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ROME, February 19, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Mario Francesco Agnoli, an Italian judge and columnist, has said that with its recent controversial report, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child may be a case of the population control lobby “striking first” in its “war against the Catholic Church” because it is seeing its influence start to wane. The February 5 report demanded the Catholic Church abandon most of its teaching on human sexuality and abortion.

Agnoli, who serves as president of the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal of Bologna, said that the timing of the report is perhaps significant, asking, “why the UN has chosen this moment to attack the Catholic Church with such fierce determination.” 

Writing on the Catholic opinion website Liberta e Persona, Agnoli said, the UN is likely “concerned by the rumblings of possible future losses,” like the more restrictive abortion law in Spain and the suspension of the same-sex “marriage” law in France. The “Malthusian” population control lobby at the UN, he said, has “identified the Catholic Church as the catalyst of the resistance in Europe and in the West.”

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“It is not unreasonable to believe that behind the intervention of the Committee is the front-lobby of the Malthusians (feminist, pro-abortion, homosexualist), which, by different roads, but converging, have always aimed at reducing the world’s population.” 

These “highly influential lobbies,” Agnoli said, could be beginning to feel the “growing, strengthening and perhaps unexpected opposition of the people to their projects.”

Responding to a previous column by religion expert and sociologist Massimo Introvigne, who said that the UN Committee had “declared war” on the Catholic Church, Agnoli said that, as in any war, the Committee has chosen to strike at a point of vulnerability in using the clerical sex abuse scandal as a wedge issue.

The Committee “has…chosen a real weak point, of genuine remorse, a painful chapter of history of the Church. One which can be used to justify criticism and reignite dislikes, but only to manipulate them for purposes that have nothing to do with the rights of children and their protection and, consequently, with its mission.”

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“The reality is that, as always when you declare war, the pretext is only a pretext, which serves to hide the least, worst and the real causes and real purposes intended.”  

“In general, in wars with armies, bombs and trenches what you really want is only fully revealed once the conflict has ended, when the winners are planning to bring home the result. Now wars are fought with other tools and the battlefields are those of the mass media, hammering home the advertising, conferences, roundtables, statements of politicians, leaders of thought and the alleged representatives of civil society,” he wrote.

But the Church has made a staunch defense, he said, pointing out that the Committee’s report took no account of the changes made in recent years that has made the Catholic Church today “probably the institution with the most stringent mandatory and transparent rules on the subject of pedophilia.”

The Italian paper Il Foglio wrote in an editorial that the UN’s report comes from a “totalitarian” impulse. “The attack by the UN is a pure attack on religious freedom, which is freedom without adjectives.”

The Catholic Church, Il Foglio said, “has no power to impose its truth, but to deny the right to proclaim it” is a separate question. “The intervention of the Committee has openly and primarily aimed to silence it, clear it from the public arena, to deprive [the Church] of freedom where it legitimately exercises its prerogatives, and this is especially true for Catholic schools.”

The paper continued, “The common and primary experience of every totalitarianism is to deny the freedom of teaching, and the sixteen pages put together by eighteen ‘independent’ experts at the UN aspire to lay the foundations for a definitive ‘re-formatting’ of secular and postmodern education, which should also apply to the Catholics, under a progressive mantle that justifies abuse.” 

Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi said February 7 that while the Church has no problem receiving justified criticisms of its policies, she will never adopt an “ideological” attitude towards human sexuality just to please certain elements at the United Nations. Lombardi added that the Committee had overstepped the boundaries of their competence “and interfered in the doctrinal and moral positions of the Catholic Church,” revealing an “ideological vision of sexuality.”
“Certainly, while the Holy See was the object of an initiative and media attention that, in our view, was unjustly pernicious, it must be recognized that the committee itself has attracted serious and well-founded criticisms,” Lombardi said.

Father Lombardi added, however, that despite recommendations from many Catholic commentators, the Vatican will not withdraw from the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Holy See was among the first sovereign states to ratify the Convention, but maintains the “reservations” that it will continue to interpret it according to Catholic teaching.