By Tom Tracy
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CNS)– With several Northeast states now joining major metropolitan regions in the Gulf Coast as Hurricane Ida-related disaster areas, Catholic Charities agencies are using virtual deployment systems refined during the coronavirus pandemic to maximize their outreach to those in need.

Prolonged power outages or record flooding are making quick disaster response access to the greater New Orleans and New York City areas an impossibility following the remnants of Hurricane Ida as it marched north after making landfall Aug. 29 in Louisiana.

Right now, disaster response teams are turning to digital workaround solutions using staff members well outside the disaster zones.

“COVID set the stage for being able to do virtual deployment: instead of a physical person on the ground, staff can assist by doing phone calls, setting up shared documents on the internet, and taking an administrative burden off the local staff,” said Kathleen Oldaker, senior director of disaster strategy for Catholic Charities USA.

As it did during Hurricane Katrina, Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is expected to serve as the central supporting role in recovery efforts in hard-hit New Orleans and Houma-Thibodaux.

“But we are also looking at possible virtual actions: a (staff) person in California or Indiana – if there is a way of doing things with our network that might require some bandwidth – can help the agencies on the ground can focus on their outreach,” Oldaker told Catholic News Service Sept. 2.

Hurricane Ida’s remnants delivered a deadly surprise punch in the Northeast, causing an estimated 41 deaths and flooding roads and cities after slogging across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut. The post-tropical cyclone reportedly dropped more than three inches of rain in an hour in New York.

Catholic Charities staff have learned that text messages can be a more reliable form of communications wherever cellphone signals are knocked out, which includes a large area of Southeastern Louisiana.

In addition, email communications for one disaster area can be managed through a related diocesan office of Catholic Charities. The email for Houma-Thibodaux’s Catholic Charities office, for example, was being intercepted this week by Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, Oldaker said.

Each year, staff members at Catholic Charities complete a training program called the “Applied Institute for Disaster Excellence,” a decade-old preparedness platform that can prepare a staff person with disaster experience in Maine, for example, to deploy to Louisiana.

But Hurricane Ida left infrastructures so badly damaged in places like Louisiana that teams will have to wait for electricity and water to come back online.

“What we are really seeing in this response is the neighboring agencies offering support from Lake Charles, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and Biloxi, Mississippi – they have had staff go and help Houma with assessments and seeing where they could do distribution sites,” Oldaker said.

In the South, Houma may have experienced some of the greatest wind damage following Ida, whereas New Orleans is mostly suffering from a damaged power infrastructure. Catholic Charities staff in New Orleans have been focused on checking in on residents living in senior care homes and other residential facilities there.

“The Catholic Charities agency in Houma is trying to get on their feet a bit in a place where you walk outside and the house next door is either destroyed or damaged,” Oldaker said. “We have a Houma-Charities staff member who lost a home down to the concrete slab there.”

In the Northeast, Catholic Charities workers spent Sept. 2 contacting agencies in the Mid-Atlantic states and New York and New Jersey especially, which took some of the heaviest flash flooding.

The rapid accumulation of rainfall from Ida’s remnants turned city streets into rivers, flooded basement-level residences and shut down subway services in New York.

“Right now, the agencies are not in assessment mode; we have heard of a flooded agency in one of our buildings in New York City; in the next day or two we will get a handle on the level of response,” Oldaker said.

Calls also went out to agency chapters in Pennsylvania, and parts of Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Across the system, Catholic Charities agencies have been inundated with calls from Ida evacuees who mostly fled the Gulf Coast region to areas across the country.

“We even had a call from Paterson, New Jersey. They reported a few evacuees there and they were wondering what they could do to help,” Oldaker said of the Catholic Charities affiliate there.

“In Houston, Texas, alone, we got some 10,000 phone calls or requests from evacuees, with people lining up outside their doors even before they opened.

“People are sleeping in the car, finding hotels are not available, or the hotel bills are getting expensive for those who cannot go home for a few weeks. Those costs get pretty expensive pretty fast,” she added.

When asked what may be different about the emergency response in 2021 over past years, Oldaker said the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic adds an additional burden to the crisis response and distribution work.

“Ten years ago, I would not have been ordering masks and gloves and personal protective gear – it wasn’t something we thought about, and in Louisiana it is something they are thinking about in terms of spacing evacuees and people having to wear masks in such high heat.”

