just ours. It is a win for honesty, transparency, and the fundamental rights of teachers and parents,” they said. 

The Thomas More Society said on Dec. 22 that California officials had gone to “extreme lengths” to “evade responsibility” for their policies, up to and including claiming that the gender secrecy rules were no longer enforced even as they were allegedly continuing to require them. 

Gender- and LGBT-related school policies have come under fire over the past year from the White House. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in August directed U.S. states to remove gender ideology material from their curricula or else face the loss of federal funding. 

In February the Department of Education launched an investigation into several Virginia school districts to determine if they violated federal orders forbidding schools from supporting the so-called “transition” of children. 

In December, meanwhile, a Catholic school student in Virginia forced a school district to concede a lawsuit she brought alleging that her constitutional rights had been violated when the school subjected her to “extreme social pressure” to affirm transgender ideology.

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Albany’s retired bishop files for personal bankruptcy #Catholic Bishop Edward Scarfenberger. / Credit: Photo courtesy of the Diocese of Albany National Catholic Register, Dec 19, 2025 / 12:24 pm (CNA). A retired New York bishop has filed for personal bankruptcy protection in federal court after a state jury verdict found him, along with other officials, personally liable for the collapse of a Catholic hospital pension fund that left about 1,100 retirees without the lifetime monthly payments they were expecting.It’s not clear whether a Catholic bishop in the United States has ever previously filed for personal bankruptcy protection.Bishop Edward Scharfenberger, 77, who served as bishop of Albany from April 2014 until his retirement in October, is seeking protection from creditors for his assets valued at between $100,001 and $500,000, according to a filing Tuesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of New York.The seven-page filing does not list the bishop’s assets but states that he has between 100 and 199 creditors and debts totaling between $1,000,001 and $10 million.Last week, a jury found Scharfenberger 10% liable in a $54.2 million judgment in a civil lawsuit over the failed pension plan once provided by St. Clare’s Hospital in Schenectady, a Catholic hospital that operated from 1949 until 2008, according to The Evangelist, the diocese’s newspaper.The verdict and judgment, issued Dec. 12, cover compensatory damages — the amount a court finds is owed to plaintiffs for harm they have suffered — but not punitive damages, which may be added in cases of recklessness, malice, or fraud. The bankruptcy filings by the bishop and another defendant in the state lawsuit over the pension plan failure forced a pause in a punitive damages hearing earlier this week, according to WNYT Channel 13 in Albany.The National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, was unable to reach Scharfenberger before the publication of this story. A lawyer representing the bishop acknowledged a request for comment Dec. 17 but did not immediately provide one.A rare personal bankruptcyIn recent decades, bankruptcies have occurred regularly in the Catholic Church in the United States. Between 2004 and November 2025, 39 of the country’s dioceses have filed for bankruptcy, almost all to protect assets from clergy sex-abuse lawsuits, as the Register reported last month. One of those is the Diocese of Albany, which filed for bankruptcy in March 2023. But those diocesan cases were filed under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, which allows a corporation, partnership, or sole proprietorship to reorganize and continue operating while developing a court-approved plan to repay creditors.Scharfenberger filed under Chapter 13, which allows an individual with regular income who cannot pay debts to keep certain assets while working out a repayment plan. “The rules in Chapter 13 permit a debtor to keep property and confirm a plan with payments to creditors based on the debtor’s ‘disposable income,’” said Marie Reilly, a bankruptcy expert and law professor at Penn State Dickinson Law, in an email. “If the debtor commits his disposable income to paying creditors for the term of a three- to five-year plan, he gets a discharge (forgiveness) of the unpaid balance.”Reilly, who has researched several dozen diocesan bankruptcies for The Catholic Project, a lay initiative of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., told the Register that the bankruptcy filing does not necessarily solve all of the bishop’s money problems.“There are exceptions — some debts don’t get discharged. Creditors can object to the plan if it does not meet the statutory requirements,” Reilly said. “And, it is possible that the pension fund creditor may move to dismiss the bishop’s Chapter 13 case as having been filed ‘in bad faith.’”$50 million shortfall St. Clare’s Hospital was originally run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor. The Diocese of Albany maintains that it never owned the hospital and that the bishop of Albany merely provided “canonical oversight” to make sure the hospital met “its mission to serve all in accord with Catholic moral standards,” according to an August 2025 statement from the diocese.Last week, the jury found that the Diocese of Albany has no liability for the pension failure, instead holding the hospital corporation and certain officers and board members accountable. In addition to Scharfenberger, the jury found two deceased employees of the diocese liable, according to The Evangelist: Former Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard (1938–2023), who led the diocese from 1977 to 2014, was found 20% liable; and Father David LeFort, a former vicar general of the diocese who died in August 2023, was found 5% liable. Also found liable were St. Clare’s Corporation (20%), St. Clare’s president Joseph Pofit (25%), and former St. Clare’s president Robert Perry (20%), according to The Evangelist.The judgments stem from a pension plan that operated for about 60 years. In 1959, the hospital began offering employees a defined-benefit plan that provided a lifetime monthly pension after retirement.Church plan exempt from ERISALike most plans operated by Catholic institutions, the pension plan had a religious exemption from the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (known as ERISA), which sets minimum funding requirements for most nonreligious pension plans and also enables the federal government to step in and make payments to retirees of failed plans, using a fund financed by covered pension plans.When the hospital closed in 2008, the officers of St. Clare’s “determined that the corporation would continue to exist for purposes of administering the pension plan,” according to a complaint filed in state court in Schenectady County by the New York attorney general’s office in May 2022. “They also chose to continue treating the pension plan as a ‘Church plan’ — which it could do only if the corporation’s former employees and pensioners were designated as employees of the Church. This was all in order to avoid the contribution and insurance requirements of ERISA, and the duties imposed by ERISA upon corporation directors and trustees as fiduciaries,” the complaint states.The bishop of Albany was automatically a member of the hospital’s board and served as its honorary chairman, and had authority to appoint most of the directors on the board, according to the state attorney general’s complaint.The attorney general’s office alleged that St. Clare’s Corporation failed to make contributions to the pension fund “for all but three years from 2001 to 2019” and concealed from retirees “the insolvency of the pension plan.”In 2018, the St. Clare’s board terminated the pension plan effective Feb. 1, 2019, because of an approximately $50 million shortfall. More than 1,100 employees lost retirement benefits, including about 650 who lost all pension payments and about 450 who received a lump-sum payment “equal to 70% of the value of their vested pension,” the complaint states. The retired employees include “nurses, lab technicians, social workers, EMTs, orderlies, housekeepers, and other essential workers” who worked at the hospital “between 10 and 50 years,” the complaint states.Testimony and reactionOn Dec. 9 during the civil trial, Scharfenberger testified that during his tenure no boards he sat on ever discussed the hospital’s pension plan, according to The Times-Union of Albany. In a written statement issued in August, when Scharfenberger still led the Diocese of Albany, the diocese said the bishop “has actively sought ways to help the pensioners” while denying that the diocese ever “exercised any control over St. Clare’s Hospital operations or its pension.” “He hosted a listening session with pensioners at Siena College to identify issues and consider ways to help those in need. He also reached out to the Mother Cabrini Foundation to try to secure funding for the pensioners, but that effort was unable to move forward once the pensioners filed the lawsuit,” the statement said. “The diocese is eager to see the case move forward and promptly resolved,” the August statement continued. “Our prayers continue for all who are struggling in any way, and as we stated previously, our offer to connect those in need with services that can help, stands. No one should walk alone.”His successor, Bishop Mark O’Connell, who was installed as bishop of Albany on Dec. 5, told reporters shortly before the verdict was announced last week: “I care deeply about their hurt [and] not having their pensions,” according to The Evangelist.During the Dec. 12 press conference, when a reporter asked O’Connell what the diocese would do if the jury found the diocese liable for the pension fund collapse, the bishop noted that the diocese is already in the midst of a bankruptcy process.“If we are liable, then we’ll do what we can to make amends, given that they are one creditor as a group among many people accusing the Diocese of Albany,” O’Connell said, according to WAMC Northeast Public Radio. “And that’s what bankruptcy process is. We obviously cannot pay a billion dollars. Right? So that’s what Chapter 11 is all about, to figure out what’s fair. And since you have a bankruptcy judge and mediators, it’s not up to us.”Later that day, the jury found the diocese not liable in the pension fund collapse lawsuit. The diocese issued a written statement, according to The Evangelist, that said: “As grateful as we are for the jury’s informed decision, we are still very much aware of the hurt felt by the St. Clare’s pensioners who cared for the sick and the poor throughout the long history of St. Clare’s Hospital. This does not mean that we will turn our backs to the pensioners, for as Bishop O’Connell has noted, they are a part of our flock; they are still in need of healing.”That same day, lead plaintiff Mary Hartshorne, who worked in the hospital’s radiology department for about 28 years, told WNYT Channel 13 in Albany that she and other hospital retirees were pleased with the jury’s verdict but did not feel they would be made whole.“We’ve been playing this game for seven and a half years, and I think my question I ask everybody is: How do you get that back? You don’t,” she said.This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.
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Albany’s retired bishop files for personal bankruptcy #Catholic Bishop Edward Scarfenberger. / Credit: Photo courtesy of the Diocese of Albany National Catholic Register, Dec 19, 2025 / 12:24 pm (CNA). A retired New York bishop has filed for personal bankruptcy protection in federal court after a state jury verdict found him, along with other officials, personally liable for the collapse of a Catholic hospital pension fund that left about 1,100 retirees without the lifetime monthly payments they were expecting.It’s not clear whether a Catholic bishop in the United States has ever previously filed for personal bankruptcy protection.Bishop Edward Scharfenberger, 77, who served as bishop of Albany from April 2014 until his retirement in October, is seeking protection from creditors for his assets valued at between $100,001 and $500,000, according to a filing Tuesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of New York.The seven-page filing does not list the bishop’s assets but states that he has between 100 and 199 creditors and debts totaling between $1,000,001 and $10 million.Last week, a jury found Scharfenberger 10% liable in a $54.2 million judgment in a civil lawsuit over the failed pension plan once provided by St. Clare’s Hospital in Schenectady, a Catholic hospital that operated from 1949 until 2008, according to The Evangelist, the diocese’s newspaper.The verdict and judgment, issued Dec. 12, cover compensatory damages — the amount a court finds is owed to plaintiffs for harm they have suffered — but not punitive damages, which may be added in cases of recklessness, malice, or fraud. The bankruptcy filings by the bishop and another defendant in the state lawsuit over the pension plan failure forced a pause in a punitive damages hearing earlier this week, according to WNYT Channel 13 in Albany.The National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, was unable to reach Scharfenberger before the publication of this story. A lawyer representing the bishop acknowledged a request for comment Dec. 17 but did not immediately provide one.A rare personal bankruptcyIn recent decades, bankruptcies have occurred regularly in the Catholic Church in the United States. Between 2004 and November 2025, 39 of the country’s dioceses have filed for bankruptcy, almost all to protect assets from clergy sex-abuse lawsuits, as the Register reported last month. One of those is the Diocese of Albany, which filed for bankruptcy in March 2023. But those diocesan cases were filed under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, which allows a corporation, partnership, or sole proprietorship to reorganize and continue operating while developing a court-approved plan to repay creditors.Scharfenberger filed under Chapter 13, which allows an individual with regular income who cannot pay debts to keep certain assets while working out a repayment plan. “The rules in Chapter 13 permit a debtor to keep property and confirm a plan with payments to creditors based on the debtor’s ‘disposable income,’” said Marie Reilly, a bankruptcy expert and law professor at Penn State Dickinson Law, in an email. “If the debtor commits his disposable income to paying creditors for the term of a three- to five-year plan, he gets a discharge (forgiveness) of the unpaid balance.”Reilly, who has researched several dozen diocesan bankruptcies for The Catholic Project, a lay initiative of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., told the Register that the bankruptcy filing does not necessarily solve all of the bishop’s money problems.“There are exceptions — some debts don’t get discharged. Creditors can object to the plan if it does not meet the statutory requirements,” Reilly said. “And, it is possible that the pension fund creditor may move to dismiss the bishop’s Chapter 13 case as having been filed ‘in bad faith.’”$50 million shortfall St. Clare’s Hospital was originally run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor. The Diocese of Albany maintains that it never owned the hospital and that the bishop of Albany merely provided “canonical oversight” to make sure the hospital met “its mission to serve all in accord with Catholic moral standards,” according to an August 2025 statement from the diocese.Last week, the jury found that the Diocese of Albany has no liability for the pension failure, instead holding the hospital corporation and certain officers and board members accountable. In addition to Scharfenberger, the jury found two deceased employees of the diocese liable, according to The Evangelist: Former Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard (1938–2023), who led the diocese from 1977 to 2014, was found 20% liable; and Father David LeFort, a former vicar general of the diocese who died in August 2023, was found 5% liable. Also found liable were St. Clare’s Corporation (20%), St. Clare’s president Joseph Pofit (25%), and former St. Clare’s president Robert Perry (20%), according to The Evangelist.The judgments stem from a pension plan that operated for about 60 years. In 1959, the hospital began offering employees a defined-benefit plan that provided a lifetime monthly pension after retirement.Church plan exempt from ERISALike most plans operated by Catholic institutions, the pension plan had a religious exemption from the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (known as ERISA), which sets minimum funding requirements for most nonreligious pension plans and also enables the federal government to step in and make payments to retirees of failed plans, using a fund financed by covered pension plans.When the hospital closed in 2008, the officers of St. Clare’s “determined that the corporation would continue to exist for purposes of administering the pension plan,” according to a complaint filed in state court in Schenectady County by the New York attorney general’s office in May 2022. “They also chose to continue treating the pension plan as a ‘Church plan’ — which it could do only if the corporation’s former employees and pensioners were designated as employees of the Church. This was all in order to avoid the contribution and insurance requirements of ERISA, and the duties imposed by ERISA upon corporation directors and trustees as fiduciaries,” the complaint states.The bishop of Albany was automatically a member of the hospital’s board and served as its honorary chairman, and had authority to appoint most of the directors on the board, according to the state attorney general’s complaint.The attorney general’s office alleged that St. Clare’s Corporation failed to make contributions to the pension fund “for all but three years from 2001 to 2019” and concealed from retirees “the insolvency of the pension plan.”In 2018, the St. Clare’s board terminated the pension plan effective Feb. 1, 2019, because of an approximately $50 million shortfall. More than 1,100 employees lost retirement benefits, including about 650 who lost all pension payments and about 450 who received a lump-sum payment “equal to 70% of the value of their vested pension,” the complaint states. The retired employees include “nurses, lab technicians, social workers, EMTs, orderlies, housekeepers, and other essential workers” who worked at the hospital “between 10 and 50 years,” the complaint states.Testimony and reactionOn Dec. 9 during the civil trial, Scharfenberger testified that during his tenure no boards he sat on ever discussed the hospital’s pension plan, according to The Times-Union of Albany. In a written statement issued in August, when Scharfenberger still led the Diocese of Albany, the diocese said the bishop “has actively sought ways to help the pensioners” while denying that the diocese ever “exercised any control over St. Clare’s Hospital operations or its pension.” “He hosted a listening session with pensioners at Siena College to identify issues and consider ways to help those in need. He also reached out to the Mother Cabrini Foundation to try to secure funding for the pensioners, but that effort was unable to move forward once the pensioners filed the lawsuit,” the statement said. “The diocese is eager to see the case move forward and promptly resolved,” the August statement continued. “Our prayers continue for all who are struggling in any way, and as we stated previously, our offer to connect those in need with services that can help, stands. No one should walk alone.”His successor, Bishop Mark O’Connell, who was installed as bishop of Albany on Dec. 5, told reporters shortly before the verdict was announced last week: “I care deeply about their hurt [and] not having their pensions,” according to The Evangelist.During the Dec. 12 press conference, when a reporter asked O’Connell what the diocese would do if the jury found the diocese liable for the pension fund collapse, the bishop noted that the diocese is already in the midst of a bankruptcy process.“If we are liable, then we’ll do what we can to make amends, given that they are one creditor as a group among many people accusing the Diocese of Albany,” O’Connell said, according to WAMC Northeast Public Radio. “And that’s what bankruptcy process is. We obviously cannot pay a billion dollars. Right? So that’s what Chapter 11 is all about, to figure out what’s fair. And since you have a bankruptcy judge and mediators, it’s not up to us.”Later that day, the jury found the diocese not liable in the pension fund collapse lawsuit. The diocese issued a written statement, according to The Evangelist, that said: “As grateful as we are for the jury’s informed decision, we are still very much aware of the hurt felt by the St. Clare’s pensioners who cared for the sick and the poor throughout the long history of St. Clare’s Hospital. This does not mean that we will turn our backs to the pensioners, for as Bishop O’Connell has noted, they are a part of our flock; they are still in need of healing.”That same day, lead plaintiff Mary Hartshorne, who worked in the hospital’s radiology department for about 28 years, told WNYT Channel 13 in Albany that she and other hospital retirees were pleased with the jury’s verdict but did not feel they would be made whole.“We’ve been playing this game for seven and a half years, and I think my question I ask everybody is: How do you get that back? You don’t,” she said.This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.

