Fourteen Things That Caught My Eye: Yeshiva University, Hasidic Schools, Religious Liberty, Pluralism & More

1. Before her murder by insurgents, Italian nun called niece for prayers

According to Fides, the information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies, Italian Sister De Coppi, 84, was killed by a bullet to the head during the night between Sept. 6 and 7 during an attack on their mission. She had been serving in Mozambique since 1963.

According to reports sent to Fides, those who attacked destroyed the mission’s structures, including the church, the hospital and the primary and secondary school. Fides reported the nun was killed while trying to reach the dormitory where the few remaining students were.

Other sisters and two Italian missionary priests were able to escape and hide: Father Loris Vignandel, 45, and Father Lorenzo Barro, who is the rector of a diocesan seminary in the city of Destra Tagliamento.

The BBC reported Sept. 8 that the Islamic State group (IS) claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed four Christians, including Sister De Coppi. IS said it killed the nun because she had “excessively engaged in spreading Christianity,” the BBC reported.

2. Bill McGurn: Yeshiva University Case Means We’re All Jews Now

“The stakes couldn’t be higher, not just for Yeshiva but for the country,” says Mark Rienzi, the Catholic University law professor and Becket Fund president who represented the Little Sisters in 2013. “That’s why people of many different faiths filed briefs asking the court to protect Yeshiva. If Yeshiva can’t even make religious decisions on its own campus, then no religious group is safe from government control.”

3. Eli Spitzer in Mosaic: New York State vs. the Yeshivas

What the dispute about ḥasidic yeshivas is really about, then, is something much more critical than instruction in secular studies. It’s about whether the liberal state is willing to let a countercultural social movement that bends the rules of the liberal order grow up in its midst. From the perspective of the state, and those loyal to it, there are reasonable grounds to prevent that. What is not reasonable, however, is the sort of liberal triumphalism that imagines that, under the pretext of implementing minor or neutral reforms, Ḥasidim will simply be intimidated into dismantling their own social order. Those among YAFFED’s supporters who understand what is at stake and want to disable the ḥasidic community’s ability to ensure generational continuity should do them the credit of not imagining it will be so easy.

In the meantime, those who have the more modest goal of promoting better secular studies in the ḥasidic education system would be well advised to return to first principles and remember the distinction between education—the molding of an individual—and instruction—the imparting of specific skills. If they wish to get the majority of ḥasidic parents on board, then their most urgent priority is to demonstrate how specific forms of instruction can be introduced into ḥasidic schools without imperiling its overall educational purpose. In my own experience as a headmaster trying to do exactly this, I have found the task both easier and harder than you might think. Many seemingly impossible obstacles can be overcome when your goals are clear and defined, and many seemingly innocuous reforms actually have a destabilizing effect that ripples throughout the whole system.

Many features of a ḥasidic school seem pointless or bizarre to those who have not thought deeply about how they fit together, but it is precisely for that reason that reformers—assuming they want to succeed—must tread carefully. As G.K. Chesterton warned in his famous fence parable, you cannot fix what you do not first understand. The instinctive attitude of ordinary ḥasidic parents who would like better, more engaging, and successful secular studies for their sons, but who fear any tampering with the existing system, is wholly reasonable. Improving standards of secular education can be done only by those who have demonstrated their ability to tinker with the edifice of hasidic education without bringing the walls tumbling down. As for those who want those walls to fall so that poor, oppressed ḥasidic children can taste the pleasure of liberal autonomy—well, as we say in Yiddish, zol zayn mit mazel.

4. Charlie Camosy: ‘Caring for Faith’ — Disabilities and medical discrimination

When Brad and Jesi Smith were first told that their daughter might have the chromosomal condition Trisomy 18, doctors raised the possibility of an abortion. The couple declined. They knew they wanted to choose life for their daughter, whom they named Faith.

But even after Faith was born, the Smiths found they had to continue fighting to have her human dignity recognized by many in the medical field, even to obtain basic treatment for her ongoing health challenges.

For the past 12 years, the Smiths have advocated not only for their daughter, but for other children with disabilities, who are often considered “exceptions” in the abortion debate.

Brad and Jesi are both speakers for SaveThe1.com, and they work to connect children with disabilities and doctors who will support them.

5. Democrat Mom Accuses Educators, Therapist of Driving Her Autistic, Gender-Confused Child to ‘Catastrophic Ruin’

After educators and a therapist drove her high-functioning autistic, gender-confused daughter to a mental breakdown, a California mother is speaking out about the “trauma” and “catastrophic ruin” that gender ideology has caused her family.

Vera Lindner (not her real name) says she worries that other parents’ children will be led down a path of delusion.

“Children who have experienced trauma or adverse childhood experiences, who are neurodivergent such as autistic or with ADD, ADHD [attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] are extremely susceptible to the transgender ideology,” Lindner says.

“Instead of the teachers and the doctors saying, ‘OK, now let’s get to the bottom of this. Let’s see what’s really bothering you. Why are you saying you’re not a girl?,’ the teachers and the doctors blindly affirm. They perpetuate this delusion.”

Lindner says she wanted to speak up using her real name, but doesn’t feel safe doing so. She is an industry leader in California who employs more than 10 individuals and mentors dozens more.

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7.  Pregnant woman with terminal cancer survives, chooses life

“Many people are not aware chemotherapy can be actually quite safe during pregnancy,” Hanna explained. “I chose the middle road that I would do some chemotherapy with some modifications, and she was a big inspiration for me.” . . .

