By DONALD DeMARCO
A few years ago, Frances Kissling, the then executive director of Catholics for a Free Choice, a curious organization that consists of no Catholics and has little regard for any choice that is pro-life, organized a campaign to revoke the Vatican’s seat from the United Nations.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly, by a count of 416-1, in its formal objection to the effort (Tuesday, July 11, 2000).
“If anything the Holy See deserves a more prominent role in the United Nations,” said Cong. Christopher Smith (R., N.J.).
“This attack against the Vatican strikes at our bedrock democratic values that teach us tolerance for legitimate differences of opinion,” commented House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R., Texas).
The House resolutions commended the Holy See “for its unique contributions to a thoughtful and robust dialogue in issues of international concern during its 36 years as a permanent observer at the United Nations.” They stated that “any degradation of the status accorded to the Holy See would seriously damage the credibility of the United Nations by demonstrating that its rules of participation are manipulable for ideological reasons rather than being rooted in neutral principles and objective facts of sovereignty.”
The United Nations no longer needs the promptings of Catholics for a Free Choice. It is now violating its own expressed commitment to democracy, tolerance, objective principles, and the refusal to bend to ideological values on its own. For the second time in recent months, the UN has openly criticized the Holy See’s longstanding opposition to abortion in all instances.
In February, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child reproached the Catholic Church by claiming her teachings on abortion and contraception harmed young women.
The most recent attempt, in early May 2014, to discredit the Church’s position against abortion is to falsify language so that opposing abortion for young girls in cases of rape and incest, in the UN’s new lexicon, now means “torture.” According to a UN committee, laws that criminalize the termination of pregnancy in all circumstances can violate the terms of the convention on torture.
In rebuttal, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the permanent observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, reminded the committee that the Church’s pro-life position is to protect human rights. “The Holy See’s goal,” he added, “is to prevent children from being tortured or killed before birth….Some methods of late-term abortions constitute forms of torture, particularly, where the fetus, still alive, is dismembered to be pulled out of the womb in pieces.”
The contradiction inherent in UN’s inverted Newspeak was immediately rebuked. Rebecca Kiessling of Save the 1, which advocates for children conceived in rape, exposed the duplicity by returning to reality: “Putting a nine-year-old through an abortion,” she said, “is the real torture after having already been traumatized….The last thing she needs is more violence within her body.”
“I have spoken to so many girls,” pro-life speaker Monica Kelsey recently told LifeSiteNews, “who have been raped who have had their child, and not one of them has said, ‘I wish I had had an abortion’ But I have had a lot of women who have been raped who had an abortion say, ‘I wish I would have had my child’.”
It is the Catholic Church, and not the United Nations, that stands for the inherent dignity of all people and their fundamental right to life. In fact, the UN owes a large debt of gratitude to Christianity for its very acceptance of the notion of “rights.” The current problem is that the UN is now willing to subvert language, Orwellian style, so that “rights” become “wrongs” and “care” becomes “torture.” By extension, “United” becomes “Divided,” while “Nations” becomes a single “Empire.” In order for the UN to get its way, it must reinvent language and manipulate the illiterate. It will have enough trouble inverting English. Its task to invert all languages of the world will be impossible.
Abortion on demand is not an absolute principle or the cornerstone to a better world. It is in direct opposition to everything that the U.S. or the UN should advocate, namely, an unswerving defense of life and an unflinching commitment to universal care.
+ + +
(Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth & Charity Forum.)
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress