VATICAN
CITY, April 11, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com)
– Human life is “sacred and inviolable” and “every civil law is based on the
recognition of the first and most fundamental right, the right to life,” Pope
Francis told an Italian pro-life organization today.
The pope thanked the Movimento per la Vita,
one of Italy’s leading political pro-life groups, for their work, urging them to
continue “with courage and love” for life “in all its phases.”
“It is therefore necessary to reiterate the
strongest opposition to any direct attack on life, especially innocent and
defenseless, and her unborn child in the womb is the innocent par excellence,”
the pope told the gathering of politicians and pro-life activists at the
Vatican today.
“If you look at life as something that is
consumed,” the pope said, “it will also be something that sooner or later you
can throw away, with abortion to begin with.”
Human life, however, is “a gift from God” and
if it is accepted as such, “then you have before you a valuable and intangible
asset, to be protected by all means and not to be discarded.”
In a different tack from previous popes, Pope
Francis took the opportunity to link the pro-life message of the Church to his
critique of the global economy, a major theme of this pontificate. “This
economy kills. It considers the human being in himself as a commodity; a
commodity that you can use and then throw away.” He added, quoting his own
recent document Evangelii
Gaudium, “We started
the culture of ‘waste’ that, indeed, is promoted” through abortion in which
“even life is discarded.”
One of the “most serious risks” of the modern
world, he said, “is the divorce between economics and morality.” In a world
offering “a market equipped with every technological innovation, elementary
ethical standards of human nature more and more neglected.”
In his brief address, Pope Francis quoted the
document Gaudium et Spes of the Second Vatican Council, that
says, “Life once conceived, must be protected with the utmost care; abortion
and infanticide are abominable crimes.” He encouraged pro-life workers to fight
for life “with a style of closeness” to women so that “every woman feels
regarded as a person, heard, accepted, accompanied.”
In a speech on
Friday to the
International Catholic Child Bureau (BICE), the pope also spoke of the need to
reaffirm the rights of parents to decide “the moral and religious education of
their children” and reject all forms of “educational experimentation with
children and young people.”
Every child, he said, has the right to grow up
in a family “with a father and a mother” capable of creating “a suitable
environment for the child’s development and emotional maturity.” The Pope also
warned against the effort to push a “dictatorship of one form of thinking” on
children comparing these to the “horrors of the manipulation of education that
we experienced in the great genocidal dictatorships of the twentieth century.”
These totalitarian impulses, he said, “have
not disappeared; they have retained a current relevance under various guises
and proposals.”
The pope’s comments on Friday follow a push from
parliamentarians and parents’ rights
groups against the
recent wave of incursions of “gender ideology” into Italy’s schools. A group of
MPs has introduced a bill into Parliament to reinforce the constitutional
protection of parent’s right to guide the “ethical” content of their children’s
education, even in state-funded schools.
