“Every year, we struggle to secure funding for our ministry,” shares Sandy Buck, cofounder of Be Not Afraid, “and 2016 was a particularly difficult year for us financially.”
BNA is a national Catholic ministry headquartered in Charlotte that provides support to parents carrying their unborn child to term following a prenatal diagnosis. Founded originally as a local, parish ministry of St. Mark Church in Huntersville, BNA welcomed its first baby in 2009. Since then, the ministry has grown into a private non-profit organization that has assisted parents in 25 states and will welcome its 100th baby this spring. BNA has also helped other dioceses interested in replicating its model of care – most recently, in the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., and the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, Texas.
The ministry receives no diocesan or regular annual funding, however, and relies entirely on donations and fundraisers to assist expecting parents and help develop similar ministries elsewhere. Fundraisers by several Charlotte-area Knights of Columbus councils have been critical to BNA’s continued operations.
Notes Rich Adams, Past Grand Knight of North Carolina Council 7343 at St. John Neumann Church, “We are happy to support BNA. As Catholic men, the Knights of Columbus believe in the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, and the work that BNA does in supporting families expecting vulnerable infants is admirable.”
The Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus has offered three significant donations over the past five years, and most recently, the Respect Life Committee at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Spartanburg, S.C., also held a successful baby bottle campaign in support of BNA.
“Our committee is a small group, ranging from three to six core members,” says committee member Katherine Brown. “We have hosted baby bottle fundraisers for pregnancy resource centers in the past, but we chose BNA as our focus with this fundraiser because of the little-known high abortion rate among mothers receiving poor prenatal diagnoses, and the impact of services like BNA in reducing that abortion rate.”
While abortion rates in general have dropped since the mid-1970s, abortions following the detection of a fetal anomaly are on the rise. A 2006 article published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons noted that 80 percent of parents told that their unborn child had a severe congenital anomaly decided to abort. More importantly, however, the same article noted that when presented with a program of comprehensive support at the time of diagnosis – like that provided by BNA – more than 80 percent of parents chose to carry their unborn children to term.
Brown knows something about the parent experience of a prenatal diagnosis, and the support BNA provides.
“During my first pregnancy, my husband and I were given a poor prenatal diagnosis at 19 weeks and offered the option to abort our daughter,” she recalls. “We chose to carry her for as long as God allowed…and after our loss, I knew (I) wanted to be part of something that helped those who were walking that same uncertain path. I attended a BNA conference in Charlotte in 2011, and knew I wanted to be involved.”
Brown is the BNA Prayer Sponsor Coordinator assigning and updating prayer sponsors who pray for parents carrying to term daily.
Special efforts were taken to educate St. Paul parishioners about the needs of parents experiencing a prenatal diagnosis in advance of the fundraiser. BNA offered an evening presentation the week before the kickoff, and mothers who experienced a prenatal diagnosis and carried to term were allowed to speak at each Mass the weekend that the bottles were distributed.
“After Mass, several parishioners shared stories they had heard of parents struggling against pressures from medical professionals to abort after a prenatal diagnosis,” explains Heather Hayes, chairperson of the parish’s Respect Life Committee. “Most commented that not enough young parents know about their options when faced with an unexpected diagnosis. The lack of awareness of the option of carrying to term is the biggest challenge.”
When the bottles were collected and the money inside counted, the efforts of this small group of dedicated pro-life volunteers resulted in the collection of over $2,600 to support BNA. Hayes reports that the BNA baby bottle campaign was the parish’s most successful Respect Life fundraiser to-date.
“We were amazed and frankly humbled by the generosity of the St. Paul parish community,” Buck says.
“This is the largest single donation we have received from any parish,” Townsend adds. “And we would love to see one or two of our local Charlotte parishes support BNA with baby bottle fund raisers this year.”
BNA has received requests for support from parents in California, Texas, Michigan and Florida in just the first week of 2017, besides continuing to provide the only comprehensive service of support for Charlotte-area parents carrying to term following a prenatal diagnosis.
For more information about BNA, go to www.benotafraid.net. Find them on Facebook at “Benotafraid.net.”
— Tracy Winsor, Special to the Catholic News Herald
HUNTERSVILLE — Close to 500 men attended the seventh annual Catholic Men’s Conference, “Men on a Mission,” at St. Mark Church March 4.