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Bishop Edward Scarfenberger. / Credit: Photo courtesy of the Diocese of Albany

National Catholic Register, Dec 19, 2025 / 12:24 pm (CNA).

A retired New York bishop has filed for personal bankruptcy protection in federal court after a state jury verdict found him, along with other officials, personally liable for the collapse of a Catholic hospital pension fund that left about 1,100 retirees without the lifetime monthly payments they were expecting.

It’s not clear whether a Catholic bishop in the United States has ever previously filed for personal bankruptcy protection.

Bishop Edward Scharfenberger, 77, who served as bishop of Albany from April 2014 until his retirement in October, is seeking protection from creditors for his assets valued at between $100,001 and $500,000, according to a filing Tuesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of New York.

The seven-page filing does not list the bishop’s assets but states that he has between 100 and 199 creditors and debts totaling between $1,000,001 and $10 million.

Last week, a jury found Scharfenberger 10% liable in a $54.2 million judgment in a civil lawsuit over the failed pension plan once provided by St. Clare’s Hospital in Schenectady, a Catholic hospital that operated from 1949 until 2008, according to The Evangelist, the diocese’s newspaper.

The verdict and judgment, issued Dec. 12, cover compensatory damages — the amount a court finds is owed to plaintiffs for harm they have suffered — but not punitive damages, which may be added in cases of recklessness, malice, or fraud. The bankruptcy filings by the bishop and another defendant in the state lawsuit over the pension plan failure forced a pause in a punitive damages hearing earlier this week, according to WNYT Channel 13 in Albany.

The National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, was unable to reach Scharfenberger before the publication of this story. A lawyer representing the bishop acknowledged a request for comment Dec. 17 but did not immediately provide one.

A rare personal bankruptcy

In recent decades, bankruptcies have occurred regularly in the Catholic Church in the United States. Between 2004 and November 2025, 39 of the country’s dioceses have filed for bankruptcy, almost all to protect assets from clergy sex-abuse lawsuits, as the Register reported last month. One of those is the Diocese of Albany, which filed for bankruptcy in March 2023. 

But those diocesan cases were filed under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, which allows a corporation, partnership, or sole proprietorship to reorganize and continue operating while developing a court-approved plan to repay creditors.

Scharfenberger filed under Chapter 13, which allows an individual with regular income who cannot pay debts to keep certain assets while working out a repayment plan. 

“The rules in Chapter 13 permit a debtor to keep property and confirm a plan with payments to creditors based on the debtor’s ‘disposable income,’” said Marie Reilly, a bankruptcy expert and law professor at Penn State Dickinson Law, in an email. “If the debtor commits his disposable income to paying creditors for the term of a three- to five-year plan, he gets a discharge (forgiveness) of the unpaid balance.”

Reilly, who has researched several dozen diocesan bankruptcies for The Catholic Project, a lay initiative of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., told the Register that the bankruptcy filing does not necessarily solve all of the bishop’s money problems.

“There are exceptions — some debts don’t get discharged. Creditors can object to the plan if it does not meet the statutory requirements,” Reilly said. “And, it is possible that the pension fund creditor may move to dismiss the bishop’s Chapter 13 case as having been filed ‘in bad faith.’”

$50 million shortfall 

St. Clare’s Hospital was originally run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor. The Diocese of Albany maintains that it never owned the hospital and that the bishop of Albany merely provided “canonical oversight” to make sure the hospital met “its mission to serve all in accord with Catholic moral standards,” according to an August 2025 statement from the diocese.

Last week, the jury found that the Diocese of Albany has no liability for the pension failure, instead holding the hospital corporation and certain officers and board members accountable. 

In addition to Scharfenberger, the jury found two deceased employees of the diocese liable, according to The Evangelist: Former Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard (1938–2023), who led the diocese from 1977 to 2014, was found 20% liable; and Father David LeFort, a former vicar general of the diocese who died in August 2023, was found 5% liable. 

Also found liable were St. Clare’s Corporation (20%), St. Clare’s president Joseph Pofit (25%), and former St. Clare’s president Robert Perry (20%), according to The Evangelist.

The judgments stem from a pension plan that operated for about 60 years. 

In 1959, the hospital began offering employees a defined-benefit plan that provided a lifetime monthly pension after retirement.

Church plan exempt from ERISA

Like most plans operated by Catholic institutions, the pension plan had a religious exemption from the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (known as ERISA), which sets minimum funding requirements for most nonreligious pension plans and also enables the federal government to step in and make payments to retirees of failed plans, using a fund financed by covered pension plans.

When the hospital closed in 2008, the officers of St. Clare’s “determined that the corporation would continue to exist for purposes of administering the pension plan,” according to a complaint filed in state court in Schenectady County by the New York attorney general’s office in May 2022. 

“They also chose to continue treating the pension plan as a ‘Church plan’ — which it could do only if the corporation’s former employees and pensioners were designated as employees of the Church. This was all in order to avoid the contribution and insurance requirements of ERISA, and the duties imposed by ERISA upon corporation directors and trustees as fiduciaries,” the complaint states.

The bishop of Albany was automatically a member of the hospital’s board and served as its honorary chairman, and had authority to appoint most of the directors on the board, according to the state attorney general’s complaint.

The attorney general’s office alleged that St. Clare’s Corporation failed to make contributions to the pension fund “for all but three years from 2001 to 2019” and concealed from retirees “the insolvency of the pension plan.”

In 2018, the St. Clare’s board terminated the pension plan effective Feb. 1, 2019, because of an approximately $50 million shortfall. More than 1,100 employees lost retirement benefits, including about 650 who lost all pension payments and about 450 who received a lump-sum payment “equal to 70% of the value of their vested pension,” the complaint states. The retired employees include “nurses, lab technicians, social workers, EMTs, orderlies, housekeepers, and other essential workers” who worked at the hospital “between 10 and 50 years,” the complaint states.

