When Proximity Becomes Compromise:
Maura Healey, the Vatican, and the Cost of Blurred Catholic Boundaries
Long before Maura Healey signed Massachusetts’s radical abortion law, Catholic institutions were welcoming her to their platforms, praising her values and working closely with her administration. Public funds flowed to Catholic charities and projects while the governor became a familiar presence in Catholic institutional life. Massachusetts is not an isolated case. From diocesan charities and Catholic universities to episcopal conferences and the Vatican itself, decades of institutional proximity to political power have blurred distinctions which an earlier Catholic culture understood perfectly well. The problem was never cooperation with those outside the Church. It is cooperation without sufficiently visible boundaries.
The photographs which followed Governor Maura Healey’s signing of Massachusetts’s new abortion legislation were disturbing enough. Around the governor stood representatives and supporters of organisations which had worked for precisely this result: the dismantling of the remaining statutory restrictions governing abortion after twenty-four weeks. There were smiles, applause and the familiar atmosphere of political victory. For Catholics, however, there is another collection of photographs which deserves examination. They show Healey at Catholic schools, Catholic fundraising events and beside senior churchmen; speaking at Catholic institutions, praising Catholic organisations and being praised in return. They belong to the years before the present confrontation, and they help explain why the question facing the Church in Massachusetts is now considerably larger than whether one Catholic governor should be denied Holy Communion.
Joe Doyle of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts drew attention to this history on 17 August in an article pointedly entitled “The Friends of Governor Maura Healey”. His argument is deliberately provocative. Planned Parenthood and its allies wanted abortion legislation from Healey; Catholic institutions wanted cooperation from the Commonwealth in areas ranging from charitable provision and employment programmes to housing and education. Both developed relationships with the governor because both had things they wanted government to do. Doyle presses that observation further than Nuntiatoria needs to do. The more searching question is what happens when years of partnership, access, funding, public praise and institutional familiarity create a relationship in which serious confrontation becomes progressively more difficult.
That proximity is well documented. In July 2023, Catholic Charities Boston announced that it had received a $1 million Senator Kenneth J. Donnelly Workforce Success Grant from the Healey-Driscoll administration. The money was intended to train unemployed and underemployed people as nursing assistants and home-health aides and help them into work. In October 2024, Catholic Charities announced another $500,000 award from the administration to continue the programme.¹ These are entirely recognisable works of social welfare, and Catholic agencies are entitled to participate in public programmes serving the common good. The significance for the present discussion is not the legitimacy of the work but the development of an institutional relationship repeatedly described in terms of cooperation and partnership.
The relationship was not confined to grants. In April 2024 Healey visited St John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, a Catholic school in the Xaverian Brothers tradition. The school’s own account could scarcely have been warmer. It declared that “it was quickly clear her personal values are closely aligned with those of the Xaverian Brothers”. Healey addressed student leaders on ethical leadership, compassion, trust and empathy.² Whatever civic justification may be offered for inviting the governor, the language matters. This was not merely a school receiving the chief executive of the Commonwealth with appropriate courtesy. The institution itself interpreted Healey’s values through a Catholic frame and presented the alignment affirmatively.
A month later came another conspicuous example. Catholic Charities Boston held its Spring Celebration at the Boston Harbor Hotel to honour Cardinal Seán O’Malley with the John and Virginia Kaneb Justice and Compassion Award. More than 350 guests attended and the evening raised nearly $1.5 million. Healey gave the opening remarks. Catholic Charities presented the governor and the Cardinal within the same public celebration of partnership in addressing social need.³ Here was Healey not grudgingly tolerated at the edge of Catholic institutional life but occupying a prominent place within it. Her established abortion politics were no secret. The controversy of August 2026 cannot therefore be understood as though Catholic institutions discovered her moral and political commitments only when the latest bill reached her desk.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about cooperation of this kind. A bishop ought to be able to work with a governor on homelessness while opposing her on abortion. Catholic Charities ought to be able to accept properly awarded public funding for nursing training without endorsing an administration’s entire political programme. Catholic schools should teach pupils how to engage civil authority respectfully. The Church does not preserve her integrity by refusing every conversation with rulers, legislators, officials or citizens whose beliefs contradict Catholic doctrine. She never has.
