WASHINGTON—The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) today expressed congratulations to Lopez Lomong, Olympian athlete and former refugee from Sudan, for being chosen as the flag bearer for the U.S. Olympic team at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing, China.

Bishop John Wester of Salt Lake City, Utah, chairman of the Bishops’ Committee on Migration, said that the choice of Lomong by the Olympic team highlights the United State’s traditional role as a safe haven for persecuted around the world.

Lopez Lomong escaped the Sudanese civil war with other Sudanese youth—known as the “lost boys of Sudan”—in the 1990s and was resettled to the United States in 2001.   Upon his arrival in the United States, Migration and Refugee Services (MRS) of the USCCB helped resettle Lomong. Each year the United States welcomes up to 60,000 refugees from around the world, with MRS/USCCB and Catholic dioceses across the country assisting about one-quarter of them.

The Catholic Conference of Ohio sent the address below to Gov. Ted Strickland and members of the Ohio General Assembly July 25. The address expresses the bishops’ disappointment with the governor’s veto of a provision within the economic stimulus legislation (HB554) that would have banned the use of state funding for embryonic stem cell research related to human cloning.

In emphasizing their opposition to the use of public dollars to support public and private funding of embryonic stem cell research, the bishops note: “By prohibiting state funds from being used for research on human embryos, the ban would have encouraged funding for research using adult stem cells which do not involve the destruction of human life and which have already proven to be of great medical benefit.”

The governor and state legislators also received a copy of On Embryonic Stem Cell Research: A Statement of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The USCCB released this statement June 13, the day following Gov. Strickland’s veto.