Jason Adkins, executive director and general counsel of the Minnesota Catholic Conference (MCC) and Maggee Hangge, policy associate at MCC, invited The Catholic Spirit into the conference’s offices in St. Paul to talk about Minnesota’s 2025 legislative session, which concluded in May and was followed by a special session June 10. The conference is the public policy arm of Minnesota’s Catholic bishops, which includes Archbishop Bernard Hebda and Bishops Michael Izen and Kevin Kenney of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. This interview has been edited for length.
Q Jason and Maggee, thank you for inviting us to the MCC. The 93rd Minnesota Legislative session recently concluded, followed by a special session. Among leading moral issues during this session were proposed cuts to nonpublic school pupil aid. Responding to these proposed budget cuts, many Catholics gathered in the Minnesota State Capitol rotunda May 7 as part of a rally protesting Gov. Tim Walz’s proposed budget. Nonpublic school pupil aid was ultimately retained in the two-year budget. What is this aid and why was it so important to retain?
Adkins: The state of Minnesota makes a commitment to all students, irrespective of where they go to school, to provide essential services. That includes transportation such as busing, nursing, counseling services, textbook aid and other instructional aids as well, such as standardized test funding. Now these aren’t subsidies to private schools. These are funds that are administered by public school districts in collaboration with nonpublic schools and Catholic schools for the benefit of students. The state funds all students in these essential services.
We thought cutting those services simply because you go to private schools or Catholic schools was discriminatory and unfair. And these are essential services. We shouldn’t be balancing the budget on the backs of our students.
Because of the great work of our principals and the people in the pews and people in our Catholic schools standing up, educating legislators about what those aids are and why they’re important, we were able to win the day, and those cuts were removed. They were taken off the table and that funding was retained for the next two years.
Q Your office has advocated against the legalization of online gambling, even saying, “sports gambling is addictive and often leads to problem gambling.” This year, online sports gambling suffered a second defeat in committee. Minnesota remains one of 12 states to not have legal online sports gambling despite attempts to push the bill forward. But the attempts to legalize online gambling failed to pass even one committee this session. What are lawmakers saying about this issue?
Adkins: Lawmakers and the public generally are waking up to the reality that online sports gambling is a consumer fraud scheme. The house really does always win.
There are legal forms of betting, but what we’re against is the creation of commercial sports books; ‘the house,’ if you will, because those really are consumer fraud schemes.
We think it’s addictive. We think putting a sports book on everyone’s cellphone 24/7 and giving them access to sports gambling combines both the highly addictive nature of gambling with all the things that we’re learning about the addictive nature of cell phones and social media. That’s a toxic brew. It would amount to a massive multibillion dollar wealth transfer from Minnesotans into the gambling entities without any benefit to the state of Minnesota because the tax revenue that’s generated would actually go into a gaming fund that is then redistributed among gaming entities. The state loses. We bear all the costs of family fragmentation, addiction, bankruptcies and everything else. The state gets no benefits.
Q Another victory your office announced on June 10 was an in vitro fertilization (IVF) proposal not being included in legislation that would have required insurance coverage for IVF. If passed, how would this proposal have impacted Catholic’s religious liberty in the state?
Hangge: We were fortunate this year that the IVF insurance mandate did not get a hearing, but there was an attempt to get it into the one of the omnibus bills towards the end of session, which fortunately did not prevail.
We have a lot of concerns surrounding IVF. First, I’ll say that we have a lot of sympathy for couples who are struggling with infertility. That’s a huge cross to bear and really hard for those couples. But IVF simply is not the answer. Of course, it’s expensive. We know that it can cost between $15(,000) and $30,000 per cycle. People often need more than one cycle. But on top of that, it often leads to eugenic practices. They start with genetic testing and try to see which embryo was going to be the most viable.
More embryos are discarded or are aborted at IVF clinics than at Planned Parenthood. We have a lot of concerns with the practices surrounding that. We don’t want that to go into all of our insurance programs to be mandated by the government.
What we’re proposing as the alternative is restorative reproductive medicine. IVF, like I said, isn’t always the most successful. Its success rate is actually pretty low. Being fertile is a marker of good health. If you’re infertile, something is off in your body and we should be exploring that. … We have proposals to actually explore that from the restorative reproductive medicine side.
Because IVF has a lot of ethical concerns because of the way it discards humans, we don’t want to be paying for that at a minimum in our insurance plans. We have looked into religious liberty exemptions for that and had those prepared during the floor debate, for example, but beyond that we don’t think we should just get a carve out, so that’s why we’re working to stop the mandate itself.
Q: A major point of contention was health care access for undocumented adult and child immigrants. While access for adults, which began five months ago, was dropped as potentially increasingly expensive, children retained access to MinnesotaCare.
Adkins: This is something that’s raised a lot of concern.
The simple fact is that we’re all stewards of the gift of life. That is an important aspect of who we are in our human dignity. To be a good steward of the gift of life, you have to have access to health insurance and health care. We have a system that’s based around insurance and so people need access to the insurance.
