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Month: December 2020

Colorado medical practice to offer specialized care to adults with Down syndrome

Posted by | Dec 21, 2020 | , |

Denver, Colo., Dec 21, 2020 / 07:15 am (CNA).- In a first-of-its-kind initiative, a Catholic-run healthcare practice in Colorado will partner with a major foundation based in Paris to bring specialized medical care to adults with Down syndrome.

Bella Health & Wellness, a practice based in the Denver suburb of Englewood, Colorado, announced at a Dec. 3 fundraiser that they will partner with the Jerome Lejeune Foundation, a French organization named for the pro-life doctor who discovered the genetic cause of Down syndrome in the 1950s.

Dede Chism, Bella’s co-founder and executive director, told CNA that the Lejeune Foundation was looking to partner with a medical practice in the United States that shared their ethos.

“The biggest thing is really believing in one another’s mission. We really believe in the mission of Lejeune and the mission of life…to be able to augment one another’s capacity to care by joining forces in any way that we can,” Chism told CNA.

Named for Servant of God Jérôme Lejeune, a French pediatrician and geneticist, the Lejeune Foundation aims to provide research, care, and advocacy for people with genetic intellectual disabilities. The foundation currently operates the largest medical center for people with Down syndrome in the world, located in Paris.

Bella opened in December 2014 as a non-profit medical practice, founded by Chism and her daughter Abby Sinnett, both of whom are nurse practitioners, with the goal of taking a holistic approach to caring for women in mind, body, and spirit.

The practice is run in full alignment with Church teaching, although it attracts non-Catholics as well, particularly those drawn to the clinic’s natural and scientific approach. Some areas of focus for the clinic include obstetrics, annual exams, gynecology, infertility treatment, menopause care, and abortion pill reversal.

Over the years, the practice has expanded its scope to offer care for men and children as well as for women, with services such as well child check ups, management of chronic illness, and COVID-19 testing.

One of the important facets of Bella’s work is care for pregnant mothers, and Chism said they are already adept at meeting the medical needs of mothers who are carrying babies with Down syndrome.

The new partnership will enable Bella to care for adult patients who have Down syndrome, she said. Bella will help Lejeune learn more about how medicine in the United States works, while the Foundation’s knowledge of how to care for people with Down syndrome, passed on to Bella’s staff through mentorships, will greatly benefit Bella’s medical practice.

“We know that there is an identified need, and we are going to be there to fill it,” she said.

Chism said they expect to begin serving their first patients with Down syndrome on March 21, 2021. March 21 has been marked as World Down Syndrome Day by the United Nations since 2012.

Dr. Lejeune, a devout Catholic, discovered the genetic cause for Down syndrome— an extra copy of chromosome 21— in 1958.

He spent the rest of his life researching treatments and cures for the condition— also known as trisomy 21— advocating strongly against the use of prenatal testing and the abortion of unborn children who were found to have Down syndrome.

Chism commented that before Lejeune’s discovery, people generally thought there was  something “missing” from people with Down syndrome, but Lejeune found that there was “nothing missing at all.” Rather, “God chose to write a second sentence in the DNA of Down syndrome people.”

Kieth Mason, executive director of the Jerome Lejeune Foundation USA, told CNA that the foundation chose Bella as their first medical practice partner in the United States because of a shared reverence for the dignity of the human person.

Denver is already home to the Anna and John J. Sie Center for Down Syndrome at Children’s Hospital Colorado, as well as the Global Down Syndrome Foundation, a major advocacy organization.

Currently however, Mason said, there is no freestanding medical center in the United States for people with Down syndrome older than 21. Most specialized clinics— of which there are about a dozen throughout the country— are pediatric. The partnership with Bella will aim to change that, he said.

The Lejeune Foundation operates the largest DNA database in the world, Mason said, and they base their specialized care for people with Down syndrome on many years of research. Research by the foundation is likely to yield positive results not only for people with Down syndrome, but for all people, he noted.

For example, it is very common for people with Down syndrome to get Alzheimers, so the foundation is doing a lot of research into how to lessen the impact of the disease. On the other hand, women with Down syndrome appear to be protected from contracting breast cancer, so research into this area could benefit all humanity, he said.

Mason said he fully expects Bella to attract interest from patients across the country, just as their clinic in Paris attracts patients from across Europe and the world.

Mason’s daughter Maria, who has Down syndrome, will be one of the first people to receive specialized medical care at the Denver clinic, he said.