She received eight to 10 opinions before moving forward with treatment. A couple of doctors told her to terminate the pregnancy and she explained that “it was not necessary at all. My prognosis didn’t change. My treatment plan did not change — pregnant or not pregnant.”

8. Katie Yoder: ‘We’re having a problem on the plane’: Husband writes about losing wife, unborn child on 9/11

9. Karen Swallow Prior: The scandal of evangelical Christian friendship

The modern companionate model of marriage so emphasizes friendship that when a spouse inevitably fails to fulfill all of our friendship needs, and we seek fulfillment of those needs elsewhere, the resulting friendships are conflated with sexual relationship.

In other words, perhaps because we have overlapped marriage with friendship so much, we don’t know how to have opposite-sex friendships that aren’t inherently sexual. A spouse ought to be a friend, to be sure. But “friend” — even “best friend” — is a demotion from “husband” or “wife.”

Wide, varied friendships of varying depths and lifespans are healthy and good — and biblical. I have book friends, movie friends, theology friends, author friends, news junkie friends, funny meme sharing friends, childhood friends, social media friends, dog friends, “Wordle” friends and work friends, to name a few.

Some of these friends are men. Some are women. None of my friends share all of these interests. My husband shares some but not all of these interests.

All friendships require limits of various kinds, even same-sex friendships.

The Billy Graham rule is no help to those whose sin occurs in a homosexual liaison, after all. And while I’m at it, it doesn’t always take two to tango: How many strict advocates of the rule watch porn? Technology has introduced increasingly intimate forms of connection: text messages, Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs. These complications have been the source of recent controversies about contacts between men and women that make the Billy Graham Rule’s ban on sharing airspace somewhat moot.

10. Edward Pentin: A Tribute to My Queen

What made Queen Elizabeth so special was that she grasped the full spiritual weight and responsibility of her office, and sought to execute it with that in mind. Her steadfast witness of faith in Jesus Christ and her firm hope in his promises — as Pope Francis rightly put it in his tribute to her this evening — was central to all that she was and all that she did. And it made her a pillar of stability in an ever-changing world.

The Queen was fully aware that the British monarchy, whose roots are deeply Catholic, is primarily a spiritual office, requiring that it be set apart from other elements of the nation. For this reason, she largely remained intensely private and almost never gave interviews, allowing a rightful mystique to surround the office that pointed, not so much to her, but to the God she served.

11. CNN: A Kentucky toddler dressed up as the Queen. A few months later she received royal mail

12. Stephen P. White: The Lay Vocation

While many lay people continue to clamor for a seat at the clerical table – worrying themselves about who gets to be in the sanctuary during Mass or serve as head of this or that dicastery in the Roman Curia – vast swaths of the vineyard which can only be tended by the laity are falling into disarray.

Take family life, for example. The Council spoke beautifully about the essential role of marriage and family in spreading the faith.

From the wedlock of Christians there comes the family, in which new citizens of human society are born, who by the grace of the Holy Spirit received in baptism are made children of God, thus perpetuating the people of God through the centuries. The family is, so to speak, the domestic church. In it parents should, by their word and example, be the first preachers of the faith to their children; they should encourage them in the vocation which is proper to each of them, fostering with special care vocation to a sacred state.

Yet here in the United States, in the years since the Council, the number of Catholic marriages has collapsed.

According to CARA, there were 426,309 Catholic marriages celebrated in this country in 1969, when there were roughly 50 million Catholics in the United States. By 2014, the number of Catholics in the country had grown to roughly 70 million – but the number of Catholic marriages had fallen below 150,000 for the first time. In 2020, no doubt because of the pandemic, the total number of Catholic marriages celebrated in the United States fell to 97,200.

When it comes to forming Catholic marriages – a central and irreplaceable part of the lay vocation – lay Catholics are failing miserably. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to raising the next generation of Catholics the numbers show lay Catholics are failing in their vocation there, too. In 1969, there were more than a million infant baptisms; by 2014, the number had fallen below 700,000. First Communions are also down dramatically.

This is not news; the trends have been obvious for decades. In virtually every case, the pandemic has rapidly accelerated the collapse. And we haven’t even touched on the evangelization of culture or the economy or politics – all primarily the responsibility of the laity.

The Second Vatican Council envisioned a revitalization of the lay vocation. And as easy as it has been in recent years to blame this bishop or that pope or such-and-such a priest for the state of affairs, lay Catholics need to ask ourselves why our portion of the vineyard has fallen into such disarray.

13. Co-founder of Kazakhstan’s only seminary shares astonishing stories of rebirth after Soviet regime

On Palm Sunday, 1992, the missionary opened a three-month pre-seminary: “At first I thought there would be no one. I saw 12 boys arrive … And the miracle was renewed every year. We continued for four years with me going back and forth between Lugano and Karaganda. It was still clandestine, communications were complicated, and we were being watched by the KGB.”

The pre-seminary was located in Karaganda, in the heart of one of the largest gulags of the Communist period, the Karlag. This is where Catholics were most numerous at the time, half of the population being descendants of Russian, German, Polish and Ukrainian deportees.

Karaganda was the only place in the Soviet Union where a Catholic church had been built, on an unusual architectural model: The miners of this coal town used materials found on the spot such as mine tubes or railway rails.

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