Angelus News | January 26, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 2

NATION
■ White House to gut conscience protection rules
The Biden administration announced plans to reverse a 2019 rule that would
have enforced conscience protections for certain health care providers.
The old Trump-era rule, which never took effect due to lawsuits, would have
stripped federal funding from facilities that required workers to provide any service
they objected to, such as abortions, contraception, gender-affirming care, and
sterilization.
The new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rules are scheduled
to go into effect March 11. The HHS said the old rules sometimes undermined
“the balance Congress struck between safeguarding conscience rights and protecting
access to health care.”
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the Conscience Project, told Catholic News
Agency that the change doesn’t change legal protections for health care workers
with conscience, but makes them harder to enforce.
“[The White House] is incapable of erasing those rights,” she said. “But it looks
like they’re going to do all in their power to make people think that they don’t have
them.”
Martin Scorcese in the 2021 PBS show “The Oratorio:
A Documentary with Martin Scorsese.” | PBS
■ Scorsese sets his
sights on Jesus (again)
Martin Scorsese said he wants to get
rid of the stigma around organized
religion — so he’s making an 80-minute
film about Jesus.
“Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that
word and everyone is up in arms
because it’s failed in so many ways,”
Scorsese told the Los Angeles Times.
“But that doesn’t mean necessarily
that the initial impulse was wrong.
Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it.
You may reject it. But it might make a
difference in how you live your life.”
The director said he has finished a
screenplay, set mainly in the present
day, with writing collaborator Kent
Jones based on “A Life of Jesus” by
novelist Shusaku Endo. This will be
Scorsese’s second adaptation of an
Endo book, following the 2016 film
“Silence.”
Scorsese directed the 1988 film “The
Last Temptation of Christ,” which was
heavily criticized by Catholics at the
time for its depiction of Christ and
rated “morally offensive” by the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops
Scorsese cited meeting with Pope
Francis in 2023 as the inspiration for
the film, which is set to be shot this
year.
■ Illinois teen’s fundraiser to save
Catholic school has unlikely success
A Catholic grade school in Ingleside, Illinois, was brought back from the brink of
insolvency thanks to one high-school-aged alumna.
Susan Lutzke, a 17-year-old who attended St. Bede School as a child, learned
last December that the school was facing closure due, in part, to decreased state
funding. The next morning, she started a GoFundMe campaign.
By Jan. 13, the campaign had raised $380,000 of the $400,000 needed to close the
budget gap.
“It’s pretty crazy. I don’t think I ever really expected it to get where it is,” Lutzke said.
As of press time, neither the school nor the Archdiocese of Chicago had made any
definitive statement about St. Bede’s fate.
Opening a new chapter — Boston Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley greets Carlos Metola, postulator for the sainthood
cause for Servant of God Carmen Hernández, co-initiator of the Neocatechumenal Way, at a Jan. 7 event in
Boston to officially introduce the English translation of a book of Hernández’s diaries. Hernández’s sainthood
cause was opened officially in December 2022. Metola confirmed that a medical committee is studying two
reported medical “favors” attributed to Hernandez’s intercession that have occurred in the U.S. since her death in
2016. | OSV NEWS/GREGORY L. TRACY, THE PILOT
January 26, 2024 • ANGELUS • 5