We Are Our Mother of Perpetual Help Parish

Feast date: May 22

On May 22, the Church celebrates the feast day of St. Rita of Cascia, who the late John Paul II called “a disciple of the Crucified One” and an “expert in suffering.”

Known in Spain as “La Santa de los impossibiles” (the saint of the impossible), St. Rita has become immensely popular throughout the centuries. She is invoked by people in all situations and stations of life, since she had embraced suffering with charity and wrongs with forgiveness in the many trials she experienced in her life: as a wife, widow, a mother surviving the death of her children, and a nun.

Born in 1386 in Roccaparena, Umbria, St. Rita was married at the age of 12 to a violent and ill-tempered husband. He was murdered 18 years later and she forgave his murderers, praying that her twin sons, who had sworn to avenge their father’s death may also forgive. She was granted this grace, and her sons, who died young, died reconciled to God.

The saint heard the call to become a nun in the Augustinian convent at Cascia, but was refused entry at first. She asked the intercession of Sts. Augustine, Mary Magadalene and John the Baptist and was finally allowed to enter the convent where she lived the last 40 years of her life in prayer, mortification and service to the people of Cascia.

For the last 15 years of her life she received a stigmata-like thorn wound in answer to her prayers to be more profoundly conformed to the passion of the Lord Jesus. Rita was bedridden for the last four years of her life, consuming almost nothing except for the Eucharist. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 70 on May 22, 1456.

On the 100th anniversary of her canonization in 2000, Pope John Paul II noted her remarkable qualities as a Christian woman: “Rita interpreted well the 'feminine genius' by living it intensely in both physical and spiritual motherhood.”

St. Rita was canonized in 1900 by Pope Leo XIII. She is the patron saint of impossible causes, sterility, abuse victims, loneliness, marriage difficulties, parenthood, widows, the sick, bodily ills and wounds.

Puebla, Mexico, May 21, 2025 / 19:22 pm (CNA).

The Mexican Bishops’ Conference expressed its “profound consternation” following the assassination of two senior officials of the Mexico City government, which occurred Tuesday in the Mexican capital.

The victims of the shooting are Ximena Guzmán, private secretary to Clara Brugada, Mexico City’s mayor, and José Muñoz, adviser to the city government. 

“We join in the grief of their families, friends, and colleagues. To them, we express our closeness, prayers, and solidarity, asking God to grant them comfort, hope, and strength in the face of this painful loss,” the Mexican bishops expressed in a message following the assassinations.

The Mexico City government reported in a statement that the “direct attack” occurred in the Moderna neighborhood of the Benito Juárez borough, approximately four miles south of Mexico City’s historic Zócalo (main square).

“Personnel from the Mexico City Secretariat of Citizen Security and the attorney general’s office, both with support from the Mexican [federal] government, are already conducting the corresponding investigations to determine the motive for the attack. Additionally, video surveillance cameras in the area are being analyzed to identify the probable perpetrators, who are known to have been traveling on a motorcycle,” the Mexico City government stated. 

“There will be no impunity; those responsible will be arrested and must face justice,” the statement assured.

The Mexico City attorney general’s office stated that “according to initial reports, the incident occurred while the victims were in the course of their daily routines, when the vehicle they were traveling in was intercepted by individuals who reportedly opened fire from a motorcycle.”

“Departmental, forensic, and investigative police personnel are carrying out the corresponding investigations to determine the facts of the case,” he said, indicating that they are analyzing recordings “from video surveillance cameras in the area” and gathering information from witnesses “that will allow us to identify and locate the probable perpetrators.”

May Christ ‘sustain us in this dark moment’

In their statement, the Mexican bishops lamented that this recent crime “joins a painful chain of violent events that, as we noted in our statement of May 19, following the massacre of seven young people in Guanajuato, ‘is an alarming sign of the weakening of the social fabric, impunity, and the absence of peace in vast regions of our nation.’”

“As shepherds of the people of God, we do not resign ourselves to living with fear nor with violent death. We trust that, with the power of the Gospel and the collaboration of all, it is still possible to build a Mexico where life, justice, and peace flourish,” the bishops said.

