As the 49th anniversary of Humanae Vitae approaches, there are signs on the horizon, not of celebration but of danger. Marco Tosatti, a respected journalist in Rome, recently wrote that “in the Vatican, unconfirmed reports from good sources have leaked that the Pontiff is on the verge of appointing – or even might have already formed – a secret commission to examine and potentially study changes to the Church’s position on the issue of contraception, as it was laid down in 1968 by Paul VI in the encyclical Humanae Vitae. That was the last document signed by Pope Montini, and it was the formalization of what the Second Vatican Council had developed on this issue.
We have so far no official confirmation of the existence and composition of this entity; but a request for confirmation, or for denial, which was put forward to the competent authorities, has so far not been answered – which could be a signal in itself – in the sense that, if the report was completely unfounded, it wouldn’t take much to say so.” Enquote.
Mr. Tosatti is unfortunately correct: one almost perceives an intentional uncertainty on the part of the Vatican under Pope Francis to simply and with finality confirm basic church teachings. And it’s an old bureaucratic rule, in the Vatican’s bureaucracy as well as our own, that if you want to stay out of trouble, write a memo; if you want to cause trouble, name a committee.
We know from the visionaries of Fatima that attacks on marriage and the family are the central ammunition in the war waged by the Prince of This World in his battle to capture every living soul and condemn them to an eternity in Hell.
PRI’s longtime friend, chaplain, and board member, Father Linus Clovis, recently gave a penetrating summary of our current plight in an address he delivered in Rome. Following are a few of his most salient remarks:
Two years, prior to his election as Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, the archbishop of Cracow, delivered a prophetic message in Philadelphia on the occasion of the bicentennial anniversary of American Independence.
We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel.
We must be prepared to undergo great trials in the not-too-distant future; trials that will require us to be ready to give up even our lives, and a total gift of self to Christ and for Christ. Through your prayers and mine, it is possible to alleviate this tribulation, but it is no longer possible to avert it. . . . How many times has the renewal of the Church been brought about in blood! It will not be different this time.
Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, the founding President of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family, wrote to Sister Lucia asking for prayers for this new undertaking. She declared in a signed response (42) to him that “the final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Do not be afraid, (she added), because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue.” And then she concluded: “however, Our Lady has already crushed his head.” The Cardinal noted that for John Paul II this was the crux, as it touches the very pillar of creation, the truth of the relationship between man and woman, and among generations. it is well known that any tampering with a keystone risks the collapse of the entire building. The keystone, the basic cell of society is marriage and family. With the tacit acceptance of contraception and divorce, the recent ‘merciful’ embracing of remarried civil divorcees and the benign nod to same-sex ‘marriage’, the keystone has been tampered with and the omega point has been reached.
It is self-evident that the Catholic Church and the anti-Church currently co-exist in the same sacramental, liturgical and juridical space. The latter, having grown stronger, is now attempting to pass itself off as the true Church, all the better to induct, or coerce, the faithful into becoming adherents, promoters and defenders of a secular ideology. Should the anti-Church succeed in commandeering all the space of the true Church, the rights of man will supplant the rights of God through the desecration of the sacraments, the sacrilege of the sanctuary, and the abuse of apostolic power. Thus, politicians who vote for abortion and same-sex “marriage” will be welcome at the Communion rails; husbands and wives who have abandoned their spouses and children and entered into adulterous relationships will be admitted to the sacraments; priests and theologians who publicly reject Catholic doctrines and morals will be at liberty to exercise ministry and to spread dissent, while faithful Catholics will be marginalized, maligned and discredited at every turn. Thus, the anti-Church would succeed in achieving its goal of dethroning God as Creator, Saviour and Sanctifier and replacing Him with man the self-creator, the self-saviour and the self-sanctifier.
The advent of Pope Francis has, in the divine order of things, proved a great and true blessing. A hidden conflict has been raging in the Church for over one hundred years: a conflict explicitly revealed to Pope Leo XIII, partially contained by St. Pius X, unleashed at Vatican II. Under Francis, the first Jesuit pope, the first pope from the Americas and the first pope whose priestly ordination was in the New Rite, it is now full blown, with the potential of rendering the Church smaller but more faithful. Consequently, there is a burgeoning fear among the more astute of the clergy who, because of their training, education and expertise in matters ecclesiastical, are generally able to see further and understand better than the average lay person the fallout from either an open conflict or the maintenance of the status quo. The apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia is the catalyst that has divided not only bishops and Episcopal Conferences from each other but, priests from their bishops and from each other, and the laity, anxious and confused. As a Trojan horse, Amoris Laetitia spells spiritual ruin for the entire Church, as a gauntlet thrown down it calls for courage in overcoming fear. In either case, it is now poised to separate the anti-Church of which St. John Paul II spoke from the Church that Christ founded. As the separation begins to take place, each one of us, like the angels, will have to decide for himself whether he would rather be wrong with Lucifer than right without him.
