Mexico City, Mexico, Aug 1, 2005 / 22:00 pm
The vice president of the Latin American Bishops’ Council (CELAM), Bishop Carlos Aguiar Retes of Texcoco, Mexico, is denouncing the efforts by some socialist governments to impose anti-life and anti-family policies on Latin America. In an interview with the Mexican daily La Jornada, the bishop said the CELAM leadership recently met in Bogota, Colombia to analyze this and other issues common to the region.
“We spoke about common concerns. The first was the policies which appear to be coming from Spain, in particular from socialist governments, seeking to influence the entire continent, not only Mexico, in order to impose laws such as homosexual marriage, when what we should be doing is simply avoiding homophobia and not granting equivalence to something that is unnatural,” he said.
Bishop Aguiar noted there are many individuals, groups and organizations interested in carrying out the “orders” of the United Nations against human life, and that such groups need to be exposed “because many of them operate without revealing who they are.”
The bishop pointed to Mexico’s Health Secretary, Julio Frenk, and to feminist organizations seeking to legalize abortion in the country, as members of this network. Frenk “carried out his work at the UN, and I think he wants to go back there and be able to say, ‘I was able to impose on a country with a Catholic majority everything we agreed upon’,” Bishop Aguiar said.
At the meeting in Bogota the bishops also discussed their concern about the legalization of euthanasia as well. “Man does not own his life. His life is on loan from God,” Bishop Aguiar stated. He said the bishops were concerned about a domino effect of the same arguments and pressures spreading from one country to the next. “We tried to analyze where they are coming from, why there is this pressure, who the groups are that are behind it and how they are getting into leadership positions,” he said.
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