Ss. Cyril and Methodius Ukrainian Catholic Church

An unborn baby at 20 weeks. | Credit: Steve via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Jan 21, 2026 / 15:49 pm (CNA).

A federal health spending bill would impose a long-enforced ban on using taxpayer funds for elective abortion, known as the Hyde Amendment.

The U.S. House is set to consider the bill this week, which would fund the departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services. Lawmakers would need to pass spending bills in both chambers and send them to the White House by Jan. 30 or the government could face another partial shutdown.

Republican President Donald Trump had asked his party to be “flexible” in its approach to the provision in a separate funding bill. According to a Jan. 19 news release from the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, the Labor-HHS-Education spending bill includes the provision “protecting the lives of unborn children” known as the Hyde Amendment.

The Hyde Amendment, which is not permanent law, was first included as a rider in federal spending bills in 1976. It was included consistently since then although some recent legislation and budget proposals have sometimes excluded it. The provision would ban federal funds for abortion except when the unborn child is conceived through rape or incest or if the life of the mother is at risk.

Katie Glenn Daniel, director of legal affairs and policy counsel for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said the amendment is “a long-standing federal policy that’s been included for the last five decades and is popular with the American people.”

“Americans don’t want to pay for abortion on demand,” she said.

Many Democratic lawmakers have sought to eliminate the rider in recent years, saying it disproportionately limits abortion access for low-income women. Former President Joe Biden reversed his longtime support of the Hyde Amendment in the lead-up to the 2020 election and refused to include it in his spending proposals, saying: “If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s zip code.” But Republicans successfully negotiated the rider’s inclusion into spending bills.

In January 2025, Trump issued an executive order directing the government to enforce the Hyde Amendment. A year later, Trump urged Republicans to be “a little flexible on Hyde” when lawmakers were negotiating the extension of health care subsidies related to the Affordable Care Act. A White House spokesperson also said the president would work with Congress to ensure the strongest possible pro-life protections.

The House eventually passed the extension without the Hyde Amendment after 17 Republicans joined Democrats to support the bill. The Senate has not yet advanced the measure, where the question of whether to include the Hyde Amendment has been a point of contention between Republicans and Democrats.

In mid-January, Trump announced a plan to change how health care subsidies are disbursed. There was no mention of the Hyde Amendment in the White House’s 827-word memo.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has consistently lobbied for the inclusion of the Hyde Amendment in spending bills. On Jan. 14, the bishops sent a letter to Congress “to stress in the strongest possible terms that Hyde is essential for health care policy that protects human dignity.”

“Authentic health care and the protection of human life go hand in hand,” the letter said. “There can be no compromise on these two combined values.”

Thousands gather in Paris on Jan. 18, 2026, for the annual March for Life in France. | Credit: Zofia Czubak

Jan 21, 2026 / 14:55 pm (CNA).

Approximately 10,000 people — mainly a young and engaged crowd — gathered at Place Vauban in Paris for the annual March for Life on Jan. 18.

Each year, the march is held around Jan. 17 because on that date in 1975 abortion was first legalized under the Veil Act, named after the health minister at the time, Simone Veil.

This year’s march was held two years after France made history in 2024 by becoming the first and only country in the world to enshrine access to abortion directly in its constitution.

Paris’ March for Life has not been solely focused on abortion, with the debate over life issues becoming intensified in recent months. In March 2025, the French National Assembly approved a bill to legalize assisted dying for adults suffering from incurable, serious, and terminal illnesses, both physical and psychological.

Demonstrators at the march on Sunday protested the French government’s plans to legalize euthanasia.

“They say you can help people die. But the intention is to give death, and that is not our job. It cannot be our job,” said geriatric doctor Geneviève Bourgeois in an interview with EWTN News. “That’s not how you soothe people. There is suffering, but if you kill the sufferer, you don’t kill the suffering, you kill the patient.”

‘Life is a gift from God’

One of the most prominent Catholic voices in France is Bishop Dominique Rey, one of the few senior Church leaders to attend a March for Life.