The conference was an opportunity for the men of the Diocese of Charlotte to live their Catholic faith, and lead their families and others to God by the example of their lives.
This year it featured three dynamic Catholic speakers with very different delivery styles, including former Carolina Panthers quarterback Steve Beuerlein. Bishop Peter J. Jugis also celebrated Mass for the men. The day-long conference also featured Adoration and Benediction, with a Lenten reflection by Father Cory Catron, parochial vicar at St. Mark Church.
Soft-spoken Catholic speaker Robert Rogers, from Mighty in the Land Ministries, shared his testimony of how his wife Melissa and his four children were tragically killed during a flash flood in Kansas in August 2003. “The flood washed us off the freeway… I was in that flood as well. How I survived, only God knows,” Rogers recounted.
“The core of my message is to know God deeply, intimately, personally, and to live a life of no regrets,” he said.
Beuerlein followed Rogers’ poignant testimony. The former NFL quarterback told football stories about his college years as quarterback for the University of Notre Dame. Buerlein also shared with the men how central his Catholic faith has been since he was young.
“My Catholic faith is really at the core and center of who I am,” Beuerlein said. “It’s always been that way. I was born into an incredibly strong Catholic family… The example they set for us at a very young age is kind of the example I strive to live by myself now.”
Preaching on the Gospel of Luke 5:27-32, the calling of Levi, the tax collector, Bishop Jugis encouraged the men gathered to follow Christ.
“It’s an invitation that’s made, not just to Levi, but to each one of us here this morning, who has heard those words from Jesus, spoken to each one of us: ‘Follow me.’ Follow Him. Get up right away and start on the journey,” Bishop Jugis encouraged the men.
Father Bill Casey, superior general of the Fathers of Mercy, was the final speaker of the day. A former U.S. Army officer, Father Casey used a fiery tone to encourage the men to think about the things of above. Quoting St. Thomas Aquinas, the priest described heaven this way: “Heaven is the place where every good thing you have ever known or needed, and did not have; searched for, and could not find;…and everything that has eluded you, will be yours.”
Joe Warwick, a parishioner at St. Ann Church in Charlotte who has attended all seven men’s conferences, said he was thankful to have been at this year’s event, as he was deeply touched by Rogers’ testimony.
“I saw one of the greatest, if not the greatest, personal testimony of one man’s faith I’ve seen or heard today at the seventh annual Charlotte Catholic Men’s Conference. His faith is intact, but his soul continues to cry out,” Warwick said, “Robert Rogers has raised the bar higher than any lay person I’ve seen regarding being a husband and father through his witness as head of the domestic church.”
Sergio Miranda, core-organizing team leader, said he received great feedback from the participants, “I personally believe the Holy Spirit was with us that day. We were electrified and recharged with an energy that can only be experienced from men gathering, sharing and praying together.”
— Rico De Silva, Hispanic Communications Reporter
CHARLOTTE — Everyone is invited to participate in several ancient liturgies during this Lenten season at St. Basil Ukrainian Catholic Mission.
Lent for Ukrainian (Byzantine Rite) Catholics, called “Great Lent,” includes several liturgies designed to help the faithful enter into this holy season of fasting, prayer and almsgiving.
Every Wednesday during Lent, the very ancient Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts will be celebrated at St. Basil Mission at 6:30 p.m. During this unique liturgy, Vespers is sung and Holy Communion consecrated on the previous Sunday is distributed to the faithful.
On the Sundays of Great Lent, the Divine Liturgy (Mass) of St. Basil the Great will be celebrated starting at 11 a.m.
St. Basil Mission is an Eastern rite Catholic Church in full communion with the pope. All liturgies are celebrated in English in the chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas Church, located at 1400 Suther Road in Charlotte. Everyone is welcome to come and experience the various ancient liturgies of the Byzantine Rite. For more information, go to www.stbasil.weebly.com.
— Catholic News Herald
HUNTERSVILLE — St. Mark Church now has more than 5,500 registered families, making it the second-largest parish in the Diocese of Charlotte after St. Matthew.
Father John T. Putnam, pastor of the Huntersville parish, knew that many parishioners could feel overwhelmed by so many people. So he asked the parish’s stewardship committee to look for a program designed to make them feel more a part of the parish family. The result was “SmallGroups.”
