The Leadership Team of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis has joined the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and signed the petition sponsored by the Shut Tornillo Down Coalition National and Local Partners. (This detention camp for child immigrants is located in the desert in Tornillo, Texas.)

The camp was built with the express purpose of discouraging immigrants from coming to the U.S. Thousands of children are imprisoned there. There is no healthcare there for them and their abusive imprisonment causes irreparable harm to their normal development.There are many other, much more suitable places to house the children in a significantly less expensive way. The petition asks that the children be placed with family or sponsors, who will not be targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation and that no more centers be built to replace it.

The Leadership Team of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis
Springfield, Illinois
January 1, 2019

This year marks the 175^th anniversary of the founding of the Hospital Sisters of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis. This graphic was designed by Sister M. Theodora (Japan Province) and will be displayed throughout the year in various ways including as a flag on a new flagpole at Convent Entrance and on the flagpole at Chiara Center.

The central image of the graphic is Our Lady of Grace Chapel (Telgte, Germany) where Father Christopher Bernsmeyer, OFM, welcomed young women to begin their life of caring for the sick on July 2, 1844. Surrounding the Chapel are the flags where the Sisters have a Province: Germany (since 1844), Poland (since 1849), USA (since 1875), Japan (since 1948), and India (since 1973).

The Leadership Team of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis stands in solidarity with opposition by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious to the proposed Affordable Clean Energy Rule. We have committed ourselves to a life of meeting the needs of the poor, ill, marginalized and vulnerable. The proposed Rule would significantly weaken the progress made to protect the population of the world from increasing carbon pollution, rapid climate change and the health of all people, especially the most vulnerable.

The proposed Rule allows each state to decide if and how they would reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuel, placing the health of all people at significantly greater risk. The United States has historically been the world’s largest carbon polluter. There is ample evidence readily available to show that the pollution we have already produced is a danger to all people. Further weakening of our laws for control of pollution will only exacerbate the problem.

The climate is a common good given to all and we are all responsible to care for it. Each of us are called by God to protect this common home by caring for all of Creation. Blessed Pope Paul VI pointed out in his address to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “the most extraordinary scientific advances, the most amazing technical abilities, the most astonishing economic growth, unless they are accompanied by authentic social and moral progress will definitely turn against man.” (Address to the FAO on the 25th anniversary of its Institution [16 November 1970], 4: AAS 62 [1970], 833.)

In his encyclical, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis reminds us of our biblical exhortation to live in right relationship and cooperate with God’s design for his world. We urgently oppose adoption of the proposed Rule that threatens the health and safely of all people and the earth itself.

The Leadership Team of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis
Springfield, Illinois
November 1, 2018

The Leadership Team of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis stands in solidarity with the opposition by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious to the proposed changes to regulations for immigrants entitled Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds. We have committed ourselves to a life of meeting the needs of the poor, ill, marginalized and vulnerable.

This legislation would impose impossible restrictions on immigrants and their families, particularly those with lower income. It would increase difficulties in obtaining lawful immigration status and place further barriers to obtaining needed benefits for which their children qualify. Further restriction of obtaining legal immigration status and ability to care for their basic needs, their basic right to human dignity and their desire to be a contributing member of our communities is unjust and not in keeping with the values for which our country was founded. The restrictions would increase poverty, disease, homelessness and decrease access to education and general well-being. No one should be forced to choose between medical care, housing and food and endangering their eligibility for possible legal permanent residency.

The obvious attempt to target the most vulnerable within the immigrant population is completely contrary to our faith and creates further threats to the values of our country. Our faith encourages us to welcome the stranger and care for the vulnerable among us. Our national values lead us to work always for the welfare of children and families and to promote the common good.

We encourage all people of faith to advocate for protection of immigrants and to object to this unreasonable and harmful proposal.

The Leadership Team of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis
Springfield, Illinois
October 24, 2018

Yesterday in a ceremony at St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, Pope Francis named seven new saints and one of them has been pictured in St. Francis of Assisi Church for 55 years.

Shortly after Pope Paul VI was elected on June 21, 1963, a redecorating was planned for St. Francis of Assisi Church with Moroder-International (Milwaukee, WI). Stanislaus Estkowski, the lead artist, was to paint a mural of the new pope above the altar canopy along with the two preceding Popes: John XXIII, Pius XII and Saint Peter.

Saint Pope Paul VI oversaw the closing of the Church's pivotal Second Vatican Council, and issued the landmark encyclical that cemented the church's opposition to birth control. "On July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI stunned Catholics around the world with his announcement of Humanae Vitae, "Of Human Life," a document in which he forcefully reaffirmed the church's previously stated position on the use of artificial birth control, calling it "intrinsically wrong." "'We are obliged once more to declare that [methods for] the direct interruption of the generative process,' the pope wrote, '... are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children.'

"Humane Vitae came as a surprise to many Vatican observers. Though an encyclical issued in 1930 already prohibited birth control, a papal commission had been assembled to revisit that ban, and a majority of the commission members suggested that it be dropped."

The Vatican calls Paul VI the "pope of modernity" for his influence on changes in "liturgy, seminary formation, theological study, and many other areas of ecclesiastical life."

In solidarity with the statement by Daniel Cardinal DiNardo of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops regarding our current Administration’s immigration policy of intolerance toward asylum seekers, the leadership team of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis join with other people of faith in seeking to end the radically unjust immigration policies. Recently the cruel practices of separation of parents and children have been replaced by detention of whole families. Anti-immigration forces continue to fan fears and blame the victims of horrible violence in their countries of origin.

As women of faith, we challenge our national leaders to assume responsibility for ending our current inhumane immigration policies, and, instead, to focus on ending policies that are the cause of such desperate needs for people to seek safety in a strange and foreign land.

In 1875, 20 of our Sisters emigrated to the United States at the invitation of Bishop Baltes of the Alton, Illinois Diocese to provide health care to the German immigrants of the diocese who had fled Germany because of the cruel practices of the Dictator Bismarck. Our Congregation honors its immigrant beginnings and reaffirms its commitment to comprehensive immigration reform.

The Leadership Team of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis
Springfield, Illinois
July 13, 2018