“We must not touch life. Life is a gift from God,” Rey told EWTN News. “In the defense of life, we need freedom and the courage not to be afraid, even when some media are very opposed to the defense of life, liberty, and freedom.”

He continued: “In France, in Europe, and in the world, we need the courage of the Church to say that this is very important for the future of humanity and for the future of the Church: to be strongly engaged in the defense of life.”

Among those present at this year’s march was Emilie Quinson, who had three abortions earlier in her life. “What was very difficult for me was that I was not informed about what an abortion was, under what circumstances it would take place, or about its consequences,” she told EWTN News.

Today, she is a leading figure in the pro-life movement. “I got married, I have five wonderful children, and my daughter is here with me today,” she said. “I went through a long process of rebuilding and forgiveness, because for a woman who has had an abortion, the hardest thing is forgiveness — first forgiving herself, and then receiving God’s forgiveness.

Nuns with the Sisterhood of Saint Mary. | Credit: Photo courtesy of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

Jan 21, 2026 / 13:33 pm (CNA).

A coalition of religious groups that includes an order of Protestant nuns and two Catholic dioceses scored a major victory after the state of New York backed off trying to force the groups to cover abortion in their health insurance plans.

The state government in a Jan. 16 agreement agreed to drop its efforts to force abortion coverage onto the dioceses of Ogdensburg and Albany, along with two Catholic Charities groups and numerous other religious plaintiffs.

The concession came months after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state court of appeals to review the long-running case in light of a major religious liberty victory at the high court in June 2025.

That victory, Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review, saw the Supreme Court unanimously affirm that the U.S. Constitution “ mandates government neutrality between religions” and that states may not impose unlawful “denominational preferences” between religious organizations.

In the Wisconsin case, the state had attempted to argue that a Catholic charity’s undertakings were not “primarily” religious and that the group thus did not qualify for a tax exemption. The New York government had adopted a similar argument, exempting religious groups from the abortion mandate only if they primarily employ members of their own faith.

In a press release celebrating the New York victory, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty — which represented the religious groups in their fight against the mandate — described the state’s effort as a “disgraceful campaign.”

“This victory confirms that the government cannot punish religious ministries for living out their faith by serving everyone,” attorney Lori Windham said.

In addition to the Protestant nuns and the Catholic groups, the plaintiffs included a Lutheran church, a Baptist church, and a Teresian nursing home.

The nuns, a contemplative order called the Sisters of St. Mary, are known for raising Cashmere goats at their cloister in Greenwich, New York.

Their sponsorship of a 4-H club and their leasing of the goats to local youth led the state to deny them the exemption to the abortion mandate, according to Becket. The religious exemption, Becket had argued, was “so narrow” that “Jesus himself would not qualify for it.”

Participants gather in Płock, Poland, on Jan. 15, 2026, to mark the 29th Day of Judaism in the Catholic Church in Poland. | Credit: Karol Darmoros/Heschel Center KUL

Jan 21, 2026 / 12:30 pm (CNA).

A prominent Polish cardinal and the country’s chief rabbi warned against silence in the face of hatred and called for peace at the central celebration of the 29th Day of Judaism in the Catholic Church in Poland on Jan. 15.

“Too much pain, too much tragedy, too much death. We pray for peace,” Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich said during the event in Płock, a city in central Poland where most of its prewar Jewish population of 9,000 was murdered or deported during the Nazi occupation.

Schudrich recalled the words of Holocaust survivor Marian Turski that “Auschwitz did not fall from the sky,” noting that the Shoah would not have happened without the silence of good people. He underlined the need to combat antisemitism and all forms of racism and hatred.

Cardinal Grzegorz Ryś, the archbishop of Kraków and chairman of the Polish Bishops’ Conference’s Council for Religious Dialogue, called for Catholics and Jews to “listen to each other, because the other perspective is important for each side.”

