(LifeSiteNews) — A collection of Catholic parents in Poland have penned a letter to members of the Church’s hierarchy demanding this year’s World Youth Day (WYD) event in Lisbon stop its promotion of religious pluralism and the United Nations’ pro-abortion 2030 Agenda.
The January 3 letter, sent to Portuguese Bishop Américo Manuel Alves Aguiar – the head of the 2023 WYD Lisbon organizing committee – and pro-LGBT Cardinal Kevin Farrell – head of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life – begins with a request by “parents of young people planning to attend World Youth Day 2023” to have the event’s “Sustainability commitment” to the United Nations “Agenda 2030” and its corresponding “Sustainable Development Goals” removed as a “guiding element.”
The group of parents also mention WYD’s endorsement of the “Global Tree Initiative” (GTI) that promotes “other religions” such as “Buddhism” on its website.
“The reason for our request is that there is a serious risk that the Agenda 2030 and the Goals, promoted by the organizers of WYD, will have a negative impact on the youth attending WYD,” the parents wrote in a translated letter provided to LifeSiteNews.
“This may occur as a result of a lack of or misunderstanding of the moral wickedness of some of these Goals. It is worth noting that the Agenda and the Goals have been controversial from the outset such that some countries, including the Holy See, have raised serious objections to them (e.g. Vatican Notes of 2015 and 2016),” they added.
The parents explained how many of these globalist goals are “irreconcilable with the Gospel and the Church’s teaching,” may “mislead” or “bring moral confusion to young people,” and can be seen as the Church “condoning the use of morally unworthy methods to achieve the Goals.”
The parents then outlined some of the objectionable goals found in the 2030 Agenda, which LifeSiteNews has previously reported, including the promotion of “universal access” to abortion and contraceptives, the introduction of universal so-called sex education, and the “need to promote so-called gender equality, with the ambiguous concept of gender increasingly interpreted as a culturally-determined sex that everyone has the right to change.”
Turning their attention to the GTI, the parents stated that its website “de facto promotes Buddhism by making it easier for young people to learn about the teachings of, among others, the 14th Dalai Lama, who advocates the permissibility of abortion and accepts homosexual relationships.”
Explaining the harm this may cause, the parents wrote:
Engaging in so-called dialogue with other religions, which some of them contain elements contrary to our faith or even demonic, alongside the light of truth, can lead children and young people who are unprepared for such a confrontation to confusion, abandoning the faith and even, in extreme cases, to demonic enslavement or possession. We do not want this for our children!
While Pope Francis and his appointed officials often promote interreligious “dialogue” as a way of promoting “unity” or a “fraternal” brotherhood, the truth remains that this is done in violation of the traditional teaching of the Church, for similar reasons the parents listed in their letter.
As explained by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Mortalium Animos:
Certainly such attempts can nowise be approved by Catholics, founded as they are on that false opinion which considers all religions to be more or less good and praiseworthy… Not only are those who hold this opinion in error and deceived, but also in distorting the idea of true religion they reject it, and little by little. turn aside to naturalism and atheism, as it is called; from which it clearly follows that one who supports those who hold these theories and attempt to realize them, is altogether abandoning the divinely revealed religion.
In an annex adjoining the letter, the parents further broke down their objections to the endorsement of these programs and the necessity for the Church to abandon its associations with them, mainly by pointing to the increasing departure of the youth from the Catholic faith since these types of programs and initiatives have become commonplace in society.
In the younger generations, especially also in the context of other phenomena such as the COVID pandemic, attitudes of fear and reluctance to marry, to form families, to give birth to children have been more and more present. Such a narrative has been also promoted in the mass media, in the education system for at least some years. It is also increasingly visible in culture, cinema and in many institutions, not excluding government programs. There are entire campaigns urging people to give up the idea of having children or radically limit their number (e.g. anti-natalist propaganda campaigns to this effect in Canada, the UK) in the name of stopping climate warming and forcing governments to take radical steps.
Today, young people are asking the question: why should we have children if we are about to face a climate catastrophe? In the last 3 years in Canada, the UK and elsewhere, these campaigns against having children have been portrayed as an expression of concern for the future of the planet or as helpful in the face of government action to reduce CO2 emissions. According to a 2022 study of a sample of the Polish population, almost 38% of respondents were anti-natalist, with this group having significantly more arguments citing climate change as a reason for not having children. In this light, it is understandable that abortion, contraception and euthanasia are ‘benevolent programs leading to the healing of Mother Earth.’
In response to the letter, the parents explained in an email to LifeSiteNews that just one hour later they received what seemed to be a “copy and paste” reply from Aguiar that failed to address any of the concerns they raised.
The group has since sent another letter to the bishop and to Farrell seeking a more substantive answer but has yet to receive a reply.
As reported by LifeSiteNews last week, the Polish parents are not the only Catholics who have been disturbed by WYD’s promotion of the 2030 Agenda and other secular initiatives.
In fact, Spanish Bishop José Ignacio Munilla recently told Catholic News Agency that “since there were many complaints, the reference [to the 2030 Agenda] was later qualified … [to explain that] we adhere to Agenda 2030 ‘as it is interpreted according to the Catholic Church.’”
This “qualification,” which seeks to reconcile the UN’s anti-Catholic goals with teachings of the Catholic Church, was first published in 2016 by then-Apostolic Nuncio and Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, Archbishop Bernardito Auza.
While Auza’s instructions do insist that Pope Francis and the Vatican “reject” the various pro-abortion and population control efforts found in the 2030 Agenda, there still exists an overall approval of the UN’s mission in the instruction, referencing the “proper and laudable aspirations” of the program and the inclusion of Francis’ 2015 remarks calling the international adoption of the measures a “sign of hope.”
This situation with WYD is not the first time Catholics have been up in arms over what appears to be Francis’ Vatican cozying up to anti-Catholic globalist actors.
In October 2021, Francis appointed prominent abortion and population control advocate Jeffrey Sachs as an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
Interestingly, Sachs is also one of the architects of the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals and has even previously praised Francis’ controversial encyclical Laudato Si for having “made possible” their passage.
In similar fashion in October 2022, Francis appointed pro-abortion, World Economic Forum-linked economist and self-described atheist Mariana Mazzucato to the Pontifical Academy for Life, leading to outrage and concern among the faithful.