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We’ve been passing through lands lately without asking permission...

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USCCB President Archbishop Timothy Broglio speaks at the bishops’ spring meeting, Thursday, June 13, 2024. / Credit: USCCB

CNA Staff, Jul 3, 2025 / 18:38 pm (CNA).

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” on Thursday, just in time for President Donald Trump to schedule his signing into law of the controversial bill on the Fourth of July.

Following the bill’s passage, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), issued a statement lamenting “the great harm the bill will cause to many of the most vulnerable in society.”

Specifically, Broglio faulted the legislation for including “unconscionable cuts to health care and food assistance, tax cuts that increase inequality, immigration provisions that harm families and children, and cuts to programs that protect God’s creation.”

Broglio also expressed disappointment over several “positive aspects” of the bill in the final version approved on Thursday that were either reduced or removed. In particular, he cited the reduction of federal funds to Planned Parenthood from 10 years to only one, the weakening of educational parental choice provisions, and the elimination of restrictions on the use of federal dollars for so-called “gender transition” medical procedures.

In the face of this situation, Broglio affirmed that “the Catholic Church’s teaching to uphold human dignity and the common good compels us to redouble our efforts and offer concrete help to those who will be in greater need and continue to advocate for legislative efforts that will provide better possibilities in the future for those in need.”

In the run-up to the passage of the measure in the U.S. House and Senate, the USCCB had delineated concerns over numerous aspects of the bill, including its tax provisions, increased immigration enforcement, the reduction of federal safety net programs, and the reduction of green energy and environmental programs.

The measure also raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion.

Defunding Planned Parenthood

Meanwhile, following the bill’s passage, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told CNA that “the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ delivers a historic win on a critical priority: stopping forced taxpayer funding of the abortion industry.”

The bill halts for one year taxpayer funding through Medicaid of abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood. Even though the original bill proposed a 10-year stop to funding, Dannenfelser called the one-year pause “the greatest pro-life victory since the Dobbs decision.”

“This will save lives and strip over $500 million from Big Abortion’s coffers,” she continued. “Combined with last week’s Supreme Court decision empowering states to do the same, this represents tremendous progress toward achieving a decades-long goal that has long proved elusive.”

“Women are far better served at federally qualified health centers, which outnumber Planned Parenthood locations 15 to 1 nationwide and provide comprehensive, accessible care to Medicaid recipients and families in need,” Dannenfelser affirmed.

Administration aims to deport 1 million people per year

The Trump administration is now touting its plan to deport 1 million unauthorized immigrants per year as a result of the bill’s more than $150 billion in funding for border security and deportation efforts, which include expanding ICE detention capacity by 100,000 beds, the hiring of over 10,000 new ICE agents, and the completion of construction of a border wall.

In an interview with CNN just prior to the bill’s passage, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., Cardinal Robert McElroy, called the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies “morally repugnant” and “inhumane.”

While he acknowledged the government’s right to deport those convicted of serious crimes, he said the bigger issue is the U.S. political system’s failure to reform immigration laws. 

McElroy said the administration’s removal of protections against arrests in sensitive areas like churches has instilled fear, with some immigrants avoiding worship services. 

Paul Hunker, a former head lawyer for ICE in Dallas who is now a private immigration attorney, told CNA that he has seen the Trump administration deport a lot of hardworking people with no criminal history and expects to see more of that now that the bill has passed.

“This is bad for those deported and for society as well,” Hunker said.

Following the anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles last month, Archbishop Jose H. Gómez of Los Angeles said: “We all agree that we don’t want undocumented immigrants who are known terrorists or violent criminals in our communities. But there is no need for the government to carry out enforcement actions in a way that provokes fear and anxiety among ordinary, hardworking immigrants and their families.”

According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, 64% of voters say they prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the United States a pathway to legal status, while 31% say they prefer deporting most undocumented immigrants in the United States.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS) –On a warm June evening, Christian music legend Amy Grant finished up a set at church in Brentwood, a music celebrity-laden suburb of the country music capital, set down her guitar and picked up her phone.

“I’ve never done this before,” Grant said from the stage at Otter Creek Church, as she dialed the Washington office of Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty.

After getting through to voicemail and introducing herself, Grant launched into an appeal for continued support to fund the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — a George W. Bush-era federal program known as PEPFAR that the Trump administration has threatened to defund.

“We want you to know that here in Nashville, we want to see full funding of PEPFAR so that we can stay on track to end the HIV AIDS epidemic by 2030,” Grant said in a moment caught on video. Audience members, who had come to the church to help raise awareness about PEPFAR, hooted their support.

After hanging up, Grant urged audience members to follow her example. “What if everyone called?” she said. “That is democracy — to use our voice.”

Despite its history of bipartisan support and long success — PEPFAR has been credited with saving 26 million lives around the world — the program’s future is uncertain. The White House Office of Management and Budget, led by Russ Vought, is seeking to cut $400 million in funds already approved for the current fiscal year, through a process known as rescission.

