Time to reaffirm pro-life teachings

Submitted on August 29, 2002

Send to friend Since 1972, the Catholic Church in the United States and abroad has tolerated a pro-abortion organization calling itself Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC). During its 30-year history the group has claimed to speak as a legitimate voice within the Church to purvey its real agenda: the total mainstreaming of abortion as a method of population control in the West and in the Third World. In October 2001 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops forcefully spoke out about CFFC's real agenda because of its publicity campaign to end the permanent observer status of the Holy See at the United Nations. The then-president of the bishops' conference, Galveston-Houston Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza, said of the organization, "CFFC is, practically speaking, an arm of the abortion lobby in the United States and throughout the world. It is an advocacy group dedicated to supporting abortion. It is funded by a number of powerful and wealthy private foundations, mostly American, to promote abortion as a method of population control." Some of the foundations enabling the CFFC to continue its work are the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (more than $1.5 million in the 1990s) and the Ford Foundation, which has given at least $5 million to the group in the last 12 years for the promotion of abortion and contraception among poor women and their families in Central and South America. In the Chronicle of Philanthropy and Foundation Center's publications, the Ford Foundation's reasons for bankrolling CFFC are clearly given. For example in 1998 the Ford Foundation awarded $218,000 "for continued support to consolidate pro-choice Catholic groups and promote public discussion on sexual and reproductive health . . . reproductive rights . . . sexuality education." Again, in 1998 the foundation gave CFFC another $200,000 "for continued support for public education and the dissemination of Catholic pro-choice values." Of special note is the fact that CFFC has also been funded by the Playboy Foundation. During the last year and half CFFC launched a scurrilous campaign against the Catholic Church and her bishops called "Condoms4Life." The slogan for the campaign is the following: "Because the bishops ban condoms people die." Francis Kissling, president of CFFC, said of the campaign, "The Vatican and the world's bishops bear significant responsibility for the death of thousands of people who have died from AIDS." The very same claim is suggested in CFFC's recently conducted survey of health care practices at Catholic universities titled, "Student Bodies: Reproductive Health Care at Catholic Universities." CFFC surveyors asked whether these institutions dispensed contraceptives, including condoms, or made available "sex education." Of 133 Catholic colleges responding to the survey, 16 of those reported making contraceptives available to students. The writer then concludes that because "only" 16 out of 133 provide contraceptives the level of health care is "dangerously inadequate" while also observing that female students "feel they have been abandoned by their schools on the issue of reproductive health care." The Church can expect CFFC to continue to purvey death, bigotry and falsehood. Also the Church, both laity and clerical, must remember that what happens at Catholic institutions is of great concern to the Church's avowed enemies. Prominent media outlets such as the New York Times have run pieces "warning" that Catholic hospitals "deny health care to poor women" by not permitting abortions. It is in this context that Francis Kissling suggests, "In the current climate, where the Church needs to be pretty careful what it says about sexual morality, maybe the campuses can fly under the radar and not be attacked." It would be a disgrace if this avowed enemy of the Church is correct in her view of the contemporary crisis. Now, more than ever, is the time for the Church's bishops and her priests to uphold the Church's teaching on sexual morality firmly and unequivocally. Now is the time, especially in the face of exploitation by the Church's enemies, for the bishops to reaffirm the Church's teaching on marriage, homosexuality, artificial contraception, abortion and all life issues.