Hello and welcome to Cat the Gants was live. I'm Psy Kelly your host. Thanks for being here with us on this Thursday afternoon or if you're in Australia Friday morning and I'll tell you why I mentioned Australia specifically in a moment.

Second hour Jimmy Akin will be here and we'll do open forum your calls welcome eighty eight three one eight seven eight eight four this hour will do kind of an open forum but on a specific very very specific topic we have the director of the office of public I don't know what you better help me out here Monica.

Hi, I'm Monica Duman. I'm the director of public affairs engagement. That's what I was going to say. Public affairs engagement and you've heard us I talked with Monica before if you ever watched our podcast focus you know about Monica but we also just talk about how much we admire her here at Cat the Gants was and that admiration is born of the fact that Monica was kind of people would say to us you should get to know her because she's this great pro life leader down in Australia and then we got to know her and we found out she's a great pro

life leader but also a very capable defender of the faith in every way. She's a lawyer but they don't call them lawyers there. They call embarrassed or something like that. We're very glad you're here Monica. Thank you for being here. I'm so excited to be finally in person. Yeah, why are you in the United States? What brought you here?

You invited me. Okay. There was that. Yes. I didn't mean to ask it in an accusatory way like why are you here Monica. But you've kind of toured around a bit. You see seeing the country a little bit. I have absolutely. So this is my first time on the West Coast, but I attended the Catholic media conference in Baltimore last week, visited a friend in Harvard who's just finished her doctorate another friend of mine who's a sister of life in the Bronx and who in August

got willing will make a final profession there. Beautiful. The first Australian ever to do so. Oh, she did she come to America to to be with the sisters of life as a sister Mary Grace one girl. Shout out to you sister Mary Grace. Congratulations sister Mary Grace. That's wonderful. We love those sisters of life. We've had in here a few times and what a wonderful order founded by the the now deceased cardinal of New York City and a growing and growing and that's great. So you got to see a little bit of the country.

Absolutely. So the the the the rumor here is, and by the way, we're going to talk about the state of the church in Australia. And that's what I want to want people to if you have questions about the state of the Catholic church in Australia with the pro life battle is like down there what the what the kind of the battle for I guess just for for Catholicism to be known and to be lived is like in in Australia today's your date call 8883187884.

I was going to say the rumor is that you don't like American bacon that bacon is better in Australia. I was saying today over lunch that the the stuff that you serve as bacon in America is what we discard in Australia.

That sounds so snobby to us Americans. That sounds unbelievable. It sounds like a Canadian. You sound as snobby as a Canadian about their bacon 8883187884 triple 831 truth. I want to start with a news story from Australia to give people kind of a sense of the position of the Catholic church there. For one thing, Catholics in Australia make up about what percentage of the population of Australia 20% 20% OK. So a fifth of the country.

Is Catholic the recently a Catholic hospital was seized by the government of Australia which to an American will sound shocking and terrifying because I think we have this sense that it's coming here event if they're doing an Australia eventually get here. So what is this about season Catholic hospitals and what does it say about the state of the society in Australia.

Yeah, so certainly so our national capital the equivalent of Washington DC here is a place called the Australian Capital Territory in Canberra is the capital city in Australia and it's only very small a very small place. It has two public hospitals one is a fully public hospital owned and operated by the state the other one is owned and operated by a Catholic organization, Calvary Health Care.

Which is sort of the formal body of the the little company of Mary and about about six weeks ago there was a parliamentary report on the availability of abortion across the ACT and it criticized Calvary Hospital for its overriding religious ethos and then on the 10th of May of this year. The government announced that it would just

um forcibly acquire the hospital which basically they would seize the land the buildings the assets the operations they would transfer the staff are currently working in under Calvary over to public health contracts and the law passed on the 31st of May Calvary went to court to try and stop it but since I've been here in the United States the lost that battle.

I'm someone the third of July obviously the the hospital will be forced into state hands so in a matter of 60 days the the hospital went from being a Catholic hospital to having all of its assets seized by the state and it will become a state run hospital now.

Yeah absolutely and they say that you know they will provide some form of compensation but what that compensation will be will be determined at a later date so we don't even know if they'll get value for

everything that they put into the hospital or not it's it's actually quite extraordinary um youth in Asia is not legal there yet but uh it certainly will be probably by the end of the year and we expect that that will be some of the most egregious

euthanasia laws in the in the country are they're talking about extending that to miners um and potentially even those with um a so-called completed life so people who aren't terminally ill but they just feel like dying you just feel like dying.

This ready to go wow um so this this makes a Catholic hospital inconvenient though yeah in in a in a state uh or or a region or well in in and I suppose in the entire country of Australia.

Um Catholic hospitals become inconvenient if medical care becomes the is expected or the standard of medical care is that you kill children in the womb and that you take the lives of the disabled and you take the lives of the elderly.

Uh now those last two with the word voluntary attached but nonetheless the culture of death in other words Catholic hospitals are inconvenient to it so they're just sees the hospital.

We'll just take it we'll just take it wow yeah and the and the courts allowed this.

They absolutely allowed it um wow and if I have to say like one of the things that we're we're concerned about is what's next uh Catholic school is going to be

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