“May Christ, our peace, sustain us in this dark moment. May Our Lady of Guadalupe, queen of peace, intercede for our nation,” they concluded.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

CNA Staff, May 21, 2025 / 17:33 pm (CNA).

In response to national outcry over the case of Adriana Smith, a brain-dead pregnant woman on life support, the Georgia attorney general’s office released a statement clarifying that the state’s heartbeat law, which prohibits abortions after detection of a fetal heartbeat, does not require Smith be kept alive.

“There is nothing in the LIFE act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death,” said the statement, issued by Attorney General Chris Carr’s office last week.  

Quoting the law itself, the statement continued: “Removing life support is not an action ‘with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy.’”

Doctors at Emory University Hospital declared Smith, who was nine weeks pregnant at the time, brain dead in February after she was diagnosed with multiple blood clots in her brain. 

According to Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, doctors told her that Georgia’s law protecting unborn children with a heartbeat required that they keep Smith on life support until her child could be safely delivered.

Echoing the attorney general’s statement, a spokesperson for the Georgia state House told the Washington Post this week that the LIFE Act is “completely irrelevant” regarding Smith’s situation, saying “any implication otherwise is just another gross mischaracterization of the intent of this legislation by liberal media outlets and left-wing activists.”

Although he supports the hospital’s decision to keep the unborn child alive until viability, state Sen. Ed Stetzer, the original sponsor of the LIFE Act, told CNA last week that “the removal of the life support of the mother is a separate act” from an abortion.

David Gibbs III, a lawyer at the National Center for Life and Liberty who was a lead attorney in the Terri Schiavo case, said he thinks there may be a misunderstanding about which law the hospital is invoking in Smith’s case. Georgia’s Advance Directive for Health Care Act may be the law at play here, Gibbs told CNA.

Section 31-32-9 of that law states that if a woman is pregnant and “in a terminal condition or state of permanent unconsciousness” and the unborn child is viable, certain life-sustaining procedures may not be withdrawn.

“The majority of states have advance directive laws with a pregnancy exclusion,” Gibbs explained. 

“When in doubt, the law should err on the side of life,” he said.

A pregnancy exclusion means that if a patient is pregnant, the law prioritizes the survival of her unborn child over her stated wishes in an advance directive if there is a conflict between her wishes and the child’s well-being.

Several Democratic Georgia legislators have continued to demand the attorney general provide clarification of the heartbeat law, and some are calling for its repeal.

In a letter sent to the attorney general’s office last Friday, state Sen. Nabilah Islam Parkes characterized the hospital’s decision to keep Smith on life support to sustain the life of her unborn child as “inhumane” and called it “a grotesque distortion of medical ethics and human decency.” She asked the attorney general to “speak clearly and candidly” about the applicability of the law. 

In a statement released Monday, state Reps. Kim Schofield, Viola Davis, and Sandra Scott called Smith’s case “barbaric” and cited the “emotional torture” her family is enduring. They are calling for the repeal of Georgia’s heartbeat law, even though Carr made it clear on Friday that the LIFE Act does not require Smith be kept alive.

Joe Zalot, an ethicist and director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told CNA Wednesday: “I don’t know what’s barbaric or inhumane about seeking to sustain the life of the unborn child, who is a fellow human being.”

For its part, Emory Healthcare released a statement saying that while it cannot comment on particular patients, it “uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws.”

“Our top priorities continue to be the safety and well-being of the patients we serve,” the statement continued.

Newkirk told 11Alive last week that Smith was transferred to Emory Midtown recently because she was told that the hospital is better at providing obstetric care.

On a GoFundMe page Newkirk has set up since the story broke last week, she said she was saddened to have “no say so regarding [Smith’s] lifeless body and unborn child,” who, she claimed, “will suffer disease which will lead to major disabilities.” 

Newkirk could not be reached for comment by time of publication.

Society of apostolic life founded in Canada in 1985 arrived in the Archdiocese of Detroit in 2011 with a call to evangelize

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, May 21, 2025 / 17:02 pm (CNA).

