“A high-ranking Vatican official stunned Catholics during a recent television interview by inadvertently confirming the Catholic Church’s retreat from one of its fundamental moral positions. The official in question said on Italy’s national network Aug. 26 that the church had no interest in opposing that nation’s law allowing abortion. Enacted in 1978, Law 194 legalizes abortions in the first trimester and permits them afterward only if the mother’s life is in danger or if the fetus displays ‘serious abnormalities or malformations,’ the law states. That official even had the audacity to say that Law 194 represented ‘a pillar of our social life.’ Astonishingly, the Vatican official who made those remarks was Cardinal Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which Pope John Paul II founded specifically to oppose abortion. Tommaso Scandroglio, reporter for the Catholic newspaper La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, perfectly described the impact: ‘It is as if the president of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League is declaring himself in favor of the Holocaust.’ In May 2021, the Vatican’s leading theological authority after the pope discouraged American bishops from withholding Communion from Catholic politicians who support abortion. In issuing that letter, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, contradicted both his own church’s catechism and canon law. The Catholic catechism describes abortion a ‘moral evil.’”
“Mother Earth, Pregnant Mothers,” FrontPageMag.com, Sept. 29, 2022
