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Beautiful! with wonderful tributes and very fine talks by Maura Reilly and honoree Tina McDermott. Some pictures, with video and audio to follow over the next few days.
Guest speaker Maura Reilly and honoree Tina McDermott, with County legislator Gordon Burrows.
A good crowd with almost 40 people As always held in the County Legislator meeting room.
Co-chairs of the event, Brigid Faranda and Regina Riely. The third co-chair Judy Anderson was unable to attend.
Channel 12 was there! Second year in a row.
Guest speaker Maura Reilly gave her perspective on being a collegiate pro-lifer at a secular university and moving on from there to her current activism in the political arena.
Melinda Cosentino gave a beautiful introduction to the honoree Tina McDermott who has worked 42 years !! with Birthright. Tina has stepped down as Director of the Peekskill office but will continue her work with Birthright.
And Tina was the last of the marvelous speakers.
Two other people were honored. Patricia Vasta for her lifetime achievement - incredible hard worker for decades in Croton on Hudson and Westchester. Pat has nine children and one of her (how many!?) grandchildren was getting married so she could not attend. And also remembered was the late Alan Mehldau who we lost after a long illness several months ago.
The Birthright crowd with Tina!
A fine poster - that's our missing co-chair Judy at the top and below a shot from a Vasta wedding many years ago with Pat, Sal, and their nine children.
More to follow - the brief talks were excellent.
This from the Catholic League; do the click through!
August 6, 2018
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has begun a nine week Novena for the Legal Protection of Human Life in conjunction with the upcoming Senate confirmation hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. To participate, click here.
From Friday, August 3, 2018 to Friday, September 28, 2018, the weekly Call to Prayer will be adapted as a nine-week Novena for the Legal Protection of Human Life. In addition to the current invitation to fast on Fridays, participants are encouraged to pray one Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be for the intention of the novena.
Participants will also be provided with weekly opportunities to learn more about Roe v. Wade, and share that information with their representatives.
While the death penalty is not abortion or euthanasia, they are related. They all entail government sanctioned killing.
UPDATE: Numerous commentaries on this which we will post in next several days.
The amendments approved by the Pope are In full continuity with Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict. Excerpt below the link.
The decision was announced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in a ‘Letter to the Bishops’ dated 1 August and signed by the Prefect, Cardinal Luis Francisco Ladaria.
The death penalty
2267. Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.
Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.
Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”,[1] and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide”.
[1] FRANCIS, Address to Participants in the Meeting organized by the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, 11 October 2017: L’Osservatore Romano, 13 October 2017.
According to the previous text of paragraph 2267, the Church did not exclude recourse to the death penalty in “very rare, if not practically nonexistent” circumstances:
2267. Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.
If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.
Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."68
In the Letter to the Bishops Cardinal Ladaria explained that the revision of n. 2267 of the CCC “expresses an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium” and said “these teachings, in fact, can be explained in the light of the primary responsibility of the public authority to protect the common good in a social context in which the penal sanctions were understood differently, and had developed in an environment in which it was more difficult to guarantee that the criminal could not repeat his crime”.
Ladaria recalled that John Paul II asked that the teaching on the death penalty be reformulated to better reflect the development of the doctrine that centers on the clearer awareness of the Church for the respect due to every human life affirming that “Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this.” Ladaria said that in many occasions John Paul II intervened for the elimination of capital punishment describing it as “cruel and unnecessary.
In the letter Cardinal Ladaria also recalled Benedict XVI who appealed for “the attention of society’s leaders to the need to make every effort to eliminate the death penalty” and encouraged “political and legislative initiatives being promoted in a growing number of countries to eliminate the death penalty and to continue the substantive progress made in conforming penal law both to the human dignity of prisoners and the effective maintenance of public order.”