Lima, Peru, Jul 29, 2008 / 15:54 pm
During the Te Deum marking Peru’s Independence Day, the Archbishop of Lima, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, called on the government to resist international pressure to pass laws that would “attack life and the family.”
During the ceremony at the Cathedral of Lima attended by President Alan Garcia and numerous government officials, the cardinal pointed out that the Church “defends the person, today more than ever, because she is concerned about some tendencies to limit the inviolable value of human life itself or to disassociate it from its natural environment, which is human lived in marriage and the family.”
He warned that “there is more and more pressure from certain ideological groups to achieve the legalization of abortion in the countries of Latin America, including our own. These minority groups, which make a lot of noise in the media and receive millions from overseas, seek to intimidate the average citizen and push for the legalization of new forms of abortion, under the pretext of ‘reproductive health’ and other slogans that lead to confusion,” the cardinal said.
“We wish to recall on this solemn occasion that the right to life is a right that should be recognized by all, because it is a fundamental right with respect to all other human rights,” he stated.
Cardinal Cipriani warned that some groups “of the so-called first world want to use the benefits of globalization to impose the idea that what is important in life is power, money and influence in the areas of politics, economics and the media.”
These pressures must be resisted, he said, because they stem from “practical materialism,” which is dehumanizing and damaging to human dignity and human relations. Cardinal Cipriani also called on members of the media to reflect on the responsibility they have for today’s entertainment-driven society.
The media must urgently “assume the role it has in the education of children and young people and in the formation of a coherent moral framework that must serve as the spiritual basis for the material development we are pursuing,” he said.