Damned Catholics

[Fireball]

For extra points, Virginia. 

[Fake Messiah]

Portland Catholic school revokes admission for same-sex couple’s children

Just weeks before the start of the school year, the pastor who oversees St. Agatha Catholic School in Southeast Portland rescinded an offer of enrollment to the children of a same-sex couple.

The decision by the Rev. Father Luan Tran, the pastor of the neighboring St. Agatha Catholic Church.

“[Tran] said that he wanted to protect young children from seeing families like ours, and that having our family be a part of the school could be perceived as a scandal,” the parent said. “He said that in Catholicism, marriage is between a man and woman, and what would it do to the other kids in the class to find out that our kids have two parents of the same sex.”

The school had known since mid-May that they were a same-sex couple, the parent said, because they provided that information when their child came to St. Agatha for a shadow day. But Tran did not take action until months later, leaving them scrambling for a new plan just weeks from the start of the school year.

They have not yet had the heart to tell their child about the change, the parent said.

Some parents said they are now considering whether they should remove their own children from the school.

https://www.oregonlive.com/education/202...ldren.html

[Fake Messiah]

Keep people uneducated, pregnant and poor. - motto of the Catholic Church.

Mothers at 14. The fierce debate over sex education in a deeply Catholic nation

Manila, Philippines — Clara says that at school, sex education “wasn’t taught in our class… we had different topics in science class.” Had she known more about reproductive health, Clara believes she would have avoided getting pregnant so young.

Clara is one of an increasing number of girls, between ages 10 and 14, who have become pregnant in their early adolescence. Stories like hers are at the heart of a fierce debate between lawmakers, health experts and church groups over what the future of sex education should look like in this deeply Catholic country.

CNN spoke with several Filipino girls and young women between the ages of 14 and 23, including mothers, who said they had either not had any sex education at school, or if they had, it lacked helpful information about consent or contraceptives. One of the women, Sam, 23, remembers learning about contraceptives in an 8th grade class, with a disclaimer not to use them.

Doctor Aileen Marie Rubio from Dr Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Manila said most teens have “very limited knowledge on reproductive health, consent and what is considered abuse.” Rubio, who works with the hospital’s dedicated clinic for adolescent mums, said most teens didn’t know they could get pregnant if they had sex.

In the Philippines, child and teen pregnancies are amongst the highest in Asia.

Government bodies have long declared teen pregnancies a “national social emergency,” and in 2022 lawmakers filed the earliest draft of an Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Bill aimed at tackling the problem.

Three years on, the bill is still working its way through the legal process, after multiple amendments, and the most recent refile last month, following fierce opposition from conservative organizations and church groups.

The bill aims to standardize comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in schools and improve access to sexual health services. Currently, teens younger than 18 need parental consent to access contraceptives, with some exceptions.

But an earlier edition of the bill faced fierce opposition from church groups across the deeply Catholic state. The Catholic Church believes intercourse should only happen between married couples and teaches abstinence for all others. The church also disapproves of artificial contraception but permits natural methods of avoiding pregnancy within marriage. Abortion is illegal in all circumstances in the Philippines, including after rape or incest.

This opposition recently culminated in a combined lobbying effort by a coalition of at least eight evangelical and catholic organizations across the country, known as Project Dalisay.

The project’s convenor, Maria Lourdes Sereno, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the Philippines, tells CNN that CSE “intends to normalize sexual discussion, which is not part of Filipino culture.”

Their site pointed to 15 “harmful effects” of CSE, taken from resources by US-based anti-abortion organization Family Watch International (FWI). They included eroticizing condom use and promoting “gender confusion.”

Another US anti-abortion group, Human Life International (HLI)’s country head in the Philippines, Dr Rene Bullecer, has vocally backed Project Dalisay. HLI’s President, Father Shenan J. Boquet, also denounced the bill, saying that it posed “a significant threat to the societal, moral, and spiritual foundations of the Philippines,” in a lengthy statement to CNN.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/31/asia/...s-intl-cmd

[Fake Messiah]

I am sure that defrauding these people was an honest mistake.

A girls’ Catholic school in Wenham filed a $26 million bankruptcy. Faculty and family feel like they’ve been swindled.

Nearly a decade after it opened at a historic estate in Wenham, the Academy at Penguin Hall is closed, its dream of educating girls in the Catholic tradition ending in a $26 million filing in bankruptcy court.

Before the filing, the academy had collected $500,000 in tuition for the 2025-26 school year, which led to parents filing lawsuits and a complaint with the state attorney general’s office.