Thus far the words of Father Clovis. And unsettling signs abound of the divisions which he describes. For instance, the bishops of Malta, a tiny island in the Mediterranean, have shown signs of outright opposition to the church’s basic teaching on two sacraments – that of marriage and that of the holy Eucharist. It has not always been so. Malta is most well-known as the site where, in 1565, after four months of heroic efforts against an overwhelming Moslem force, the valiant Catholic Knights of St. John of Jerusalem under Grandmaster John La Valette defeated the Saracen hordes of the Ottoman Empire, who were intent on invading Europe from the south.
It is worth noting that the Turkish Sultan Mustafa finally fled in defeat on September 11, 1565.
Six years later, in 1571, the Turkish fleet was decisively annihilated at the battle of Lepanto, in which the Order of Saint John, now known as the Order of Malta, also played a central role.
A Hundred and 12 years later, the last great Turkish threat to the heart of Europe was defeated on September 11, 1683, with the victory of Polish King John Sobieski at the gates of Vienna.
Who will be our John La Vallete at our Lepanto? Who will be our John Sobieski at our Vienna?
Once more, September 11 plays a critical role in the history of Christian – Islamic relations – decidedly un-ecumenical. When it comes to battle, Muslims have long memories.
What a beautiful history! And yet today the bishops of Malta – the Catholic bishops, mind you – refused to defend Catholic marriage, and condemned the Catholic faithful who insist that “same-sex marriage” is unnatural. It runs against natural law is designed by God and handed down to us through every generation in our Maltese history.”
Instead of affirming these basic Catholic truths, Archbishop Charles Scicluna condemned them as propaganda. Moreover, in a recent statement, he and his colleagues in Malta issued guidelines that allow civilly divorced-and remarried Catholics living in adultery to receive all the community and if they are “at peace with God.”
Meanwhile, our own American bishops are focusing not on marriage and the family, but on money – specifically, the hundreds of millions of dollars a year that the bishops and their welfare agencies received from the federal government from programs that are threatened by the budget submitted to Congress by President Trump. Pretending that the Church has a magisterial position on budget allocations, five leading bishops from the Catholic conference have written Congress condemning Trump’s budget proposal and urging the full funding of all of Obama’s welfare programs – including, of course, those designated for the bishops’ agencies.
Meanwhile, the letter made no mention of Trump’s completely terminating all federal funding of Planned Parenthood.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake in taxpayer funding for the bishops. But there’s no money in opposing abortion.
The bishops have made their priorities clear.
The same is true when it comes to foreign policy, where Donald Trump has already done more to curtail funding for abortion than any president in recent history, expanding the Mexico City policy to include all federal spending on all foreign aid.
But what are the bishops’ priorities? Not abortion. They focus instead on global warming, which is apparently the highest foreign policy priority of the American Catholic Church. They have even written to Secretary of State Tillerson a letter urging the U.S. to sign the Paris Agreement, committing billions to secular organizations supposedly fighting climate change.
We are pleased to report that President Trump has recently returned from Europe, where he pointedly refused to sign the Paris Agreement.
Did the bishops applaud Trump’s expansion of Mexico City, keeping billions of taxpayer funding from abortionists worldwide?
‘We Have a President Who, Without Apology, Stands for the Sanctity of Humanae Vitae,’ Vice President Pence told graduates at Notre Dame. One wonders, do our bishops believe that fighting global warming is more important than fighting to save the unborn around the world?
Meanwhile, with the 49th anniversary of Humanae Vitae quickly approaching, while the bishops voices are stentorian in defense of Obama’s funding of the welfare state, it is difficult to find a single voice applauding President Trump’s pro-life accomplishments and commending his budget for zeroing out all funding of Planned Parenthood and abortion worldwide.
Instead, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, the immediate past president of the Catholic Bishops conference, criticizes the president’s budget as, and I quote, “at odds with Catholic and American ideals” – never mentioning Planned Parenthood or the hundreds of millions of dollars the bishops’ welfare agencies might lose if the budget is passed.
And Humanae Vitae? Silence.
Alas, It is furtive statements like these from our beloved bishops that lead good people to fear the worst, should a commission be inaugurated to “review” this treasured encyclical of Blessed Paul VI.