Testimony and reaction

On Dec. 9 during the civil trial, Scharfenberger testified that during his tenure no boards he sat on ever discussed the hospital’s pension plan, according to The Times-Union of Albany. 

In a written statement issued in August, when Scharfenberger still led the Diocese of Albany, the diocese said the bishop “has actively sought ways to help the pensioners” while denying that the diocese ever “exercised any control over St. Clare’s Hospital operations or its pension.” 

“He hosted a listening session with pensioners at Siena College to identify issues and consider ways to help those in need. He also reached out to the Mother Cabrini Foundation to try to secure funding for the pensioners, but that effort was unable to move forward once the pensioners filed the lawsuit,” the statement said. 

“The diocese is eager to see the case move forward and promptly resolved,” the August statement continued. “Our prayers continue for all who are struggling in any way, and as we stated previously, our offer to connect those in need with services that can help, stands. No one should walk alone.”

His successor, Bishop Mark O’Connell, who was installed as bishop of Albany on Dec. 5, told reporters shortly before the verdict was announced last week: “I care deeply about their hurt [and] not having their pensions,” according to The Evangelist.

During the Dec. 12 press conference, when a reporter asked O’Connell what the diocese would do if the jury found the diocese liable for the pension fund collapse, the bishop noted that the diocese is already in the midst of a bankruptcy process.

“If we are liable, then we’ll do what we can to make amends, given that they are one creditor as a group among many people accusing the Diocese of Albany,” O’Connell said, according to WAMC Northeast Public Radio. “And that’s what bankruptcy process is. We obviously cannot pay a billion dollars. Right? So that’s what Chapter 11 is all about, to figure out what’s fair. And since you have a bankruptcy judge and mediators, it’s not up to us.”

Later that day, the jury found the diocese not liable in the pension fund collapse lawsuit. The diocese issued a written statement, according to The Evangelist, that said: “As grateful as we are for the jury’s informed decision, we are still very much aware of the hurt felt by the St. Clare’s pensioners who cared for the sick and the poor throughout the long history of St. Clare’s Hospital. This does not mean that we will turn our backs to the pensioners, for as Bishop O’Connell has noted, they are a part of our flock; they are still in need of healing.”

That same day, lead plaintiff Mary Hartshorne, who worked in the hospital’s radiology department for about 28 years, told WNYT Channel 13 in Albany that she and other hospital retirees were pleased with the jury’s verdict but did not feel they would be made whole.

“We’ve been playing this game for seven and a half years, and I think my question I ask everybody is: How do you get that back? You don’t,” she said.

This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.

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Catholic bishops, families ask Supreme Court to rule for Catholic schools in Colorado suit #Catholic Colorado state capitol in Denver. / Credit: Shutterstock CNA Staff, Dec 19, 2025 / 11:52 am (CNA). The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a coalition of Catholic families, and numerous other advocates are petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in favor of Catholic schools seeking to be included in Colorado’s universal preschool funding program. The religious liberty law group Becket said in a Dec. 18 release that the Catholic schools’ advocates — including numerous religious groups, legal organizations, and public policy groups — are urging the high court to rule against Colorado’s “discriminatory exclusion” of the faith-based schools. The Archdiocese of Denver and a group of Catholic preschools asked the Supreme Court in November to allow them to access the Colorado program after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled in September that the state may continue to exclude the preschools from the education fund. The state has barred those schools from the funding pool because they require teachers and families to sign a pledge promising to uphold their religious mission, including teachings on sexuality and gender identity.In an amicus filing this week, the U.S. bishops said the Colorado rule “denies Catholic preschools access to a state-run tuition assistance program solely because those schools adhere to Catholic doctrine about human sexuality.”Allowing the rule to stand will offer a “roadmap” for other governments to violate the First Amendment rights of religious Americans around the country, the bishops argued. Permitting the schools’ exclusion “will impair the ability of Catholic organizations and other faith-based service providers to partner with state and local governments to serve the public,” the prelates said, arguing that the “resulting harm to the nation’s social support infrastructure would be immense.”In another filing, a coalition of Catholic families said it regards Catholic schools as “essential partners” in their mission to impart the Catholic faith to their children. The Colorado rule, however, would force the Catholic schools to operate in a manner “inconsistent with their religious beliefs and mission.” Multiple families in the filing — all of whom have four or more children — testified to the formative role that Catholic preschools have played for them. The families said they “want their children to embrace the Catholic Church’s teachings on the nature of the human person” and that the state rule impedes their ability to do so through Catholic schools. Numerous other amicus filers include the Thomas More Society, the Center for American Liberty, and Concerned Women for America as well as religious groups representing Lutherans, Evangelicals, Jews, and Muslims.Archdiocese of Denver School Superintendent Scott Elmer said via Becket that the archdiocese is “humbled” by the showing of support. “Our preschools aren’t asking for special treatment, just equal treatment,” he said, expressing hope that the Supreme Court “takes this case and upholds the promise of universal preschool for every family in Colorado.” The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on whether it will hear the case. Becket said the high court will likely decide whether or not to hear it “in early 2026.”
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Catholic bishops, families ask Supreme Court to rule for Catholic schools in Colorado suit #Catholic Colorado state capitol in Denver. / Credit: Shutterstock CNA Staff, Dec 19, 2025 / 11:52 am (CNA). The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a coalition of Catholic families, and numerous other advocates are petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in favor of Catholic schools seeking to be included in Colorado’s universal preschool funding program. The religious liberty law group Becket said in a Dec. 18 release that the Catholic schools’ advocates — including numerous religious groups, legal organizations, and public policy groups — are urging the high court to rule against Colorado’s “discriminatory exclusion” of the faith-based schools. The Archdiocese of Denver and a group of Catholic preschools asked the Supreme Court in November to allow them to access the Colorado program after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled in September that the state may continue to exclude the preschools from the education fund. The state has barred those schools from the funding pool because they require teachers and families to sign a pledge promising to uphold their religious mission, including teachings on sexuality and gender identity.In an amicus filing this week, the U.S. bishops said the Colorado rule “denies Catholic preschools access to a state-run tuition assistance program solely because those schools adhere to Catholic doctrine about human sexuality.”Allowing the rule to stand will offer a “roadmap” for other governments to violate the First Amendment rights of religious Americans around the country, the bishops argued. Permitting the schools’ exclusion “will impair the ability of Catholic organizations and other faith-based service providers to partner with state and local governments to serve the public,” the prelates said, arguing that the “resulting harm to the nation’s social support infrastructure would be immense.”In another filing, a coalition of Catholic families said it regards Catholic schools as “essential partners” in their mission to impart the Catholic faith to their children. The Colorado rule, however, would force the Catholic schools to operate in a manner “inconsistent with their religious beliefs and mission.” Multiple families in the filing — all of whom have four or more children — testified to the formative role that Catholic preschools have played for them. The families said they “want their children to embrace the Catholic Church’s teachings on the nature of the human person” and that the state rule impedes their ability to do so through Catholic schools. Numerous other amicus filers include the Thomas More Society, the Center for American Liberty, and Concerned Women for America as well as religious groups representing Lutherans, Evangelicals, Jews, and Muslims.Archdiocese of Denver School Superintendent Scott Elmer said via Becket that the archdiocese is “humbled” by the showing of support. “Our preschools aren’t asking for special treatment, just equal treatment,” he said, expressing hope that the Supreme Court “takes this case and upholds the promise of universal preschool for every family in Colorado.” The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on whether it will hear the case. Becket said the high court will likely decide whether or not to hear it “in early 2026.”

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Colorado state capitol in Denver. / Credit: Shutterstock

CNA Staff, Dec 19, 2025 / 11:52 am (CNA).

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a coalition of Catholic families, and numerous other advocates are petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in favor of Catholic schools seeking to be included in Colorado’s universal preschool funding program. 

The religious liberty law group Becket said in a Dec. 18 release that the Catholic schools’ advocates — including numerous religious groups, legal organizations, and public policy groups — are urging the high court to rule against Colorado’s “discriminatory exclusion” of the faith-based schools. 

The Archdiocese of Denver and a group of Catholic preschools asked the Supreme Court in November to allow them to access the Colorado program after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled in September that the state may continue to exclude the preschools from the education fund. 

The state has barred those schools from the funding pool because they require teachers and families to sign a pledge promising to uphold their religious mission, including teachings on sexuality and gender identity.

In an amicus filing this week, the U.S. bishops said the Colorado rule “denies Catholic preschools access to a state-run tuition assistance program solely because those schools adhere to Catholic doctrine about human sexuality.”

Allowing the rule to stand will offer a “roadmap” for other governments to violate the First Amendment rights of religious Americans around the country, the bishops argued. 

Permitting the schools’ exclusion “will impair the ability of Catholic organizations and other faith-based service providers to partner with state and local governments to serve the public,” the prelates said, arguing that the “resulting harm to the nation’s social support infrastructure would be immense.”

In another filing, a coalition of Catholic families said it regards Catholic schools as “essential partners” in their mission to impart the Catholic faith to their children. The Colorado rule, however, would force the Catholic schools to operate in a manner “inconsistent with their religious beliefs and mission.” 

Multiple families in the filing — all of whom have four or more children — testified to the formative role that Catholic preschools have played for them. The families said they “want their children to embrace the Catholic Church’s teachings on the nature of the human person” and that the state rule impedes their ability to do so through Catholic schools. 

Numerous other amicus filers include the Thomas More Society, the Center for American Liberty, and Concerned Women for America as well as religious groups representing Lutherans, Evangelicals, Jews, and Muslims.

Archdiocese of Denver School Superintendent Scott Elmer said via Becket that the archdiocese is “humbled” by the showing of support. 

“Our preschools aren’t asking for special treatment, just equal treatment,” he said, expressing hope that the Supreme Court “takes this case and upholds the promise of universal preschool for every family in Colorado.” 

The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on whether it will hear the case. Becket said the high court will likely decide whether or not to hear it “in early 2026.”