In a sit-down interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, Vice President JD Vance opened up about how his Catholic faith informs his political views and how he squares his religious beliefs with his hard-line views on immigration enforcement.

Vance, an outspoken convert to the faith, appeared on Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast while the two were in Rome for Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural Mass this past weekend. Douthat, who is also a convert to Catholicism, is a conservative columnist at the Times.

During the interview, Vance discussed how his faith and Catholic social teaching contribute to his views on governance. Yet, he also explained why he believes an American vice president cannot simply “do everything the Holy Father tells me to do” because of his obligations to serve the interests of the American people.

A Catholic American approach to governing

“When you really believe something, it ought to influence how you think about the way that you do your job, the way that you spend time with your wife and your children,” Vance said. “It just kind of necessarily informs how I live my life.”

Regarding governing, this philosophy means he thinks “the purpose of American politics” is “to encourage our citizens to live a good life.”

Vance said his faith informs his care for “the rights of the unborn” along with his belief in “dignified work,” where a person has “a high enough wage that [he or she] can support a family.”

On family policy, Vance said he fears that American and other Western societies have “become way too hostile to family formation,” contending that they “have been quite bad at supporting families over the last generation, and I think you see that in the fact that fewer people are choosing to start families.”

Vance added that he has faced criticism from the political right for being “insufficiently committed to the capital-M market.” Although he said “I am a capitalist,” he said he is not in principal against all interventions in the marketplace and cited the administration’s tariff policies as an example.

“I think one of the things that I take from my Christian principles and Catholic social teachings — specifically whether you agree with the specific policies of our administration — is the market is a tool, but it is not the purpose of American politics,” the vice president said.

Vance also discussed the potential benefits and drawbacks of developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and said he looks forward to Pope Leo providing moral guidance on these questions.

“The American government is not equipped to provide moral leadership, at least full-scale moral leadership, in the wake of all the changes that are going to come along with AI,” he said. “I think the Church is. This is the sort of thing the Church is very good at.”

Vance said he disagrees with the view that policy and religion are “two totally separate matters … because it understates the way in which all of us are informed by our moral and religious values.” Yet, he also said that taking direct orders from the Vatican on policy matters “would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution.”

“My obligation more broadly as a vice president [is] to serve the American people,” Vance said.

During his time in Rome, he said, “I’m not there as JD Vance, a Catholic parishioner” but rather “I’m there as the vice president of the United States and the leader of the president’s delegation to the pope’s inaugural Mass.”

“So some of the protocols about how I respond to the Holy Father were much different than how I might respond to the Holy Father, or how you might respond to the Holy Father purely in your capacity as a citizen,” Vance told Douthat.

For example, the vice president said he did not bow down to kiss Leo’s ring. Although that is a common act of respect for the pontiff, he noted that kissing the ring of a foreign leader would be against the protocol for an American vice president.

“So, no sign of disrespect, but it’s important to observe the protocols of the country that I love and that I’m representing and that I serve as vice president of, the United States,” he added.

When explaining this balance, Vance said he does not “just disregard” positions of Church hierarchy but that “you make a prudential judgment informed very much by the Church’s teachings as reflected by these leaders.”

The dignity of migrants and immigration enforcement

One of the primary issues on which President Donald Trump’s administration has sparred with the Vatican and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is the enforcement of American immigration laws.

During the first four months of Trump’s presidency, he has clamped down on illegal border crossings, halted the entry of most refugees, stripped federal funding from nongovernmental organizations (including Catholic ones) that resettle migrants, and vowed mass deportations of those who are in the country illegally.

These policies have been criticized by Catholic charitable organizations, the USCCB, Pope Francis, and then-Cardinal Robert Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV.

On U.S. immigration policy, Vance noted that the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Catholic leaders acknowledge “the right of a country to enforce its borders” but also emphasize the need to respect “the dignity of migrants.” He said: “You have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at the same time.”

