RESPECT LIFE

Download the issue at respectlifegaylord.com/newsletter.

Download the issue at respectlifegaylord.com/newsletter.

Here is the flyer for our 6th Annual RESPECT LIFE Presentation, “Putting Our Lives into the Hands of the Father”. The presentation is on January 22, 2012 at Immaculate Conception Parish in Traverse City, Michigan.

You can print a flyer to share here.

Ave Maria Radio’s Al Kresta writes about a recent interview with Bishop Alexander Sample from the Diocese of Marquette. In the interview Bishop Samples talks about how contraception has impacted church numbers and how as a society we must protect all stages of life, from the unborn to the elderly.

Read Marquette bishop: contraception a ‘clear factor’ in decline of church numbers at Kresta in the Afternoon

You can read the entire interview at www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/968/lost_generations.aspx.

We’ve added a section for Natural Family Planning (NFP) on our website. We’ll be posting more information soon, but in the meantime you can learn about our NFP Racks in parishes across the diocese and download a NFP re-order form for re-ordering rack materials.

Pictured is our Office Manager Kathryn Mousseau with the NFP Rack.

URGENT: Respond by September 30

In implementing the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the new health care reform law), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently issued a rule requiring almost all private health plans to cover contraception and sterilization as “preventive services” for women. The mandate even forces individuals and groups with religious or moral objections to purchase and provide such coverage if they are to receive or provide health coverage at all. This poses an unprecedented threat to individual and institutional religious freedom.

The rule includes a religious exemption so extremely narrow that it protects almost no one. It covers only a “religious employer” that has the “inculcation of religious values” as its purpose, primarily employs and serves persons who share its religious tenets, and is a church organization under two narrow provisions of the tax code. A great many religious organizations — including Catholic colleges and universities, as well as hospitals and charitable institutions that serve the public — will be ineligible. Individuals and religiously affiliated health insurers will not qualify for the exemption.

The new rule would force insurance plans to cover “all Food and Drug Administration approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.” Never before has the federal government required private health plans to include such coverage. The FDA-approved “emergency contraception” (EC) drugs that are covered by this mandate can work by interfering with implantation of a newly conceived human being. Also, the drug the FDA most recently approved for EC, “Ella,” a close analogue to the abortion drug RU-486, has been shown in animal tests to cause abortion. Thus, the mandate includes drugs that may cause an abortion both before and after implantation.

The public comment period on this interim final rule ends September 30.

ACTION: Please send an e-mail message to HHS by visiting www.usccb.org/conscience. Once you send your comments to HHS, you will be automatically invited to send a message to your elected representatives in Congress, urging them to support the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act (H.R. 1179/S. 1467) to ensure that such federal mandates do not violate Americans’ moral and religious convictions.

MESSAGE TO HHS: “Pregnancy is not a disease, and drugs and surgeries to prevent it are not basic health care that the government should require all Americans to purchase. Please remove sterilization and prescription contraceptives from the list of ‘preventive services’ the federal government is mandating in private health plans. It is especially important to exclude any drug that may cause an early abortion, and to fully respect religious freedom as other federal laws do. The narrow religious exemption in HHS’s new rule protects almost no one. I urge you to allow all organizations and individuals to offer, sponsor and obtain health coverage that does not violate their moral and religious convictions.”

WHEN: Please send your comments to HHS by the September 30 deadline. Thanks!

Download the issue at respectlifegaylord.com/newsletter/.

The moment has come! RESPECT LIFE in the Diocese of Gaylord is gaining momentum, and not a moment too soon. The world is in a tangled cobweb of moral relativism and decisions about life are being made left and right by those with no concept about how precious life really is.

RESPECT LIFE is at the forefront of the action, helping the body of Christ to understand the Catholic Church’s teaching on life and how the Church can be counted on to lead us through the quagmire of decisions that seem to face every member of the body.

To this end, RESPECT LIFE has been creating a network of Natural Family Planning experts who have been reaching out to young families by teaching and encouraging couples to use their gift of fertility in a Godly fashion that is sanctioned by the Catholic Church.

With our first Newsletter, we are committed to reaching out to this diocese to provide access to the Church teachings on life issues. We are poised to provide life-giving answers in order to steep God’s people in a culture of life that will guarantee peace and prosperity in the midst of a culture of death which only produces fear and anxiety in its wake.

We need your help to make these things happen. Our greatest need is your prayer. We need your commitment to life; to be ready and willing to make the sacrificial efforts necessary to turn the course of history.