Washington D.C., Jan 20, 2015 / 05:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News) - Special needs children can bring joy, grace and a potential to thrive in the workplace in a way that parents may never have foreseen – says a former CEO and senate candidate who gave her personal witness to this at a pro-life event on Tuesday.
After discussing her time teaching an eight year-old boy at a special needs school, Carly Fiorina revealed that, “I have learned over the course of my life that every person has potential, that everyone has God-given gifts, and in truth, most people have far more potential than they realize.”
Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlitt Packard and 2010 GOP senate nominee, gave the keynote address at the Heritage Foundation event “Welcoming Every Life.” The event emphasized the tough choice parents face when their child receives a “poor prenatal diagnosis” like Down Syndrome, Spinal Bifida, or another genetic disorder.
The vast majority of unborn children diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted; statistics from the Global Down Syndrome Foundation estimate the percentage as between 67 and 85 percent.
Couple recalls terrifying flight from Vietnam, and the kind hearts in a Kansas town
By DAVID MYERS
Southwest Kansas Register
The child’s father stood behind her on a large fishing boat as the 12-year-old desperately maneuvered herself up a ladder to the nearby giant U.S. aircraft carrier. Crashing waves tossed the smaller vessel up and down as the girl struggled hand over hand, her feet trying to take hold of each step.
This was 1975 in the Gulf of Thailand. Enemy forces had the carrier in their sites. The U.S. Navy sailors had to move fast to get the refugees onboard. Family and friends of the Vietnamese girl struggled up the ladder behind her. The sailors quickly helped the frantic refugees onboard.
The enemy ship was closing in. Several civilians, including the girl’s father, were left behind on the fishing boat as the Navy vessel pulled away, lurching toward the open sea.
High above the fishing craft on the deck of the massive aircraft carrier, the child, her mother and siblings looked on helplessly as her father, a brother and his wife, and a sister stood on the fishing boat, watching their beloved family sail off into the distance.
It was the last time the 12-year-old would ever see her father.
“My dad was a fisherman,” Melissa Luong said from her home in Garden City. “He owned the fishing boat. There were probably 100 refugees on his boat that day.”
Catholic Charities Centennial
Celebrating the permanence of Christ’s
love throughout a century of change
By REBECCA FORD
Catholic Social Service
Every so often, I bet each of us has those moments when we feel a need to pause, rise up from under the canopy of daily life and take a better look at the broader landscape of where we’ve come from and where we’re going. New Year celebrations, birthdays, anniversaries and jubilees are just a few of the moments that lend themselves to such reflection.
The Catholic Charities Centennial that we celebrate this year is one of those moments, and a lot has happened over the past 100 years.
The change is mind-boggling when you think about it. We’ve gone from horses, rifles, simple automobiles, and freighters to hybrid vehicles, cruise ships, airliners, atomic bombs, and space shuttles. Our life expectancy has risen from 50 to 78. Our quality of life has been enriched by radio, television, antibiotics, frozen food, computers, the internet, and mobile smartphones. We’ve gone from ABC, NBC and CBS to Myspace, YouTube and Facebook. We’ve replaced the annual set of Britannica Encyclopedias with the online Wikipedia in more than 200 languages. We now have access to about 15.15 billion web pages, 100,000 iPhone apps, 10,500 radio stations, 5,500 magazines, and 200-plus cable television networks. It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to encounter in an entire lifetime prior to the 20th Century.
How one CEO sees unrealized potential in special needs kids
By Matt Hadro
Astronomers meet in Rome share
discoveries, dreams of finding life
By CAROL GLATZ
Catholic News Service
ROME (CNS) -- Normally filled with theology students, the creaking classroom seats of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas were crammed with planetary scientists and astronomers from all over the world.
Overhead screens flashed slideshows of planned space missions and colorful graphs as dozens of speakers and nearly 600 participants shared their latest discoveries and dreams of finding extraterrestrial life in the universe.
100-year-old nun a witness to history
By GAIL ULFLIN
Catholic News Service
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (CNS) -- Her deep brown eyes have seen a lot of life in 100 years.
