Washington D.C., May 19, 2012 / 05:03 pm (CNA).- The author of the best-selling book and award-winning screenplay “The Exorcist” has announced that he is leading an effort to file a canon lawsuit against Georgetown University for failures to live up to the demands of the school’s Catholic identity. 

William P. Blatty, who graduated from Georgetown in 1950, told CNA on May 18 that he believes there is a need for disciplinary action against the university.

“As I recall it, the Lord knocked over a few tables,” he said.   

Blatty, who has been honored by Georgetown with the John Carroll Medal for alumni achievement, will lead other alumni, students and members of the university community in the newly-formed Father King Society to Make Georgetown Honest, Catholic, and Better.

The society is named for the late Jesuit Fr. Thomas M. King, a former theology professor at Georgetown who was rumored to be the inspiration for the priestly character in “The Exorcist.”

Its website encourages members of the Georgetown community to join the canon lawsuit and share their grievances against the university with Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl of Washington, D.C. and Pope Benedict XVI.

It also asks them to withhold their donations from the school for one year.

Blatty believes that Georgetown has given scandal to the faithful on numerous occasions and has refused to comply with “Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” the document issued by Pope John Paul II in 1990 to outline the functions of Catholic universities.

He explained that the Father King Society’s canon lawyers and scholars are finalizing the brief for the Church law case. It will then go to the Archdiocese of Washington, and then to the Vatican if necessary.

Blatty noted that “Georgetown is merely the leader of a pack” of schools that are failing to live up to their Catholic identity. He hopes that his actions will encourage others to follow suit.

“Georgetown was the first Catholic college in America, and we hope that it will now be the first again,” he said, urging Georgetown to pave the way for other Catholic colleges that are similarly in need of renewal. 

In an open letter explaining his decision, Blatty said that he is grateful for his Georgetown education but is grieved to see “that Georgetown University today almost seems to take pride in insulting the Church and offending the faithful.”

He said that he is now seeking remedies up to the point that “Georgetown’s right to call itself Catholic and Jesuit be revoked or suspended for a time.”

“Of course, what we truly seek is for Georgetown to have the vision and courage to be Catholic,” he added, “but clearly the slow pastoral approach has not worked.”

The canon lawsuit was announced on May 18, the same day that Georgetown welcomed U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to speak at an awards ceremony during its commencement weekend.

The invitation drew heavy criticism, not only due to Sebelius’ long record of advocating abortion, but also because she was the architect behind the controversial contraception mandate  that has been denounced by Catholic bishops across the nation for the threat that it poses to religious liberty.

The federal mandate will require employers to offer health insurance plans that cover contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs, even if doing so violates their consciences.
 
The Father King Society said that their legal action was being planned before the Sebelius controversy erupted. Its website lists numerous instances of what it considers to be scandal and violations of “Ex Corde Ecclesiae” by the university in recent months.

In pursuing the Church lawsuit, Blatty and the Fr. King Society will be working closely with the Cardinal Newman Society, an organization that monitors and promotes Catholic identity in American higher education.

Although the process could take months, Blatty believes Catholic education is worth the fight. 

“The Catholic Church has been the single greatest civilizing influence in all of human history,” he said. “It gave birth to the very notion of a university.”

“A Catholic education is valuable because it uniquely combines the truth of science with the truth of revelation,” Blatty remarked. “It is like fighting for freedom and for our faith at once.”

Washington D.C., May 19, 2012 / 06:06 am (CNA).- An increase in the practice of surrogate pregnancy is leading to health risks, ethical concerns and a problematic understanding of the family, warns the founder of a bioethics organization.

Because people are “uninformed about the reality” of surrogate pregnancy, they have “uncritically accepted it as good technology,” said Jennifer Lahl, president of the California-based Center for Bioethics and Culture Network.

However, the practice of gestational surrogacy leads to a variety of ethical issues, as well as growing “confusion” about the purpose of a woman’s body and the meaning of family and parents, she said.

In a surrogate pregnancy, a woman is paid to have a previously created embryo implanted in her womb. After carrying the baby for nine months, she gives birth and returns the baby to the parents.

Lahl told CNA on May 18 that such pregnancies are “becoming more socially acceptable” and mainstream, as wealthy couples are increasingly using them to have children.

In addition to older women struggling with fertility, surrogate pregnancies are often used by homosexual couples who want a child, she said. 

Lahl is the executive producer, director and writer of the documentaries “Eggsploitation,” which reveals the struggles of women who have donated their eggs, and “Anonymous Father’s Day,” which explores the issues faced by children of sperm donors.

She noted that surrogacy veers toward being an exploitative industry, which targets “lower-income women needing to make money.”

While many of these women live in third world countries, women in the United States are also choosing to become surrogate mothers, Lahl said.

This is particularly true of military wives, who are often young and living on a modest income, with their husband deployed for long periods of time, she explained. Surrogate motherhood appeals to these women because it allows them to make money while staying at home with their own children.

