By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman
APARECIDA, Brazil, February 13, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Catholic Bishops of Brazil have a long record of lukewarmness – or even apparent opposition – to the Church’s teaching regarding human life issues. However, at the Shrine of Our Lady of (the Immaculate) Conception in Aparecida last week, they made what appears to be a declaration of war against abortion and other offenses against human life.
The First International Congress in Defense of Life, which was held in Aparecida from February 5-10, formulated the Declaration of Aparecida in Defense of Life, which was read by Bishop Dimas Lara, Secretary of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB) at the closing of the conference (see full text of declaration at https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/feb/08021312.html).
The Declaration seeks to take the battle over human life and family issues to the United Nations and to the wealthy international foundations that have sought to impose abortion, birth control, liberal sex education, and homosexuality in the “undeveloped” nations, in a eugenicist attempt to suppress their populations and exploit their economies.
“Since 1952 a global program has been conducted that is devoted to world population control, especially for the poorest countries,” the Declaration reads. “That program was developed initially by the Population Council created by the Rockefeller Foundation, which included the promotion of an anti-birth mentality, including the implantation of contraceptives, legal abortion, and other attacks on life, within a geopolitical and eugenicist perspective, instead of combating poverty by investing in the economic development of the poor.”
“Having implanted this contraceptive mentality, abortion and euthanasia became part of a demographic policy integrated into a wider policy of globalization that seeks the implantation of economic monopolies.”
“Since the 1980s, under the strategic plan designed by the large foundations that promote abortion, population control policies have been presented deliberately camouflaged under the appearance of a false emancipation of the woman and the defense of supposed sexual and reproductive rights spread by the creation and financing of an international network of NGOs that promote feminism, liberal sex education, and homosexuality.”
The Declaration also incriminates the UN and the International Planned Parenthood Federation for pushing the population control agenda on poorer nations.
“The United Nations, since the 1980s, has been committed to birth control policies that today constitute a huge educational focus. Through its organs it has succeeded in questioning the Universal Natural Law and the positive rights of each nation,” the Declaration states. It continues, accusing the organization of “creating a dominant legal system in international law by which the relativism of ideas and actions, for the benefit of special interests, is consecrated in detriment to the fundamental rights of the human person, the very reason for its creation.”
“The International Planned Parenthood Federation,” it continues in the next paragraph, “which constitutes the second largest NGO in the world…with its local affiliates in Brazil, its satellite organizations, such as the Inter-American Parliamentary Group for Population and Development, and is the principle provider of suction machines for early abortion, has as its objective the implantation of contraception, sterilization, abortion, and the employment of health professionals for the approval of these practices in all developing countries.”
The Declaration then issues a string of denunciations, including against “the attempt to decriminalize and legalize abortion in Latin America”, “fraud in the scientific field, the manipulation of language, and government authorizations” which permit the distribution of birth control, “hedonistic sex education,” “gender ideology”, “imposing homosexuality on children and young people”, and “attempts to implant euthanasia”.
It finishes by proposing a series of actions and strategies to combat anti-life forces, including “permanent observers in the National Congress” to track legislation, “legal actions” against violations of the right to life, and educational programs on the part of Church authorities. It also echoes the Vatican’s petition to the UN for a global “moratorium” on abortion and euthanasia.
Bishop Dimas Lara, in his opening statement to the conference, also points to the subversion of Catholics by the materialism of the modern world as a source for the culture of death.
“‘When the Bishop of Rome extends his gaze over the whole world,’ affirmed John XXIII…‘He contemplates the sad spectacle of human freedom that, under the temptation of the advantages of modern technological progress, is distracted from seeking higher goods and weakens the energies of the spirit, which constitute the strength of resistance to the errors that in the course of history always bring spiritual and moral decadence and the ruin of nations,’” said Lara.
“Much of the progress of modern technology produces these results because they are offered by a culture deliberately constructed to destroy the very idea of God. This culture is not content with just struggling from outside against the Church, but also invades its key ideas, penetrating to the very spirit of its members, including religious and priests, and contaminates them silently with its poison.”
“By means of its most conscientious members, this new society works in a very effective way: it uses the means of science and technology, social and economic possibilities, indefatigably pursues the execution of a carefully-designed strategy, exercises an almost absolute domination in international organizations, in financial companies, in the media, constructing a world that, having reached its objectives, will no longer be able to say it is enlightened by that light, nor that it possesses that life that the Word of God, becoming man, came to bring to mankind.”
The recent statements by the Brazilian bishops, who for many years have been relatively silent about human life issues and have associated themselves with the nation’s socialistic movements, seem to indicate an almost militant desire to confront the forces of global population control that have made deep inroads in Latin America in recent years.
One Argentine periodical is saying that the aggressive language used by the bishops means that they are “at war” with Brazil’s president Luiz Lula, whose health minister has promoted the decriminalization of all abortion. Currently in Brazil there are no criminal penalties for abortion only in the cases of rape or danger to the life of the mother, although both are technically still prohibited.
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
The War Against Abortion: Brazilians Come Out Swinging at Massive Pro-Life Conference
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/feb/08021201.html
Brazilian Bishops Launch Major National Campaign Against Abortion, Euthanasia, and Embryonic Stem Cell Research
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/feb/08020810.html
Brazilian Government’s National Health Conference Rejects Abortion
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/nov/07112002.html