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New Carmelite monastery to open in Fort Worth Diocese following scandal #Catholic The skyline of Fort Worth, Texas. / Credit: 21 Aerials/Shutterstock CNA Staff, Dec 12, 2025 / 09:41 am (CNA). Bishop Michael Olson of the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, has announced the opening of a new order of Discalced Carmelite nuns after an older one in the diocese lost its canonical status last year. Olson announced the news of the opening in a letter on Dec. 2 in which he said the Vatican’s Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life gave permission for the new monastery.The prelate described it as “a moment of extraordinary grace for our local Church.”In an interview with CNA, Olson said there has been “a need in our diocese for prayers, for reparation of sin … and through adoration and contemplation and meditation, to pray for all of those intentions — that is the vocation of the new Carmel.”Olson said that about six months ago he requested that a new order of nuns come to reside in the diocese from the Christ the King Association of Discalced Carmelite Monasteries in the U.S.A.After making a formal request for permission from the Holy See in October, he received word in November that the Holy See approved the establishment of the new monastery. The nuns are coming from the Carmel in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. The bishop emphasized that the Carmel “is an autonomous body even though I have supervisory rights.”He said the land was “donated generously by the faithful in the diocese” after he acted as an intermediary between the sisters and parishioners.Asked when he believes the monastery, located in a rural part of northern Cooke County about 80 miles north of Dallas, will be completed, he replied: “That’s in God’s time.” He said the sisters will not have a website “because it’s a distraction from their religious life. Social media can have adverse effects on a religious vocation, as we have seen.” Olson told CNA he is “very grateful to the Holy See for this permission, but also to the religious sisters, the nuns who have given of themselves to Christ. It’s a very unique vocation.” The bishop is encouraging people to be generous with the sisters as they establish their new home in the Fort Worth Diocese: “They’re in full communion with the Church, are rightly ordered in their Carmelite vocation.”A new page for the Carmelites after scandalIn 2023, a public scandal erupted after Olson began an investigation of an alleged relationship of a sexual nature between the former prioress of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Arlington, Rev. Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach, and a priest outside the diocese. Gerlach denied the allegation and accused Olson of overstepping his authority while seeking to obtain the nuns’ property located in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Olson has denied both claims. The scandal played out in the press through actions taken by the Vatican, lawsuits in civil courts, and through public statements on both sides. Last December, the Vatican issued a decree of suppression of the Arlington Carmelite monastery.Olson announced the suppression just over a year ago, on Dec. 2, 2024, emphasizing at the time that the women at the monastery “are neither nuns nor Carmelites despite their continued and public self-identification to the contrary.”He added that the Holy See “suppressed the monastery, so it exists no longer, despite any public self-identification made to the contrary by the former nuns who continue to occupy the premises.”In August of that year, the nuns posted on their website that they had joined the Society of St. Pius X, a group that is in an “irregular” canonical situation within the Church.‘May their vocation bring forth many graces’In his most recent letter announcing the new monastery, Olson said it “will be a place where the beauty of contemplative life radiates outward into the world. Through prayer, silence, work, and sacrifice, the Discalced Carmelite nuns will accompany the faithful and intercede for the needs of our communities.” “I ask all the faithful of the diocese to join me in prayer for these nuns as they begin this new chapter in their vocation,” the bishop said. “May their vocation bring forth many graces including priestly and religious vocations, holy and happy marriages, and faithful discipleship,” he added.
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New Carmelite monastery to open in Fort Worth Diocese following scandal #Catholic The skyline of Fort Worth, Texas. / Credit: 21 Aerials/Shutterstock CNA Staff, Dec 12, 2025 / 09:41 am (CNA). Bishop Michael Olson of the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, has announced the opening of a new order of Discalced Carmelite nuns after an older one in the diocese lost its canonical status last year. Olson announced the news of the opening in a letter on Dec. 2 in which he said the Vatican’s Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life gave permission for the new monastery.The prelate described it as “a moment of extraordinary grace for our local Church.”In an interview with CNA, Olson said there has been “a need in our diocese for prayers, for reparation of sin … and through adoration and contemplation and meditation, to pray for all of those intentions — that is the vocation of the new Carmel.”Olson said that about six months ago he requested that a new order of nuns come to reside in the diocese from the Christ the King Association of Discalced Carmelite Monasteries in the U.S.A.After making a formal request for permission from the Holy See in October, he received word in November that the Holy See approved the establishment of the new monastery. The nuns are coming from the Carmel in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. The bishop emphasized that the Carmel “is an autonomous body even though I have supervisory rights.”He said the land was “donated generously by the faithful in the diocese” after he acted as an intermediary between the sisters and parishioners.Asked when he believes the monastery, located in a rural part of northern Cooke County about 80 miles north of Dallas, will be completed, he replied: “That’s in God’s time.” He said the sisters will not have a website “because it’s a distraction from their religious life. Social media can have adverse effects on a religious vocation, as we have seen.” Olson told CNA he is “very grateful to the Holy See for this permission, but also to the religious sisters, the nuns who have given of themselves to Christ. It’s a very unique vocation.” The bishop is encouraging people to be generous with the sisters as they establish their new home in the Fort Worth Diocese: “They’re in full communion with the Church, are rightly ordered in their Carmelite vocation.”A new page for the Carmelites after scandalIn 2023, a public scandal erupted after Olson began an investigation of an alleged relationship of a sexual nature between the former prioress of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Arlington, Rev. Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach, and a priest outside the diocese. Gerlach denied the allegation and accused Olson of overstepping his authority while seeking to obtain the nuns’ property located in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Olson has denied both claims. The scandal played out in the press through actions taken by the Vatican, lawsuits in civil courts, and through public statements on both sides. Last December, the Vatican issued a decree of suppression of the Arlington Carmelite monastery.Olson announced the suppression just over a year ago, on Dec. 2, 2024, emphasizing at the time that the women at the monastery “are neither nuns nor Carmelites despite their continued and public self-identification to the contrary.”He added that the Holy See “suppressed the monastery, so it exists no longer, despite any public self-identification made to the contrary by the former nuns who continue to occupy the premises.”In August of that year, the nuns posted on their website that they had joined the Society of St. Pius X, a group that is in an “irregular” canonical situation within the Church.‘May their vocation bring forth many graces’In his most recent letter announcing the new monastery, Olson said it “will be a place where the beauty of contemplative life radiates outward into the world. Through prayer, silence, work, and sacrifice, the Discalced Carmelite nuns will accompany the faithful and intercede for the needs of our communities.” “I ask all the faithful of the diocese to join me in prayer for these nuns as they begin this new chapter in their vocation,” the bishop said. “May their vocation bring forth many graces including priestly and religious vocations, holy and happy marriages, and faithful discipleship,” he added.

unitedyam

The skyline of Fort Worth, Texas. / Credit: 21 Aerials/Shutterstock

CNA Staff, Dec 12, 2025 / 09:41 am (CNA).

Bishop Michael Olson of the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, has announced the opening of a new order of Discalced Carmelite nuns after an older one in the diocese lost its canonical status last year. 

Olson announced the news of the opening in a letter on Dec. 2 in which he said the Vatican’s Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life gave permission for the new monastery.

The prelate described it as “a moment of extraordinary grace for our local Church.”

In an interview with CNA, Olson said there has been “a need in our diocese for prayers, for reparation of sin … and through adoration and contemplation and meditation, to pray for all of those intentions — that is the vocation of the new Carmel.”

Olson said that about six months ago he requested that a new order of nuns come to reside in the diocese from the Christ the King Association of Discalced Carmelite Monasteries in the U.S.A.

After making a formal request for permission from the Holy See in October, he received word in November that the Holy See approved the establishment of the new monastery. 

The nuns are coming from the Carmel in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. 

The bishop emphasized that the Carmel “is an autonomous body even though I have supervisory rights.”

He said the land was “donated generously by the faithful in the diocese” after he acted as an intermediary between the sisters and parishioners.

Asked when he believes the monastery, located in a rural part of northern Cooke County about 80 miles north of Dallas, will be completed, he replied: “That’s in God’s time.” 

He said the sisters will not have a website “because it’s a distraction from their religious life. Social media can have adverse effects on a religious vocation, as we have seen.” 

Olson told CNA he is “very grateful to the Holy See for this permission, but also to the religious sisters, the nuns who have given of themselves to Christ. It’s a very unique vocation.” 

The bishop is encouraging people to be generous with the sisters as they establish their new home in the Fort Worth Diocese: “They’re in full communion with the Church, are rightly ordered in their Carmelite vocation.”

A new page for the Carmelites after scandal

In 2023, a public scandal erupted after Olson began an investigation of an alleged relationship of a sexual nature between the former prioress of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Arlington, Rev. Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach, and a priest outside the diocese. 

Gerlach denied the allegation and accused Olson of overstepping his authority while seeking to obtain the nuns’ property located in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Olson has denied both claims. 

The scandal played out in the press through actions taken by the Vatican, lawsuits in civil courts, and through public statements on both sides. 

Last December, the Vatican issued a decree of suppression of the Arlington Carmelite monastery.

Olson announced the suppression just over a year ago, on Dec. 2, 2024, emphasizing at the time that the women at the monastery “are neither nuns nor Carmelites despite their continued and public self-identification to the contrary.”

He added that the Holy See “suppressed the monastery, so it exists no longer, despite any public self-identification made to the contrary by the former nuns who continue to occupy the premises.”

In August of that year, the nuns posted on their website that they had joined the Society of St. Pius X, a group that is in an “irregular” canonical situation within the Church.

‘May their vocation bring forth many graces’

In his most recent letter announcing the new monastery, Olson said it “will be a place where the beauty of contemplative life radiates outward into the world. Through prayer, silence, work, and sacrifice, the Discalced Carmelite nuns will accompany the faithful and intercede for the needs of our communities.” 

“I ask all the faithful of the diocese to join me in prayer for these nuns as they begin this new chapter in their vocation,” the bishop said. 

“May their vocation bring forth many graces including priestly and religious vocations, holy and happy marriages, and faithful discipleship,” he added.