They witnessed the wonder of the children to whom she taught the catechism of the Catholic Church in pre-Castro Cuba. They also were among the first to observe the trickle, then the storm, of children landing on U.S. soil after being smuggled out of Cuba during Operation Peter Pan in the early 1960s.
Her eyes showed her the needs of the aging religious who were unable to care for themselves and whose own eyesight was failing. And now those brown eyes, accompanied by a smile and confident in the power of a life spent in prayer, greet her visitors.
Big families bring hope – not poverty, says Pope
By Ann Schneible
Vatican City, Jan 21, 2015 / 11:18 am (CNA/EWTN News) - Pope Francis has rejected the “simplistic” belief that large families are among the causes of poverty, stressing that economic systems which create a culture of waste are to blame.
“Families know they are essential to the life of society,” the Pope said Jan. 21 during his first weekly general audience since returning from his Jan. 12-19 tour of Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
Speaking to the crowds gathered in the Vatican's Paul VI Hall, the Holy Father recalled his Jan 16. meeting with 1,000 families in Manila, one of the main events of his visit to the Philippines.
“It gives consolation and hope to see many large families who welcome children as a true gift of God,” he said.
Pope confirms three US stops in September, no Mexico for now
By Alan Holdren
Aboard the papal plane, Jan 19, 2015 / 12:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News) - During his in-flight press conference from Manila to Rome, Pope Francis confirmed he plans stops in Philadelphia, New York City and Washington D.C. during his visit to the United States this autumn.
"The three cities are Philadelphia for the meeting of families, New York … for the visit to the UN, and Washington. It is these three," the Pope told journalists during his Jan. 19 return flight to Rome from the Philippines.
Pope Francis also confirmed that his September trip will not include stops in California, the U.S. - Mexico border, or Mexico proper; there had been speculation that these sites would be added to the U.S. visit agenda, particularly after Pope Francis announced plans to canonize Blessed Junipero Serra.
The 18th century Spanish-born missionary is buried at one of the nine missions he founded in California. Many of the missions still exist on the California coast, including the Carmel Mission and Mission San Juan Capistrano.
The fight for human dignity - how MLK speaks to ISIS, abortion
By Matt Hadro
Washington D.C., Jan 19, 2015 / 04:10 pm (CNA/EWTN News) - The ongoing legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is that every human life is sacred and must be protected from injustice, said leading U.S. bishops on Jan. 19.
At a Jan. 17 Mass honoring the legacy of Dr. King, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., said that the civil rights leader “quietly, forcefully, without violence and always faithful to the Gospel, simply reminded this society, this culture, this nation, that we are all one in the Spirit, we are all sisters and brothers because we are all children of the same God.
“If one is treated unjustly, we are all affected,” the cardinal added.
His comments came during the homily of a Mass at Holy Comforter/St. Cyprian Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. The parish is a combination of the historically African-American St. Cyprian parish and nearby Holy Comforter parish. The two merged in 1966.
The theme of the Mass was King’s quote that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Breathing ‘new life’ 
into the RCIA process
It is one of the most fundamental of Catholic initiatives, a process designed to introduce, educate, and guide people into the Catholic faith, yet, many parishes in the United States have failed to address this program.
The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), was the subject of two, day-long workshops: Sept. 18 in English at St. Joseph Church in Scott City; and Sept. 19 in Spanish at St. Anthony Parish in Liberal.
Hosting both workshops was Father Tim Piasecki, former member of the board of directors for North American Forum on the Catechumenate, and pastor of St. Mary Parish in Aurora, Ill.
Educators renew commitment to Church’s
Ministry of Teaching
Father Robert Schremmer, center, and Fathers Reggie Urban, Henry Hildebrandt, Wesley Schawe, and Ted Skalsky, commission the teachers of the Catholic schools of the Diocese of Dodge City during the annual Commissioning Mass, Sept. 27 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Mass was part of a day of workshops at the cathedral for the “Diocesan Teachers’ Institute.”