That last point matters, because the problem should not be lazily described as something which began when the Second Vatican Council told Catholics to speak to the modern world. The Church cooperated with civil authority long before Vatican II. Popes negotiated concordats. Bishops dealt with kings, republics and hostile ministries. Religious orders ran schools and hospitals with public support. Catholic politicians sat in cabinets and parliaments beside Protestants, Jews, secularists and socialists. Catholic charitable institutions cooperated with municipal and national governments wherever cooperation served a genuine common good. The distinction was not between an allegedly pure preconciliar Church which shunned the world and a postconciliar Church which suddenly discovered dialogue. The distinction lies elsewhere.
Before the great cultural transformation of the 1960s, cooperation did not ordinarily require uncertainty about where the Catholic boundary stood. Pius XI could write in Casti Connubii that civil authorities were obliged to defend the lives of unborn children and warn governments which by their laws “betray them to death”.⁴ Pius XII reaffirmed the absolute exclusion of direct abortion. The Catholic moral position was not treated as one negotiable element within a wider political portfolio. A Catholic politician in the 1950s publicly campaigning for the legalisation of direct abortion would have been an exceptional scandal. The notion that such a politician might simultaneously be showcased by Catholic institutions as an exemplar of values closely aligned with a religious charism would have been stranger still.
Vatican II itself did not change that doctrine. This point is indispensable. Gaudium et Spes placed abortion alongside murder, genocide, euthanasia and other attacks upon life, describing such acts as “infamies indeed”; elsewhere the Council insisted that life must be protected with the greatest care from conception and condemned abortion and infanticide in the strongest terms.⁵ Paul VI afterwards reiterated that direct abortion was absolutely excluded as a lawful means of regulating birth.⁶ The problem is therefore not that the Council taught Catholics to become relaxed about abortion. It plainly did not.
What changed was the ecclesial culture which developed afterwards. Dialogue, encounter, partnership, accompaniment and engagement gradually became not merely instruments of evangelisation and prudent diplomacy but, too often, goods almost incapable of being sacrificed. Maintaining the relationship became evidence of pastoral maturity; rupture became evidence of failure. The old distinction between loving the person and repudiating the error remained in the documents, but institutions became increasingly reluctant to allow grave and public error to disturb access, invitations, honours, platforms or sacramental appearances. Ironically, Gaudium et Spes itself had supplied the corrective: love for those who think differently “must in no way render us indifferent to truth and goodness”.⁵
Massachusetts is therefore not an eccentric local aberration. The pattern can be seen from the Vatican downwards and across country after country. It has been particularly conspicuous during the postconciliar decades because the Church’s language of dialogue has expanded at precisely the same time that Western political life has moved further away from Catholic teaching on abortion, euthanasia, marriage, sexual morality and the nature of the human person. The resulting question is not why popes and bishops speak to people who disagree with the Church. They must. It is why warmth, access and patient dialogue can appear almost inexhaustible towards some forms of opposition while becoming remarkably finite towards Catholics whose disagreement runs in the opposite direction.
The pontificate of Francis provided unusually vivid examples. In May 2021 Pope Francis received Argentine President Alberto Fernández in private audience only months after Fernández had personally sponsored the legislation which legalised elective abortion in Argentina and signed it into law. The Holy See described the talks as “cordial” and expressed appreciation for the “good bilateral relations”; its published account concentrated upon the pandemic, Argentina’s economic crisis, poverty and the contribution of the Catholic Church.⁷ The audience itself was entirely intelligible diplomatically. A Pope ought to speak to the President of Argentina. The significant point is the institutional capacity to compartmentalise an assault upon unborn life so completely that cordial cooperation on everything else may proceed without visible interruption.