“As we care for people with Down syndrome, they care for us. They minister to our hearts and show us what true joy is,” he commented.

Lejeune was a personal friend of Pope St. John Paul II. In 1994, the pope named him the first president of the then brand-new Pontifical Academy for Life.

Lejeune died of lung cancer on Easter Saturday 1994. His canonization cause was opened in 2007.

Madame Berthe Lejeune, Dr. Lejeune’s widow, has said her husband was heartbroken that many doctors and governments used his discovery to “screen out” babies with Down syndrome, targeting them for abortion.

“He thought that all doctors would be happy to find research to cure them,” Madame Lejeune told EWTN Pro-Life Weekly in 2017.

“But sadly, all government[s], not only in France, said: oh, it’s a wonderful discovery. You can detect these little sick children before they are born, and so take them away with an abortion.”

Madame Lejeune died in May 2020, also of lung cancer.

The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has consistently criticized countries which provide for abortion on the basis of disability. In some countries, such as Denmark and Iceland, the abortion rate for babies found to have Down syndrome is close to 100%.

In the United States, there have been numerous attempts at the state level to ban abortions based on a diagnosis of Down syndrome.

Missouri lawmakers passed a law during 2019 that, in addition to banning all abortions after eight weeks, prohibits “selective” abortions following a medical diagnosis or disability such as Down syndrome, or on the basis of the race or sex of the baby. The law is currently blocked in the courts amid a legal challenge.

Ohio lawmakers attempted in 2017 to pass a ban on Down syndrome abortions, but a federal judge in 2019 blocked the legislation from taking effect.

Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Utah have all considered or passed similar bans.

At the federal level, the Down Syndrome Discrimination by Abortion Prohibition Act has been introduced in Congress, but has not yet been debated. The proposed law would ban doctors from “knowingly perform[ing] an abortion being sought because the baby has or may have Down syndrome.”

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A Christmas Prayer

Posted by | Dec 21, 2020 | , |

My precious Lord, Jesus, I adore You with profound love and rejoice in the celebration of Your birth. Your love for us is unfathomable, it is glorious transforming, awe-inspiring, and deeply personal. You chose to come and dwell among us, being born into poverty, rejection and humility. Yet Your mother knew whom she bore, Her

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Pope Francis urges Roman Curia to confront the ‘ecclesial crisis’

Posted by | Dec 21, 2020 | , |

Vatican City, Dec 21, 2020 / 07:00 am (CNA).- Pope Francis urged the Roman Curia Monday not to view the Church in terms of conflict, but to see the current “ecclesial crisis” as a call to renewal.

In his annual Christmas speech to the bishops and cardinals of the Roman Curia, the pope stressed that this Christmas marks a time of crisis for society and for the Church.

“The Church is always an earthen vessel, precious for what it contains and not for the way it may appear. … This is a time when it seems evident that the clay of which we are made is chipped, damaged and cracked,” Pope Francis said Dec. 21.

The pope told the Roman Curia gathered in the Apostolic Palace: “If a certain realism leads us to see our recent history only as a series of mishaps, scandals and failings, sins and contradictions, short-circuits and setbacks in our witness, we should not fear. Nor should we deny the evidence of everything in ourselves and in our communities that is evidently tainted by death and calls for conversion.”

“Everything evil, wrong, weak and unhealthy that comes to light serves as a forceful reminder of our need to die to a way of living, thinking and acting that does not reflect the Gospel. Only by dying to a certain mentality will we be able to make room for the newness that the Spirit constantly awakens in the heart of the Church,” he said.

The pope has often used his annual Christmas address to the curia to give his perspective on the implementation of curial reform thus far and his vision for the coming year. This year, he stressed that there is a crisis that is calling the Church to renewal. The pope used the word “crisis” 44 times in his speech to the Roman Curia.

“Every crisis contains a rightful demand for renewal,” Pope Francis said.

“If we really desire renewal, though, we must have the courage to be completely open. We need to stop seeing the reform of the Church as putting a patch on an old garment, or simply drafting a new Apostolic Constitution. The reform of the Church is something else.”

Pope Francis said that throughout the history of the Church there has been a “newness born of crisis and willed by the Spirit” that is best explained by the words of Jesus: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

He added that it is “never a newness opposed to the old, but one that springs from the old and makes it continually fruitful.”

“We are not called to change or reform the Body of Christ – ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever’  – but we are called to clothe that Body with a new garment, so that it is clear that the grace we possess does not come from ourselves but from God.”