“There are obligations that we have to people who in some ways are fleeing violence, or at least fleeing poverty,” the vice president said. “I also have a very sacred obligation, I think, to enforce the laws and to promote the common good of my own country, defined as the people with the legal right to be here.”

Vance said he spoke with “a lot of cardinals this weekend” about immigration policy and “had a lot of good, respectful conversations, including with cardinals who very strongly disagree with my views on migration.”

“The point that I’ve tried to make is I think a lot about this question of social cohesion in the United States,” he said. “I think about how we form the kind of society again where people can raise families, where people join institutions together.”

The vice president argued that proponents of mass migration do not recognize “how destructive immigration at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years is to the common good” and that “I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly.”

“That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance,” he said. “That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.”

Vance became Catholic in August 2019, when he was 35 years old, and is the second Catholic vice president of the United States. Former president Joe Biden was the first when he served under former president Barack Obama from 2008–2016.

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, May 21, 2025 / 15:22 pm (CNA).

The Pontifical Academy for Life, the elderly advocacy group AARP, and the Muslim Council of Elders this month signed a declaration promising to support elderly populations and promote research on brain health. 

The organizations launched the initiative in order to help safeguard the elderly from discrimination and abuse and to protect their human dignity, right to independence, and engagement in society. 

The leaders met at a two-day global symposium held at the Vatican titled “The Memory: Addressing the Opportunities and Challenges of an Aging Global Population.”

Representatives from the Vatican and AARP talked with doctors, scientists, academics, nongovernmental organizations, and nonprofits from more than 20 countries about the future of the elderly population and how organizations can advocate for older generations.

“We promote this symposium in partnership with AARP to reflect with scientific and academic institutions on how to promote a model of longevity that does not limit itself to extending the years of life but to enriching them,” Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said at the summit.

The event concluded with Paglia, AARP CEO Myechia Minter-Jordan, and Muslim Council of Elders Secretary-General Mohamed Abdelsalam signing the official declaration pledging their commitment to the mission.

The “landmark initiative marks the first official activity of the Vatican under Pope Leo XIV,”  Abdelsalam wrote in a post to X.

“Caring for the elderly is a religious and moral responsibility, as they are the memory keepers of human societies,” he wrote. “They serve as a living record for transmitting wisdom and knowledge across generations.”

The event and declaration were spearheaded by the leaders to help plan for future demographic shifts. 

“By 2050, 1 in 5 people worldwide will be over the age of 60,” AARP reported. “Globally, systems and supports are not in place to handle the unique needs of a rapidly aging population.”

“Aging is not a problem to solve,” Minter-Jordan said at the event. “It is an opportunity to rethink how we support our communities.”

Vatican City, May 21, 2025 / 14:32 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV on May 20 visited St. Paul Outside the Walls Basilica, one of the papal basilicas located outside Rome, to pray at the tomb of the “apostle to the Gentiles.”

Upon his arrival, the Holy Father was welcomed by basilca abbot Father Donato Ogliari, OSB, and the archpriest of the basilica, Cardinal James Michael Harvey.

Accompanied by Benedictine monks, custodians of the church built over the tomb of St. Paul the Apostle, Pope Leo XIV entered the basilica through the Holy Door amid the chants of the Sistine Chapel choir and the Benedictine community.

He then descended to the altar of confession to venerate the tomb of St. Paul, kneeling in silence. After returning to the apse of the church, a passage from St. Paul the Apostle’s Letter to the Romans was read.

In his homily, delivered in Italian, the Holy Father emphasized that the reading revolves around three themes — “grace, faith, and justification” — and entrusted the beginning of his pontificate to the intercession of the apostle to the Gentiles.

Leo XIV reminded the nearly 2,000 faithful gathered in the basilica that St. Paul claimed to have received “from God the grace of his vocation.”

“He acknowledges, in other words, that his encounter with Christ and his own ministry were the fruit of God’s prior love, which called him to a new life while he was still far from the Gospel and persecuting the Church,” he explained.

He also quoted the convert St. Augustine, the pope’s spiritual father, “who spoke of the same experience.”

