The Catholic Weekly 31 May 2020

catholicweekly.com.au 12 31, May, 2020 FEATURE In brief Covid delays faith law Protect Indigenous National protocols PRIME MINISTER Scott Morrison says the coro- navirus pandemic has delayed the Federal Gov- ernment’s long-awaited religious freedom legisla- tion. The second draft of the Religious Discrimination Bill was introduced late in 2019 and was meant to be finalised in the first half of this year. Also delayed is a pro- posed Federal anti-cor- ruption commission. Mr Morrison, speak- ing at the National Press Club last Tuesday, said that Cabinet hadn’t “had the opportunity to revis- it (those proposals) be- cause of the crisis”. “We haven’t, and it’s not something the Cabi- net has considered now for some time,” he said. AUSTRALIA’S BISHOPS have expressed solidari- ty with Australia’s Indige- nous communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Bishop Columba Macbeth-Green OSPPE, chairman of the Bishops Commission for Relations with Aboriginal and Tor- res Strait Islander Peoples urged the Government to work with community leaders to maintain safe- guards against a second wave of infections. EXPERT GROUPS will work towards creating a national system for han- dling complaints of sexu- al abuse and establishing a national office to over- see safeguarding with- in the Church. “Existing methods of responding to allegations have their strengths, but the new Na- tional Response Proto- col will create a nationally consistent process wheth- er someone brings a com- plaint to a regional dio- cese, a religious institute or archdiocese,” said Confer- ence president Archbish- opMark Coleridge. Nobody’s Pawn: Norma McCorvey Jane Roe of the famous Roe vWade decisionwas a good - but complicated - woman “HONEY, WHY on earth are you crying?” Norma McCor- vey, aka Jane Roe, asked me when we first met in 1999. Then, I was crying for joy in meeting her. But I’m crying now to learn that she made a “death bed confession” and that she had only been a pro- life speaker because she was paid to switch sides. At least, this is the claim made in a documentary, called AKA Jane Roe , directed by Australian Nick Sweeney, which was released last week. And, admittedly, she told him things which would make a pro-lifer blanch. “If a young woman wants to have an abortion, that’s no skin off my ass,” she says. “That’s why they call it choice.” I knew Norma and Connie, her partner, and I am not sur- prised that people who knew her much longer than I did object that the film has many omissions and distortions (hopefully to be rectified in a forthcoming official biogra- phy). Above all, it leans decided- ly towards a pro-choice agen- da. Sweeney says that he miss- es her —but he knew her only for a few months. He blew into her nursing home and claimed that he had no agen- da other than wanting to “tell the story of Norma McCor- vey” to the world. She liked his Aussie accent and manners and agreed. She wrote to her friend, Fr Frank Pavone, a well-known pro-life Catholic priest, about a fellow who had come down from New York to document her life’s story. He would give her some money when the filming was done, and that, she wrote, “made me very happy.” But Norma died three years before the film was released, and she was never paid. Sweeney told the Los Ange- les Times that the goal of the documentary was not to add fuel to the abortion debate but to explore the life of the “enigmatic person at the cen- tre of this very divisive issue”. However, the film is made up mostly of old footage cob- bled together, garnished with short clips featuring the dra- matic “confession”. Sweeney refuses to release the extend- ed footage, so we don’t know the context of McCorvey’s re- marks. McCorvey died in 2017, of a progressive lung disease in a nursing home in Katy, Tex- as. She was 69. Her daughter, Melissa, was with her when she passed away. Only a few hours before they spoke on ¾ ¾ Ruth Lasseter Norma McCorvey, photographed when she was aged 35 in 1982, the US woman whose desire to have an abortion was the basis for the landmark US Supreme Court Roe v Wade decision which legalised abortion in the country.