Mexico City, Mexico, Jun 15, 2010 / 12:17 pm
Officials in the Mexican city of Queretaro decided this week to take down five ads that were placed on billboards around the city as part of a campaign by “Catholics for a Free Choice” (CFC) attempting to assert that abortion is not punishable by excommunication.
Bishop Felipe Arizmendi of San Cristobal de Las Casas warned that CFC has a biased interpretation of canon 1323 of the Code of Canon Law, which “contains a series of mitigating factors that exonerate not the sin but the penalty imposed by ecclesial legislation.”
“Does this canon exempt one from the sin of abortion? No,” the bishop clarified. “When it is freely and consciously carried out, abortion is an intrinsically evil act; it is evil in itself, as it is depriving life from a human being who is innocent and defenseless and is not an unjust aggressor.”
“There can be an exemption from the penalty of excommunication, but not from sin,” he explained.
Catholics for a Free Choice has reportedly been expanding its pro-abortion initiatives across Mexico in the cities of Jalisco, Baja California, Campeche, Chiapas, Colima, Guanajuato, Morelos, Oaxaca and Queretaro.