“It is not the case” that the loss of Płock’s Jewish community “changes nothing in the community of citizens who lived together,” Ryś said, noting that the Day of Judaism — observed this year under the theme “Your people will be my people and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16) — serves to remember them.

The cardinal added that “all Church documents since the Second Vatican Council” have demonstrated the connections between Christianity and “living Judaism.”

“The whole history of salvation boils down to this: God gathers people, and the evil one scatters them,” Ryś observed. “You will never be happy if you want to be happy alone.”

Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Yaakov Finkelstein; local Bishop Szymon Stułkowski; and Płock Mayor Andrzej Nowakowski also attended the Jan. 15 celebrations.

Events took place at multiple locations, including the Płock Cathedral, the Benedictine Abbey, and the Museum of Mazovian Jews, which is housed in a former synagogue. The day included joint prayers, a commemorative walk through sites linked to Płock’s Jewish history, and exhibitions including one titled “Some Were Neighbors: Choice, Human Behavior, and the Holocaust,” produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Sister Katarzyna Kowalska, co-chair of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews and vice president of the International Council of Christians and Jews, said the Church today calls the faithful to “sit down at one table” and explore important issues.

“We discussed memory, hope, and the promises made to the chosen people, in which we are also included and which we share in,” Kowalska said.

The Day of Judaism is traditionally observed on Jan. 17 in Poland’s liturgical calendar, coinciding with the eve of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Similar days of Jewish-Catholic remembrance and dialogue are celebrated by the Catholic Church in a number of European countries.

Pope Leo XIV baptizes a child in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Jan. 11, 2026. | Credit: Vatican Media

Jan 21, 2026 / 07:00 am (CNA).

Former president of Ireland Mary McAleese, a lawyer and canon lawyer, recently said in an op-ed in the Irish Times that infant baptism denies children their human rights and is an act of control on the part of the Church.

Catholic clergy and laity in Ireland have pushed back on her claims, viewing it as an opportunity to share what baptism is really about.

Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan, bishop of Waterford and Lismore, explained to EWTN News that infant baptism is commonplace in most Christian denominations and has been practiced in the Church since the first century.

“Jesus gives us a command to go and baptize. So the Church baptizes in obedience to an express command that is supported by the Bible. So to baptize infants into the body of Christ is something very good,” he said.

“If we were to say we will wait until a child is an adult to make such a decision, well, then, what other decisions would we deny taking for our children? Would we, for example, not give them good food? Will we show them the beauty of exercise and would we not give them good medical care? Would we wait until they could make their own decisions?”

Cullinan added: “One of the first things that the Catholic parent does to their child is to take his little hand or her little hand and make the sign of the cross. What a beautiful thing. Why do parents do it? Because they want their child to have a relationship with a living God throughout their life and lead them into eternal life.”

Father Owen Gorman, a parish priest in the Clogher Diocese, said the Church “encourages infant baptism out of love for souls, and so that the babies of Catholic parents would receive the best start in life, that they would be plunged into the mystery of Christ and that they would be filled with God’s life.”

He continued: “And that is a great good, and it is a great good that should not be postponed. The Church wants children to experience that immersion in Christ to be part of his body, so that they may have life and have it to the full.”

In her article, McAleese stated that baptismal promises made and renewed at confirmation are “fictitious” and that infant baptism ignores children’s later rights to freely decide for themselves their religious identity, to accept and embrace Church membership, or to change religion if that is their choice.

Mahon McCann is a doctoral student in ethics who was baptized into the Catholic faith on Easter Saturday 2025. He was raised as an atheist by parents who were baptized Catholic. He told EWTN News that it should be the choice of parents whether to baptize their children and continue the tradition they inherited.

“Infant baptism does not require an ‘opt-out’ unless you truly believe you were opted into something real in the first place,” he said. “To want some kind of formal procedure to ‘opt out’ is to implicitly accept the Church’s moral authority in the first place.”

Rather than doing this as an act of power and control as McAleese asserts, Gorman said the Church does it “as an act of love.”