But while modern culture often applauds such procedures for helping infertile couples, surrogate pregnancies pose a variety of ethical problems.

Among those are the significant health risks for surrogate mothers, including problems associated with the fertility drugs that are taken as part of the procedure. Lahl remembers a pointed experience speaking to one surrogate mother who developed cervical cancer and was forced to undergo a hysterectomy at a young age.

It's also “not uncommon,” she said, to see gestational surrogates carry twins, which is considered a higher-risk pregnancy.

On a biological level, there is also the possibility of bonding between a mother and the child in her womb, which poses questions on the “long term implications” for both the women and the children they carry.

She also voiced concern about the effect on the woman’s husband, as well as her other children, who watch their mother go through a pregnancy without understanding why the baby is given away after birth.

Children who think concretely may start to wonder when their mother will give them away too, she said. Lahl believes it is problematic to “turn baby-making into a contractual agreement,” as if one were buying a house.

“We really are buying and selling children,” she said, observing the need for contracts to regulate the transaction.

She explained that legal problems can arise in such transactions, as unexpected complications occur or a surrogate mother develops regrets about giving the baby away.

Even more troubling to Lahl is her view that increasing rates of surrogate pregnancy  are “absolutely” changing the way that people think about family.

In a world where it is possible for a child to have one woman donate his genetic material, another woman give birth to him and a third woman raise him, ideas of family and parenthood quickly fall into “confusion.”

Same-sex couples add to the complications, as do intentionally-single mothers, who conceive from donated sperm, she said.

While the culture may accept these alternate understandings of “family” as progressive and tolerant, it does not address the needs of the children, Lahl added.

A former pediatric nurse, she explained that even in cases of adoption, children can feel a great longing to know more about their family tree. Surrogate pregnancies intentionally create a child who lacks a connection to the woman in whose womb he grew and developed, and sometimes to his biological parents as well.

Lahl ultimately sees the process as exploitative, arguing that it involves the use of body parts for money and treats life as a commodity. What needs to be acknowledged, she stressed, is that the child in question “ is another human being.”

Rome, Italy, May 18, 2012 / 06:33 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A leading American rabbi and Holocaust refugee says people should trust Pope Benedict’s judgment when it comes to the Church possibly readmitting the Society of St. Pius X, which has a bishop who denied the scale of the Holocaust.

“Let me tell you this, I think that Pope Benedict XVI in many ways really understood the Holocaust because he was in the German Army. He deserted (the army), his family was anti-Nazi, I mean he was completely opposed to Hitler,” Rabbi Jack Bemporad told CNA May 16.

“Now, given the fact that he suffered under Hitler and that his family suffered under Hitler, how could he in any way accept or welcome someone who denies that Hitler did anything wrong?” he asked rhetorically.

The Society of St. Pius X broke with the Catholic Church in 1988 after its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, ordained four bishops without the approval of Pope John Paul II.

One of those ordained, Bishop Richard Williamson, was fined $13,500 in Germany in 2010 after denying the extent of the Holocaust during a television interview. The Society subsequently issued a statement disassociating itself from his views. The conviction was also later quashed by the German appeals court.

Rabbi Bemporad, who currently serves as Professor of Interreligious Studies at the Pontifical Angelicum University, dismissed Bishop Williamson as “one person who is really crazy” and “knows nothing.”

He also believes that Williamson does not speak for the vast majority of Society members.

“The mistake is to take a few people and make them somehow representative of everyone without realizing that that just isn’t true,” he said. “I think it is only a small part of this group that is that radical. I think the vast majority are very happy and would love to be part of the Church.”

Earlier this week the Vatican announced that negotiations with the Society about reconciling the 1988 breach will now happen “separately and singularly” with three of the Society’s four bishops, including Williamson.

For his part, Williamson has made it increasingly clear that he is opposed to reconciliation with Rome. In a letter written earlier this month to his superior, Bishop Williamson suggested that reunion would cause the Society to cease opposing “the universal apostasy of our time.” He also accused Pope Benedict of being “a subjectivist.”

“Now I don’t think that in trying to find a way of incorporating this group that they are going to accept in any way any of the extreme positions that Williamson stands for,” predicted Rabbi Bemporad.

The Catholic Church’s view of Judaism was most recently set out in the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on relations with non-Christian religions, “Nostra Aetate.” It rejected both anti-Semitism and the belief that present-day Jews are responsible for Christ’s death.

In recent negotiations with the Society, the Vatican has insisted that it accept all the documents of the Second Vatican Council.

Vatican City, May 18, 2012 / 04:45 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Benedict XVI says he is praying that a renewal of female religious life in the United States will “recapture a sense of the sublime dignity and beauty of the consecrated life.”

“I wish to reaffirm my deep gratitude for the example of fidelity and self-sacrifice given by many consecrated women in your country, and to join them in praying that this moment of discernment will bear abundant spiritual fruit for the revitalization and strengthening of their communities in fidelity to Christ and the Church, as well as to their founding charisms,” the Pope said on May 18.