“The mission of SmallGroups is to connect people and create friendships within our large church while growing in faith together,” said Beth Zuhosky, the parish’s stewardship director. “It is for every member of our church and community to grow in an intimate relationship with God through prayer, hospitality, formation and service.”
Similar to the “Why Catholic” program held at the church 10 years ago, SmallGroups seeks to help parishioners connect with others and grow closer to God. It includes various groups so members can feel a common bond with other members of their individual group along with sharing the Catholic faith.
For instance, there are groups for empty nesters, couples, singles, singles with children, first-time parents, interfaith marriages, all men, all women. Or people can choose a co-ed group of various ages or a specific age group. There is even a group for high schoolers.
Laura Hogan is chairwoman and one of the leaders of the steering committee for the program. “I was the chair of the Adult Education Commission at St. Mark when the pastor asked me to implement the ‘Why Catholic’ program,” she said. “I love helping people go deeper into their Catholic faith! Fast forward 10 years and I was the chair of the Education Commission again and heard that our Stewardship Commission was looking to start SmallGroups at our parish. I immediately felt drawn to it again. I prayed about it for a little while and then I asked our director of stewardship if I could step down from the Education Commission and instead lead the SmallGroups movement. Now it is eight months later, and registration for our first study just closed with more than 560 in 53 small groups.”
“It’s a huge movement,” Hogan said. “Many parishes have small groups but call it different things and run them completely different. Ours is unique to us.”
While the format for each group can be tailored, typically a group of up to 12 people gather in a parishioner’s home. They meet for eight weeks, usually in the spring and again in the fall, to do engaging studies together. St. Mark’s first session focuses on prayer using a program called “Oremus, a Catholic Prayer Study.” Members watch a video and then discuss questions.
Between studies they gather once each month to perform service together, socialize or participate in events going on at St. Mark or at other local parishes such as lectures, religious movies and prayer services.
The current program began the week of Feb. 26.
— Diana Patulak Ross, Correspondent
CHARLOTTE — This month Catholic Charities in Charlotte is expecting to welcome 36 refugees.
Last week, a federal judge in Hawaii indefinitely barred enforcement of President Donald Trump’s executive order on refugee and migrant entry, pending a full review of the order’s legality by the courts.
U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson of the District of Hawaii issued the ruling March 29.
Right now, Catholic Charities Diocese of Charlotte's Refugee Resettlement Office is working on three cases, said interim director Susan Jassan.
By the end of April, Catholic Charities Diocese of Charlotte will have resettled about 200 refugees for the federal fiscal year, Jassan said.
The order blocks two provisions of the order — one which suspends the refugee resettlement program and another that blocks travel from six countries with high instances of terror. The order applies nationwide.
With how tenuous and fluctuating the regulations have been this year, the local Refugee Resettlement Office is approaching each day as it comes and tries to plan the best they can, Jassan said.
"We just keep plugging away with a sense of gratitude as families and individuals continue to come in to Charlotte," she said.
— Kimberly Bender, online reporter
Charlotte Diocese continues to receive refugees as courts battle travel ban
CHARLOTTE — Refugee families continue to arrive in the Diocese of Charlotte while President Donald Trump and the courts battle over a travel ban temporarily suspending all refugee resettlement as well as immigration from several Muslim-majority countries.
Since the Trump administration’s initial travel ban was announced Jan. 27, Catholic Charities Diocese of Charlotte has resettled a total of 45 people, said Susan Jassan, interim director of its Refugee Resettlement Office.
The Charlotte office has received nine refugees from Somalia, six refugees from Ukraine, five refugees from Iraq, four refugees from Bhutan, three refugees from Syria, two refugees from Burma and one from Honduras.
During that same time in Asheville, the diocese has received four families, a total of 15 refugees, all from Ukraine, Jassan said.
Refugees who were approved for travel prior to March 16 were being allowed to travel to the United States in March, Jassan said. The Charlotte office welcomed three Burmese people and two Bhutanese refugees March 23.
In Asheville, one refugee from Russia arrived on March 22 and three refugees from Ukraine arrived March 23, she said.
The Trump administration’s initial travel ban was put on hold by the federal courts, following days of protests at cities and airports across the country, as well as criticism from U.S. bishops. After a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s request to reinstate the travel ban, Trump issued a revised order to remove Iraq from the list of Muslim-majority countries encompassed by the ban. The revised travel ban, which was set to take effect March 16, bars citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Syria from entering the U.S. for 90 days and all refugees for 120 days.