“As a mother, she is loving her children, and she is wise in directing parents to bring the children to the grace of God and the saving waters of baptism from a young age. It is about providing that which is best for them, so it enables them to have the best life possible, as part of the body of Christ, the Church. So the Church desires it not out of a sense of wanting to control people or exert power over them but to give as a wise and provident mother,” he said.

McCann agreed and pointed to his own experience. “My parents simply ‘canceled their subscription to the Resurrection’ in their own minds and stopped going to Mass, etc., like many Catholics today. The Church can do nothing to legally compel you to pursue holiness.”

In her article, McAleese wrote that baptism “restricts children’s rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 and United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, to which both Ireland and the Holy See — which governs the Catholic Church and is effectively the author of canon law — are state parties.”

McCann told EWTN News that rather than evaluating infant baptism through the lens of “rights,” we should ask: “Are human rights the proper ethical standard [by which] to evaluate Catholic moral theology?”

“The answer would be no,” he said. “Catholic moral theology is teleological, aims at the holiness of the person, and therefore whatever brings one to holiness is ‘good’ and whatever takes one away from holiness is ‘bad.’ Human rights ethics are not concerned with achieving holiness and therefore are not the right ethical framework to evaluate Catholic sacraments or practices.”

McCann explained that he didn’t fully understand infant baptism before becoming a Catholic but disagrees with the idea that it is like a legal contract between two parties.

“That is a very superficial modern understanding of the rite of baptism and really of tradition as such, he said.

“A tradition, by definition, is intergenerational — a tradition that isn’t passed on from one generation to another isn’t a tradition,” McCann said. “Infant baptism is primarily a decision of the parents, who are gifting their offspring membership into the life of the Church and the traditional Catholic way of life that leads to their salvation,” he said.

“The idea that babies and children should ‘consent’ to be part of a particular tradition is as ridiculous as saying that they should choose what language they are going to speak,” McCann said.

Pro-life advocates march through Washington, D.C., to protest abortion during the 2025 March for Life on Friday, Jan. 24, 2025. | Credit: Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/Middle East Images via AFP/Getty Images

Jan 21, 2026 / 06:00 am (CNA).

With tens of thousands of pro-life Americans gathering for the 53rd annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Jan. 23, EWTN will provide live coverage of the event.

The yearly national pro-life event marks the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, drawing together thousands to protest abortion and advocate for life. This year’s theme is “Life Is a Gift,” which the March for Life official website says emphasizes the “unshakeable conviction that life is very good and worthy of protection, no matter the circumstances.”

Thursday, Jan. 22: March for Life prayer vigil

5 p.m. ET: EWTN’s National March for Life coverage kicks off before the march with a night of prayer at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The National Prayer Vigil for Life is held annually on the eve of the March for Life, bringing thousands of pilgrims across the nation together to pray for an end to abortion.

At 5 p.m. ET, EWTN will stream the opening Mass followed by the Holy Hour of the National Prayer Vigil for Life at 7 p.m. as pro-lifers pray and prepare for the upcoming march.

Friday, Jan. 23: March for Life

8 a.m. ET: The all-night prayer vigil will conclude with the closing Mass of the National Prayer Vigil for Life at the shrine, televised live by EWTN.

9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET: EWTN will air coverage of the March for Life, featuring a keynote by Sarah Hurm, a single mom of four who went through a chemical abortion reversal to save the life of her child.

JD Vance will speak for the second time at the annual event as vice president of the United States. Other speakers include Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana; Rep. Chris Smith, R-New Jersey; and March for Life President Jennie Bradley Lichter. The march will also feature pro-life entrepreneurs including Shawnte Mallory, founder of Labir Love And Care, and Debbie Biskey, CEO of Options for Her, as well as student activist Elizabeth Pillsbury Oliver, a convert to Catholicism who heads Georgetown University’s Right to Life group.