The administration has proposed a further $1.9 billion in cuts in the program for the upcoming fiscal year, on top of cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has funded clinics that delivered AIDS medications.

A new report in the Lancet estimated that cuts to USAID programs, including PEPFAR, could lead to more than 14 million deaths by 2030, including more than 4 million children under 5

“We have got to do something,” said Jenny Dyer, founder of The 2030 Collaborative, a consulting firm in Nashville that advocates for global health and development issues, in a recent interview. “We can’t let these cuts happen.”

A former faith director for the One Campaign, co-founded by U2 lead singer Bono, Dyer is also the former executive director of Hope Through Healing Hands, a humanitarian group founded by Bill Frist, a physician and former U.S. senator who was a key early supporter of PEPFAR as Senate majority leader. 

She’s long seen the important role that evangelical groups have played in supporting PEPFAR and hopes that once again faith leaders will rally to support the program.

Dyer said that for much of its history, PEPFAR had the support of major evangelical leaders such as Rick and Kay Warren of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, and Bill and Lynne Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago. Before the program was approved in 2003, they and other megachurch pastors of their generation helped the Bush administration overcome the stigma around AIDS among conservative Christians. 

Kay Warren had seen the devastation of the AIDS epidemic firsthand while visiting clinics in Africa, something Warren recounted in a 2007 interview for Sojourners magazine. She recalled meeting a woman in the clinic who was dying of the disease, who asked for prayer. “Who will care for my children when I am gone?” Warren recalled her asking.

Frist spoke by video at the Otter Creek event, and he recounted his own encounters with the devastation of the AIDS epidemic while on medical mission trips to work at clinics in sub-Saharan Africa. “Three million people a year dying of HIV/AIDS at the time,” said Frist.

Frist told the audience about a 2002 dinner at the White House where President George W. Bush discussed his plans for the program to combat the AIDS epidemic and about the role that pastors and Christian musicians might play in rallying support. No one knew at the time if it would work, he said.

Now there is proof, he said.

“We are just five years away from the end of the HIV/AIDS pandemic,” Frist said. “Now is not the time to back away. We need Congress to see this through to keep the faith. And to finish the race.”

But leaders like Frist, who left office in 2007, and the Warrens, who stepped down from leadership at Saddleback in 2022, are no longer in place. Many younger church leaders have no firsthand recollection of the AIDS crisis, when support for PEPFAR grew.

“We have to go back to the people in the pews,” Kay Warren told RNS in late June.

 a researcher who worked for 20 years on AIDS prevention programs, worries that much of the progress in fighting the AIDS epidemic could be lost with the cuts to PEPFAR.

Torjesen, who was recently named president of BioLogos, a Christian nonprofit that makes connections between faith and science leaders, hopes other Christians will be willing to see PEPFAR as what she called kingdom work — taking the blessings that the United States has received and the medical advances here and sharing them with others.

“Can we at least agree that we are called by Christ to serve others?” she said. “That is a starting point.”

Asia Russell, executive director of Health GAP, an activist group that supports funding for PEPFAR, is skeptical that evangelical groups will be able to hold off cuts to the program.

Russell, whose group protested at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing in June where cuts to PEPFAR were discussed, argues that few Republican leaders will oppose the Trump administration’s budget cuts to humanitarian aid. “It’s not about bringing the band back together,” said Russell. “It’s about the fact that Donald Trump is willing to let people die.”

Josh Graves, the preaching and teaching minster for Otter Creek, said he became aware of the cuts at USAID and other programs, like PEPFAR, through his friend Mark Moore, who runs a nonprofit that produces a vitamin-fortified version of peanut butter used in food programs that combat malnutrition.

Graves has been concerned about how Trump administration cuts through the Department of Government Efficiency program started by Elon Musk would affect “real Christian people doing really good Christian things.”

Graves said that, at least in Nashville, there’s a hunger for public policy that “looks like Jesus,” shaped by justice and compassion rather than what he called the “empty calories” of polarization.

“I think there’s a group within Nashville and other cities that are hungry for clarity about how to take the red letters of Jesus and apply them into real-world situations,” he said, referring to Bible publishers’ practice of highlighting the words of Jesus in red ink.

At Otter Creek, Grant was joined onstage by Christian songwriter and producer Charlie Peacock, who recalled the heady days of getting PEPFAR passed a quarter-century ago. As Bono toured in 2002 to rally churches to support AIDS relief, the singer stopped in Nashville to ask musicians and other Nashville leaders to join the cause. The meeting with Bono was held at Peacock’s house. 

Peacock hopes that once again evangelicals will speak up for AIDS relief. That support will be needed, he said, as the current administration doesn’t share the kind of “compassionate conservatism” that inspired Frist or Bush. Peacock said that supporting PEPFAR is more spiritual than it is political.