“How do you balance response with safety, that is a new normal as we move forward with disaster work,” Oldaker said.

September, she said, is national disaster preparedness month and getting people prepared is a good thing “because you never know when what might look like just rain could be a big event. When a river washes out it is shocking how fast you can have water coming into your home.”

Patricia Cole, vice president of communications Catholic Charities USA, noted that contributions are critical right now and that 100% of the donation proceeds will be directed to the disaster areas following Ida.

For more information see: https://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org/

Of God, Creator of the universe, you extend your paternal concern over every creature and guide the events of history to the goal of salvation. We acknowledge your fatherly love in a world torn by strife and discord, when you make us ready for reconciliation. Renew for us the wonders of your mercy; send forth your holy wisdom that it may work in the intimacy of our hearts; that enemies may begin to dialogue; that adversaries may shake hands and people may encounter one another in harmony. May all commit themselves to the sincere search for true peace which will extinguish all violence.
Lord, make us instruments of your peace;
Where there is hatred, let us sow charity;
Where there is injury, let us sow pardon;
Where there is error, let us sow truth;
Where there is doubt, let us sow faith;
Where there is despair, let us sow hope;
Where there is darkness, let us sow light; and
Where there is sadness, let us sow joy.
O’ Divine Master,
Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying to ourselves that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.

(Bishop Joseph Latino delivered this prayer during a memorial service for the 10th anniversary of 9/11)

By Gregory A. Shemitz
BLUE POINT, N.Y. – Father Kevin M. Smith, a veteran fire chaplain, trauma counselor and loyal friend to scores of active and retired firefighters in the New York metropolitan area, receives more phone calls in early September than any other time of the year.

Most of the calls are from firefighters who served amid the carnage and chaos in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

A fire chaplain with 30 years of service, Father Smith, 60, is commissioned by Nassau County, New York, to minister to members of the county’s 71 volunteer fire departments, many of whom work full time with the New York Fire Department.

He also is a member of the county’s Critical Incident Stress Management team, which provides support to firefighters and emergency medical services workers who are dealing with trauma associated with their duties as first responders.

Father Smith’s cellphone starts ringing and dinging with calls and texts from firefighters in the days leading up to and including the 9/11 anniversary. They come from front-line heroes who have been emotionally and, in many cases, physically affected by the cataclysmic event.

Father Smith – pastor of Our Lady of the Snow Church in Blue Point in the Diocese of Rockville Centre – can empathize with the callers. He, too, was a first responder at ground zero, arriving near the scene as the World Trade Center’s North Tower was collapsing, completing the total destruction of the two 110-story buildings and resulting in a mountain of crushed concrete, twisted steel and pulverized debris.

In an interview with Catholic News Service to mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, Father Smith spoke about his role as a chaplain on and after 9/11.

“I can’t believe it was 20 years ago,” he remarked. “There are days when it feels like yesterday.”

For Father Smith, Sept. 11, 2001, began at St. Rose of Lima Church in Massapequa, some 40 miles east of the city. An associate pastor at the time, he had been preparing to celebrate morning Mass when a parish secretary told him to turn on the television where he witnessed the second of two hijacked jetliners crash into the World Trade Center.

Several minutes later, his fire pager chirped, alerting him about the mass casualty incident.

After notifying his pastor that he was responding to the call, Father Smith jumped into his black Chevy Trailblazer – a vehicle with emergency lights and sirens – and headed toward the city. Along the way he picked up his younger brother, Patrick Smith, an off-duty New York City firefighter, and dropped him off at his firehouse in the Bronx.

When he eventually arrived in lower Manhattan, Father Smith encountered a surreal scene. The devastation was overwhelming.

“The whole place was filled with smoke,” he recalled. “There was a lot of stuff coming out of the air. Fire trucks and Emergency Service Unit vehicles were catching fire from the falling debris and exploding.”

Throughout the day and into the early hours the following day, Father Smith offered prayers, emotional support and assistance to firefighters and other emergency personnel. A trained firefighter, he also helped search for victims.
As shaken first responders went about their business amid the mayhem, many asked Father Smith to hear their confessions.

“They wanted absolution before heading down to ‘the pile’ because you didn’t know what was going to explode next, what was going to fall down,” he said.