Read More
Senate to vote on health care plans as subsidies near expiration #Catholic Congress is set to vote on two plans regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits that are scheduled to expire Dec. 31, 2025.  / Credit: usarmyband, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 11, 2025 / 06:30 am (CNA). Congress is set to vote on two plans regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits that are scheduled to expire Dec. 31, 2025. The Senate is expected to vote Dec. 11 on a Democratic proposal to extend existing ACA tax credits for three years, as 24 million Americans use ACA marketplaces for health insurance. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, told reporters Tuesday after a Senate Republican meeting that lawmakers also will vote on a Republican alternative measure. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, who leads the Finance panel, announced the legislation on Monday. The measure (S. 3386) would set requirements for Health Savings Account (HSA) contributions and direct that the money cannot be used for abortion or “gender transitions.” It would require states to verify citizenship and immigration status before coverage.Catholic bishops weigh inThe U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have said they favor extending the taxpayer subsidies that lower health insurance costs under the ACA, but said lawmakers must ensure that the tax credits are not used for abortions or other procedures that violate Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. The enhanced premium tax credits “should be extended but must not continue to fund plans that cover the destruction of human life, which is antithetical to authentic health care,”  the bishops wrote in an Oct. 10 letter to members of Congress. There needs to be a policy that serves “all vulnerable people – born and preborn” and applies full Hyde Amendment protections to them, ensuring not only that government funding does not directly pay for the procuring of an abortion, but also that plans offered by health insurance companies on ACA exchanges cannot cover elective abortion,” they wrote. The Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress in 1977, prohibits the use of federal funds for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is at risk.Activists respondA coalition of more than 300 faith leaders including NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, Church Of God In Christ Social Justice Ministry, Faith in Action Network, and  Franciscan Action Network, delivered a joint letter to Congress Dec. 8 urging legislators to pass a bipartisan bill that protects and expands the ACA premium tax credits.“Each life is sacred, therefore, there is a moral imperative to provide care for the sick and alleviate suffering particularly for those who lack resources to pay,” the letter wrote. There must be action to ensure everyone has “the health care they need to live and thrive, as people are currently making choices about coverage for 2026.”“The letter notes that renewing the tax credits will keep healthcare premiums under the ACA from spiking by an average of 114 percent in 2026,” NETWORK reported. “This would cause an estimated 4.8 million people to lose their health coverage because they cannot afford it. Subsequently, some 50,000 people could lose their lives without their health coverage.”Other pro-life organizations have warned against expanding the subsidies. “As Congress continues to face pressure to extend Obamacare’s abortion-funding premium subsidies, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA) is making the facts clear on how Obamacare does not include the Hyde amendment and forces Americans to pay for abortions,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, said in a statement.“The enactment of Obamacare ruptured the bipartisan legacy of the Hyde amendment and resulted in the largest expansion of abortion funding since the 1970s,” she said. “Obama and the Democratic leadership at the time intentionally drafted the program to avoid annual appropriations bills, bypassing the Hyde amendment.”“Instead of stopping funding for health insurance plans that cover elective abortion, Section 1303 of Obamacare expressly permits subsidies for Obamacare plans that cover abortion using elaborate accounting requirements and an abortion surcharge to justify the funding,” she said.SBA and more than 100 other pro-life organizations are demanding that any extensions to Obamacare include a complete application of the Hyde policy. The groups sent a September letter and an October letter to lawmakers calling on Congress to ensure pro-life provisions. “Preventing taxpayer funding of abortion is a minimum requirement for any new Obamacare spending advanced by a Republican Congress and Administration,” Dannenfelser said.
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Senate to vote on health care plans as subsidies near expiration #Catholic Congress is set to vote on two plans regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits that are scheduled to expire Dec. 31, 2025.  / Credit: usarmyband, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 11, 2025 / 06:30 am (CNA). Congress is set to vote on two plans regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits that are scheduled to expire Dec. 31, 2025. The Senate is expected to vote Dec. 11 on a Democratic proposal to extend existing ACA tax credits for three years, as 24 million Americans use ACA marketplaces for health insurance. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, told reporters Tuesday after a Senate Republican meeting that lawmakers also will vote on a Republican alternative measure. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, who leads the Finance panel, announced the legislation on Monday. The measure (S. 3386) would set requirements for Health Savings Account (HSA) contributions and direct that the money cannot be used for abortion or “gender transitions.” It would require states to verify citizenship and immigration status before coverage.Catholic bishops weigh inThe U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have said they favor extending the taxpayer subsidies that lower health insurance costs under the ACA, but said lawmakers must ensure that the tax credits are not used for abortions or other procedures that violate Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. The enhanced premium tax credits “should be extended but must not continue to fund plans that cover the destruction of human life, which is antithetical to authentic health care,”  the bishops wrote in an Oct. 10 letter to members of Congress. There needs to be a policy that serves “all vulnerable people – born and preborn” and applies full Hyde Amendment protections to them, ensuring not only that government funding does not directly pay for the procuring of an abortion, but also that plans offered by health insurance companies on ACA exchanges cannot cover elective abortion,” they wrote. The Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress in 1977, prohibits the use of federal funds for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is at risk.Activists respondA coalition of more than 300 faith leaders including NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, Church Of God In Christ Social Justice Ministry, Faith in Action Network, and  Franciscan Action Network, delivered a joint letter to Congress Dec. 8 urging legislators to pass a bipartisan bill that protects and expands the ACA premium tax credits.“Each life is sacred, therefore, there is a moral imperative to provide care for the sick and alleviate suffering particularly for those who lack resources to pay,” the letter wrote. There must be action to ensure everyone has “the health care they need to live and thrive, as people are currently making choices about coverage for 2026.”“The letter notes that renewing the tax credits will keep healthcare premiums under the ACA from spiking by an average of 114 percent in 2026,” NETWORK reported. “This would cause an estimated 4.8 million people to lose their health coverage because they cannot afford it. Subsequently, some 50,000 people could lose their lives without their health coverage.”Other pro-life organizations have warned against expanding the subsidies. “As Congress continues to face pressure to extend Obamacare’s abortion-funding premium subsidies, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA) is making the facts clear on how Obamacare does not include the Hyde amendment and forces Americans to pay for abortions,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, said in a statement.“The enactment of Obamacare ruptured the bipartisan legacy of the Hyde amendment and resulted in the largest expansion of abortion funding since the 1970s,” she said. “Obama and the Democratic leadership at the time intentionally drafted the program to avoid annual appropriations bills, bypassing the Hyde amendment.”“Instead of stopping funding for health insurance plans that cover elective abortion, Section 1303 of Obamacare expressly permits subsidies for Obamacare plans that cover abortion using elaborate accounting requirements and an abortion surcharge to justify the funding,” she said.SBA and more than 100 other pro-life organizations are demanding that any extensions to Obamacare include a complete application of the Hyde policy. The groups sent a September letter and an October letter to lawmakers calling on Congress to ensure pro-life provisions. “Preventing taxpayer funding of abortion is a minimum requirement for any new Obamacare spending advanced by a Republican Congress and Administration,” Dannenfelser said.

unitedyam

Congress is set to vote on two plans regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits that are scheduled to expire Dec. 31, 2025.  / Credit: usarmyband, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 11, 2025 / 06:30 am (CNA).

Congress is set to vote on two plans regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits that are scheduled to expire Dec. 31, 2025. 

The Senate is expected to vote Dec. 11 on a Democratic proposal to extend existing ACA tax credits for three years, as 24 million Americans use ACA marketplaces for health insurance. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, told reporters Tuesday after a Senate Republican meeting that lawmakers also will vote on a Republican alternative measure. 

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, who leads the Finance panel, announced the legislation on Monday. 

The measure (S. 3386) would set requirements for Health Savings Account (HSA) contributions and direct that the money cannot be used for abortion or “gender transitions.” It would require states to verify citizenship and immigration status before coverage.

Catholic bishops weigh in

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have said they favor extending the taxpayer subsidies that lower health insurance costs under the ACA, but said lawmakers must ensure that the tax credits are not used for abortions or other procedures that violate Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. 

The enhanced premium tax credits “should be extended but must not continue to fund plans that cover the destruction of human life, which is antithetical to authentic health care,”  the bishops wrote in an Oct. 10 letter to members of Congress. 

There needs to be a policy that serves “all vulnerable people – born and preborn” and applies full Hyde Amendment protections to them, ensuring not only that government funding does not directly pay for the procuring of an abortion, but also that plans offered by health insurance companies on ACA exchanges cannot cover elective abortion,” they wrote. 

The Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress in 1977, prohibits the use of federal funds for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is at risk.

Activists respond

A coalition of more than 300 faith leaders including NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, Church Of God In Christ Social Justice Ministry, Faith in Action Network, and  Franciscan Action Network, delivered a joint letter to Congress Dec. 8 urging legislators to pass a bipartisan bill that protects and expands the ACA premium tax credits.

“Each life is sacred, therefore, there is a moral imperative to provide care for the sick and alleviate suffering particularly for those who lack resources to pay,” the letter wrote. There must be action to ensure everyone has “the health care they need to live and thrive, as people are currently making choices about coverage for 2026.”

“The letter notes that renewing the tax credits will keep healthcare premiums under the ACA from spiking by an average of 114 percent in 2026,” NETWORK reported. “This would cause an estimated 4.8 million people to lose their health coverage because they cannot afford it. Subsequently, some 50,000 people could lose their lives without their health coverage.”

Other pro-life organizations have warned against expanding the subsidies. 

“As Congress continues to face pressure to extend Obamacare’s abortion-funding premium subsidies, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA) is making the facts clear on how Obamacare does not include the Hyde amendment and forces Americans to pay for abortions,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, said in a statement.

“The enactment of Obamacare ruptured the bipartisan legacy of the Hyde amendment and resulted in the largest expansion of abortion funding since the 1970s,” she said. “Obama and the Democratic leadership at the time intentionally drafted the program to avoid annual appropriations bills, bypassing the Hyde amendment.”

“Instead of stopping funding for health insurance plans that cover elective abortion, Section 1303 of Obamacare expressly permits subsidies for Obamacare plans that cover abortion using elaborate accounting requirements and an abortion surcharge to justify the funding,” she said.

SBA and more than 100 other pro-life organizations are demanding that any extensions to Obamacare include a complete application of the Hyde policy. The groups sent a September letter and an October letter to lawmakers calling on Congress to ensure pro-life provisions. 

“Preventing taxpayer funding of abortion is a minimum requirement for any new Obamacare spending advanced by a Republican Congress and Administration,” Dannenfelser said.

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Pew study: Religion holds steady in America #Catholic American adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained steady, a new Pew Research Center report finds.  / Credit: ChoeWatt/Shutterstock Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 9, 2025 / 15:30 pm (CNA). The number of American adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained steady, a new Pew Research Center report finds. Surveys conducted since 2020 have generally found that about 70% of U.S. adults identify with a religion. The numbers have slightly fluctuated, but there has been no clear rise or fall in religious affiliation over the five-year period.A Pew Research Center study, Religion Holds Steady in America, summarizes the latest trends in American religion and examines religion among young adults. The report is based on Pew’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS), which has annually surveyed a random sample of U.S. adults since 2020. It also draws from the U.S. Religious Landscape Study (RLS), which surveyed 36,908 adults from July 17, 2023 to March 4, 2024.The number of American adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained steady, a new Pew Research Center report finds. Credit: Courtesy of Pew Research Center.The report also uses data from the General Social Survey and the American Time Use Survey.The research revealed that after Pew found a decline in Christianity in the country from 2007 to 2020, the decline has halted and there is a stable presence of Christianty and religion in the nation. Young women’s religiosity shiftsWhile the polling shows no clear evidence of a religious increase among young adults, it did find that young men are now almost as religious as women in the same age group. The finding differs from past studies which found that young women tended to be more religious than young men. This shift was found to be due to a decline in religiousness among American women, rather than an increase in the religiousness of men. In contrast to the young adults, the data revealed older women are more religious than older men. Overall, young men and young women surveyed in 2023 and 2024 are less religious than those questioned in 2007 and 2014 studies. In 2007, 54% of women and 40% of men ages 18 to 24 reported they prayed daily. Data from 2023-2024 revealed only 30% of women and 26% of men in the same age group said they pray daily, indicating the gender gap among religious men and women is closing. Young adults remain less religious than older AmericansThe data found no evidence that any age group has become substantially more or less religious since 2020. In the 2025 NPORS, 83% of adults 71 or older identified with a religion, similarly to the 84% in 2020. Among the youngest group of adults ages 18 to 30, 55% identify with a religion in 2025. This data is similar to the 57% who reported the same in 2020.While there was not a large change in the number of adults who practice religion, older generations continue to be more religious than younger ones. Adults aged 71 or older tend to pray more than those ages 18 to 30, with 59% of older adults reporting they pray daily compared to 32% of young adults. There were also discrepancies among age groups based on how often individuals attend religious services. Adults 71 and older attend the most with 43% reporting they attend at least monthly. Adults 31 to 40 were found to attend the least with 29% reporting they go monthly. The data shows that today’s adults between the ages of roughly 18 and 22 are at least as religious as the age group slightly older than them who are in their mid to late 20s. Some aspects revealed that the younger U.S. adults may be more religious than the age group slightly older than them. The 2023–24 RLS found 30% of adults born between 2003 and 2006 said they attended religious services at least once a month, which is higher than the 24% of people born between 1995 and 2002. 
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Pew study: Religion holds steady in America #Catholic American adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained steady, a new Pew Research Center report finds.  / Credit: ChoeWatt/Shutterstock Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 9, 2025 / 15:30 pm (CNA). The number of American adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained steady, a new Pew Research Center report finds. Surveys conducted since 2020 have generally found that about 70% of U.S. adults identify with a religion. The numbers have slightly fluctuated, but there has been no clear rise or fall in religious affiliation over the five-year period.A Pew Research Center study, Religion Holds Steady in America, summarizes the latest trends in American religion and examines religion among young adults. The report is based on Pew’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS), which has annually surveyed a random sample of U.S. adults since 2020. It also draws from the U.S. Religious Landscape Study (RLS), which surveyed 36,908 adults from July 17, 2023 to March 4, 2024.The number of American adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained steady, a new Pew Research Center report finds. Credit: Courtesy of Pew Research Center.The report also uses data from the General Social Survey and the American Time Use Survey.The research revealed that after Pew found a decline in Christianity in the country from 2007 to 2020, the decline has halted and there is a stable presence of Christianty and religion in the nation. Young women’s religiosity shiftsWhile the polling shows no clear evidence of a religious increase among young adults, it did find that young men are now almost as religious as women in the same age group. The finding differs from past studies which found that young women tended to be more religious than young men. This shift was found to be due to a decline in religiousness among American women, rather than an increase in the religiousness of men. In contrast to the young adults, the data revealed older women are more religious than older men. Overall, young men and young women surveyed in 2023 and 2024 are less religious than those questioned in 2007 and 2014 studies. In 2007, 54% of women and 40% of men ages 18 to 24 reported they prayed daily. Data from 2023-2024 revealed only 30% of women and 26% of men in the same age group said they pray daily, indicating the gender gap among religious men and women is closing. Young adults remain less religious than older AmericansThe data found no evidence that any age group has become substantially more or less religious since 2020. In the 2025 NPORS, 83% of adults 71 or older identified with a religion, similarly to the 84% in 2020. Among the youngest group of adults ages 18 to 30, 55% identify with a religion in 2025. This data is similar to the 57% who reported the same in 2020.While there was not a large change in the number of adults who practice religion, older generations continue to be more religious than younger ones. Adults aged 71 or older tend to pray more than those ages 18 to 30, with 59% of older adults reporting they pray daily compared to 32% of young adults. There were also discrepancies among age groups based on how often individuals attend religious services. Adults 71 and older attend the most with 43% reporting they attend at least monthly. Adults 31 to 40 were found to attend the least with 29% reporting they go monthly. The data shows that today’s adults between the ages of roughly 18 and 22 are at least as religious as the age group slightly older than them who are in their mid to late 20s. Some aspects revealed that the younger U.S. adults may be more religious than the age group slightly older than them. The 2023–24 RLS found 30% of adults born between 2003 and 2006 said they attended religious services at least once a month, which is higher than the 24% of people born between 1995 and 2002. 

