Posted on 04/11/2014 1:08:45 PM PDT by NYer
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 [are] 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.
“What would be wrong with female priests?”
For one thing, a housing problem. Just think of the gossip if male and female priests live in the same house.
Also, many parishes do not have the room for another priest’s house.
And think of the added temptations it would cause.
Hey! Who is HE to judge?!!!!
They excommunicate themselves through their actions.
While women could publicly pray and prophesy in church (1 Cor. 11:1–16), they could not teach or have authority over a man (1 Tim. 2:11–14), since these were two essential functions of the clergy. Nor could women publicly question or challenge the teaching of the clergy (1 Cor. 14:34–38).
The Fathers rejected women's ordination, not because it was incompatible with Christian culture, but because it was incompatible with Christian faith. Thus, together with biblical declarations, the teaching of the Fathers on this issue formed the tradition of the Church that taught that priestly ordination was reserved to men. Throughout medieval times and even up until the present day, this teaching has not changed.
Further, in 1994 Pope John Paul II formally declared that the Church does not have the power to ordain women. He stated, "Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church’s judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful" (OrdinatioSacerdotalis 4).
This is encouraging.
An “act of Love”? As a taxpaying citizen, I think that it is called sodomy.
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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.”
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Pope Francis seems to be making clear here (and elsewhere) that he and the Church still firmly believe and teach the truth about the evils and wrongness of both abortion and homosexual "marriage", in spite of efforts by some to change those unchangeable teachings.
These two moral exhortations (against abortion and homo-marriage) should be aimed at many countries of the world today, but especially at the United States of America.
His name is Pope Francis.
Could not care less what his name happens to be. His title is pontiff.
That is not how I read it,
It appears to me that this Pope is part and parcel of contemporary South American Liberation theology.
I don’t know what he expects out of a mortal coil other than it being mortal.
That’s easy enough to say, yet when notoriously evil people keep coming to church as a show, they often get treated as though they hadn’t.
The Catholic Church’s War on Women.
/rolleyes
And when he had a chance to wag a finger of anger and condemnation at the head butcher of babies, Obama, he was magically transformed into a mute.
This Pope disappoints me greatly and consistently.
Very few popes have ever understood economics. In fact, very few religious people understand economics.
Economics does not make people treat life as a commodity. In fact, the Pope doesn’t really seem to know what a commodity is, though it is a buzz-word on the left. He has picked this up from his Argentine upbringing. Commodities, after all, are largely good things. A commodity is something which you can buy which is useful. It is a “good” in the broad sense (which originally included services).
Obviously, many commodities are not thrown away: the better made they are, the more they last. Education is even a commodity: someone has to produce it by effort, it is useful and desirable — and in the case of education, we hope that it will last a lifetime.
Otherwise, I am glad to see this Pope forthrightly supporting life. That is the least we can expect from religious leaders, but it is nonetheless welcome.
Economy does not per se against life. Normally the economy is the human way of getting to live, which is why we say we are “earning a living,” meaning we are taking care of ourselves, and hopefully even some others. A good economy increases wealth and enables people to climb out of poverty. The Pope should be for that. By this measure, Argentina is not doing so well, though it is perhaps the best of any South American country in its natural endowments. It just shows that good luck alone does not bring success to a country.
The Pope is right on abortion, clueless on the economy.
They would be priest-esses................
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