In this context, he emphasized that “at the root of every vocation, God is present, in his mercy and his goodness, as generous as that of a mother who nourishes her child with her own body for as long as the child is unable to feed itself.”

Recalling how St. Paul spoke of the “obedience of faith,” he pointed out, however, that on the road to Damascus, the Lord “did not take away his freedom but gave him the opportunity to make a decision, to choose an obedience that would prove costly and entail interior and exterior struggles, which Paul proved willing to face.”

The pontiff thus pointed out that “salvation does not come about by magic but by a mysterious interplay of grace and faith, of God’s prevenient love and of our trusting and free acceptance.”

In this regard, he invited the faithful to “ask him to enable us to respond in the same way to his grace and to become, ourselves, witnesses of the love ‘poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’”

“Let us ask the Lord for the grace to cultivate and spread his charity,” he continued, “and to become true neighbors to one another. Let us compete in showing the love that, following his encounter with Christ, drove the former persecutor to become ‘all things to all people’ even to the point of martyrdom.”

He further emphasized that “the weakness of the flesh will show the power of faith in God that brings justification.”

From this basilica, entrusted to the care of the Benedictine community, Pope Leo XIV also recalled St. Benedict, who proposed “love as the source and driving force of the preaching of the Gospel,” noting his insistent exhortations “to fraternal charity.”

The pontiff did not want to end his homily without recalling Pope Benedict XVI and his words at World Youth Day in Madrid in 2011: “‘Dear friends,’” he said, “‘God loves us. This is the great truth of our life; it is what makes everything else meaningful.” Indeed, “our life originates as part of a loving plan of God,” and faith leads us to “open our hearts to this mystery of love and to live as men and women conscious of being loved by God.’”

“Here we see, in all its simplicity and uniqueness, the basis of every mission, including my own mission as the successor of Peter and the heir to Paul’s apostolic zeal. May the Lord grant me the grace to respond faithfully to his call,” Leo XIV concluded.

At the end of his homily, the Holy Father knelt again before the altar, located above the apostle’s tomb. Later, the Lord’s Prayer and the Regina Caeli were sung in Latin. 

Pope Leo XIV left the basilica again in procession, preceded by Benedictine monks, to the applause of the faithful.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

CNA Staff, May 21, 2025 / 14:01 pm (CNA).

A Catholic health care system in New York state has agreed to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement over allegations that it violated federal Medicare reporting laws. 

The U.S. attorney’s office for the western district of New York said in a press release that Catholic Health Systems agreed to pay nearly $3.3 million in order to resolve allegations that the network “knowingly submitted or caused to be submitted false claims to the Medicare program” in violation of federal law. 

The government had alleged that the Catholic hospital system violated the Stark Law, a federal rule that prohibits health care entities from receiving Medicare payments for services referred by a physician with “a financial relationship to the health care entity.”

The prosecutor’s office claimed that the Catholic health provider “had financial relationships with nonemployee physicians” who “referred health services, such as laboratory testing, hospital services, or medical supplies, to CHS and its affiliated hospitals.”

“The Stark Law is designed to protect Medicare by ensuring that physician referrals are not influenced by financial interest,” U.S. Attorney Michael DiGiacomo said in the press release, stating that his office “is committed to holding health care providers accountable who engage in such conduct.”

Though the Catholic medical system will pay more than $3 million over the claims, the payout does not establish the guilt of the hospital, the government said. 

“The claims resolved by the settlement are allegations only and there has been no determination of liability,” the press release stated. 

Federal authorities were originally tipped off to the alleged violations by Gary Tucker, a former executive in the Catholic Health Systems network. Under whistleblower provisions, Tucker “will receive a share of the settlement,” the government said. 

In a statement provided to CNA, Leonardo Sette-Camara, the general counsel of the hospital system, said: “Defending these types of subjective allegations requires an unsustainable and unacceptable allocation of Catholic Health resources.”

“This investigation was never about the quality of care provided to our patients. By resolving the case now, we can move forward and remain fully focused on delivering the highest standard of care,” he said.

This report was updated on Wednesday, May 21, 2025, at 3 p.m. with a statement from the hospital.