unitedyam

American adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained steady, a new Pew Research Center report finds.  / Credit: ChoeWatt/Shutterstock

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 9, 2025 / 15:30 pm (CNA).

The number of American adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained steady, a new Pew Research Center report finds. 

Surveys conducted since 2020 have generally found that about 70% of U.S. adults identify with a religion. The numbers have slightly fluctuated, but there has been no clear rise or fall in religious affiliation over the five-year period.

A Pew Research Center study, Religion Holds Steady in America, summarizes the latest trends in American religion and examines religion among young adults. The report is based on Pew’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS), which has annually surveyed a random sample of U.S. adults since 2020. It also draws from the U.S. Religious Landscape Study (RLS), which surveyed 36,908 adults from July 17, 2023 to March 4, 2024.

The number of American adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained steady, a new Pew Research Center report finds. Credit: Courtesy of Pew Research Center.
The number of American adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained steady, a new Pew Research Center report finds. Credit: Courtesy of Pew Research Center.

The report also uses data from the General Social Survey and the American Time Use Survey.

The research revealed that after Pew found a decline in Christianity in the country from 2007 to 2020, the decline has halted and there is a stable presence of Christianty and religion in the nation. 

Young women’s religiosity shifts

While the polling shows no clear evidence of a religious increase among young adults, it did find that young men are now almost as religious as women in the same age group. The finding differs from past studies which found that young women tended to be more religious than young men. 

This shift was found to be due to a decline in religiousness among American women, rather than an increase in the religiousness of men. In contrast to the young adults, the data revealed older women are more religious than older men. 

Overall, young men and young women surveyed in 2023 and 2024 are less religious than those questioned in 2007 and 2014 studies.

In 2007, 54% of women and 40% of men ages 18 to 24 reported they prayed daily. Data from 2023-2024 revealed only 30% of women and 26% of men in the same age group said they pray daily, indicating the gender gap among religious men and women is closing. 

Young adults remain less religious than older Americans

The data found no evidence that any age group has become substantially more or less religious since 2020. In the 2025 NPORS, 83% of adults 71 or older identified with a religion, similarly to the 84% in 2020. 

Among the youngest group of adults ages 18 to 30, 55% identify with a religion in 2025. This data is similar to the 57% who reported the same in 2020.

While there was not a large change in the number of adults who practice religion, older generations continue to be more religious than younger ones. Adults aged 71 or older tend to pray more than those ages 18 to 30, with 59% of older adults reporting they pray daily compared to 32% of young adults. 

There were also discrepancies among age groups based on how often individuals attend religious services. Adults 71 and older attend the most with 43% reporting they attend at least monthly. Adults 31 to 40 were found to attend the least with 29% reporting they go monthly. 

The data shows that today’s adults between the ages of roughly 18 and 22 are at least as religious as the age group slightly older than them who are in their mid to late 20s. Some aspects revealed that the younger U.S. adults may be more religious than the age group slightly older than them. 

The 2023–24 RLS found 30% of adults born between 2003 and 2006 said they attended religious services at least once a month, which is higher than the 24% of people born between 1995 and 2002. 

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Catholic Charities affiliates fear SNAP disruptions amid Trump administration warning #Catholic The Trump administration intends to cut off federal food assistance for 21 states, which has caused concern for some local Catholic Charities affiliates. / Credit: rblfmr/Shutterstock Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 3, 2025 / 17:51 pm (CNA). President Donald Trump’s administration intends to cut off federal food assistance for 21 states amid a dispute over reporting data about recipients, which has caused concern for some local Catholic Charities affiliates whose areas may be affected.In May, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins ordered states to share certain records with the federal government about people who receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). She said this was to ensure benefits only went to eligible people.Although 29 states complied, 21 Democratic-led states refused to provide the information and sued the administration. The lawsuit alleges that providing the information — which includes immigration status, income, and identifying information — would be a privacy violation.Rollins said in a Cabinet meeting on Dec. 2 that “as of next week, we have begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply and they … allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and protect the American taxpayer.”She said an initial overview of the data from states that complied showed SNAP benefits given to 186,000 people using Social Security numbers for someone who is not alive and about a half of a million people receiving SNAP benefits more than once. The Department of Agriculture has not released that data.If funding is halted, this would be the second disruption for SNAP benefits in just two months. In November, SNAP payments were delayed for nearly two weeks until lawmakers negotiated an end to the government shutdown.For many of the states that will be impacted, Catholic Charities is the largest provider of food assistance after SNAP, and some affiliate leaders fear that the disruption will cause problems.Rose Bak, chief operating officer of Catholic Charities of Oregon, told CNA the nonprofit keeps  stockpiles for emergencies, but “we’ve gone through most of our supplies” amid the November disruption and an increase in people’s needs caused by the high cost of groceries. She said their food pantry partners have told her “they’ve never been this low on stock” as well.“Our phones were ringing off the hook,” Bak said. “Our mailboxes were flooded with emails.”When asked how another disruption would compare to the problems in November, she said: “I think it will definitely be worse.”“People are scared,” Bak said. “They’re worried about how they’re going to feed their families.”Ashley Valis, chief operating officer of Catholic Charities of Baltimore, similarly told CNA that another disruption “would place immense strain on families already struggling as well as on organizations like ours, which are experiencing growing demand for food and emergency assistance.”“Food insecurity forces children, parents, and older adults to make impossible trade-offs between rent, groceries, and medication,” she said.Catholic Charities DC President and CEO James Malloy offers a prayer before a Thanksgiving meal Nov. 25, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Ralph Alswang for Catholic Charities DC.James Malloy, CEO and president of Catholic Charities DC, told CNA: “We work to be responsive to the needs of the community as they fluctuate,” and added: “SNAP cuts will certainly increase that need.”“These benefits are critical for veterans, children, and many low-income workers who have multiple jobs to cover basic expenses,” he said.Catholic Charities USA launched a national fundraising effort in late October, just before SNAP benefits were delayed the first time. Catholic Charities USA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Catholic Charities affiliates fear SNAP disruptions amid Trump administration warning #Catholic The Trump administration intends to cut off federal food assistance for 21 states, which has caused concern for some local Catholic Charities affiliates. / Credit: rblfmr/Shutterstock Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 3, 2025 / 17:51 pm (CNA). President Donald Trump’s administration intends to cut off federal food assistance for 21 states amid a dispute over reporting data about recipients, which has caused concern for some local Catholic Charities affiliates whose areas may be affected.In May, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins ordered states to share certain records with the federal government about people who receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). She said this was to ensure benefits only went to eligible people.Although 29 states complied, 21 Democratic-led states refused to provide the information and sued the administration. The lawsuit alleges that providing the information — which includes immigration status, income, and identifying information — would be a privacy violation.Rollins said in a Cabinet meeting on Dec. 2 that “as of next week, we have begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply and they … allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and protect the American taxpayer.”She said an initial overview of the data from states that complied showed SNAP benefits given to 186,000 people using Social Security numbers for someone who is not alive and about a half of a million people receiving SNAP benefits more than once. The Department of Agriculture has not released that data.If funding is halted, this would be the second disruption for SNAP benefits in just two months. In November, SNAP payments were delayed for nearly two weeks until lawmakers negotiated an end to the government shutdown.For many of the states that will be impacted, Catholic Charities is the largest provider of food assistance after SNAP, and some affiliate leaders fear that the disruption will cause problems.Rose Bak, chief operating officer of Catholic Charities of Oregon, told CNA the nonprofit keeps  stockpiles for emergencies, but “we’ve gone through most of our supplies” amid the November disruption and an increase in people’s needs caused by the high cost of groceries. She said their food pantry partners have told her “they’ve never been this low on stock” as well.“Our phones were ringing off the hook,” Bak said. “Our mailboxes were flooded with emails.”When asked how another disruption would compare to the problems in November, she said: “I think it will definitely be worse.”“People are scared,” Bak said. “They’re worried about how they’re going to feed their families.”Ashley Valis, chief operating officer of Catholic Charities of Baltimore, similarly told CNA that another disruption “would place immense strain on families already struggling as well as on organizations like ours, which are experiencing growing demand for food and emergency assistance.”“Food insecurity forces children, parents, and older adults to make impossible trade-offs between rent, groceries, and medication,” she said.Catholic Charities DC President and CEO James Malloy offers a prayer before a Thanksgiving meal Nov. 25, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Ralph Alswang for Catholic Charities DC.James Malloy, CEO and president of Catholic Charities DC, told CNA: “We work to be responsive to the needs of the community as they fluctuate,” and added: “SNAP cuts will certainly increase that need.”“These benefits are critical for veterans, children, and many low-income workers who have multiple jobs to cover basic expenses,” he said.Catholic Charities USA launched a national fundraising effort in late October, just before SNAP benefits were delayed the first time. Catholic Charities USA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

unitedyam

The Trump administration intends to cut off federal food assistance for 21 states, which has caused concern for some local Catholic Charities affiliates. / Credit: rblfmr/Shutterstock

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 3, 2025 / 17:51 pm (CNA).

President Donald Trump’s administration intends to cut off federal food assistance for 21 states amid a dispute over reporting data about recipients, which has caused concern for some local Catholic Charities affiliates whose areas may be affected.

In May, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins ordered states to share certain records with the federal government about people who receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). She said this was to ensure benefits only went to eligible people.