In addition to ministering to the firefighters, the priest blessed the bodies of many of the FDNY’s 343 fallen heroes, including Franciscan Father Mychal Judge, the beloved FDNY chaplain and first certified casualty of 9/11.

For several months following 9/11, Father Smith would commute almost daily from his parish to ground zero, where he continued to offer support to the firefighters.

He said his faith helped sustain him through the difficult work and grueling schedule. “Prayer, adrenaline and the Holy Spirit,” were the emboldening forces, he said, adding: “I had a sense that God was with me.”

Referring to his vocation as “a ministry of presence,” he said he spent time with the firefighters when they were working at ground zero and during their meals and rest breaks.

Father Smith was also present to the bereaved members of the fallen firefighters’ families. He estimates that he concelebrated 30 to 40 funeral Masses of firefighters, sometimes two or three in a single day.

“I knew a lot of the guys,” he said.

He also had been friendly with a number of people who worked inside the towers. One of his former parishes, St. Mary Church in Manhasset, lost 22 parishioners and alumni from its elementary and secondary schools, the majority of whom Father Smith had known personally. He concelebrated several of those funeral liturgies.

“I remember a year or two after 9/11 looking at a list of victims to see how many people I actually knew,” Father Smith said. “It was about 60. Sixty friends that I had contact with and knew their families. They were firefighters, guys from Cantor Fitzgerald and the other financial groups at the Trade Center.”

Like many emergency responders who served at the World Trade Center site on 9/11 and post-9/11, Father Smith developed health issues related to the toxic conditions of the environment.

“I have chronic sinusitis. I have sleep apnea. I’ve had some skin cancer,” he said. “All have been certified as 9/11-related.”

His brother Patrick, meanwhile, was forced to retire from the FDNY in 2006 with a 9/11-related illness.

Father Smith said he has proactively addressed the emotional scars that he bears from his time at ground zero. “I go to counseling,” he said. “It helps, especially on the (9/11) anniversaries. If you’re going to do trauma counseling, it’s not a bad thing to check in with somebody from time to time.

“The first couple of years, I’d have nightmares, flashbacks, a lot of that stuff.”

Father Smith’s 9/11 recollections also include positive memories of a time when people expressed their appreciation for the firefighters, police officers, construction workers and others who pitched in at ground zero.

“At night, when you left the Trade Center, there would be people on the streets with big signs saying: ‘Thank You.’ They’d hand you a bottle of water or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made by a school kid.”

Father Smith fondly remembers strangers chatting with and helping one another, a byproduct of the collective pain people shared and their desire for healing in the wake of the catastrophe.

He said he misses the post-9/11 period that was marked by a heightened degree of charity and fellowship, along with intense national pride and unity.

“You wish that some of the lessons we learned from 9/11 would have been passed on, like reaching out to one another, forgiving one another, being a little more patient with one another.”

The most important lesson, he said: “Cherish every single day.”

By Carol Zimmermann
WASHINGTON (CNS) – In a late-night decision Sept. 1, the Supreme Court ruled against blocking a Texas law banning abortions at six weeks of pregnancy.

The 5-4 vote, issued with a one-paragraph unsigned opinion, said the challengers to the Texas law – which went into effect Sept. 1 – did not adequately address the “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions” in this case.

“This order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’ law, and in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts,” the opinion said, leaving open the possibility that the state’s abortion providers could challenge it in other ways.

The Texas abortion providers had come to the Supreme Court with an emergency appeal to stop the law, but the court initially did not respond.

The Texas Catholic Conference, the public policy arm of the state’s Catholic bishops, said the Supreme Court’s action marked the first time since Roe v. Wade that the nation’s high court “has allowed a pro-life law to remain while litigation proceeds in lower courts.”

In the Supreme Court’s decision, Chief Justice John Roberts joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer in dissenting votes and each of them wrote separate statements expressing their disagreement with the majority.

A key part of the law that the dissenting justices took issue with is its emphasis on private citizens bringing civil lawsuits in state court against anyone involved in an abortion, other than the patient, but including someone who drives the patient to a clinic. As further incentive, the state law says anyone who successfully sues another person could be entitled to $10,000.

