EU PARLIAMENTARIANS MOUNT ATTACK ON HOLY SEE

BRUSSELS, July 22, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Radical elements of the European Parliament have sponsored resolutions attacking the Catholic Church’s moral authority on abortion and demanding that all church influence on temporal matters be brought to an end.  Maurizio Turco, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Italy’s Radical Party and the sponsor of the resolutions backed by 10 other MEPs, accuses the Catholic Church of a “desire to lay down the law” and meddling with “national legislations on sexual and reproductive health.” A website recommended by Turco’s office equates the Vatican with the Taliban. Pope John Paul II, however, has always said that, in the era of liberal democracy, “the Church never imposes, it only proposes.”  One of Turco’s resolutions denounces the pope’s pro-life statements; “the unbending opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to voluntary interruption of pregnancy [i.e., abortion] as well as to every other [sic] non-natural method of contraception;” and “the principle of secularity implies the total independence of public institutions and their sphere of competence from ecclesiastical and religious influences and organizations.”  Read more on this from the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute:  https://www.c-fam.org/FAX/Volume_5/faxv5n30.html