Faculty at the grade 9 through 12 academy went unpaid for the final six weeks of the school year. In 2023, the school owed $187,922 in unpaid federal taxes, court filings show.

Faculty and parents said they feel like they’ve been swindled with little hope for recovery or compensation.

“Twenty-six million dollars is a lot of debt for a tiny school,” said Deena Flaherty, who is out $24,000 paid toward tuition for her daughter’s senior year.

“We had to put a deposit and start paying monthly in February, and there’s no way they went into that much debt from February on, so they clearly knew they were just taking our money,” Flaherty told the Globe.

“The amount of debt incurred in this tiny business is astronomical,” Flaherty wrote in the complaint.

“They took and did not refund $500,000 from parents for 25/26 tuition and closed and did not refund,” the complaint said. “That is fraud.”

Teachers said paychecks regularly bounced until they just stopped altogether.

Along with not being paid for the last six weeks of school, faculty had their health insurance canceled and allege that they are owed more than $250,000 for money that was taken from their retirement accounts, records show.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/15/m...ankruptcy/

[Fake Messiah]

Ah, it's just the Catholic Church discriminating against a woman for primitive reasons. Nothing special.

New Jersey Catholic school teacher put on paid leave because she's a gestational surrogate

Bonilla was told to stay home after being placed on paid administrative leave 10 days ago because she's a gestational surrogate, now 25 weeks along in her pregnancy.

"They pulled me into the office, and the diocese said that I was possibly in violation of my contract, so I would be placed on administrative leave until further notice while they investigate. So far, I haven't heard anything back yet," she said.

CBS News Philadelphia asked to see her contract, but she said she can't access it because her school account was deactivated while she was on leave. Since news of her situation has spread, parents haven't stopped reaching out to her.

One message read, "If they're so uncomfortable having you work at the school as a surrogate, then they should be uncomfortable about taking tuition from anyone who has used a surrogate or had IVF, like myself."

According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, "Pope Francis strongly condemned the practice of surrogacy calling it 'a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child.'"

https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/new...e-teacher/

[Fake Messiah]

Being pregnant is immoral according to the Catholic Church.

Catholic Schools in the Congo Ban Pregnant Girls

Almost everywhere, girls who get pregnant in school are allowed to finish their education. Only five countries still have explicit bans or restrictions: Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Kuwait, and Senegal. Now, a quarter of schools in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) need to be added to the list.

This summer the director of Catholic schools in the DRC wrote to the government that “Pregnant students cannot be kept in Catholic Agreement Schools, given the guarantee of morality and discipline that must characterize our schools,” as reported by UNESCO.

Nearly a million girls attend these schools. Catholic schools have grown rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years, and now account for more than half of all Catholic schools globally.

How concerned should church leaders really be about “morality and discipline”? Research by Evans and Mendez Acosta shows that when other African countries lifted bans on pregnant girls in school, teen pregnancy rates didn’t rise. The research from high-income countries is mixed, but one of the highest quality studies shows that having a close friend fall pregnant makes teens less likely to get pregnant, potentially because they learn how difficult being pregnant is.

In the DRC, the fertility rate for 15-19 year olds is 91 per 1,000 (per the 2023-24 Demographic & Health Survey). So the ban on pregnant girls attending Catholic schools could affect tens of thousands of girls. Some might transfer to other schools, but many won’t. Dropping out of school can lead to lifelong consequences: worse employment, earnings, and wellbeing, and intergenerational effects on not just the mother but also the unborn child, who may have worse health and education outcomes.

The ban is also clearly discriminatory given the lack of a reciprocal ban on male teenage fathers. And the “morality and discipline” argument ignores the many cases where adolescent pregnancies are the result of forced sex.

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/catholic-scho...nant-girls

[Fake Messiah]

When it comes to contraception education, Catholic colleges are stuck in the dark ages, so the knowledge must be taught in secret.

A student 'womb service' works covertly to deliver contraception at a Catholic college

In line with church teachings that discourage premarital sex and birth control, many Catholic colleges restrict access to contraceptives on campus. To get around that, a student group runs a covert contraceptive delivery network called “the womb service.”

Maya Roman, an economics student at DePaul, grew up learning about reproductive health from her mother, a nurse. When she arrived on campus, she realized many of her peers had relatively limited sexual health knowledge. Meanwhile, she said she noticed DePaul’s sexual and reproductive health resources were lacking.

“It was seeing a need in the community and trying my best to address it right away,” she said.

Now, the group she leads receives about 15 to 25 orders each week for contraception and hosts sex education seminars.

