In todays weekly round up, we cover the news we missed from the 20th to the 26th September 2021

• Sep 20, 2021 – Poland’s March for Life and the Family drew 5,000 people this year, according to the event’s organizers. The annual march took place in Warsaw on Sunday, Sept. 19. Thousands of participants took to the streets in the Polish capital brandishing the country’s red and white flag and posters with pro-life slogans.

• Sep 21, 2021 –  Mexico’s Supreme Court invalidated an article of the General Health Law that broadly provided for medical personnel’s conscientious objection to participating in treatments, such as abortion. “The law did not establish the guidelines and limits necessary for conscientious objection to be exercised without jeopardizing the human rights of other persons, especially the right to health,” the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation announced. The law, adopted in 2018, did not allow medical professionals to invoke conscientious objection “when the life of the patient is put at risk or it is a medical emergency.”

  Marcial Padilla, director of the prolife platform ConParticipación, commented that “instead of adopting conscientious objection in its entirety,” in its ruling the Supreme Court “puts it in suspense, saying that it does not like how it is formulated, because it prevents the realization of abortion, according to the terms that they wish.”

• Sep 21, 2021 –  President Biden recommended that the United States double its limit on refugee resettlement in the coming fiscal year, from 62,500 to 125,000 refugees. The U.S. bishops’ conference has also pushed for an increase in the refugee cap to 125,000.”The number announced today is a step in the right direction and signals the President’s commitment to return to our nation’s moral leadership and track record of welcoming refugees,” said Joan Rosenhauer, executive director of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA in a statement on Tuesday. “However, we would have hoped that this number was higher,” Rosenhauer said, pointing to the recent refugee crisis in Afghanistan and arguing for a total cap of 200,000. Saying the United States “has a moral and legal duty” to help refugees, she noted that “[t]he Afghan refugee crisis only made the need to increase this number more pressing.”

• Sep 22, 2021  –  The Vatican’s Secretary of State commented Wednesday on the new security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to deploy nuclear-powered submarines in the Indo-Pacific region.

  Cardinal Pietro Parolin told journalists at the sidelines of a Sept. 22 event that “the Holy See is opposed to rearmament.”

  “All the efforts that have been made and are being made” by the Vatican are “to eliminate nuclear weapons, because they are not the way to maintain peace and security in the world, but they create even more dangers for peace and even more conflict,” Parolin said. “Within this vision, one cannot but be worried.”

• Sep 23, 2021 –  The High Court in London rejected on Thursday a landmark challenge to a U.K. law allowing abortion up to birth for disability. In its Sept. 23 ruling, the court declared that a law allowing abortion up to birth for disability was not discriminatory.

  The challenge was brought by Heidi Crowter, a woman with Down syndrome, and Máire Lea-Wilson, a mother whose son has Down syndrome. Speaking after the verdict, Crowter, a 26-year-old from Coventry, in central England, said: “I’m really upset not to win, but the fight is not over. The judges might not think it discriminates against me but I’m telling you that I do feel discriminated against.”

•  Sep 24, 2021 – The Catholic bishops of Canada issued a formal apology to the Indigenous population of the country for the abuses of the residential school system, and said they would request that Pope Francis make a pastoral visit to the nation.

  “We, the Catholic Bishops of Canada, gathered in Plenary this week, take this opportunity to affirm to you, the Indigenous Peoples of this land, that we acknowledge the suffering experienced in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools,” said the statement, which was issued Sept. 24 following the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual plenary assembly.

  “We commit ourselves to continue accompanying you, the First Nations, Métis and Inuit Peoples of this land,” said the apology. “Standing in respect of your resiliency, strength and wisdom, we look forward to listening to and learning from you as we walk in solidarity.”