Rev. Irinej Dobrijevic, a Serbian Orthodox bishop of the Diocese of Eastern America, and Cissie Graham Lynch, spokesperson for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, will also speak at the event.

In addition, the Christian band Sanctus Real will perform at the rally and the Friends of Club 21 choir — a chorus of young adults with Down syndrome — will perform the national anthem.

3 p.m. ET: EWTN will broadcast the second annual Life Fest Mass, sponsored by the Sisters of Life and the Knights of Columbus as part of the Life Fest Rally. The Life Fest Rally begins the evening before the march with live music from Matt Maher and other Christian bands.

Saturday: Walk for Life West Coast

2:30 p.m. PT: The 21st annual Walk for Life West Coast will begin with a rally followed by the walk. EWTN will livestream coverage of the walk.

5 p.m. PT: EWTN will televise highlights from One Life (Una Vida), a one-day event centered on witnessing human dignity with a focus on the pro-life issues as well as other issues such as human trafficking and homelessness. The coverage will be hosted by Astrid Bennett and Patricia Sandoval, along with EWTN producers, during the march.

8 p.m. PT: EWTN will televise a pro-life Mass from Los Angeles, concluding the weekend’s pro-life coverage.

The Catholic Church in the Córdoba province of Spain is helping victims and their families after a high-speed train accident on Jan. 18, 2026, left at least 42 people dead and dozens injured. | Credit: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

Jan 20, 2026 / 17:07 pm (CNA).

Following a tragic train accident that occurred on Sunday evening, Jan. 18, in the Spanish town of Adamuz in the Córdoba province, the Catholic Church is providing pastoral care for those affected.

In addition to the help offered immediately after the accident by the local parish priest and the provision of diocesan resources by Bishop Jesús Fernández of Córdoba after he visited the scene of the accident on Monday morning, the diocese has assigned a team of three priests to the area.

The priests, Leopoldo Rivero, Francisco J. Granados, and Manuel Sánchez, will remain at the Poniente Sur Civic Center in Córdoba, the support center for the families of the victims, for as long as needed.

In a statement, the diocese emphasized the importance of a priestly presence in “a place where despair and uncertainty take their toll as people search for any indication as to the whereabouts of their loved ones.”

Rivero stated that with its presence, the Church is providing “the spiritual care so necessary at this time,” as rescue operations continue, given that many passengers are still missing and may be trapped in the wrecked train cars.

To date, authorities have confirmed the deaths of 41 people and the transfer of 152 injured people to hospitals, where they are receiving treatment, some of them still in very serious condition. At least 43 people remain missing.

Psychologists are referring “families who need [pastoral care] to the priests so that they can be with them, accompany them, and pray with them so that they feel warmth, closeness, and comfort,” Rivero added.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.

Leah Sargeant delivers the final keynote at the conference titled “The Beauty of Truth: Navigating Society Today as a Catholic Woman” at the University of St. Thomas in Houston on Jan. 10, 2026. | Credit: Photo courtesy of the University of St. Thomas

Jan 20, 2026 / 16:07 pm (CNA).

“We have the good news that our culture needs to hear: that men and women are ordered to the good and made for amity for each other. Our embodied, sexed nature has been ordered for our salvation.”

So said Leah Sargeant, a former atheist and author who delivered the final keynote at a recent conference in Houston titled “The Beauty of Truth: Navigating Society Today as a Catholic Woman.”

At the conference, sponsored by the Catholic Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of St. Thomas on Jan. 9–10, Sargeant suggested that our culture’s view of sexuality is premised on two lies. First, that “women’s equality is premised on being interchangeable with men,” and second, that “autonomy is foundational to a fully human life.”

To the first point, she noted that “it’s been common for people who advocate for women to minimize differences [between the sexes].”

Based on this lie, women, she said, are seen as “defective men.”

However, she continued, “the fundamental asymmetry between men and women is how we engender and bear children.”

It is based on this premise that the second lie, that individual autonomy is fundamental to being fully human, gets its strength, she said.

