January 4, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) – In the wake of the pope’s recent World Day of Peace address and Christmas address affirming that abortion and homosexual ‘marriage’ are incompatible with true peace, Mexico and Spain’s top bishops are seeking to renew the fight for the values of life and family in their countries.
Only days after Pope Benedict XVI released the text of the address, Mexico City’s Cardinal Archbishop Norberto Rivera Carrera held a press conference assuring reporters that the Catholic Church would continue the fight for the values of life and family—values that have been under attack by recent Supreme Court decisions permitting abortion and homosexual “marriage.”
“The Church will continue to proclaim and to follow this doctrine, this truth, this road of family as the unit of the society, of human life as a fundamental right, to those who wish to follow them, and others will follow other roads which we judge to be a way of death,” stated Rivera.
When we see that the family “is affected by divorce, by homosexual unions, by abortion, etc., we are convinced that not only the life of people is affected. The society itself, which suffers deterioration, is affected,” said Rivera.
Madrid’s Cardinal Archbishop Antonio Maria Rouco Valera added his voice to the chorus on December 30, in a homily given in the city’s Plaza de Colon, declaring that attacks on life and family involve “a crisis of faith with few precedents in the history of Europe and Spain.”
“Only the family conceived and lived in the fullness of its truth, as taught by the unequivocal and indestructible language of human nature, clears the horizon of hope for man and the society of our day,” said Rouco Valera, who added that “to ignore it, and even more, to show disrespect for it is to jeopardize its very historic viability. Without the truth of matrimony, the living organism, which is society, would disintegrate. It would put man himself into danger.”
The cardinal affirmed that a lack of love was at the heard of the “chilling tragedy of abortion practiced massively since the ‘70s,” backed by “legislation, which first depenalized and then legitimized” the killing of the unborn.
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The words of the cardinals echo Pope Benedict XVI, who noted in his World Day of Peace address that “true peacemakers ” are “those who love, defend and promote human life in all its dimensions, personal, communitarian and transcendent. Life in its fullness is the height of peace. Anyone who loves peace cannot tolerate attacks and crimes against life.”
“Those who insufficiently value human life and, in consequence, support among other things the liberalization of abortion, perhaps do not realize that in this way they are proposing the pursuit of a false peace,” said the pope, who also highlighted the “need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union.”
Pope Benedict also denounced gender ideology, which calls into question the very sexual identity of the human person, in his Christmas message.
“While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question,” he wrote.