Now we’re disappointed that the access for adults was cut this legislative session. We are encouraged, though, by the fact that both parties recognize the moral imperative of giving health care access to undocumented children, something that we didn’t even have before 2023.
The reality is that undocumented immigrants are here for both political and business reasons, as the Minnesota bishops highlighted in their statement on immigration enforcement this February. The only just thing to do is to provide access to those who are here, who are residents, who are contributing to our community, giving them access to health insurance, health insurance that they can pay for as well.
Q Your office commissioned a report to highlight the economic impact of the Catholic Church in Minnesota. The report estimates that the Church contributes more than $5 billion annually in economic benefits to the state. How have lawmakers been receiving this report?
Adkins: (The Fruits of the Vine report) shows that the Catholic Church in Minnesota and her associated ministries create $5 billion in economic impact.
You might not be a Catholic. You might not even like the Catholic Church, but you can’t deny from an objective econometric standpoint that the Church creates serious benefits to the broader community simply because of the jobs that we create. We’re an employer; our parishes employ people; our schools employ people; our places like the Cathedral (of St. Paul) create magnet effects, economic magnet effects for the broader community. You come to St. Paul and you visit the Cathedral. You might go to a wedding, for example, or a funeral. Those all create magnet effects that impact the broader community. Then you’re going to restaurants, you’re getting a hotel, you’re buying a coffee in St. Paul.
(We) really encourage people to read that report. This is part of the good news of what the Church is bringing to the broader community simply because of our large institutional footprint. And that footprint matters.
Q There have been efforts in Minnesota to enact measures that would allow physician-assisted suicide.
Adkins: We just saw it passed in the New York legislature. Hopefully that will get vetoed by the New York governor, but we are not sure. It passed the Illinois House; it was miraculously not brought for a vote in the Illinois Senate. We work in an alliance. It’s called the Minnesota Alliance for Ethical Healthcare (ethicalcaremn.org). But we have been effective in ensuring for the last 11 years when that bill has been introduced, every single year, we’ve been able to keep that from passing. That’s because of the dedicated work of so many people across the ideological spectrum, across different groups, disability advocates, people who are concerned about racial disparities, health care advocates. We believe, just as the American Medical Association (believes), that medical aid in dying is a euphemism — that this really is physician assisted suicide. It is not consistent with sound medical practice and it will impact the most vulnerable in our community.
Q What other issues were covered this session?
Hangge: One of the big issues we were working on was the child tax credit. That’s something that passed in 2023. We were strong advocates and had a good coalition working on that and working to expand that this session. While it didn’t get expanded, there were a lot of proposals on the table to do that.
The child tax credit gives a tax credit to low-income families. We all know that families are struggling. We look at gas prices, we look at grocery prices; how can we provide for families and really put families first? That’s been our goal. How can we put families first in tax and budget discussions? The child tax credit was a great victory in 2023.
We continue to work on building off that and getting it expanded so that more families can become eligible, or like was proposed this session, if there can be different avenues to expanding it, like offering a baby bonus to families who are welcoming a new child into their family.
Adkins: The big advocacy win on the child tax credit was the fact that not only were there bipartisan proposals to expand the child tax credit this year in a tight budget year, and if you look at the bills, you have a very diverse group of authors across the ideological spectrum. It’s a huge advocacy win to generate bipartisan support for that important families first initiative. And at the same time, the proposals to cut the child tax credit were not even given any serious attention. In a tight budget year, we think that was a real advocacy win for us and generating continued momentum to expand the child tax credit and make sure that the people who are doing the most important work of raising the next generation are supported by the state. (By) removing barriers to family formation and having children and helping them flourish.
Q What legislative topics will your office be paying close attention to as the next session approaches? Might one be the Equal Rights Amendment, which would guarantee equal rights under the law to protect against discrimination but as recently proposed would include language protecting decisions about one’s own pregnancy, gender identity and sexual orientation? If lawmakers passed the amendment, the state’s voters would have to approve it as an amendment to the Minnesota State Constitution.
Hangge: This is something we’ve seen come through in the past year as it passed in the Senate in 2023 (and) a different version passed in the House in 2024. We know that that one is still around, and we’ll continue to monitor, talk with legislators, talk with Catholics about the impacts that the Equal Rights Amendment, so-called Equal Rights Amendment, would have on our state.
Adkins: It’s like dropping a bomb on parental rights and religious liberty. It’s really the ‘Erosion of Rights Amendment.’ This is not your grandmother’s Equal Rights Amendment from the 1970s. This is the imposition of gender ideology, the constitutionalization of abortion, and then a threat to the parents and religious institutions that object to the imposition of both abortion and gender ideology. It’s really a radical proposal. We think it’s harmful. We think it’s dangerous and we think it’s discriminatory.
Hangge: These are just a few of the bills we’ve worked on this session. We have a bill tracker on our website at MNCatholic.org/billtracker.
