The Corner: Twenty-Five Things that Caught My Eye: The Kids Are Not Alright, Nigerian Priests & More
2. Darcy Olsen: Why foster kids need lawyers — as much as they need love
Every 15 minutes, a baby is born to one of the growing numbers of American drug addicts. I’d seen these pregnant women on city streets, disoriented and weary. I had no idea their infants were the largest group entering child protection.
Daniel spent three weeks in intensive care, tethered to a morphine drip, fighting for his life. I expected the complications of drug withdrawals, the convulsions, shaking, and sleepless nights.
But I never imagined his life would be in jeopardy again — the next time, in a courtroom.
The state planned to return Daniel to the meth-addicted mother who abandoned him. The court required no lethality assessment, drug tests or safety checks. Daniel’s only protection was a cousin’s promise to “keep an eye on him.”
I always thought children died from abuse because no one knew what was happening behind closed doors. I was wrong. Authorities know.
- Naomi Schaefer Riley: A Child Died in a Shelter Last Week. Why Didn’t Anyone Notice the Warning Signs?
Wouldn’t the parents’ criminal records have triggered an ACS investigation? Not necessarily. In recent years, the agency has determined that parental criminal activity and drug use are not sufficient to open an investigation for child maltreatment.
Why didn’t authorities at the homeless shelter notice something amiss with the family? Jajaira Morales, who lives at the shelter, told the New York Times that she has seen police arrest people there but doesn’t think the private security firm that the shelter hired is paying enough attention. Another resident told the Times she is pretty sure that people are using drugs in the shelter.
Did these people have to pass any kind of criminal background check to live at this “family shelter?” The law allows such checks, but aside from excluding convicted sex offenders, the answer is: probably not.
- Nigerian bishop: Priest murder ‘not isolated tragedy’
While Christians were receiving ashes last Wednesday to begin Lent, news broke in Nigeria that a priest had been brutally murdered by kidnappers, who had stormed his rectory the night before and kidnapped him.
- Polina Fradkin and Amit Shremesh: Our Grandmothers, and the Scrolls They Gave Us
“During my childhood, Baghdad was bustling with Jewish life,” my grandmother explained. At the time, there were around 50,000 Jews in the city. Today there are around five.
“I attended a Jewish girls’ school and remember having several synagogues in our neighborhood,” she said. “The great synagogue, a regal building with wooden floors covered by colorful carpets, accommodated thousands during the high holidays.”
Her community coexisted peacefully with their Muslim neighbors. “However,” she told me, “during the Second World War, things changed drastically.”
The Iraqi government was pro-Nazi, and Muslim guards began patrolling Jewish neighborhoods in Baghdad. “Violence toward our community escalated almost overnight,” Tirza said. As she described how her happy childhood fell apart, she began to cry.
- Carl Trueman: Anti-Humanism at Home and Abroad
Ours is an age marked by anti-humanism. By that I mean that we live at a time when the very nature of what it means to be human is not simply something upon which there is currently consensus. Many assume that there can never be such a consensus. For how can we find widespread agreement on the matter of human nature when it does not exist, its various expressions deemed nothing more than manipulative power plays by one group to marginalize others? That this is not an abstract question for philosophers in seminar rooms should be clear from the rise in assisted suicide to the insanity of trans surgery to the confused approach to anthropological issues that is already characterizing the current administration. The end result can only be more unnecessary human suffering.
- Hannah Brockhaus: ‘Support to the end’: Religious sister brings palliative care to unborn babies in Ukraine
Since 2020, a pandemic and then an active war have caused untold tragedy for Ukrainians, but these circumstances have also allowed the country to confront death and grief in a way it never did before, according to a religious sister who offers palliative care to unborn children and their families.
In Ukraine, “one couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about death before the COVID pandemic,” Sister Giustina Olha Holubets, SSMI, told CNA earlier this month.
The more open a society is about death and loss and grief, she said, the easier it is to know how to respond to a family going through the pain of losing a child in the womb or shortly after birth.
“They feel like children waiting to know about their father,” said Sister Anthony, who runs the operation in a spartan office steps away from St. Peter’s. Basilica. “We tell them to pray for him.”
- Kenneth Craycraft: Three films that make great Lenten viewing
- Michael Pakaluk: Christmas in Lent
If the death of Christ is a payment, a redemption or “buying back” (“You have been bought at a great price,” both St. Paul and St. Peter teach), then the Incarnation looks like a deposit: of divinity into the human race. And then Matthew’s Gospel becomes a kind of ledger for the household of God. The first half gives an accounting of the deposit of divinity, credited to the account of the human race, while the second gives an accounting of how that wealth was spent, to buy us back from slavery to sin.
On Ash Wednesday, when my wife and I explained to our youngest child, Finnan, eight-years-old, that the family was beginning its observance of Lent, a season leading up to Easter, he jumped into the air with jubilation, raising his arm high and pumping his fist, and shouted, “Yippee! Only seven weeks to Easter!” He might have done the same at the start of Advent.