Although 29 states complied, 21 Democratic-led states refused to provide the information and sued the administration. The lawsuit alleges that providing the information — which includes immigration status, income, and identifying information — would be a privacy violation.

Rollins said in a Cabinet meeting on Dec. 2 that “as of next week, we have begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply and they … allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and protect the American taxpayer.”

She said an initial overview of the data from states that complied showed SNAP benefits given to 186,000 people using Social Security numbers for someone who is not alive and about a half of a million people receiving SNAP benefits more than once. The Department of Agriculture has not released that data.

If funding is halted, this would be the second disruption for SNAP benefits in just two months. In November, SNAP payments were delayed for nearly two weeks until lawmakers negotiated an end to the government shutdown.

For many of the states that will be impacted, Catholic Charities is the largest provider of food assistance after SNAP, and some affiliate leaders fear that the disruption will cause problems.

Rose Bak, chief operating officer of Catholic Charities of Oregon, told CNA the nonprofit keeps  stockpiles for emergencies, but “we’ve gone through most of our supplies” amid the November disruption and an increase in people’s needs caused by the high cost of groceries. 

She said their food pantry partners have told her “they’ve never been this low on stock” as well.

“Our phones were ringing off the hook,” Bak said. “Our mailboxes were flooded with emails.”

When asked how another disruption would compare to the problems in November, she said: “I think it will definitely be worse.”

“People are scared,” Bak said. “They’re worried about how they’re going to feed their families.”

Ashley Valis, chief operating officer of Catholic Charities of Baltimore, similarly told CNA that another disruption “would place immense strain on families already struggling as well as on organizations like ours, which are experiencing growing demand for food and emergency assistance.”

“Food insecurity forces children, parents, and older adults to make impossible trade-offs between rent, groceries, and medication,” she said.

Catholic Charities DC President and CEO James Malloy offers a prayer before a Thanksgiving meal Nov. 25, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Ralph Alswang for Catholic Charities DC.
Catholic Charities DC President and CEO James Malloy offers a prayer before a Thanksgiving meal Nov. 25, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Ralph Alswang for Catholic Charities DC.

James Malloy, CEO and president of Catholic Charities DC, told CNA: “We work to be responsive to the needs of the community as they fluctuate,” and added: “SNAP cuts will certainly increase that need.”

“These benefits are critical for veterans, children, and many low-income workers who have multiple jobs to cover basic expenses,” he said.

Catholic Charities USA launched a national fundraising effort in late October, just before SNAP benefits were delayed the first time. Catholic Charities USA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Report details persecution of Turkish Christians ahead of Pope Leo XIV's visit #Catholic The scene outside a Catholic church in Istanbul, Turkey, where a reported armed attack took place on Jan. 28, 2024. / Credit: Rudolf Gehrig/EWTN Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 26, 2025 / 16:15 pm (CNA). A Christian advocacy group’s report details “legal, institutional, and social hostility” toward Turkish Christians as Pope Leo XIV begins his six-day visit to Turkey and Lebanon Thursday.The report from The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), titled “The Persecution of Christians in Turkey,” explores government interference against clergy and Christian entities, restrictions on foreign Christians who visit the country, and widespread social animosity toward the faithful, which sometimes includes direct violence.“Communities that were once integral to the cultural, religious, and historical fabric of Anatolia have been reduced to a fragile remnant,” the authors state.“Their disappearance is not the product of a single event but the cumulative result of restrictive legislation, administrative obstruction, property confiscations, denial of legal personality, and — more recently — arbitrary expulsions of clergy, missionaries, and converts,” they add.Modern-day Turkey, which was governed by Christians prior to the Ottoman Empire invasions in late Middle Ages, is still home to about 257,000 Christians. In 1915, Christians still accounted for about 20% of the Turkish population, but the number has dwindled over the past century and they now account for less than 0.3% of the population.Persecution of ChristiansThe report says hostility toward Christians is kept alive through environmental factors, such as Turkey’s refusal to recognize its past by continuing to deny the genocide of Armenians and other Christians during World War I. At that time, about 1.5 million Armenians and 500,000 other Christians were forcibly deported or massacred, and Turkey’s criminalization of “insulting the Turkish nation” and “insulting Turkishness” is often enforced to quell speech about the historical events, according to the report.It notes that politicians and state-run media frequently scapegoat Christians for societal issues and depict them as an external and internal threat, with one example being President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan referring to survivors of the genocide as “terrorists escaped from the sword” and another being the state-run Yeni Akit allegedly editing Wikipedia to smear Christians, Jews, and other groups.In some cases, this hostility yields violence, including a 2024 terrorist attack on a Catholic church that killed one person, and other acts of violence and vandalism.The report notes that Turkey signed the Treaty of Lausanne after the Armenian genocide, which granted people who believe some non-majority faiths full legal recognition and property rights.Yet, a narrow interpretation of the treaty ensures “a national narrative that presents Sunni Islam as the primary marker of Turkish identity,” the report says. The treaty also fails to recognize all Christians, only giving a specific reference to Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic Christians, and Jews, but not Catholics or Protestants, according to the report.It states that Sunni Islam is often tied to Turkish identity in public education and the process to be exempt from compulsory Islamic education is burdensome for Christians not covered under the treaty.No church holds legal personality as a religious institution, which means patriarchates, dioceses, and churches cannot “own property in their own name, initiate legal proceedings, employ staff, open bank accounts, or formally interact with public authorities,” the report states.The government also interferes with religious leadership, prohibiting non-Turkish citizens from being elected as Ecumenical Patriarch, sitting on the Holy Synod, or participating in patriarchal elections in the Greek Orthodox Church. The government also regulates elections for leadership in the Armenian Apostolic Church.Turkey shut down the Greek Orthodox Halki Seminary in 1971 and — despite promises to let it reopen — keeps it shut down, according to the report.The report also says Turkey imposes legal constraints and administrative obstruction on Christian “community foundations,” which operate churches, schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions.This includes blocking board elections and failing to enforce court orders. One of the more egregious violations is imposing “mazbut” trusteeship, which ends Christian institutions’ legal recognition and grants control to the government, which essentially confiscates property, the report said.“These practices reveal a structural system designed to undermine the autonomy, continuity, and survival of Christian communities in Turkey,” the report states.According to the report, foreign Protestant pastors are often expelled from seminaries. More broadly, it states that foreign missionaries and converts are often targeted as “national security” threats and frequently expelled from Turkey. The authors encouraged Turkey to grant full legal recognition to all churches, halt interference in Christian organizations, protect places of worship, end arbitrary expulsions, and return property that has been confiscated.
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Report details persecution of Turkish Christians ahead of Pope Leo XIV's visit #Catholic The scene outside a Catholic church in Istanbul, Turkey, where a reported armed attack took place on Jan. 28, 2024. / Credit: Rudolf Gehrig/EWTN Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 26, 2025 / 16:15 pm (CNA). A Christian advocacy group’s report details “legal, institutional, and social hostility” toward Turkish Christians as Pope Leo XIV begins his six-day visit to Turkey and Lebanon Thursday.The report from The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), titled “The Persecution of Christians in Turkey,” explores government interference against clergy and Christian entities, restrictions on foreign Christians who visit the country, and widespread social animosity toward the faithful, which sometimes includes direct violence.“Communities that were once integral to the cultural, religious, and historical fabric of Anatolia have been reduced to a fragile remnant,” the authors state.“Their disappearance is not the product of a single event but the cumulative result of restrictive legislation, administrative obstruction, property confiscations, denial of legal personality, and — more recently — arbitrary expulsions of clergy, missionaries, and converts,” they add.Modern-day Turkey, which was governed by Christians prior to the Ottoman Empire invasions in late Middle Ages, is still home to about 257,000 Christians. In 1915, Christians still accounted for about 20% of the Turkish population, but the number has dwindled over the past century and they now account for less than 0.3% of the population.Persecution of ChristiansThe report says hostility toward Christians is kept alive through environmental factors, such as Turkey’s refusal to recognize its past by continuing to deny the genocide of Armenians and other Christians during World War I. At that time, about 1.5 million Armenians and 500,000 other Christians were forcibly deported or massacred, and Turkey’s criminalization of “insulting the Turkish nation” and “insulting Turkishness” is often enforced to quell speech about the historical events, according to the report.It notes that politicians and state-run media frequently scapegoat Christians for societal issues and depict them as an external and internal threat, with one example being President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan referring to survivors of the genocide as “terrorists escaped from the sword” and another being the state-run Yeni Akit allegedly editing Wikipedia to smear Christians, Jews, and other groups.In some cases, this hostility yields violence, including a 2024 terrorist attack on a Catholic church that killed one person, and other acts of violence and vandalism.The report notes that Turkey signed the Treaty of Lausanne after the Armenian genocide, which granted people who believe some non-majority faiths full legal recognition and property rights.Yet, a narrow interpretation of the treaty ensures “a national narrative that presents Sunni Islam as the primary marker of Turkish identity,” the report says. The treaty also fails to recognize all Christians, only giving a specific reference to Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic Christians, and Jews, but not Catholics or Protestants, according to the report.It states that Sunni Islam is often tied to Turkish identity in public education and the process to be exempt from compulsory Islamic education is burdensome for Christians not covered under the treaty.No church holds legal personality as a religious institution, which means patriarchates, dioceses, and churches cannot “own property in their own name, initiate legal proceedings, employ staff, open bank accounts, or formally interact with public authorities,” the report states.The government also interferes with religious leadership, prohibiting non-Turkish citizens from being elected as Ecumenical Patriarch, sitting on the Holy Synod, or participating in patriarchal elections in the Greek Orthodox Church. The government also regulates elections for leadership in the Armenian Apostolic Church.Turkey shut down the Greek Orthodox Halki Seminary in 1971 and — despite promises to let it reopen — keeps it shut down, according to the report.The report also says Turkey imposes legal constraints and administrative obstruction on Christian “community foundations,” which operate churches, schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions.This includes blocking board elections and failing to enforce court orders. One of the more egregious violations is imposing “mazbut” trusteeship, which ends Christian institutions’ legal recognition and grants control to the government, which essentially confiscates property, the report said.“These practices reveal a structural system designed to undermine the autonomy, continuity, and survival of Christian communities in Turkey,” the report states.According to the report, foreign Protestant pastors are often expelled from seminaries. More broadly, it states that foreign missionaries and converts are often targeted as “national security” threats and frequently expelled from Turkey. The authors encouraged Turkey to grant full legal recognition to all churches, halt interference in Christian organizations, protect places of worship, end arbitrary expulsions, and return property that has been confiscated.

unitedyam

The scene outside a Catholic church in Istanbul, Turkey, where a reported armed attack took place on Jan. 28, 2024. / Credit: Rudolf Gehrig/EWTN

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 26, 2025 / 16:15 pm (CNA).

A Christian advocacy group’s report details “legal, institutional, and social hostility” toward Turkish Christians as Pope Leo XIV begins his six-day visit to Turkey and Lebanon Thursday.

The report from The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), titled “The Persecution of Christians in Turkey,” explores government interference against clergy and Christian entities, restrictions on foreign Christians who visit the country, and widespread social animosity toward the faithful, which sometimes includes direct violence.

“Communities that were once integral to the cultural, religious, and historical fabric of Anatolia have been reduced to a fragile remnant,” the authors state.

“Their disappearance is not the product of a single event but the cumulative result of restrictive legislation, administrative obstruction, property confiscations, denial of legal personality, and — more recently — arbitrary expulsions of clergy, missionaries, and converts,” they add.