“And for many Christ-followers around the U.S. — around the globe — the care of orphans and widows, those in need of lifesaving meds, is never off the table,” he told RNS. “ It is as front and center as ever.”

WARSAW, Poland (RNS) — Ukrainian authorities moved Wednesday (July 2) to strip Metropolitan Onufriy, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, of his Ukrainian citizenship, citing alleged ties between Onufriy himself, as well as the church he leads, with Moscow. 

Since 2018, Ukraine, whose population is primarily Eastern Orthodox, has two competing Orthodox church bodies, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, formed in the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and support of separatist militias in the Donbas region.

The break with Moscow came in response to a call from Ukrainian clergy for a religious body divorced from Patriarch Kirill, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who justified Russia’s aggression in spiritual terms. In 2019, the OCU was recognized as fully independent of Moscow under the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople Bartholomew I. 

Since then, a large number of Ukrainian churches have moved to the OCU, while the historic church, along with other arms of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad, were accused of spreading Russian pro-war propaganda and of serving Russia’s intelligence services. 

The Ukrainian Parliament has brought forth a series of bills to ban or otherwise outlaw religious movements with ties to Russia, which most have considered designed to target the UOC. 

Wednesday’s statement from Ukraine’s security service repeated these claims, saying Onufriy “maintains ties with the Moscow Patriarchate and deliberately opposed the acquisition of canonical independence of the Ukrainian Church from the Moscow Patriarchate, whose representatives openly support Russian aggression against Ukraine.”

It also accused him of supporting “the policy of the Russian Orthodox Church and its leadership, in particular Patriarch Kirill,” and “the aggressive policy of the Russian Federation.”

Onufriy, however, has denied such claims, arguing that his church had cut its ties to Moscow as early as May 2022, a few months after the onset of the Russian invasion. 

“For three years, our motherland has been suffering from the horrible bloodshed that the Russian army, which takes away the lives of our fellow countrymen literally every day, has brought to our Ukrainian land,” he said in an address in February, on the third anniversary of the outbreak of the war. “The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, regardless of slander, speculation and artificial accusations, remains with her people, caring about their well-being and the coming of a just peace in our motherland.”

Nonetheless, Ukrainian security services have launched a series of investigations against UOC priests and convicted dozens of aiding the Russian invasion. Just two days before stripping Onufriy’s citizenship, the UOC Metropolitan of the occupied Luhansk region was sentenced in absentia to 11 years in prison. 

Despite Onufriy’s claims of separation, Kirill and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, have previously spoken out in his and the UOC’s defense, considering it to be a canonical part of the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia has also accused Ukraine of “waging a war on the Russian Orthodox Church.”

Onufriy becomes at least the seventh UOC leader to have his citizenship revoked, following actions against six other hierarchs in 2023, but he is the most senior cleric to lose his rights.

The measures taken against the UOC have drawn criticism from international religious freedom watchdogs and religious leaders outside Ukraine. In August 2024, Pope Francis urged Ukrainian leaders to “let those who want to pray be allowed to pray in what they consider their Church.”

Pope Leo XIV prays with pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican for his general audience on Wednesday, May 28, 2025. / Credit: Daniel Ibañez/CNA

CNA Staff, Jul 3, 2025 / 16:50 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV’s prayer intention for the month of July is for formation in discernment.

“Let us pray that we might again learn how to discern, to know how to choose paths of life and reject everything that leads us away from Christ and the Gospel,” the pope said in a video released July 3.

The Holy Father offered the faithful a prayer to guide them in learning how to discern. In the prayer he also encourages Catholics to call upon the Holy Spirit to help inform their decisions.

According to a press release, this month’s video was made in collaboration with the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York, and DeSales Media, a diocesan organization that specializes in communication and media.

“In the rush of daily life, we must learn to pause and create sacred moments for prayer,” said Bishop Robert Brennan of Brooklyn in the press release. “It is in these quiet spaces of attentive listening that we discover which paths truly matter and find the discernment to choose what truly leads to joy that comes only from God.”

Here is Pope Leo’s full prayer for discernment:

Holy Spirit, you, light of our understanding,
gentle breath that guides our decisions,
grant me the grace to listen attentively to your voice
and to discern the hidden paths of my heart,
so that I may grasp what truly matters to you,
and free my heart from its troubles.

I ask you for the grace to learn how to pause,
to become aware of the way I act,
of the feelings that dwell within me,
and of the thoughts that overwhelm me
which, so often, I fail to notice.

I long for my choices
to lead me to the joy of the Gospel.
Even if I must go through moments of doubt and fatigue,
even if I must struggle, reflect, search, and begin again…
Because, at the end of the journey,
your consolation is the fruit of the right decision.

Grant me a deeper understanding of what moves me,
so that I may reject what draws me away from Christ,

and love him and serve him more fully.

Amen.

The video prayer intention is promoted by the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, which raises awareness of monthly papal prayer intentions.

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