To the editor:
Legislators in our nation’s capital drafting the next version of the Farm Bill need to get their priorities straight. The largest portion of the Farm Bill deals with SNAP, commonly known as food stamps.
Drafts of the proposed Farm Bill include serious cuts to the SNAP program, at a time when people need it the most. Hunger has been on the rise, despite the best efforts of food pantries, soup kitchens, and community volunteers.
To the editor:
President Obama and the head of the federal Department of Health and Human Services have decided not to allow girls under 17 years to get the morning-after pill, Ella, without a doctor’s prescription.
In the state of Wisconsin, Governor Walker signed into law in our public schools that abstinence only can be taught to our youth.
We all need mothers. Obviously we wouldn’t be here if our mothers didn’t give us life. Yet, as we look forward to Mother’s Day on this Sunday, May 13, I think we need to examine what our society is doing to encourage and support mothers and mothers-to-be.
On Tuesday, May 8, Wisconsin will be experiencing its first statewide recall primary. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the recall election is happening and state citizens should be paying attention.
The Wisconsin Catholic Conference (WCC) encourages Catholic voters to visit its Faithful Citizenship voter education page for resources on Catholic teaching (www.wisconsincatholic.org/faithful_citizenship.cfm).
There you will find a letter from the bishops of Wisconsin written prior to the 2010 elections. In that letter, the bishops admit that “being a faithful citizen is never easy.” Yet, they encourage Catholics to “remain engaged, not just politically but also culturally,” since there is “so much good that we will contribute to our nation and to our world.”
The WCC Web site also includes the latest edition of its Guidelines for Church Involvement in Electoral Politics as well as a question card voters can use when questioning candidates running for state office.
Also helpful is information provided by the state’s Government Accountability Board (GAB), which issued a press release with information for state voters about the primary recall rules (http://gab.wi.gov/elections-voting/recall).
An elderly woman lives on a very tight fixed income. She depends on food stamps to provide enough food so that she can pay for her rent and medical expenses.
A married man with four children loses his job. His unemployment compensation has run out and he relies on receiving government help for rental assistance and buying food for his family.
These are real situations facing real people. In fact, recent statistics show that one in two Americans are living at or near the poverty level. That means up to 50 million Americans are poor, the highest number since the Census Bureau began tracking poverty rates in 1959.
But despite the growing numbers of poor people — many of them formerly considered “middle class” — we aren’t hearing much about poverty in the current political campaign. It seems to be an issue that everyone is avoiding like the plague.
Everyone except the U.S. Catholic bishops, that is.
When I was growing up, my dad (a teacher who had summers off) always planted a large vegetable garden.
As his tomatoes, beets, carrots, and other vegetables multiplied, he would often take pails of produce around the neighborhood as gifts to other families. I helped with planting and weeding, although my main role was taking care of the flowers decorating the garden.
Ever since then, I’ve always enjoyed gardening. Being outdoors with the smell of dirt (to me it smells good) and the bees buzzing gives me a sense of calm and peace.
When our children were young, we, too, had a vegetable garden. However, it got to be too much work to keep up with the weeding and harvesting — plus two of our neighbors had gardens and liked to share their produce with us. We decided to give up the vegetables, but we still have flowers and maintain our fairly large yard.
A recent cover story in Newsweek magazine proclaimed, “Forget the Church: Follow Jesus.” This issue contained a story by Andrew Sullivan that in essence claimed that Christianity has been destroyed by politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists.
To the editor:
On Sunday, March 18, approximately 6,000 area residents joined us in celebrating the opening of the new Monroe Clinic Hospital. It was an exciting day for our staff who also came out in full force to welcome the community and tour them through the new facility.
We are touched by the outpouring of support we have experienced through the grand opening events over the past week, and we want to take a moment to say thanks. We’d like to start by thanking the community for their personal interest and kind words during the open house and throughout the entire construction process.
To the editor:
In his March 29 column, Bishop Morlino hits the nail on the head when he notes how the contraceptive mandate puts a disturbing new spin on the tired, old “my body, my choice” slogan.
What strikes me in particular is how the folks who’ve been telling us for years that the government has no place legislating about what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms are now arguing that the government has every right to do so by executive fiat.
Starting with Palm Sunday, Catholics are following in the footsteps of Jesus during the liturgies of Holy Week and Easter with the wonderful Scripture readings recounting the Passion, death, and Resurrection.
We read in all four Gospels that Jesus experienced a triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He rode on a donkey, which traditionally meant he arrived in peace (those with more war-like purposes were said to ride on a horse).