Modern-day Turkey, which was governed by Christians prior to the Ottoman Empire invasions in late Middle Ages, is still home to about 257,000 Christians. In 1915, Christians still accounted for about 20% of the Turkish population, but the number has dwindled over the past century and they now account for less than 0.3% of the population.

Persecution of Christians

The report says hostility toward Christians is kept alive through environmental factors, such as Turkey’s refusal to recognize its past by continuing to deny the genocide of Armenians and other Christians during World War I. 

At that time, about 1.5 million Armenians and 500,000 other Christians were forcibly deported or massacred, and Turkey’s criminalization of “insulting the Turkish nation” and “insulting Turkishness” is often enforced to quell speech about the historical events, according to the report.

It notes that politicians and state-run media frequently scapegoat Christians for societal issues and depict them as an external and internal threat, with one example being President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan referring to survivors of the genocide as “terrorists escaped from the sword” and another being the state-run Yeni Akit allegedly editing Wikipedia to smear Christians, Jews, and other groups.

In some cases, this hostility yields violence, including a 2024 terrorist attack on a Catholic church that killed one person, and other acts of violence and vandalism.

The report notes that Turkey signed the Treaty of Lausanne after the Armenian genocide, which granted people who believe some non-majority faiths full legal recognition and property rights.

Yet, a narrow interpretation of the treaty ensures “a national narrative that presents Sunni Islam as the primary marker of Turkish identity,” the report says. The treaty also fails to recognize all Christians, only giving a specific reference to Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic Christians, and Jews, but not Catholics or Protestants, according to the report.

It states that Sunni Islam is often tied to Turkish identity in public education and the process to be exempt from compulsory Islamic education is burdensome for Christians not covered under the treaty.

No church holds legal personality as a religious institution, which means patriarchates, dioceses, and churches cannot “own property in their own name, initiate legal proceedings, employ staff, open bank accounts, or formally interact with public authorities,” the report states.

The government also interferes with religious leadership, prohibiting non-Turkish citizens from being elected as Ecumenical Patriarch, sitting on the Holy Synod, or participating in patriarchal elections in the Greek Orthodox Church. The government also regulates elections for leadership in the Armenian Apostolic Church.

Turkey shut down the Greek Orthodox Halki Seminary in 1971 and — despite promises to let it reopen — keeps it shut down, according to the report.

The report also says Turkey imposes legal constraints and administrative obstruction on Christian “community foundations,” which operate churches, schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions.

This includes blocking board elections and failing to enforce court orders. One of the more egregious violations is imposing “mazbut” trusteeship, which ends Christian institutions’ legal recognition and grants control to the government, which essentially confiscates property, the report said.

“These practices reveal a structural system designed to undermine the autonomy, continuity, and survival of Christian communities in Turkey,” the report states.

According to the report, foreign Protestant pastors are often expelled from seminaries. More broadly, it states that foreign missionaries and converts are often targeted as “national security” threats and frequently expelled from Turkey. 

The authors encouraged Turkey to grant full legal recognition to all churches, halt interference in Christian organizations, protect places of worship, end arbitrary expulsions, and return property that has been confiscated.

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Fact check: Did Pope Leo host a rave last week in Slovakia #Catholic Pope Leo XIV greets the faithful in Piazza della Libertà in August 2025. / Credit: Marco Iacobucci Epp/Shutterstock CNA Staff, Nov 25, 2025 / 13:18 pm (CNA). Social media lit up last week with claims that Pope Leo XIV “threw a rave” outside St. Elisabeth Cathedral in Košice, Slovakia. The viral stories included images of laser lights, electronic dance music, and a priest serving as DJ. But what really happened? Here’s what you need to know.What was the event?An outdoor electronic music event in front of the city’s iconic 14th-century cathedral was organized by the Archdiocese of Košice to celebrate the Jubilee of Young People and the 75th birthday of Archbishop Bernard Bober. It took place on Nov. 8 and included a Mass celebrated by Bober, who is also the president of the Slovakian Episcopal Conference, with the apostolic nuncio to the country, Archbishop Nicola Girasoli.Who was there?The main performer was Father Guilherme Peixoto, 51, a Portuguese priest and electronic music DJ, who led attendees in a mix of electronic and spiritual music. Peixoto also performed at the 2023 World Youth Day in Lisbon. “Electronic music is a privileged way to build a better world,” Peixoto has said.Catholic leaders in Košice also attended the event.Guilherme Peixoto, a priest and DJ, performs onstage during a fair in Coimbra, Portugal, on July 4, 2024. Credit: Felipe Amorim/Getty ImagesDid the pope attend or host the rave?Contrary to sensational headlines, Pope Leo XIV did not throw or personally attend a rave. Instead, the pope appeared on large LED screens via a prerecorded video message, greeting the young people and offering his apostolic blessing: “Dear young people, with joy, I greet you, as you gather before the splendid cathedral of Košice, which is a beating heart of faith and hope. Coming from different nations, yet united by the same faith, your presence is a tangible sign of the fraternity and peace that is instilled in our hearts by friendship with Christ.”What really happened?The DJ set blended techno music with fragments of the pope’s message and performed an unreleased track, “Dear Young People,” which included phrases spoken by Leo in his address. Lasers and lights lit up the cathedral, and the crowd — largely composed of young people — danced in celebration. According to press coverage at the time, the event aimed to connect faith with youth culture by “promoting inclusion, tolerance, and respect on the dance floor.”The pope’s video message included a final “amen,” which was woven into the musical performance. While the Vatican supported the event, it was local clergy and the DJ priest who were hands-on organizers and hosts.CNA finds: Claims that “the pope hosted or threw a rave” exaggerate the reality. The Vatican supported the event, the pope gave a prerecorded blessing, but the actual rave was organized and performed by Peixoto and the diocese in Košice. The pope did not attend in person nor DJ, but his message to young people and blessing were central to the celebration.
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Fact check: Did Pope Leo host a rave last week in Slovakia #Catholic Pope Leo XIV greets the faithful in Piazza della Libertà in August 2025. / Credit: Marco Iacobucci Epp/Shutterstock CNA Staff, Nov 25, 2025 / 13:18 pm (CNA). Social media lit up last week with claims that Pope Leo XIV “threw a rave” outside St. Elisabeth Cathedral in Košice, Slovakia. The viral stories included images of laser lights, electronic dance music, and a priest serving as DJ. But what really happened? Here’s what you need to know.What was the event?An outdoor electronic music event in front of the city’s iconic 14th-century cathedral was organized by the Archdiocese of Košice to celebrate the Jubilee of Young People and the 75th birthday of Archbishop Bernard Bober. It took place on Nov. 8 and included a Mass celebrated by Bober, who is also the president of the Slovakian Episcopal Conference, with the apostolic nuncio to the country, Archbishop Nicola Girasoli.Who was there?The main performer was Father Guilherme Peixoto, 51, a Portuguese priest and electronic music DJ, who led attendees in a mix of electronic and spiritual music. Peixoto also performed at the 2023 World Youth Day in Lisbon. “Electronic music is a privileged way to build a better world,” Peixoto has said.Catholic leaders in Košice also attended the event.Guilherme Peixoto, a priest and DJ, performs onstage during a fair in Coimbra, Portugal, on July 4, 2024. Credit: Felipe Amorim/Getty ImagesDid the pope attend or host the rave?Contrary to sensational headlines, Pope Leo XIV did not throw or personally attend a rave. Instead, the pope appeared on large LED screens via a prerecorded video message, greeting the young people and offering his apostolic blessing: “Dear young people, with joy, I greet you, as you gather before the splendid cathedral of Košice, which is a beating heart of faith and hope. Coming from different nations, yet united by the same faith, your presence is a tangible sign of the fraternity and peace that is instilled in our hearts by friendship with Christ.”What really happened?The DJ set blended techno music with fragments of the pope’s message and performed an unreleased track, “Dear Young People,” which included phrases spoken by Leo in his address. Lasers and lights lit up the cathedral, and the crowd — largely composed of young people — danced in celebration. According to press coverage at the time, the event aimed to connect faith with youth culture by “promoting inclusion, tolerance, and respect on the dance floor.”The pope’s video message included a final “amen,” which was woven into the musical performance. While the Vatican supported the event, it was local clergy and the DJ priest who were hands-on organizers and hosts.CNA finds: Claims that “the pope hosted or threw a rave” exaggerate the reality. The Vatican supported the event, the pope gave a prerecorded blessing, but the actual rave was organized and performed by Peixoto and the diocese in Košice. The pope did not attend in person nor DJ, but his message to young people and blessing were central to the celebration.

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Pope Leo XIV greets the faithful in Piazza della Libertà in August 2025. / Credit: Marco Iacobucci Epp/Shutterstock

CNA Staff, Nov 25, 2025 / 13:18 pm (CNA).

Social media lit up last week with claims that Pope Leo XIV “threw a rave” outside St. Elisabeth Cathedral in Košice, Slovakia. The viral stories included images of laser lights, electronic dance music, and a priest serving as DJ. But what really happened? Here’s what you need to know.

What was the event?

An outdoor electronic music event in front of the city’s iconic 14th-century cathedral was organized by the Archdiocese of Košice to celebrate the Jubilee of Young People and the 75th birthday of Archbishop Bernard Bober. It took place on Nov. 8 and included a Mass celebrated by Bober, who is also the president of the Slovakian Episcopal Conference, with the apostolic nuncio to the country, Archbishop Nicola Girasoli.

Who was there?

The main performer was Father Guilherme Peixoto, 51, a Portuguese priest and electronic music DJ, who led attendees in a mix of electronic and spiritual music. Peixoto also performed at the 2023 World Youth Day in Lisbon. “Electronic music is a privileged way to build a better world,” Peixoto has said.

Catholic leaders in Košice also attended the event.

Guilherme Peixoto, a priest and DJ, performs onstage during a fair in Coimbra, Portugal, on July 4, 2024. Credit: Felipe Amorim/Getty Images
Guilherme Peixoto, a priest and DJ, performs onstage during a fair in Coimbra, Portugal, on July 4, 2024. Credit: Felipe Amorim/Getty Images

Did the pope attend or host the rave?

Contrary to sensational headlines, Pope Leo XIV did not throw or personally attend a rave. Instead, the pope appeared on large LED screens via a prerecorded video message, greeting the young people and offering his apostolic blessing: “Dear young people, with joy, I greet you, as you gather before the splendid cathedral of Košice, which is a beating heart of faith and hope. Coming from different nations, yet united by the same faith, your presence is a tangible sign of the fraternity and peace that is instilled in our hearts by friendship with Christ.”

What really happened?

The DJ set blended techno music with fragments of the pope’s message and performed an unreleased track, “Dear Young People,” which included phrases spoken by Leo in his address. Lasers and lights lit up the cathedral, and the crowd — largely composed of young people — danced in celebration. According to press coverage at the time, the event aimed to connect faith with youth culture by “promoting inclusion, tolerance, and respect on the dance floor.”

The pope’s video message included a final “amen,” which was woven into the musical performance. While the Vatican supported the event, it was local clergy and the DJ priest who were hands-on organizers and hosts.

CNA finds: Claims that “the pope hosted or threw a rave” exaggerate the reality. The Vatican supported the event, the pope gave a prerecorded blessing, but the actual rave was organized and performed by Peixoto and the diocese in Košice. The pope did not attend in person nor DJ, but his message to young people and blessing were central to the celebration.

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