News

(co-authored by Steve Jalsevac)

TORUN, Poland, November 26, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The “destruction of countless children in the womb” and the “corruption” of children already born will be the result of the massive confusion over comments on the use of condoms for AIDS prevention by Pope Benedict XVI, published this week, a prominent pro-life Catholic has said. 

John Smeaton, head of the UK’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, the oldest pro-life organization in the world said, addressing Pope Benedict directly, “Countless children, perhaps my own grandchildren, will be deliberately corrupted as a result of the exploitation and misrepresentation of your interview about condoms by opponents of Catholic teaching within the Catholic Church.”

Since Benedict’s remarks on condoms to a German journalist in the interview book “Light of the World” were leaked earlier this month, thousands of news stories, editorials and blog posts appeared in the media claiming that Pope Benedict XVI had “changed” the Church’s teaching.

Smeaton, writing last week from Torun, Poland where he addressed the third international Congress of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin and the International Gilson Society, has taken the entire affair as a sign that all is not well even among the Curia in Rome.

“My heart breaks,” Smeaton said, “for my children and for my grandchildren; my heart breaks for the children of Britain and for children throughout the world. My heart breaks as I witness leading figures in the Vatican fomenting universal confusion on Catholic teaching on the use of condoms.” 

“Countless women will be exploited by selfish or insensitive or brutal husbands and boyfriends, as a result of the confusion generated in the mass media by opponents, within the Church, of Catholic teaching on the use of condoms.”

Smeaton called to account many of the world’s Catholic bishops for failing in their responsibility to adequately uphold Church teaching on the life issues. He stated, “the failure of Catholic bishops to teach their flocks on matters relating to the fundamental right to life is directly responsible for great confusion and, consequently, for the failure of the overwhelming majority of Catholics, both clerical and lay, to provide truly effective resistance to the greatest legalized slaughter of human beings in the history of the world.”

The international pro-life leader charged that “Countless millions of unborn children are being killed each year and the policy of very many Catholic bishops is contributing hugely to this deplorable situation.”

In recent years, Smeaton has focused much of his work and writing on the separation in western culture between the sexual act and the conception of a child. He maintains that the pro-life movement will not succeed in eradicating the abortion mentality until it addresses that separation.

In his address in Poland, Smeaton said, “The world’s rejection of the inseparability of the unitive and procreative elements of marital acts had led to the imposition, in Britain, on families, of access to induced abortion and birth control drugs and devices to children at school.”

The only thing that will redress the situation, he says, is “a clear understanding of the relationship of the right to life to the truth about the conjugal act and its essentially procreative nature”.

“This understanding is the foundation stone of a pro‐life movement in Europe which is beginning to have a real impact in the European institutions.”

The linking of the defense of human life with the “truth about the transmission of human life through the marriage act” he said, “must become the foundation stone of the pro‐life movement worldwide.”