The same Francis received Nancy Pelosi in October 2021 while she was Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and one of America’s most prominent Catholic advocates of legal abortion. Later that month he received President Joe Biden, another Catholic politician whose abortion policies had become the subject of acute controversy among the American bishops. The Vatican communiqué again described “cordial discussions” centred upon climate, the pandemic, migrants, religious freedom and international affairs.⁸ Whatever was said privately cannot simply be invented, and Biden’s subsequent claims about what Francis told him concerning his Catholic standing were never confirmed by the Holy See. But the public image remained unmistakable: access and cordiality continued despite a public conflict over one of the most fundamental claims of Catholic moral teaching.
More remarkable still was Francis’s relationship with Emma Bonino. This was not diplomatic necessity. Bonino was a veteran Italian radical whose political career was inseparable from the campaign which brought legal abortion to Italy. Francis nevertheless met her repeatedly, received her privately in the Apostolic Palace in 2016, and in November 2024 made the extraordinary gesture of visiting her personally at her home while she was recovering from illness. Vatican News recalled their previous meetings and Francis’s praise for her work on migrants; Reuters reported that he arrived with roses and chocolates.⁹ Nobody need begrudge an elderly and sick woman personal kindness. Christian charity requires more, not less, of us. But Catholics are permitted to notice the extraordinary reservoir of personal warmth available to one of Italy’s most celebrated abortion-rights campaigners while other members of the Church have struggled simply to obtain a hearing on matters they regard as touching the survival of Catholic tradition.
Francis displayed the same appetite for encounter in his long relationship with Eugenio Scalfari, the avowedly atheist founder of La Repubblica. At Scalfari’s death the Holy See referred to the Pope’s sorrow at the passing of “his friend” and Francis’s affectionate memory of their meetings and “deep conversations” over the years.¹⁰ Again, that friendship was not wrong because Scalfari was an atheist. Quite the contrary: a pope willing to speak seriously with an unbeliever about ultimate things offers an admirable image of evangelisation. The problem appears only when Catholics compare the apparently limitless patience accorded to ideological and moral opponents outside the Church with the markedly different treatment sometimes experienced by troublesome voices inside it.
Cardinal Joseph Zen supplied one particularly painful contrast. In September 2020, at the age of eighty-eight, the emeritus Bishop of Hong Kong travelled to Rome seeking an audience with Francis because he wished to raise his concerns over the Church in China and the appointment of a new bishop for Hong Kong. The audience was not granted.¹¹ It would be inaccurate to imply that Francis never received Zen: the two had met previously, and Zen was received privately by Francis when he returned to Rome in January 2023. But the 2020 episode remains revealing. At the very moment the Vatican was pursuing renewed dialogue with the Chinese Communist authorities, one of the most senior Chinese Catholics, who had travelled to Rome specifically to plead the case of persecuted and underground Catholics, could not obtain the meeting he sought.
Pope Leo XIV deserves credit for correcting that particular contrast. On 7 January 2026 he formally received Cardinal Zen in audience.¹² That fact should be acknowledged without qualification. Yet the broader question of selective access has not disappeared under the new pontificate. Leo received Emmanuel Macron privately on 10 April 2026. Vatican News itself noted that Macron was by then familiar with repeated papal encounters under Francis and explicitly identified among the points dividing France and the Holy See the constitutionalisation of abortion in France and the debate over assisted dying. Macron had not merely accepted France’s abortion settlement: after abortion was inserted into the French Constitution, he publicly called for a right to abortion to be written into the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.¹³ None of this prevented the normal courtesy and access of a private papal audience.
On 27 May Leo received Pedro Sánchez, the Socialist Prime Minister of Spain. The subsequent official talks were described by the Holy See as “cordial” and emphasised good relations, fruitful dialogue, migration, multilateralism and peace.¹⁴ Sánchez heads the political administration under which Spain legalised euthanasia in 2021, and his government in October 2025 formally began the process of amending the Spanish Constitution to guarantee a right to abortion.¹⁵ Again, a papal audience for the Spanish head of government is not itself scandalous. The Pope is also a sovereign and the Holy See conducts diplomacy. The point is the immense institutional capacity for dialogue with political power even when that power is actively advancing measures which contradict Catholic teaching on the deliberate taking of innocent life.
