Rome, Italy, Jun 14, 2007 / 08:41 am
In response to the recent decision by Amnesty International to support abortion as a human right, Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, announced this week that the Catholic Church will stop making financial contributions to the organization.
The cardinal issued a statement that reaffirmed what he had said about the matter in an interview with the National Catholic Register. He explained that the decision was made after AI decided to promote abortion as a human right. “The consequence was unavoidable,” he said. Cardinal Martino denounced “the international lobbies that push abortion and the propaganda that promotes it as part of what John Paul II called ‘the culture of death’.” “Thank God the right to abortion has not been recognized internationally,” he added.
“It is very serious that an organization as courageous as Amnesty International gives in to the pressures of lobbyists,” the cardinal lamented, adding that to defend abortion as a human right “is to define a baby in the womb of his mother as an enemy, something that can be destroyed.”
“The decriminalization of abortion represents a betrayal of the institutional purposes of the organization itself,” the cardinal noted. “The voluntary suppression of all human life is always a crime and undermines the bases of the common good of the human family,” he added.
Nevertheless, Ricardo Noury, the spokesman for the Italian division of AI, said the organization “does not receive economic aid from the Vatican.” “We have never received funds from the Vatican nor from entities that depend on the Catholic Church. That guarantees the independence of the organization as provided for in its statutes,” he said.
The statements by Noury are totally false as numerous Catholics individually contribute to AI. Many Catholic organizations may possibly follow the Vatican’s lead and cease to contribute to AI.