Sotomayor said the majority opinion in this case was “stunning.” She said that when the court examined a “flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”

Kagan similarly called the Texas law “patently unconstitutional,” for its emphasis on encouraging “private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the state’s behalf.”

Roberts said the “statutory scheme” involving citizens’ enforcement of the law “is not only unusual, but unprecedented.”

“The legislature has imposed a prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks, and then essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large. The desired consequence appears to be to insulate the state from responsibility for implementing and enforcing the regulatory regime.”

He also noted that the case is not shut, saying that although the court denied the emergency relief sought by the applicants, its order is “emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue.”

The law, signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, became effective at midnight central time Sept. 1. It is one of the strictest abortion measures in the country, banning abortions in the state after a fetal heartbeat is detectable. The law has an exception for medical emergencies but not for rape or incest.

“We celebrate every life saved by this legislation. Opponents of the law argue the term ‘heartbeat’ is misleading. They call it ’embryonic cardiac activity’ or worse, ‘electrically induced flickering of embryonic tissue.’ These attempts to dehumanize the unborn are disturbing,” the Texas bishops said in a Sept. 3 statement.

Abortion providers in the state had argued that the law would prevent about 85% of abortions in the state and will likely cause many clinics to close.

Two months after the law was signed, abortion providers challenged it in court, saying it violated patients’ constitutional right to end a pregnancy before viability, when a fetus is said to be able to survive on its own.

The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that states cannot restrict abortion before the 24-week mark. This fall, the court will take up a Mississippi abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Those appealing the state law filed a motion in late August that was denied by the district court. They turned to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which granted their request to put the district-court proceedings on hold but denied the challengers’ request to expedite the appeal, which led them to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court Aug. 30.

Scotusblog, which reports on the Supreme Court, said the Texas attorney general and other defenders of the state’s abortion law had urged the Supreme Court to stay out of the dispute, saying the court is limited in its power to grant relief before laws have actually been enforced. They argued that courts can bar people from doing something, but they have no power to “expunge the law itself.”

Follow Zimmermann on Twitter: @carolmaczim

By Carol Zimmermann
WASHINGTON (CNS) – Catholic leaders, pro-life organizations, Republican members of Congress and several governors are among those on a long list of supporters backing Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy and urging the court to reexamine its previous abortion rulings when it takes up this case in the fall.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in its friend-of-the-court brief filed July 27, stressed that abortion is not a right created by the Constitution and called it “inherently different from other types of personal decisions to which this court has accorded constitutional protection.”
Referring to the court’s major abortion decisions – Roe v. Wade, the 1973 court case which legalized abortion, and 1992’s Casey v. Planned Parenthood, which affirmed Roe, – the brief warned that if the Supreme Court “continues to treat abortion as a constitutional issue,” it will face more questions in the future about “what sorts of abortion regulations are permissible.”
Other Catholic groups echoed the USCCB, which was joined in its brief by other religious groups and the two dioceses of Mississippi, in their support of the state’s abortion ban after 15 weeks.
The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, came before the court last year but the justices only agreed in late May to take it up in the next term.
The case focuses on an appeal from Mississippi to keep its ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, which was struck down by a federal District Court in Mississippi in 2018 and upheld a year later by the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
A brief filed by O. Carter Snead, law professor at the University of Notre Dame and director of the university’s Center for Ethics and Culture, and Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, said the Mississippi case “offers the cleanest opportunity since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 for the court to revisit its deeply flawed and harmful jurisprudence,” or theory of law, on abortion decisions.
They also said the court’s abortion rulings have been “completely untethered from the Constitution’s text, history and tradition” and have imposed “an extreme, incoherent, unworkable and antidemocratic legal regime for abortion on the nation for several decades.”
Similarly, a brief filed by the National Association of Catholic Nurses and the Catholic Medical Association urged the court to take itself out of the “arbitrary line-drawing that Roe and Casey engaged in while attempting to settle the abortion controversy.”
“There is no nonarbitrary line during pregnancy that the court can draw,” the groups added, emphasizing that “the lives of unborn children are on a continuum toward adulthood from conception forward.”
Other Catholic or pro-life groups that filed briefs supporting Mississippi in this case included the Thomas More Society, the National Catholic Bioethics Center, the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, which joined other religious and civil groups, the National Right to Life Committee, Americans United for Life and the March for Life Education and Defense Fund.
The case, which is already getting a lot of attention, will be the court’s first look at the right to an abortion since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the court last year.
The Mississippi law is being challenged by the state’s only abortion facility, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
In announcing they would take up this case, the justices said they would only review one of the three questions presented to them: “Whether all previability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”
In other words, they are focusing on the viability, or when a fetus is said to be able to survive on its own. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that states cannot restrict abortion before the 24-week mark. The ban on abortions after 15 weeks is more restrictive than current law.