Nor is access reserved to heads of government. On 1 September 2025, the Holy See’s official audience list recorded Fr James Martin SJ among those personally received by Leo XIV.¹⁶ Whatever judgment is made of Fr Martin or his ministry, his reception was inevitably read in the context of long-running Catholic disputes concerning homosexuality and the presentation of Catholic sexual teaching. Once again, Rome was signalling that conversation and access remained available across a highly controversial progressive frontier.
Set beside that the case of Fr Davide Pagliarani. According to the Society of Saint Pius X’s published chronology, its Superior General wrote to Leo XIV in August 2025 requesting an audience in order personally to explain the Society’s need for new bishops. He wrote again in November. The Society states that both letters went unanswered. Only after Pagliarani announced on 2 February 2026 that episcopal consecrations would proceed did Rome promptly arrange a meeting — not with the Pope, but with Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on 12 February.¹⁷ Whatever one thinks of the SSPX’s subsequent decision to consecrate bishops without papal mandate, this chronology matters. Before the crisis reached rupture, the Superior General of a priestly society whose disagreement with Rome concerns doctrine, liturgy, episcopal succession and the sacramental life of large numbers of Catholics says he twice asked to put his case personally before the Pope and received no audience.
This is the asymmetry which Catholics increasingly notice. The argument is not that Leo should refuse Macron or Sánchez merely because they are secular politicians, nor that Francis should have refused Fernández because he happened to disagree with the Church. The Pope is not preserved from contamination by avoiding sinners, unbelievers or ideological opponents. If that were the standard, none of us could approach him. But there is a legitimate case for a much clearer Vatican praxis where politicians have personally and publicly advocated, legislated for or enacted abortion or euthanasia. Such figures need not be granted the distinction of a personal papal audience. Where diplomacy genuinely requires contact, it can be conducted through the Secretariat of State, the appropriate nuncio, or another papal representative. The Holy See would remain in diplomatic communication; what would be withheld is the symbolic privilege of personal reception by the Roman Pontiff while the public promotion of an intrinsic evil continues.
Such a discipline would recover a distinction increasingly lost in modern Vatican practice. A papal audience is not synonymous with diplomatic relations. It is not necessary for the maintenance of relations between states that every president or prime minister be personally received by the Pope. The Holy See possesses one of the oldest and most sophisticated diplomatic services in the world precisely because much international business can and does occur without direct papal involvement. To reserve personal audiences where necessary would therefore not mean refusing dialogue. It would mean ordering dialogue according to the gravity of the moral circumstances.
The advantage would be precisely the clarity now missing. Papal audiences generate photographs, communiqués, headlines and political capital. Whatever may be said privately behind closed doors, the enduring public image is normally the handshake, the smile and the exchange of gifts. Politicians understand the value of such images perfectly well. A government which has just constitutionalised abortion or promoted euthanasia can display its leader beside the Pope as readily as any other administration. The ordinary Catholic is then asked to remember that the encounter must not be interpreted as approval. The politician, meanwhile, has obtained the image.
A consistent praxis would reverse that confusion. A president actively advancing abortion could still communicate with the Holy See; the Secretary of State could receive him. A prime minister promoting euthanasia could still meet Vatican diplomats or the relevant curial authorities where questions of peace, migration, war or bilateral relations required discussion. But personal access to the Pope would cease to be treated as morally neutral. The absence of such an audience would itself communicate, without theatrical denunciation, that certain public choices objectively affect the character of a relationship with the Church.
The principle would need to be consistent. It could not be selectively enforced against politicians of one party, country or ideological tendency. Nor should it be expanded casually to every policy dispute on which Catholic social teaching has something to say. The category would properly concern those intrinsic evils to which Catholic doctrine attaches particular gravity: most obviously the direct killing of innocent human beings through abortion and euthanasia. Consistency would turn what critics might otherwise call a political snub into a recognisable moral discipline.