‘Forming a society open to dependency’

Sargeant said that when a woman is pregnant with another human being, the baby’s dependence and fragility does two things: It makes the baby’s life seem less valuable to those who believe autonomy is required to be fully human, and it makes the woman less-than when compared with a man, who never biologically has to enter into such a dependent relationship.

“The idea of having our lives upended by someone else [the baby’s] is a blow to women’s equality. This is the original argument for women’s access to abortion,” she said.

“The right to privacy wasn’t good enough because men always have the opportunity to abandon a child: that only required an act of cowardice. He could walk away, run, leave no forwarding address, and sever the connection. For a woman, she couldn’t divorce herself from her child by failing to step up: It would require outside, active, violent intervention in the form of poison or a scalpel.”

Women had to have what Sargeant called “an equality of vice” with men: namely, abortion. They had to “access to this cowardice as well or they could not be interchangeable with men and would lose political equality.”

Fundamentally, she concluded, both men and women must reject the lies of sameness and the “lie of autonomy” and be “radically dependent on God” and one another to live in the truth.

She quoted St. John Henry Newman, who wrote that “we cannot be our own masters. We are God’s property, by creation, by redemption, by regeneration … Independence was not made for man. It is an unnatural state that may do for a while, but will not do till the end.”

Sargeant reminded her listeners that we should not be afraid to “invite others into our lives or be ashamed to place demands on others.”

“We were always made to need each other,” she said. “We are not betraying ourselves when we expose ourselves as deeply human.”

Our task, she said, “is to give people reassurance that this truth is good,” reminding them that “hope doesn’t come from excesses of strength but in the midst of our frailty, and reminds us of how we are loved, and by whom.”

Sargeant's talk at the conference was based on her latest book, "The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto," which was released in October 2025.

Participants in a pro-life rally hold signs in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on June 24, 2023, at a rally marking the first anniversary of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. | Credit: Joseph Portolano/EWTN News

Jan 20, 2026 / 14:37 pm (CNA).

Members of the pro-life movement have mixed thoughts on the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, noting many wins early into his presidency but a number of shortfalls as time has gone by.

Some wins include defunding Planned Parenthood, walking back some of President Joe Biden’s initiatives, and removing foreign aid funding for organizations that promote abortion. However, a lack of action on chemical abortions and weakened rhetoric surrounding taxpayer-funded abortions are causing concern.

A notable pro-life win was included in the tax overhaul bill signed by Trump in July, which cut off all Medicaid reimbursements for organizations that provide a large number of abortions, such as Planned Parenthood.

Amid funding cuts, nearly 70 Planned Parenthood affiliates shut down. The administration also initially cut off Title X family planning grants from the abortion giant, but those have resumed.

The president pardoned pro-life protesters convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and blocked foreign aid from supporting organizations that promote abortion. He rescinded several policies from the Biden administration, including one that paid Pentagon workers to travel for abortions. He also established strong conscience protections for pro-life doctors.

“Right out the gate, we saw some progress on the pro-life issue,” Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA), told EWTN.

Yet, she cautioned: “We have also not seen progress in the one area that matters the most — and that’s on abortion drugs.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched a study into the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone in September 2025, but so far no action has been taken to curtail the drug. Rather, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) went in the opposite direction, approving a generic version of mifepristone later that same month.

Pritchard said that move was “the opposite of what they should have done,” and referred to the generic mifepristone as “a new kill pill to increase the number of abortions that are done in this country.”

She said Kennedy’s promised study has “absolutely been moving too slow” and added that there is no confirmation it even began or is taking place. SBA called for FDA Commissioner Marty Makary to be fired following allegations he was “slow-walking the report for political reasons,” she said.

Trump has said abortion should be regulated by the states, but Pritchard warned “those [pro-life] laws can’t be in effect at all, really, when mail-order abortion happens with the abortion drugs.”

“They’re allowing [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom and [New York Gov.] Kathy Hochul and their blue state friends to completely nullify the pro-life laws in states like Texas and Florida,” she said.