He made his comments to a delegation of U.S. bishops from the Eastern Catholic churches that is currently in Rome on a May 15-19 “ad limina” pilgrimage.

Last month the Vatican called for a reform of the Maryland-based Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), after concluding there was a “crisis” of belief throughout its ranks. It also appointed Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle to lead the renewal efforts.
 
During his May 18 address, Pope Benedict asked the bishops to promote and pray for new religious vocations, since there is an “urgent need in our own time for credible and attractive witnesses to the redemptive and transformative power of the Gospel.”

He also called for a “strengthening of the existing channels for communication and cooperation” between dioceses and the individual religious communities within their territory.

The Vatican’s decision to reform the LCWR followed a four-year audit of the group by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Among its key findings, the assessment documented serious theological and doctrinal errors in presentations at the conference’s annual assemblies in recent years.

Several speakers depicted a vision of religious life that is incompatible with the Catholic faith, the assessment said, with some attempting to justify dissent from Church teaching and showing “scant regard for the role of the Magisterium.”
 
Pope Benedict’s audience with the leaders of the Eastern Catholic churches marks the conclusion of several months of “ad limina” visits by U.S. bishops.

The Pope said he hoped that the forthcoming Year of Faith, which begins in October, will “awaken a desire on the part of the entire Catholic community in America to re-appropriate with joy and gratitude the priceless treasure of our faith.”
 
“With the progressive weakening of traditional Christian values, and the threat of a season in which our fidelity to the Gospel may cost us dearly,” he warned, “the truth of Christ needs not only to be understood, articulated and defended, but to be proposed joyfully and confidently as the key to authentic human fulfillment and to the welfare of society as a whole.”

Los Angeles, Calif., May 18, 2012 / 03:09 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Mauricio Kuri has come to believe that, like the teenage Mexican martyr he plays in the upcoming film “For Greater Glory,” people must stand up for religious freedom.
 
Kuri is not your typical fourteen-year-old boy. Born and raised Catholic in Mexico City, he was cast in the upcoming film “For Greater Glory” with fellow stars Andy Garcia, Eva Longoria, Nestor Carbonel, and Eduardo Verastagui.
 
Blessed Jose Luis Sanchez del Rio is “a really strong character because you can see the transformation in him,” Kuri told CNA in an April 25 interview in Los Angeles.
 
“At the beginning he's just a young boy, naughty. He even makes a prank to the Father of the church, but you can see his transformation in his beliefs, and at the end he’s a martyr.”
 
“For Greater Glory” charts the history of Mexico’s Cristero War, which was sparked by anti-clerical legislation being passed by the Mexican President Elías Calles in 1926. Those laws banned religious orders, deprived the Church of property rights and denied priests their civil liberties, including the right to a trial by jury and the right to vote.
 
The persecution became so fierce that some Catholics began to forcibly resist, fighting under the slogan and banner of “Cristo Rey” (Christ the King).
 
“I think this movie, it threw me closer to my religion because it is a really strong character,” he said.
 
Kuri explained that Bl. Jose Luis Sanchez del Rio is “a Cristero martyr, and he was beatified by the Pope.”
 
Most importantly for the young actor, “this character existed. He was a real person.”

Kuri keeps a medal of Bl. Jose around his neck. Holding the medal up and pointing at the image on it, he explains, “This is his real photo. It's the real Jose Sanchez del Rio, and he was fourteen years old; I'm fourteen.”

“I don't believe in coincidences,” Kuri said.

The actor said he did spend a great deal of time thinking about his “strong character” and wondered if he could show the same courage as Bl. Jose.
 
“There is a phrase of the movie that I love that says ... ‘Who are you if you don't stand up for what you believe?’”

The young actor began to wonder if he had lived in Mexico during the 1920s and during the Cristero War, “Would I do what Jose did?”

“I tested myself, and I said 'I think I wouldn't,’” Kuri admits.
 
So he started to read about the life of Bl. Jose as part of his research for the role. He also sought guidance from a priest—his “spiritual guide.”
 
Looking back on the whole experience, Kuri sees Bl. Jose’s true strength as being rooted in his courage to stand up for what he believes in.
 
“I think I would do that,”Kuri said, “because to defend for what you believe is the most cool thing” you could ever do.
 
Kuri was particularly impressed the “strong” and “beautiful” transformation that becomes so visible at Bl. Jose’s moment of martyrdom. Bl. Jose was “a little naughty guy,” he explained, but “at the end you can see him as a saint.”
 
Kuri encourages Catholics everywhere to stand up for religious freedom like the faithful Catholics of Mexico did during the Cristero War.

“What is happening right now with the Church and the attack to the religious freedom is something that will happen to the end of the times. And I think if you stand up and you say 'I am Catholic and I am not ashamed of being Catholic and I'm proud of being Catholic … and you defend it, then you are a terrific person.”
 
Just like Bl. Jose, Kuri said that “We can be Cristeros right now; we can defend our faith; we can defend not only our faith, but our freedom.”