Nor would such a policy contradict evangelical charity. The Pope could pray for the politician, write to him, appeal publicly for his conversion, send representatives, or authorise whatever diplomatic contact prudence required. If the politician were sick, bereaved or in genuine personal distress, Christian humanity need not disappear. But the institutional distinction between pastoral charity and honorific access would once again become visible. The Church can love someone without furnishing the photograph by which his public repudiation of her moral teaching is normalised.
Indeed, this would restore precisely the principle Vatican II itself articulated: courtesy and love towards those who think differently must never become indifference to truth and goodness.⁵ Dialogue was meant to carry truth into encounter. It was not meant to make encounter itself the highest good, still less to oblige the Pope personally to confer the symbolic prestige of an audience upon every political leader with whom the Holy See has business.
The contrast with internal Catholic disputes would then be much less damaging. If the Pope chose not personally to receive a head of government who had actively constitutionalised abortion, while diplomatic business continued normally through the Secretariat of State, Catholics would understand that access to the Roman Pontiff possesses an ecclesial meaning as well as a diplomatic one. Conversely, when a cardinal such as Zen or the superior of a Catholic priestly society seeks urgently to put before the Pope a question concerning persecution, doctrine, episcopal succession or the sacramental life of the Church, the instinct ought surely to be to hear him wherever reasonably possible. The successor of Peter is not simply another head of state. His first responsibility is to the household of faith.
This is why the case of Fr Pagliarani remains so revealing. When the SSPX proceeded with episcopal consecrations on 1 July, Rome’s disciplinary machinery was anything but hesitant. A decree followed on 2 July. Names were specified, canonical offences identified and excommunications declared. Whatever assessment one makes of that decree and the arguments surrounding it, nobody could suggest that contemporary ecclesiastical authority had forgotten how to draw a boundary.
That is precisely why Massachusetts matters. The same Church which knows how to establish boundaries when ecclesiastical jurisdiction, sacramental regulation or institutional obedience is at stake often appears considerably less certain when Catholic politicians publicly violate the natural moral law. Healey has now signed legislation which her own bishops described beforehand as “a radical measure which is gravely immoral”.¹⁸ Archbishop Richard Henning has called its passage and signing “a grave offense against the sanctity and dignity of every person”. Healey, far from retreating, has according to the statement attributed to her office defended herself as a “proud Catholic” and appealed to kindness and empathy while defending the policy.
Massachusetts is therefore a local manifestation of something much larger. The problem is not simply that Catholic Charities accepted a grant or that a governor appeared at a Catholic dinner. It is the accumulated ecclesial habit by which moral contradiction is compartmentalised so that institutional partnership may continue almost indefinitely. Abortion is placed in one file, immigration in another, housing in another, education somewhere else. A politician may be condemned on Monday for attacking innocent life and celebrated on Thursday as a valued partner for supporting a social programme. Administrators understand the distinction intellectually; ordinary Catholics and politicians themselves absorb the photograph.
Catholic institutions teach through more than doctrinal documents. They teach through whom they honour, whom they invite, whom they praise, whom they place before their children and whom they describe as partners. A gala programme catechises. A school news report catechises. So does a smiling photograph with the Pope. None of these gestures proves doctrinal agreement, but accumulated public gestures create public meanings, and a footnote explaining that the Church still disagrees on abortion cannot always undo the catechesis communicated by years of warmth.
This is why the comparison with the preconciliar Catholic world is legitimate if stated accurately. That world was not free of political compromise, cowardice, diplomatic calculation or episcopal failure. History affords no such fantasy. Catholic politicians sinned; bishops cultivated rulers; concordats involved compromises; institutions depended upon governments. But there remained a much more intelligible conviction that certain public acts placed a Catholic in objective conflict with Catholic moral teaching and that such conflict could have visible consequences. A Catholic politician publicly campaigning in the 1950s to legalise abortion would not ordinarily have expected the disagreement to be treated as one unfortunate policy divergence among many otherwise compatible Catholic commitments.