The pope warned that crisis must not be confused with conflict, which he said “always creates discord and competition, an apparently irreconcilable antagonism that separates others into friends to love and enemies to fight.”

He said: “Conflict always tries to find ‘guilty’ parties to scorn and stigmatize, and ‘righteous”’ parties to defend, as a means of inducing … a sense that certain situations have nothing to do with us.”

“When the Church is viewed in terms of conflict – right versus left, progressive versus traditionalist – she becomes fragmented and polarized, distorting and betraying her true nature,” Pope Francis said.

At another point in the speech, Pope Francis added as an aside: “I am reminded of what that holy Brazilian bishop said: ‘When I take care of the poor, they say of me that I am a saint; but when I ask and I question: ‘Why so much poverty?’ They call me ‘Communist’’.

“Conflict … is a false trail leading us astray … aimless, directionless and trapped in a labyrinth; it is a waste of energy and an occasion for evil,” he said. “The first evil that conflict leads us to, and which we must try to avoid, is gossip … idle chatter, which traps us in an unpleasant, sad and stifling state of self-absorption, and transforms every crisis into conflict.”

The pope said that the right approach to renewal is “like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old,” quoting chapter 13 of the Gospel of Matthew.

“That treasure is Tradition, which, as Benedict XVI recalled, ‘is the living river that links us to the origins, the living river in which the origins are ever present, the great river that leads us to the gates of eternity,’” Pope Francis said.

“The ‘old’ is the truth and grace we already possess. The ‘new’ are those different aspects of the truth that we gradually come to understand … No historical form of living the Gospel can exhaust its full comprehension. If we let ourselves be guided by the Holy Spirit, we will daily draw closer to ‘the whole truth’”.

“Without the grace of the Holy Spirit, on the other hand, we can even start to imagine a ‘synodal’ Church that, rather than being inspired by communion, ends up being seen as just another democratic assembly made up of majorities and minorities — like a parliament, for example, and this is not synodality — Only the presence of the Holy Spirit makes the difference,” he added.

Pope Francis said that in this “Christmas of the pandemic” there is a health crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis, and “an ecclesial crisis.”

“What should we do during a crisis? First, accept it as a time of grace granted us to discern God’s will for each of us and for the whole Church. We need to enter into the apparent paradoxical notion that ‘when I am weak, then I am strong,’” he said.

Pope Francis urged that “we must not tire of praying constantly” during a time of crisis. “We know of no other solution to the problems we are experiencing than that of praying more fervently and at the same time doing everything in our power with greater confidence. Prayer will allow us to ‘hope against all hope.’”

He said: “The voice of God is never the tumultuous voice of the crisis, but rather the quiet voice that speaks in the crisis.”

Pope Francis spoke to the cardinals and supervisors of the departments in the Roman Curia inside the Vatican’s Hall of Blessing, a location chosen to provide more space for social distancing. The pope spoke in front of a large tapestry depicting the nativity of Christ in the Apostolic Palace. Poinsettia arrangements and Christmas trees with large wooden ornaments flanked him on either side.

He said: “God continues to make the seeds of his kingdom grow in our midst. Here in the Curia, there are many people bearing quiet witness by their discreet, unassuming, faithful, honest and professional work. There are many of you, thank you.”

“Our times have their own problems, yet they also have a living witness to the fact that the Lord has not abandoned his people. The only difference is that problems immediately end up in the newspapers … while signs of hope only make the news much later, if at all.”

The pope announced that he will give each member of the Roman Curia a biography of Blessed Charles de Foucauld as a Christmas gift, along with another book by Biblical scholar Gabriele M. Corini.

He added: “Allow me to ask expressly of all of you, who join me in the service of the Gospel, for the Christmas gift of your generous and whole-hearted cooperation in proclaiming the Good News above all to the poor.”

Pope Francis said that the hope for the world found “its most glorious and and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their glad tidings: ‘A child has been born unto us.’”

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‘Are Those Table Runners?’ Asked the Woman Who’d Lost Everything Just Before Christmas

Posted by | Dec 21, 2020 | , , , , , , , |

She had her left leg on one of those little scooters people use when they’ve broken an ankle. She’d asked the clerk at St. Vincent de Paul to take a drip coffee maker out of the box. It was new, still in the wrapping, and cost about $2.00, maybe $3.00. Everything’s sold as is and

The post ‘Are Those Table Runners?’ Asked the Woman Who’d Lost Everything Just Before Christmas appeared first on Catholic Herald.

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