The case of Maya Kowalski’s medical kidnapping and subsequent abuse at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital (JHACH) has been widely reported on. But what might have slipped under the radar and isn’t being widely reported is the extreme anti-Catholic activities of the state workers and hospital staff involved in her ordeal. It came out in the trial, which is currently being televised, that after Maya was seized by JHACH and Department of Children and Families (DCF) and isolated in a hospital room by herself, she wasn’t given many of the comforts of home including her Catholic sacramentals like a rosary, a statue of Mary, a prayer book, holy water, and holy oil. Most shockingly, she was denied communion and visits with her priest.
The hospital’s social worker, Cathi Bedy, who had previously been accused of abusing another child she worked with, and the colluding child abuse doctor who worked for the state of Florida’s DCF seem to have unlawfully confiscated the religious items from Maya, citing the ludicrous conspiracy theory that the child’s mother had spiked the holy water, holy oil, and consecrated host with ketamine. To do so, for a devout Catholic like Beata Kowalski, would be an automatic excommunication. No Catholic serious about her faith would do such a thing. Further, DCF never tested the items they confiscated for ketamine to prove their outlandish allegations.
Shocking testimony revealed that the DCF workers not only confiscated the body of Christ; it also wasn’t given back to a priest to be properly disposed of or stored. Instead, it was taken back to DCF headquarters and presumably thrown in a dumpster. To Catholics, this is beyond outrageous. The reason for that is that the Catholic faith teaches transubstantiation, which means that the ordinary wafer actually becomes the body and blood of Christ after it is consecrated by a priest. After that happens, there are many rules about how to treat the host and what can and cannot be done.
The Catholic Church Canon Law # 1367 states: “One who throws away the consecrated species or, for a sacrilegious purpose, takes them away or keeps them, incurs a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See; a cleric, moreover, may be punished with some other penalty, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state.”
In other words, he or she who knows that it is wrong, and throws away the Consecrated Host in the garbage or uses other degrading methods, is automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church. The only way to have this excommunication lifted is for the person to go to confession and ask the priest to write to the Sacra Penitenzieria Apostolica in Rome, the priest asking for the faculties to absolve the person of the censure (excommunication). There are two steps involved. The person would have to return to the priest a few weeks later to find out if he received the faculties to forgive his/her sin.
If a person does not know that it is a grave sin to desecrate the body of Christ, there is no sin according to church teaching. BUT there is no excuse for DCF workers to not understand this basic Catholic belief and honor it by returning the host to a priest for proper disposal. Maya’s guardian ad litem testified that they receive “cultural competence” training as a requirement for their jobs. This includes education on different faiths so they do not offend the families they are meant to serve. It is written in their policies that children removed from their families have a right to practice their home-taught religions. Government workers are also bound by the First Amendment of the Constitution in federal law, requiring that the free practice of religion “not be infringed.” There was no reasonable excuse to keep Maya away from her religious practices other than to separate her from her mother, who was accused falsely of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a controversial and overused charge that a mother is abusing her child by making him or her sick for attention.
JHACH and Florida DCF workers gleefully infringed on Maya’s right to practice her faith without any reservations. They admitted it on the stand. The question now becomes: What will we do about it? These are the same government workers who would take your child from you if that child wanted a gender reassignment surgery and you objected to cutting healthy body parts off that child. At some point, they need to be told, “No more!” When will that happen? Does it take Jesus being thrown in a dumpster for us to understand how insidious this is? Ron DeSantis is the governor in the state of Florida, where this happened and continues to happen to thousands of families every day. Why has he allowed it? Why have Republicans been so silent on the constant erosion of our civil rights by these “protective” services? Republicans get no quarter from me when these things are happening in states where they hold the power. It is shameful that they are unwilling to control the abuse from the government that they preside over.
Watch this compilation of admitted testimony that a child’s 1st Amendment rights were violated without apology.
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