The transformation is particularly striking because the formal doctrine did not soften. Pius XI condemned laws which surrendered unborn children to death. Pius XII condemned direct abortion. Vatican II condemned abortion. Paul VI condemned abortion. John Paul II condemned abortion and addressed directly the duties of legislators. Benedict XVI’s doctrinal officials articulated the responsibilities of Catholic politicians. Francis himself repeatedly compared abortion to hiring a hitman. Leo XIV has affirmed the sanctity of life. The paper trail is not the problem.
The problem is the gap between doctrine and institutional behaviour.
An ecclesial culture can preserve every sentence of Catholic teaching while teaching something different through practice. If politicians repeatedly discover that repudiating doctrine carries no cost to their access, honours, platforms, relationships or sacramental visibility, they learn what the operative limits really are. If traditional Catholics discover that liturgical or jurisdictional disputes can result in immediate restriction while politicians advancing abortion and euthanasia remain honoured interlocutors, they learn something too. And if ordinary Catholics observe both patterns at once, no amount of insistence that all the relevant distinctions are technically complex will prevent them from recognising the imbalance.
This is where Doyle’s argument about Healey becomes most useful. The danger is institutional domestication. Government and Church learn to need things from one another. The state needs Catholic agencies because they possess buildings, personnel, charitable infrastructure, community trust and the ability to deliver social services on a scale government often cannot reproduce efficiently. Catholic agencies benefit from contracts, grants, planning approvals and political cooperation. Politicians benefit from appearing beside respected clergy and charitable institutions; Catholic organisations benefit from access to governors, ministers and departments. Each relationship may be defensible. Together, over decades, they can create an environment in which confrontation becomes expensive.
Relationships accumulate. Officials become “partners”. Governors attend dinners. Bishops attend civic occasions. Staff cooperate across agencies. Vatican diplomats cultivate governments. Politicians receive audiences. Photographs multiply. Mutual praise becomes routine. The ideological opponent becomes a familiar interlocutor and the familiar interlocutor becomes someone whose exclusion would feel aggressive, embarrassing or “unpastoral”. The maintenance of the relationship gradually becomes an institutional good in itself.
Then the boundary actually has to be defended.
The Church in Massachusetts is confronting that moment now. The question is not whether Catholic Charities should have refused money which enabled unemployed people to train as nursing assistants. The question is whether Catholic institutions were equally prepared to make clear those matters upon which partnership was impossible. It is not whether senior churchmen should never have met Maura Healey. The question is whether a relationship cordial enough for Catholic events, mutual praise and public partnership was accompanied by a moral clarity proportionate to the governor’s sustained advocacy for abortion. It is not whether St John’s Prep was forbidden from receiving the governor. It is why a Catholic school thought it appropriate to tell its pupils that her “personal values are closely aligned” with those of the Xaverian Brothers when one of the most elementary demands of Catholic moral witness pointed in the opposite direction.
The same question must now be addressed to Rome. Nobody seriously proposes that the Holy See cease diplomatic relations with governments which permit abortion or euthanasia. Nobody should object to a Pope showing elementary humanity towards ideological opponents. But diplomacy does not require the Pope personally to receive every politician whose government has business with the Holy See. The distinction between diplomatic necessity and papal honour should once again be made visible. A Vatican praxis under which active promoters of abortion and euthanasia were dealt with, where necessary, through the Secretariat of State or papal representatives rather than routinely granted personal audiences would not end dialogue. It would demonstrate that dialogue has boundaries because truth has consequences.
There is no contradiction between charity and boundaries. Our Lord ate with sinners and told them to sin no more. Saint Paul could become all things to all men and still instruct the Church to exercise discipline. Catholic diplomacy can be patient without becoming morally amorphous. A bishop can work with a governor on housing while making unmistakably clear that deliberate cooperation with abortion carries consequences. A Pope can maintain relations with a secular government without furnishing its leaders with the prestige of personal access while they actively promote the legal destruction of innocent life.
