July 23, 2014 – Excerpted from “Put Out Into the Deep”, Bishop DiMarzio’s column in The Tablet:

The Church throughout the U.S. has just completed a special week dedicated to promoting the true meaning of Natural Family Planning (NFP). Natural family planning is an umbrella term that refers to modern, scientifically accurate, healthy and reliable methods of birth regulation. The Church teaches that parents must be responsible for bringing new life into the world so that they will be able to properly support and educate the children that God gives them.

Unfortunately, our contemporary society has adopted what we might call a “contraceptive mentality,” whereby couples often choose means other than natural ones to prevent conception from occurring. This attitude, unfortunately, is also evidenced among our own Catholic people. However, for the most part, I believe that many Catholic couples do not understand the various forms of natural family planning that can assist them in achieving the natural and God-given ends of their marriage, namely the loving, unitive and life-giving procreative aspects of sexual intercourse within the sacramental covenant of marriage. For this reason, the Catholic Church teaches that couples must not actively intervene to separate their fertility from their physical union. To do so is to show disrespect for an important gift given to married couples by the Creator.

Read the full text of the Bishop’s column on The Tablet website.

July 16, 2014 – Excerpted from “Put Out Into the Deep”, Bishop DiMarzio’s column in The Tablet:

The influx of unaccompanied minors at the southern border of the U.S. has grabbed national headlines in recent weeks and turned much of our attention to our Nation’s capital and our foreign policy. Last week, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to participate in the National Migration Conference, where organizers brought together migration workers from around the U.S. who not only provide legal services but also resettlement services to immigrants and refugees. It was truly inspiring to see close to 1,000 attendees, showing that the Church around our country is truly dedicated to the service of the strangers in our midst.

The situation at the border – the “border crisis” as it has become known – was the major topic of discussion during the conference. This movement of unaccompanied minors has always been part of the migration and refugee flow, but in the past several months, attention has been brought to this particularly vulnerable group. One factor, which is not well publicized, is that nearly 85 percent of those coming are destined to be reunited with either parents or close relatives who are awaiting their arrival.

Read the full text of the Bishop’s column on The Tablet website.

July 2, 2014 – Excerpted from “Put Out Into the Deep”, Bishop DiMarzio’s column in The Tablet:

This week, we celebrate the Fourth of July, the remembrance of the beginning of the independence of the United States of America. Contemporaneously, Catholics in the U.S. have been asked to observe a fortnight for religious liberty, which began on June 22, the Feast of St. Thomas More, the martyr for religious freedom during the reign of King Henry VIII.

This year’s remembrance of the Fortnight for Freedom finds ourselves in a little better condition than we were last year, with religious liberty still being threatened in our country, a nation founded on “liberty and justice for all.” Certainly, that liberty contains the right not just for worship but also for our preservation of conscience. The Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obama Care, with the mandate, which was part of the regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, state that all entities who provide health care insurance in its strictly defined definition of religious organizations must provide contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs to those it covers.

Read the full text of the Bishop’s column on The Tablet website.