By Free Republic | Created at 2024-10-24 20:13:42 | Updated at 2024-10-24 22:24:50
2 hours ago
Pro-choice Catholics protest at Vatican after abortion left off summit agenda
The Guardian ^ | October 3, 2024 | Angela Giuffrida
Posted on 10/24/2024 1:11:55 PM PDT by Morgana
A vibrantly coloured, 15-metre-long quilt woven with stories of Catholic women who have had abortions has been unrolled outside the Vatican in protest against the topic being left off the agenda of a major summit hosted by Pope Francis.
Thursday’s demonstration by Catholics for Choice, a US-based abortion rights group, comes days after the pontiff emphasised his traditional views of women while reiterating that abortion was “murder” and that doctors who terminate pregnancies were “hitmen”.
Those words, made during a visit to Belgium, were enough to prompt the prime minister, Alexander De Croo, to summon the Vatican’s ambassador, it emerged on Thursday.
Speaking to parliament, De Croo lambasted the remarks as “unacceptable”, adding he had invited the Holy See’s top diplomat in the country, the apostolic nuncio, “for discussions.”
“My message to the apostolic nuncio will be very clear: what happened there is unacceptable,” he said. “We do not need lessons on how our lawmakers democratically approve laws. The time when the church dictated the law in our country is fortunately long behind us,” he said.
The month-long, closed-door summit in the Vatican, known as a synod, is the final session of a debate on the future of the church and how to adapt it to the needs of Catholics today. But decisions on some of the most divisive topics, including women’s ordination and blessings for same-sex couples, have been postponed until next year, while abortion was never on the agenda.
Official Catholic church teaching condemns abortion in all circumstances, even if there is a risk to the mother’s life. But data from the Pew Research Centre earlier this year showed that the majority of Catholics in the United States, which has the fourth-largest Catholic population in the world, believed it should be legal in all or most cases.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
TOPICS: Catholic
KEYWORDS: abortion; catholic; prolife
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1 posted on 10/24/2024 1:11:55 PM PDT by Morgana
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