Joseph Meaney, a senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, similarly said “the delay in the promised review of the rushed process in which mifepristone was approved as an abortion drug by the FDA has frustrated pro-lifers.”

“When the FDA approved a second generic version of mifepristone, … it highlighted the lack of progress in fighting the leading means of doing abortions in the [United States],” he said.

Trump also began to waver on taxpayer-funded abortions early in 2026, asking Republicans to be “flexible” on the Hyde Amendment amid negotiations on extending health care subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. Trump later unveiled “The Great Healthcare Plan” and said the White House intends to negotiate with Congress to ensure pro-life protections.

Pritchard called taxpayer-funded abortion “a very basic red line” and said it’s “concerning to see Republicans back away from something so basic.”

She warned Republicans to not take pro-life voters for granted in the upcoming midterms, saying “you’ll lose the elections and we won’t have the majority of Congress” without pro-life voters.

“You must remain the pro-life party or you will lose the midterms if you decide to bow to the pro-death Democrat agenda,” Pritchard said.

Meaney said there is “a widespread feeling that the second Trump administration has seemed to deprioritize issues important to the pro-life community,” adding he has “seen calls for pro-life groups to ‘flex their muscles’ and show that they cannot be taken for granted.”

However, he said the shortfalls “should not obscure the fact that the Trump administration has rolled back the Biden-era pro-abortion measures internationally and domestically.”

“It even achieved a temporary defunding of Planned Parenthood domestically in legislation,” he said. “The federal government no longer funds research on fetal tissues and defends the conscience rights of health care professionals and others robustly.”

Trump also signed an executive order that directed departments and agencies to boost access to and reduce the cost of in vitro fertilization (IVF). The Catholic Church opposes IVF, which results in the destruction of human embryos, ending human lives.

Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio leads the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA. | Credit: “EWTN News In Depth”/Screenshot

Jan 20, 2026 / 14:07 pm (CNA).

Military Archbishop Timothy Broglio says the United States’ threat to use the military to annex Greenland “tarnishes” the reputation of the United States around the world.

The archbishop made the comments during a Jan. 18 interview with the BBC, speaking to broadcaster Edward Stourton. As the archbishop of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, Broglio oversees clergy and sacraments for the U.S. armed forces.

Asked about the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to use military force to take Greenland if diplomacy fails, Broglio said he “cannot see any circumstance” where doing so would, as Stourton put it, “fulfill the criteria of a just law.”

“Greenland is a territory of Denmark,” the prelate said. “Denmark is an ally. It’s part of NATO. It does not seem really reasonable that the United States would attack and occupy a friendly nation.”

“It’d be one thing if the people of Greenland wanted to be annexed,” the archbishop pointed out. “But taking it by force when we already have treaties there that allow for a military installation in Greenland — it doesn’t seem acceptable to invade a friendly nation.”

Military force in such a scenario would “tarnish” the image of the U.S., Broglio said, because “traditionally, we’ve responded to situations of oppression” instead of engaging in proactive invasion.

The archbishop acknowledged that soldiers who are “put in a situation where they’re being ordered to do something that is morally questionable” are within their rights of conscience to disobey such a directive.

“But that’s perhaps putting that individual in an untenable situation, and that’s my concern,” he said.

A sparsely populated landmass with little Church presence, most of the Catholic population in Greenland is concentrated in a single parish, Christ the King Church in Nuuk. That parish falls under the administration of the Diocese of Copenhagen, located approximately 2,000 miles east of Nuuk.

U.S. plans to annex the landmass have drawn international backlash and rebuke from leaders in Europe and elsewhere. Catholics in the region have reportedly expressed opposition to Greenland falling under American control.

Asked if he believes he can “make a real difference” in the international dispute by “laying down red lines,” Broglio acknowledged that it’s unknown “whether the powers that be will listen to those admonitions.”

But “I think it is my duty to speak appropriately as I’m able,” he said.