But just hours before it was to take effect, federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland blocked the Trump administration’s revised order.
U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii ruled that the government had not proved it was necessary to protect the country from terrorists trying to infiltrate the country through legal immigration or through the refugee resettlement program. U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland ruled the revised order was meant to be a ban on Muslims and therefore violated the First Amendment.
During a campaign rally in Nashville last week, Trump vowed to fight the latest court ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We’re going to fight this terrible ruling,” the president told a crowd of cheering supporters in Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium. “The danger is clear. The law is clear. The need for my executive order is clear.”
On March 16 in Washington, D.C., White House press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed the Trump administration plans to appeal the two judges’ rulings.
During the Nashville rally, the president said his administration is “working night and day to keep our nation safe from terrorism. ... For this reason, I issued an executive order to temporarily suspend immigration from places it cannot safely occur.”
“The best way to keep ... radical Islamic terrorists from attacking our country is to keep them from coming to our country in the first place,” Trump said. “This ruling makes us look weak, which we no longer are.”
Despite the court rulings to block the travel ban, Jassan said, Catholic Charities Diocese of Charlotte still anticipates a reduced workload for the 20-plus employees in Charlotte and three employees in Asheville who work on refugee resettlement.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops runs the largest refugee resettlement program in the United States, and there are 11 staff members in the diocese who receive funding for their positions from the USCCB.
“We are thinking creatively about how to utilize their skills in other areas, looking at the Employment Program and the Youth Program, specifically,” Jassan said.
“We are also hoping to use this time of halted arrivals to evaluate some of our internal processes to improve and streamline some of our methods of serving clients,” she said.
Since the initial travel ban was announced in January, Jassan said her office has received many calls from community members who would like to volunteer to help refugees in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area.
— Kimberly Bender, online reporter. Catholic News Service contributed.
Related story: Refugee families scheduled to be resettled in Charlotte again next week
Justice Department to appeal decision blocking temporary travel ban
WASHINGTON, D.C. —The U.S. Department of Justice issued a brief notice March 17 that it will appeal a Maryland federal judge's ruling that blocked President Donald Trump's new executive order on a temporary travel ban.
An appeal of the March 16 decision by U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland sends the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which is based in Richmond, Virginia.
A day before Chuang ruled, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu blocked the revised order, which called for stopping refugee resettlement programs for 120 days and banning citizens of six Muslim-majority countries -- Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen -- from entering the U.S. for 90 days. The new order leaves out Iraq, which was in his first order.
Both judges said the temporary ban, which was to have taken effect at midnight March 16, violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which says the government can pass no law that establishes religion or prohibits the free exercise of religion.
If the Department of Justice had decided to appeal Watson's order, the case would have gone to the 9th Circuit, the court that upheld several lower court rulings that blocked Trump's first executive order.
Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc., or CLINIC, applauded both judges for blocking implementation of the latest Trump administration travel and refugee policies.
"As both judges said, the March 6 executive order is clearly a religion-based test and it should be stopped," said Jeanne Atkinson, executive director of CLINIC, which is based in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland. "The language of this order may differ somewhat from the earlier version -- which was also blocked by several federal courts -- but it is no improvement on the core problem with the ban."
"In the United States, we do not base our laws about who may come here to visit, work or study, let alone who may immigrate, on religious beliefs," she said in a March 16 statement. "There is too much evidence that animus toward Muslims is at the heart of both versions of these travel bans."
In their decisions, Watson and Chuang both pointed to anti-Muslim comments made by Trump during his presidential campaign and such comments made by others associated with Trump as evidence that the ban discriminated against a certain religion.
In her statement, Atkinson said: "We stand in solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters, who would be affected disproportionately by the ban on travel from six predominantly Muslim countries."
Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project, said the organization looked forward "to defending this careful and well-reasoned decision in the appeals court." The ACLU was one of the groups that filed suit against the executive order.
Trump's temporary travel ban "has fared miserably in the courts, and for good reason -- it violates fundamental provisions of our Constitution," Jadwat added in a statement.
In her statement, Atkinson said Chuang and Watson were "correct to stop such misguided policies."
"The United States is better than this," she added.
— Catholic News Service