1. Emma Green: The Anti-Abortion-Rights Movement Prepares to Build a Post-Roe World

Bachelder agreed to financially back an SBA List test program in Georgia called PLAN—the Pregnancy and Life Assistance Network—that would compile and publicize resources already available to women dealing with unplanned pregnancies, modeled after a version of the program in Northern Virginia. In theory, it’s an ambitious effort to find common ground between hard-core anti-abortion-rights activists and people who want to help pregnant women but may not be convinced that abortion should be completely banned.

2. The Jewish Case Against Abortion

Whatever few differences there are between Jewish morality and Christian morality, the issue of abortion is not one of them. That is why the NCJW statement is a great distortion of both Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, those Jews and those Christians who endorse abortion have been overly influenced by a secularist culture that is in principle hostile to the morality taught by both these great, often overlapping, traditions. On questions like abortion and euthanasia, it is what the late Pope John Paul II called a “culture of death.” 

3. Kristen Day & Xavier Bisits: The Democrats Biden Doesn’t Want

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The Democrats of 2020 will barely give a thought to policies that make it easier for women to choose life, such as government-funded hospital care for women giving birth, or palliative care for infants with prenatal diagnoses. Such policies, previously central to Democratic values, violate the core tenet that “abortion is normal.”

4. BBC: Beirut Explosion

What’s really noticeable as you walk the streets here is that every second person seems to have a broom in their hand. There are clear-up teams everywhere, but it’s pretty low tech: tiny teams of people with pans and brushes to clean up an entire city’s devastation.

5. Michael Gerson: Covid-19 threatens to overwhelm the developing world

Across Africa, health systems are already fragile. Covid-19 is like a battering ram against a paper wall. In crowded slums, the exhortation to socially distance is a cruel joke. And most African countries are already dealing with an assortment of deadly infectious diseases that are infinitely complicated by the addition of a new one.

6. Steven D. Mosher: Catholicism a Casualty of China’s New Cultural Revolution

It is not merely that the CCP is suspicious of, or even hostile to, religious faith in China, although it is certainly both. Rather, it is the case that the party conceives of itself as a secular religion and is determined to impose that religion on the people of China by deploying all of the considerable resources that a hi-tech, one-party dictatorship has at its disposal. This is the environment in which Catholic bishops, priests and laity are forced to operate in today’s China. It is an environment of constant propaganda, surveillance and intrusion by hostile agents of the state. 

7. Stephen P. White: Waiting for the McCarrick Report

The longer the McCarrick report is delayed, the longer the open wound of distrust between the flock and the shepherds will fester.

This distrust, by the way, is damaging to the faithful and to the Church as a whole. It is also damaging to those whose names have been tainted by their proximity to McCarrick – men who, if they are innocent of wrongdoing, deserve to have their names cleared.

8. Crux: Pope says fighting clerical abuse fosters deeper respect for life

“Fighting abuse [means] fostering and empowering communities so that they are capable of keeping watch and announcing that all life deserves to be respected and valued, especially that of the most defenseless who do not have the resources to make their voice heard,” Francis wrote.

9. We need to talk about what school closures mean for kids with disabilities

For a lot of families of kids with disabilities, virtual learning this spring “meant nothing,” Maria Hernandez, executive director of the nonprofit VELA, which helps parents in the Austin, Texas, area navigate special education for their kids, told Vox. “It meant one phone call; it meant one packet.”

And now, parents worry about a fall with more of the same uncertainty over whether schools will be able to provide from a distance the resources their kids need. At the same time, some students with disabilities also have underlying conditions and complex medical needs that make the physical reopening of schools a frightening prospect.

10. Fr. Wilson D. Miscamble: Mayor Pete at Notre Dame

The Buttigieg appointment illustrates that the university’s leadership has embraced a defective understanding of Notre Dame’s Catholic mission. Anyone can see that the Church suffers from significant challenges in restoring trust after the failure to address the clergy sexual abuse crisis, and a properly constructed course on “trust,” taught by someone with convictions in line with the Catholic faith, could do much good. But that is not what Our Lady’s university has chosen to do.

11. Susan Codone: Public Theology Isn’t Just for Academics

When I was given an opportunity to speak directly to the church culture that silenced me, I unearthed a deeply held personal theology of trauma—that my relationship with God rests upon his grace alone, and that he redemptively rescues and restores me from suffering I’ve experienced by the abuse of power.

12. The Washington Post: He asked to play a piano at a store. His performance went viral, and the owner gave him his first piano.