News

By Hilary White

LONDON, June 21, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The appointment of Archbishop Rino Fisichella to a major new Vatican office would be a “total disaster” for the defense of innocent unborn life around the world, John Smeaton said today.

Smeaton, director of the British Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) and one of the most influential voices in the global pro-life movement, told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) in an interview that pro-life people everywhere must strenuously oppose the appointment.

“We need people to come out publicly, to pin their colors to the mast,” he said. “People need to understand what a total disaster [the appointment] would be.”

Smeaton was responding to a recent uptick in rumors from Rome that Fisichella, currently head of the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV), will shortly be appointed to head the soon-to-be announced Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization. Italian journalist and Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli reported in Il Giornale this weekend that the decision was already a certainty. Although no official announcement has yet been made, Vatican sources have informed LSN that the rumors are well founded.

“We’re in a different situation now, if he’s appointed. If that comes to pass, it means we’ve definitively lost a battle,” Smeaton warned.

Smeaton spoke of a “new phase” of the pro-life fight overall, with the establishment in the upper reaches of the Catholic Church’s governing bodies of “a school of thought that upholds the right to abortion.”

Under this new theological concept, he said, it becomes established “within the Church” that abortion “becomes a matter for the individual conscience of the parties involved, rather than the dignity and inviolability of human life.”

Fisichella was the author of an article published in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano in March last year supporting doctors who had aborted the twin children of a 9-year-old rape victim in Brazil. The article caused a furor as abortion campaigners around the world took it as endorsement of abortion from the Vatican’s highest levels. Pro-life advocates, a number of them senior members of the PAV, have since been calling for Fisichella to be removed.

In his article, Fisichella asserted that the doctors had acted only after due consideration of their consciences and stated definitively that they did not “deserve” excommunication for killing the twins. This declaration was lauded by American abortion campaigner Frances Kissling (among others) who called it a “crack” in the Church’s position.

Smeaton and others have argued that even the appearance of Vatican approval of abortion has immeasurably helped the abortion movement around the world.

Professor Joseph Seifert, a senior member of the PAV and the founder and rector of the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein, has said that Fisichella’s manifest opposition to Catholic teaching means that he is not fit for any leadership position in the Church.

Seifert said that with his article Fisichella promoted “a new moral doctrine diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Church and particularly to those of the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae.” This “would make it impossible to nominate him as bishop of a diocese, let alone of a diocese linked to a Cardinal’s hat and rank.”

Smeaton said today, “I believe babies will die, that babies are dying now as a result of this man’s statement. And that as it goes along, more babies will die. Because as killing develops and grows, so it becomes more acceptable to the conscience.”

The new Vatican office will be key to the plans of Pope Benedict XVI to reawaken the faith in long-established Christian parts of the world, particularly Europe, but which have since fallen away. Fisichella’s appointment as head of a Pontifical Council would be a step up from, and widely interpreted as a reward for his current work as head of the Pontifical Academy for Life. 

To express concerns:

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
William Cardinal Levada
Piazza del S. Uffizio, 11,
00193 Rome, Italy
Fax: 06.69.88.34.09
E-mail: [email protected]

Secretariat of State
Tarcisio Bertone, Cardinal, Secretary
Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano,
Citta del Vaticano 00120
Phone: 06.69.88.39.13
Fax: 06.69.88.52.55

Read LSN’s extensive coverage of the “Recife Affair”
https://www.lifesitenews.com/search/index.html?q=fisichella&sa=Go

Watch LSN Editor-in-Chief John Henry Westen give a summary of the Fisichella scandal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ertQu1pAAaA