Welcome to the June 9, 2021 edition of
Just 3 Things, the weekly social action newsletter of the Office of Human Life & Dignity. If this email was forwarded to you, and you'd like to receive it each week, please
click here. Valerie Schmalz
Director
Office of Human Life & Dignity
Archdiocese of San Francisco
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Religious Freedom Week is June 22-29. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops invites Catholics "to pray, reflect and act to promote religious freedom" during Religious Freedom Week. This year's theme is "Solidarity in Freedom." Each day of the week focuses on different religious liberty topics of concern for the U.S. Catholic Church. Resources prepared by the USCCB for Catholics to "Pray -- Reflect -- Act" on the day's theme can be found at: www.usccb.org/ReligiousFreedomWeek.
The Philippines has become a global center for the online sexual exploitation and human trafficking of children, according to reporting by UCA News. In 2018, the Philippine Department of Justice reported receiving 600,000 cyber tips of images and videos of naked, sexualized and abused Filipino children, an increase of more than 1,000 percent from 45,645 cases in 2017. Responding to government figures that showed online sex trafficking had tripled during the pandemic,
Bishop Ruperto Santos of
Balanga in the Philippines issued a 2020 pastoral statement calling sexual predators “more dangerous and extremely deadly than the coronavirus.” UCA News is publishing a series on human trafficking in Asia. It is important to note that the U.S. and other Western countries are big markets for pornography, and that pornography is not only a sin but always exploits and damages, often irretrievably, other human beings.
Eucharistic coherence is more than a theological buzz word. It means there needs to be coherence between receiving the Eucharist and the way we live our lives. Public figures--in fact anyone--who espouse evils such as abortion should not receive holy Communion. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone was recently interviewed on EWTN Pro-Life Weekly (above) about why this is important. The U.S. bishops will vote at the June 16-18 virtual conference on whether to craft a document that will be voted upon at the in-person conference in November. In his pastoral letter of May 1, Archbishop Cordileone issued a clarion call for greater respect for the Eucharist and tied it directly to respect for life and opposition to the evil of abortion.