Will America’s influential bishops urge Pope Francis to celebrate Humanae Vitae, rather than to rewrite it?
It’s hard to say; after all, there are millions at stake for the bishops and their welfare agencies, but there’s no money for them in defending Humanae Vitae.
Segment two
Honduran Lawmakers Resist Pressure from UN, Abortion Activists to Legalize Abortion
Last week, Honduran lawmakers resisted significant pressure from the United Nations, the European Union, and pro-abortion nongovernmental organizations to legalize abortion.
A proposal seeking to legalize abortion in cases of rape, fetal disability, and risks to life of the mother was initiated by foreign independent advisors from Spain contracted by the Honduran government to help lawmakers revise the nation’s Penal Code. The proposal came as the Honduran National Congress undertakes the first major comprehensive revision of the Penal Code since 1983.
In response, thousands of pro-life Hondurans took to the streets of Tegucigalpa, the nation’s capital, to protest the proposed change to the country’s abortion law.
“Honduras faced brutal pressure from the international community to depenalize abortion,” says Martha Lorena Alvarado of Provida Honduras.
“Pro-lifers, the young people, religious people both Catholic and Evangelical responded immediately, the outpouring of support was tremendous,” Alvarado says, “we reacted as a pro-life country and as a result our nation’s laws continue to defend the life of the unborn child from the moment of conception.”
Honduras is an overwhelmingly pro-life country. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 71% of Hondurans believe that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Currently, Honduran law protects all unborn life at any moment during pregnancy without exceptions.
Lawmakers in the National Congress decisively rejected the abortion proposal. In the legislative assembly, 77 lawmakers voted in favor of article 169 of the new Penal Code which retains the nation’s abortion law without loosening any of the restrictions currently in place. Five lawmakers voted against the measure while eight members abstained. Lawmakers further rebuffed efforts to legalize the morning-after pill.
“It was a complete defeat for them,” according to Alvarado.
Pro-abortion activists, however, had perceived the occasion as an opportunity to push for the legalization of abortion. In an attempt to win over public opinion, pro-abortion allies rushed to finance numerous television and radio advertisements that aired across the country in the days leading up to last week’s vote.
Pro-abortion NGOs including U.K.-based Amnesty International, and the U.S.-based Center for Reproductive Rights also weighed in in the hopes of swaying lawmakers.
“By criminalizing abortion, the Honduran Penal Code is incompatible with human rights standards and must be modified without delay,” Erika Guevara-Rosas, the Americas Director for Amnesty International said on the organization’s website.
A number of parliamentarians from Spain, Sweden, Finland, Slovenia, and Belgium in the EU’s European Parliament also sent a letter to leaders in the Honduran National Congress last week, strongly urging lawmakers to legalize abortion to accord with purported international human rights standards.
A group of United Nations so-called human rights experts also condemned Honduras for its laws in defense of life, charging that the Central American nation was failing to heed recent recommendations handed down by UN treaty bodies:
We sincerely hope that the Honduran Congress will seize this key opportunity to comply with its obligations to eliminating discrimination against women in its legislation…we regret that the criminalisation of abortion is maintained in the bill as a serious offence despite recommendations from the UN’s Universal Periodic Review and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women as well as the Committee against Torture.
Honduras, as state party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and its optional protocol, is bound by the provisions of these UN treaties. However, neither of these treaties mention abortion, let alone any purported human right standard to legalize abortion.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Committee against Torture (CAT) are charged with monitoring the implementation of these treaties respectively.
CEDAW concluding observations from periodic review last fall had condemned Honduras for its pro-life laws, urging Honduras to come into compliance with “circumstances under which abortion must be decriminalized, namely, at least in cases of rape or incest, threats to the life and/or health of the woman, and severe foetal impairment.” CEDAW based its recommendation on a statement on reproductive health at the committee’s 57th Session. Recommendations issued by treaty bodies, like CEDAW, however, are non-binding on state parties.
Despite claims that failing to legalize abortion is contrary to international human rights standards, no UN treaty compels any country to legalize abortion. On the contrary, the Program of Action of the UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, a landmark non-binding international agreement on population and development assistance, asserts that the decision of whether or not to legalize abortion should lie solely in the legislative processes in sovereign states.
Furthermore, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses the international consensus that all people have the right to life, liberty, and security of person.
“It is reprehensible that UN human rights experts have turned human rights on its head, using the stature of their office to attack, rather than to defend, the universal right to life for the most defenseless among us,” says Population Research Institute President Steven Mosher, “we need to continue to work to cut public funding from all entities, groups and individuals who engage in this kind of cultural imperialism.”
