As Father Bob Penhallurick discussed in his Jan. 11 column, the Office of Catholic Advocacy & Social Doctrine works with the other offices in the Vicariate for Catholic Social Doctrine to promote the culture of life that the Church offers to the world.
What is that culture?
The culture of life is one that recognizes and protects the dignity of every human being as a beloved child of God. It calls for public policy that serves only the common good, rather than the narrow interests of a single class, race or other group. Observing the principle of subsidiarity, it insists that individuals, families, associations, parishes and local communities have the space to organize their own lives and common affairs, free from interference from more distant powers, unless absolutely necessary. Finally, given how modern technologies have brought all human beings into much closer contact and much greater danger than ever before, it teaches the solidarity of all mankind.
Of course, the foregoing prompts at least one obvious question: What does this look like in practice? Speaking for my office, it means, first of all, advocating for public policies that foster and extend the material conditions necessary to live a life that will allow us to know God, love our neighbor and become the people God made each of us to be.
For example, this past year my office worked with the Catholic Conference of Ohio to beat back efforts at expanding legal online gambling in our state. While there’s no problem with a friendly bet over a football game, some buddies getting together for a low-stakes game of poker or a parish bingo night, the business of gambling is another story.
In short, the gambling industry trades on the human appetites for distraction and excitement, drawing people into a web of habit and addiction that robs them of their self-control, their self-respect, their relationships and their very existence. The gambling industry does all of this under the masks of “freedom,” “choice” and “free enterprise.”
Whatever the advocates of industrial gambling call it, however, a social order that permits and encourages behavior that enslaves so many wills and leads to the destruction of families and lives is neither free nor just. Our commitment to human life and the common good, then, demanded that the Church fight against this misguided proposal. It also demands that we continue to combat legalized gambling and other businesses that seek to profit from addiction.
Similarly, in the interests of the common good and the necessary conditions for good human lives, we’re working with the Catholic Conference and members of the General Assembly to promote public policies that end the corporate chokehold on housing. Similarly, we’re seeking ways to end data centers’ binges on public utilities like electricity and water, binges that force the rest of us to pay for the same utilities at grossly inflated prices. In short, we seek public policies that will further all of our lives instead of the interests of a few.
Bishop Earl Fernandes is deeply committed to prison ministry, and my office is responsible for effecting his prison visits. While in no way discounting the great harms that the incarcerated have visited upon individual citizens, families and the social order, the men and women in prison have fallen to truly dark places. Bringing Christ’s grace into these places stands as one of the purest expressions of the clerical offices, and I’m very proud that in 2025 alone, we were able to get the bishop into the state prisons to say 12 Masses. The Spirit’s presence at those Masses is impossible to overstate. Moreover, in 2025, we negotiated a direct contract with the State of Ohio, thus easing the path for our priests and deacons to enter and work in the prisons. Masses are now being said and confessions heard on a weekly basis in all 12 prisons in the diocese.
I should also note that my office advocates for the right of incarcerated Catholics to receive the sacraments. The liturgical practices of the Church are often misunderstood by state employees who would prefer a more standardized form of religious exercise, and that misunderstanding sometimes leads prison employees to block priests from bringing in candles or communion wine, or even from hearing confessions. In those instances, we work with representatives of the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction to remedy the misunderstanding and ensure that our Catholics in prison can remain in full communion with the Body of Christ, our true source of life.
Bishop Fernandes has also tasked my office with finding ways to respond to the evil of human trafficking. In furtherance of that mission, we’ve formed a human trafficking committee that will sponsor four summits this year to raise the awareness of the issue among pastors and parish staff, nurses, first responders, motel staff, law enforcement and people from other relevant occupations. The summits will also provide attendees with tools for identifying and assisting the victims of trafficking: those who are trafficked and the morally lost men who create the demand for sex trafficking.
Somewhat longer term, we’re looking at a mobile clinic that can bring medical care to the victims of trafficking while also building relationships of trust with trafficking victims. Those kinds of relationships, more than any other intervention, is the best way to rescue trafficking victims and lead them to a life that’s worthy.
The office has also developed relationships with Gov. Mike DeWine’s Human Trafficking Task Force and Attorney General David Yost’s Human Trafficking Initiative. I’ve also joined the attorney general’s Human Trafficking Commission and serve on the commission’s Legal and Legislative Subcommittee to look for more high-level policy responses to trafficking.
Like gambling and so many other social pathologies to which we turn a collective blind eye, human trafficking destroys lives: the lives of the trafficked, the lives of the Johns, and the lives of whole families. Trafficking, far from what some might claim about prostitution or “sex work,” is not a victimless crime: it attacks the dignity of all involved, for some of them it brings death, and for all of us it erodes the conditions for healthy family life and a wholesome social order.
It also leads to the deaths of countless innocent children: when a trafficked woman gets pregnant, the chances are incredibly high that her trafficker — her abuser and tormenter — will put relentless pressure on her to get an abortion. Trafficking, then, is a life issue to the very core, and in working to rescue its victims, we are working to protect the lives and dignity of baby girls and boys, children and adolescents, grown women and men, and all of our families. We, each of us, are called to do no less.