That is the freedom which has to be recovered. A free Church can accept a lawful grant and condemn the governor whose administration awarded it when justice requires. A free Church can cooperate on homelessness today and apply Eucharistic discipline tomorrow if the requirements of Catholic law demand it. A free Catholic school can welcome a public official without certifying her values as Catholic. A free bishop can deal courteously with political power without becoming dependent upon its favour. A free Vatican can conduct necessary diplomacy through its representatives while reserving personal papal audiences for circumstances in which the encounter will not predictably obscure the Church’s moral witness.
Massachusetts is therefore not merely a story about Maura Healey. Nor is it merely a story about Archbishop Henning. It is a case study in an ecclesiastical habit which Catholics can recognise far beyond Boston: the long transition from cooperation with boundaries to proximity in which the boundaries become increasingly difficult to see.
And that distinction explains why the comparison with the 1950s matters. The Church then cooperated with the world. She simply had less difficulty remembering that she was not the world.
The important question is not whether Maura Healey has friends in the Catholic Church. Christians should be capable of friendship with those with whom they profoundly disagree. Francis was right to speak to atheists; Leo is right to maintain diplomatic contact with socialist governments; popes are right to deal with heads of state. The test of Catholic freedom is not whom the Church is willing to communicate with.
It is whether every form of access must remain available regardless of what a political leader publicly advocates.
It is whom she is still willing to contradict after the meeting.
And whether, when contradiction finally requires a consequence, decades of proximity have left her free enough to impose one.
That is the price now being calculated in Massachusetts.
It is being calculated elsewhere too.
And after more than half a century of blurred boundaries, it may prove considerably higher than the value of any government grant.
¹ Catholic Charities Boston, “Catholic Charities Boston Receives $1 Million Grant from Healey-Driscoll Administration,” 21 July 2023; “Catholic Charities Boston Receives Grant from Healey-Driscoll Administration for Second Year in a Row,” 16 October 2024.
² St John’s Preparatory School, “Governor Healey Offers St. John’s Student Leaders an Inside Look,” 12 April 2024.
³ Catholic Charities Boston, report on the 2024 Spring Celebration, 31 May 2024; The Boston Pilot, report on the event, 7 June 2024.
⁴ Pius XI, Casti Connubii, 31 December 1930, §§66–67.
⁵ Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, §§27–28, 51.
⁶ Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, 25 July 1968, §14.⁷ Vatican News, “Pope Francis meets with Argentina’s president,” 13 May 2021; contemporary reporting concerning President Alberto Fernández’s sponsorship and enactment of Argentina’s abortion legislation.
⁸ Holy See Press Office, “Audiences,” 9 October 2021, recording the audience granted to Nancy Pelosi; Holy See Press Office, “Audience with the President of the United States of America,” 29 October 2021.
⁹ Vatican News, “Pope makes home visit to Italian parliamentarian,” 5 November 2024; Reuters, report of Pope Francis’s visit to Emma Bonino, 5 November 2024.
¹⁰ Vatican News, “Pope on Scalfari: I remember our conversations with affection,” 14 July 2022.
¹¹ National Catholic Register, interview with Cardinal Joseph Zen, 28 September 2020, reporting his unsuccessful journey to Rome seeking an audience with Pope Francis; Francis subsequently received Zen privately in January 2023.
¹² Holy See Press Office, “Audiences,” 7 January 2026, recording Pope Leo XIV’s audience with Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun.
¹³ Vatican News, “Pope Leo to receive French President Emmanuel Macron in the Vatican,” April 2026; Élysée, President Macron’s speech advocating incorporation of abortion into the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
¹⁴ Holy See Press Office, “Audience with the President of the Government of Spain,” 27 May 2026.
¹⁵ Spain, Organic Law 3/2021 regulating euthanasia; Spanish Government, Council of Ministers, 14 October 2025, beginning the process of constitutional reform concerning abortion.
¹⁶ Holy See Press Office, “Audiences,” 1 September 2025.
¹⁷ Society of Saint Pius X, “How Does the SSPX Justify the July 1, 2026, Consecrations?”, 12 May 2026.
¹⁸ Catholic bishops of Massachusetts, joint statement of 29 July 2026, describing elimination of legal restraints upon late-term abortion as “a radical measure which is gravely immoral”.
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