WASHINGTON (CNS) – The U.S. Supreme Court said in a May 17 order that it will hear oral arguments during its next term on a 2018 Mississippi abortion law banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The case is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The court’s term opens in October and a decision is expected by June 2022.
Just after then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed the law March 19, 2018, a federal judge blocked it temporarily from taking effect after the state’s only abortion clinic filed suit, saying it is unconstitutional. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the block on the law.
In commending Bryant for his signature, the state’s Catholic bishops, Bishop Joseph R. Kopacz of Jackson and Bishop Louis F. Kihneman III of Biloxi, said: “(We) wish to reaffirm the sacredness of human life from conception until natural death. With Pope St. John Paul II, we recognize abortion as ‘a most serious wound inflicted on society and its culture by the very people who ought to be society’s promoters and defenders.’”
In 2020, the Jackson and Biloxi dioceses filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s petition to the Supreme Court asking it to review the 5th Circuit’s ruling prohibiting the state from enforcing the law.
The high court should clarify current law on abortion “in light of a state’s interests in protecting the sanctity of life,” the dioceses’ brief said.
A number of states have passed laws restricting abortion that have been challenged in court by supporters of legal abortion. Pro-life advocates have been hoping one or more of those laws would be taken up by the Supreme Court as a way to challenge 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
The Mississippi case will be the first abortion case the court will consider since the Oct. 26, 2020, confirmation of now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump’s third pick for the court. His first two picks, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, were on the court when it took up its first major abortion decision since they were confirmed.
The case was a Louisiana law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals.
The court struck it down as unconstitutional in a 5-4 ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts joined Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in knocking down the law. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch joined Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas in upholding the law.

The upcoming Mississippi case – it has been on the Supreme Court’s docket as a potential case since last fall – will examine the question of viability, specifically if a fetus can survive on its own at 15 weeks.
Pro-life advocates were pleased with the court’s decision to take this case.
“We applaud the U.S. Supreme Court for examining the Mississippi law,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, who stressed that so much more is known now about viability with advanced technology.
Eric Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life Action League based in Chicago, said many activists see this as “an opportunity for the high court to overturn Roe v. Wade” or at the very least to “bring abortion policy in the United States in line with rest of the world, where abortion is strictly limited after 12-15 weeks.”
Similarly, Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, said the United States “is one of only seven countries – including China and North Korea – that allows abortions through all nine months of pregnancy.”
“An overwhelming majority of Americans agree that this goes way too far,” she said. “In fact 70% think abortion should be limited to – at most – the first three months of pregnancy.”
In a May 17 statement she added: “States should be allowed to craft laws that are in line with both public opinion on this issue as well as basic human compassion, instead of the extreme policy that Roe imposed.”
Thomas Olp, vice president and senior counsel for the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit national public interest law firm, said his firm, on behalf of Illinois Right to Life, has “argued against the now long-outdated science behind Roe v. Wade and urged the court to uphold the subsequent 14th Amendment rights due the preborn.”
Activists were not the only ones to respond in favor of the court taking the case.
Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., chair of the new Senate pro-life caucus, tweeted May 17 that he was encouraged the court decided to hear it.
“There is no constitutional right to abortion, yet for nearly 50 years since Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, more than 62 million children have been the tragic victims of abortion. It is long past time for the Supreme Court to right this wrong,” he said.
O. Carter Snead, law school professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the court agreeing to take this case “signals the possibility that it may finally end its failed and constitutionally unjustified experiment as the nation’s ad hoc abortion regulatory body of last resort.”
He said the court’s “tortured reading of the Constitution has undermined the rule of law, broken our electoral politics and resulted in a staggering number of lives lost. It is time once and for all for the Supreme Court to return to its role as faithful interpreter of the Constitution and to repair the damage it caused years ago.”