Holy Spirit Roman Catholic Church

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.

[...]

cna

cna

Blessed Father Miguel Agustín Pro, a martyr during the Cristero War in Mexico, with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross before being executed by firing squad on Nov. 23, 1927. | Credit: Unknown, public domain, via Wikipedia Jan 20, 202... [...]

Iranians gather while blocking a street during a protest in Tehran, Iran, on Jan. 9, 2026. The nationwide protests started in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar against the failing economic policies in late December 2025, which spread to universities and oth... [...]

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 ... [...]

feature

feature

Credit: Photo courtesy of March for Life Jan 20, 2026 / 13:37 pm (CNA). Thousands will gather for the 53rd National March for Life in the nation’s capital on Friday, Jan. 23.Every January, tens of thousands of people march on Capitol Hill i... [...]