Archbishop calls simultaneous rejection of Iraq war and support for abortion hypocritical

Madrid, Spain, Feb 5, 2006 / 22:00 pm

In his most recent pastoral letter, Archbishop Francisco Gil Hellin of Burgos said it was hypocritical to be shocked by the Iraq war and yet support legal abortion in Spain, where 85,000 unborn are killed each year.
 
“One wonders how there could be such hypocrisy when evaluating, for example, the war in Iraq and abortion.  What would have happened if there were 85,000 executions in Spain in one year? It is unthinkable,” the archbishop said in his letter. 

Archbishop Gil said the national and international media were rightly “outraged” by the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Grab but that this was “Snow white in comparison to what happens with the aborted unborn: most of them are dismembered, others are poisoned, others are cut to pieces.  After 21 weeks, the mother undergoes a caesarian and the fetus is extracted alive and left to die.”

The archbishop compared the number of abortions carried out in Spain during 2004 with “the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism.” The data from that year was “chilling,” he said, as abortion in Spain was up 6.5% from the previous year, 27% of women have had more than one abortion, 23% of abortions are performed after the 12th week of pregnancy, and the average age of women who have abortions continues to go down.  The archbishop said estimates are that during the last 20 years since abortion was legalized in Spain, “almost one million innocent and defenseless lives have been taken.”

“The horrors of Nazism and Stalinism are not far off in this society that calls itself and presumes to be progressive and democratic.  It is not an exaggeration to state that we are facing a totalitarian situation, where the strongest impose their will on the weakest.”  This is occurring, he said, with “at least the tacit consent of politicians and the mass media.”

Society “remains asleep and is allowing unprecedented genocide,” Archbishop Gil continued, “even though people are now beginning to see abortion as something evil.”

The Church is attacked for denouncing such “barbarism” and for trying to awaken consciences, he added, and the number of women “who suffer over the child that could have been theirs continues to grow.”  The Church will continue to reach out to young women to help prevent them from having to carry “a heavy conscience for the rest of their lives.”