There's excellent news from Mexico. Not only has the Mexican state of Colima rejected an initiative by Mexican socialists to legalize abortion by an overwhelming majority (19 votes to 1!), the Catholic Church has been given the credit for this pro-life victory.Reportedly, Adolfo Nunez Gonzales of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who introduced the measure, has attributed his defeat to the influence of the Catholic Church, saying:
"It's not a secret for anyone that the Catholic Church is a sector with a lot of power and weight, and that, of course, what is said in a church one Sunday or whatever day the mass is done, influences the people to analyze it all week".Excellent! That's exactly what Pope John Paul II called for, in 1995, in Evangelium Vitae when he wrote: "What is urgently called for is a general mobilitzation of consciences and a united ethical effort to activate a great campaign in support of life ... " (EV, 95)
Four years earlier, on 19 May 1991, Pope John Paul wrote a personal letter to "each of my brother bishops" saying: "All of us, as pastors of the Lord's flock, have a grave responsibility to promote respect for human life in our dioceses. In addition to making public declarations at every opportunity, we must exercise particular vigilance with regard to the teaching being given in our seminaries and in Catholic schools and universities."
Equally excellent are the outspoken comments of Archbishop Raymond Burke, called to Rome recently to head the Church's top canonical court, who has observed that the US bishops' statement Faithful Citizenship had contributed to Obama's victory in the recent US presidential election. LifeSite news reports as follows:
"Archbishop Burke, citing an article by a priest and ethics expert of St. Louis archdiocese, Msgr. Kevin McMahon, who analysed how the bishops’ document actually contributed to the election of Obama, called its proposal 'a kind of false thinking, that says, there’s the evil of taking an innocent and defenceless human life but there are other evils and they’re worthy of equal consideration.What's happened in Mexico shows that with strong religious leadership, from all faiths and none, throughout the world - the pro-life movement not only can prevail, the pro-life movement will prevail. We've seen this also in Northern Ireland - where politicians of different faiths who are totally unafraid of declaring their religious faith - have resisted pro-abortion efforts to impose Britain's Abortion Act on Northern Ireland for over four decades.
“But they’re not. The economic situation, or opposition to the war in Iraq, or whatever it may be, those things don’t rise to the same level as something that is always and everywhere evil, namely the killing of innocent and defenceless human life.”
Let's continue to hear it for the unborn from bold bishops and from other religious leaders. Abortion is the top political issue of today. 4,000 babies are killed in Britain every week. If it were 4,000 policemen, teachers, Catholics, Muslims, being killed each week - who would doubt that this was the top political issue on which to judge politicians? If a difference is being made for the unborn, then they're not being treated as fully human.