Segment 3
When he spoke at Notre Dame, Vice President Pence said, “Just as Notre Dame has stood strong to protect its religious liberty, I’m proud that this president just took steps to ensure that this university and the little sisters of the poor could not be forced to violate their consciences to fully participate in American civic life. And just as Notre Dame has stood for those who are persecuted for their faith around the world, just a short while ago, in Saudi Arabia, this president spoke out against religious persecution of all people of all faiths. And on the world stage, he condemned in his words, the murder of innocent Muslims, the oppression of women, the persecution of Jews and the slaughter of Christians.”
He said a lot of things Obama didn’t say eight years ago. How’s this?
“And where this president stood for the unalienable right to life at home and abroad, I’m so proud that the University of Notre Dame has stood without apology for the sanctity of human life. Far too many campuses across America have become characterized by speech codes, safe zones, tone-policing, administration-sanctioned political correctness, all of which amounts to nothing less than suppression of the freedom of speech.
These all-too-common practices are destructive of learning and the pursuit of knowledge, and they are wholly outside the American tradition. As you, our youth, are the future, and universities the bellwether of thought and culture, I would submit that the increasing intolerance and suppression of the time-honored tradition of free expression on our campuses jeopardizes the liberties of every American. This should not, and must not be met with silence.”
The Vice President is correct. And yet, the intolerance and suppression on college campuses continues. Students who don’t know what a pronoun is are hectored if they use the wrong one when referring to one of their so-called transsexual classmates. The tranny’s feelings are hurt, apparently, if you don’t call yesterday’s “he” a “she” today.
Unfortunately, these days college students are taught to feel, not to think. That’s why Notre Dame students who were celebrated by the usual suspects in the left-wing media walked out on vice president Pence because, they insisted, he made them “feel unsafe.” Of course, had they really felt unsafe, they would never have gotten within a mile of his armed Secret Service detail, but these kids lost any sense of honesty and reality long ago, embracing the notion that they could be whatever sex they felt like being any hour of any given day and everybody else ought to applaud them for it.
But wait a minute. When were they really unsafe? That was 21 years ago, under Pres. Bill Clinton, when one third of the kids their age were aborted. That’s when they were unsafe. Not at Notre Dame and not with Vice President Mike Pence.
The frivolity continues. Students at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Michigan were actually arrested for distributing pocket-sized copies of the U.S. Constitution on the campus of the public college. And yes, unfortunately, the administrators and so-called leaders of the campus community are even crazier than the student snowflakes. One administrator claimed that he was trying to protect what he called rural students who might be too polite to say no to those distributing the Constitution. The answer? Arrest those who offend not the students, but the left-wing administrators!
On the West Coast, a biology professor has had to move his class off campus because minority students insisted on having a “no whites day” at Evergreen State College. Campus radicals have warned the college president, George Bridges, that if he did not accept their demands, there would be violence.
This charade is going on all over the country. On the East Coast, international student Yang Shupin, from Communist China, gave the student address at the University of Maryland’s commencement. Yang told her fellow graduates that when she grew up in China, she had to wear a face mask whenever she went outside or she would get sick. The longer she was in America, the more she said she appreciated free speech and democracy, because in China, she complained, only state authorities within the Communist Party could define truth.
Well, those state authorities were not pleased. Yang was mercilessly attacked on social media in China – which is understandable, since anyone commending her remarks would immediately be in trouble with those same authorities.
And is there really free speech at Maryland? Well, the University’s office of diversity and inclusion “guarantees all students a safe, inclusive, and welcoming campus environment for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.” What this means, of course, is that there is no freedom of speech at all for anyone who wants to defend normality, natural law, and Catholic teaching when it comes to the morality of homosexual acts and the idiocy of gender transformation. Yang wore a face mask in China; at U of M, she knew when to keep her mouth shut.
Natural law? Created as man and woman? Students at the University of Maryland would undoubtedly be thrown off campus like the professor in the state of Washington for saying something so obvious. Here is one observation, made by a former president in a letter to a friend of his in Pennsylvania, right next door to Maryland.
“The Bible contains the most profound philosophy, the most perfect morality, and the most refined policy, that was ever conceived upon the earth, Adams writes. “It is the most Republican book in the world, and therefore I will still revere it. The curses against fornication and adultery, and the prohibition of fornication or libidinous ogle at a woman, I believe to be the only system that did or ever will preserve a Republic in the world.”
The author is president John Adams, and his friend is Dr. Benjamin Rush.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Well, folks, on college campuses today, them are fighting words.
This is PRI Review from www.pop.org. Thanks for listening.