“These schools disproportionately don’t provide contraception access, so students are stepping up to fill those gaps so that other students aren’t being prevented from controlling their own reproductive destiny and reproductive freedom,” said Maddy Niziolek, development specialist at Catholics for Choice, which helps students organize against Catholic universities’ restrictions on contraception access.

At Loyola University, another Catholic institution in Chicago, Students for Reproductive Justice delivers condoms, lubricant, pregnancy tests and emergency contraception directly to students. They receive as many as 20 orders in a single night. The group also hosts Free Condom Friday, where members pass out condoms at bus stops just off campus.

The group applied for registered student organization status in 2016 but was denied, said Alyssa Suarez Tineo, a junior studying women and gender studies and an organizer for SRJ Loyola.

At the University of Notre Dame, the student group Irish 4 Reproductive Health formed in 2017 to file a lawsuit challenging the university’s decision to deny birth control coverage to students and employees. The group today distributes contraception off campus.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/stu...rcna234621

Then there's also the dark age going on in the Catholic hospitals.

Emergency abortion denials by Catholic hospitals put woman in danger, lawsuit claims

A California woman is suing Dignity Health, alleging two hospitals denied her emergency abortion services due to their Catholic directives, violating state law and putting her life in danger.

During two separate pregnancies, Rachel Harrison’s water broke at just 17 weeks — a condition that can cause deadly complications. An abortion is typically the course of action recommended by doctors, but on both occasions staff members at Dignity Health hospitals refused to act because they detected a fetal heartbeat, the lawsuit alleges.

The second time it happened, Harrison experienced life-threatening sepsis and had to travel to a hospital outside her insurance network to receive a blood transfusion, the complaint states.

Harrison, 30, and her partner Marcell Johnson filed a lawsuit against Dignity Health in San Francisco Superior Court on Friday. The claim, first reported by Courthouse News Service, alleges that subsidiaries Mercy San Juan Medical Center and Mercy General Hospital refused to provide her emergency abortion care for religious reasons.

“While publicly touting their hospitals’ qualifications as reliable emergency services centers, Dignity Health prioritized its own religious directives over the best interests of Rachel’s health and well-being,” the lawsuit alleges.

On Sept. 13, 2024, according to Harrison‘s lawsuit, she experienced a condition called previable preterm premature rupture of the membranes, or previable PPROM, when her water broke at just 17 weeks of pregnancy.

This condition is fatal for the fetus and dangerous for the mother.

“Rachel was told that because of the hospital’s Catholic affiliation, there was nothing more the hospital could do for her,” the complaint states. “Confused and distressed, Rachel was discharged and left to complete a high-risk miscarriage of a fetus ‘the size of an avocado’ — as she was told by the physician’s assistant — at home, on her own, and without medical supervision.”

Last December, Harrison was thrilled to learn that she was pregnant again, but then “her worst nightmare” repeated itself. At 17 weeks pregnant, she once again experienced previable PPROM, the complaint states.

In a repeat of her past experience, staff members told her they could not provide the care she sought due to the fetal heartbeat. She was able to access care at another hospital, her complaint says, but experienced sepsis and heavy blood loss in the process.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story...on-lawsuit

And it will only get worse.

Growing Market Power Among Catholic Hospitals Restrains Access to Reproductive Health Care

As more hospitals merge or acquire smaller providers, patients are left with fewer choices and are charged higher prices as they experience greater difficulty accessing health services and, potentially, diminished quality of care. An overlooked but significant part of this trend has been the growing market power of Catholic health care providers. From 2001 to 2020, Catholic provider growth rate was 28.5 percent. During that same period, the number of non-Catholic hospitals declined by nearly 14 percent.

Catholic hospitals are constrained in ways that most other providers are not. Catholic hospitals are governed by the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, guidelines established by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that restrict the types of care that can be provided in their facilities or by their providers, especially care related to family planning and sexual and reproductive health. This includes contraception, abortion, gender-affirming care, and fertility treatments. For example, the directives state that institutions “may not promote or condone contraceptive practices” and that “abortion … is never permitted.” These directives can be at odds with accepted medical standards according to physicians and other medical practitioners.

As Catholic health systems, like other hospital systems, have seen their market power grow, more and more women are encountering barriers to obtaining the care they seek.

These restrictions are followed even in states where abortion rights are protected through state law or constitutional amendments. This has serious implications for women’s health against the backdrop of an increasingly hostile and fragmented reproductive rights landscape.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article...alth-care/

[zebo-the-fat]

Keep your women ignorant it makes god smile!