The Holy Father met today with the heads of U.N. agencies and the Secretary General as the U.N. system is gearing up for the next big thing: the post-2015 development agenda—a set of goals and targets that will be development priorities for governments and international institutions for decades to come.
Billions of dollars in development aid will be spent on the priorities that find their way into the post-2015 development agenda, and everyone wants a piece of the pie.
Governments, NGOs, pharmaceutical companies, private foundations and international organizations that make up the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) establishment have their sights set on getting some of that money, and they want to use it for abortions.
Pope Francis, like his predecessors had no qualms about saying where his priorities are.
…an awareness of the dignity of each of our brothers and sisters whose life is sacred and inviolable from conception to natural death must lead us to share with complete freedom the goods which God’s providence has placed in our hands, material goods but also intellectual and spiritual ones, and to give back generously and lavishly whatever we may have earlier unjustly refused to others.
When John Paul II told Nafis Sadik to keep abortion out of U.N. development plans in 1994 because it was a “heinous crime” he got a lot more attention than Francis. The present media blackout on abortion issues is disquieting. The same happened in the middle of the week in Geneva when the Vatican told U.N. Experts that abortion is a form of torture. It is disquieting when the only voice in the world speaking out for millions of unborn human beings is silenced by the media.
The mainstream press focused instead on his comment about “legitimate redistribution of wealth by the state” misunderstanding the emphasis of the Holy Father entirely. The Holy Father was certainly exhorting those present that a generous disposition is essential for authentic human development to take place, but he did not say that every re-distribution is legitimate as the AP seems to suggest, or that he demanded that it take place.
That misunderstanding is possibly due to the literal translation of his statement. What the Holy Father actually said is that where redistribution takes place, it should be done in a legitimate way, and that when carried out so, it is indeed legitimate for redistribution to take place. The context of his words is as much Venezuelan style redistribution as the Tea Party uprising in the United States.
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
The Holy Father also attacked the “throwaway culture” of our times equating it with what his predecessors terms the “culture of death,” and spoke of the need to include the family in development plans. Francis has stated before that abortion is part of a throwaway culture.
LifeNews.com Note: Stefano Gennarini, J.D., writes for the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. This article originally appeared in the pro-life group’s Turtle Bay and Beyond publication and is used with permission.
