Editor’s note: Voice of the Family’s Maria Madise gave the following talk at the Rome Life Forum on May 8.
ROME, May 26, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — On Tuesday last week, a symposium was held at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences called “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity. The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development.” This workshop featured two of the world’s leading population control advocates Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, and Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute. The event was jointly hosted by Pontifical Academy for Sciences (PAS), Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and Religions for Peace in anticipation of the new papal encyclical on the environment.
The desired outcome of the last week’s symposium was a joint statement on the moral and religious imperative of sustainable development, highlighting the intrinsic connection between “respect for the environment and respect for people.”
This declaration of an intrinsic connection is very deceptive and links a real human crisis of poverty and modern slavery with certain theories about climate change. The participants in the Vatican workshop aimed to “raise awareness and build a consensus that the values of sustainable development cohere with values of the leading religious traditions, with a special focus on the most vulnerable.”
We in the pro-life and pro-family lobby are entitled to ask the question, what are the implications of this “special focus on the most vulnerable”? Pro-life and pro-family advocates who lobby at the UN, several of whom are present here today, know all too well how environmental issues have become an umbrella to cover a wide spectrum of attacks on human life and the family. These attacks pose an immediate threat to the lives of the most vulnerable – the unborn, the disabled and the elderly – as well as grave violations of parental rights as the primary educators of their children.
In light of the attacks on innocent human life witnessed at the UN under the guise of environmental concerns, it is very troubling to note the desire as stated in the agenda of this workshop “to help build a global movement across all religions for sustainable development and climate change throughout 2015 and beyond.”
It is even more troubling that this timetable exactly coincides with the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UN, which include these very attacks on the most vulnerable members of the world’s population. The SDG negotiations that will culminate in June and July will determine the direction and financial aid for the third world countries for the next 15 years. By the time of these negotiations we should have a papal encyclical on – environmentalism.
Understandably the population control, pro-abortion lobby must be feeling very much empowered by the influence being exercised in the Vatican by two of the culture of death’s leading figures, Ban Ki Moon and Professor Jeffrey Sachs, especially just before the publication of an encyclical on the environment. The UN must eagerly await the papal encyclical on environment and hope that it will help to provide moral justification for imposing the Sustainable Development Goals on the world. If the encyclical remains silent on the hidden UN agenda, one can be quite certain that the UN and Obama administration will find ways how to use the encyclical to promote the sustainable development goals.
Who are the people advising the guardians of the Church teaching, whose job it is to guide and protect the faithful in the loving truth of Christ?
Ban Ki-Moon has on many occasions promoted the “right” to abortion worldwide. He also issued a controversial report this year on sexual violence in conflict zones, which was critical of the lack of so-called “safe abortion” in many conflict situations. The directive openly defies the consensus at the UN that abortion is an issue that should be left to individual nations.
Dr. Jeffrey Sachs is a well-known international proponent of population control and abortion. He is the man sowing panic and fear that the world is overpopulated and that fertility rates must be lowered. In 2007 Sachs claimed “we are bursting at the seams.”
Last week I had a pleasure of hearing an excellent briefing by Elizabeth Yore, a noted children’s rights advocate, on the genesis and development of his agenda. She explained how Sachs’ forerunner Paul Ehrlich offered “solutions” from birth control in drinking water to coercive sterilisations to control population growth. She also discussed how, despite the fact that Ehrlich’s doomsday prophecy was a fraud, the UN began on its course of world wide reproductive edicts to reduce fertility, including contraception, sterilization and abortion.
In a recent article on a well known Italian site La Bussola, Riccardo Cascioli writes: “I got to meet Sachs a few years ago at [a] Meeting in Rimini, where he was one of the speakers, and [when a] question arose on this issue, he replied with a smile: ‘I have spoken with many bishops on birth control and they have told me in private that they agree with me though for obvious reasons cannot say openly.’” The “obvious reasons” are, of course, the Magisterium of the Church, the doctrine that holds every human life sacred without exception.
Dr. Sachs is one of the architects of the millennium development goals and a member of the Executive Board of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Continuing Paul Ehrlich’s line of overpopulation he uses human trafficking, and climate change to justify the urgency of abortion and sterilization tools to achieve the UN proposed SDGs. The Network to which Sachs belongs has proposed draft Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which contain provisions that are radically antagonistic to the right to life from conception to natural death, to the rights and dignity of the family and to the rights of parents as the primary educators of their children.
These meetings that are happening in the shadow of the family synod, aim to bring the language of the papal documents in line with the UN directives. The language that we are opposing at the UN, with the Holy See being the only delegation clearly rejecting the UN’s population control plans for 20 years, is now being given some credence before the publication of a new papal document.
The final document of SDGs at the UN is going to be signed in September. Pope Francis is going to address the UN General Assembly in September on – environmentalism. Very sadly, it is all too obvious that his address could be seen as providing acceptance or validation by the Catholic Church of the global population-control agenda. Pope Francis is already on record as saying that humanity and mankind are behind 99% of the climate change.
Without prejudice to the validity or otherwise of the many theories about climate change, they should not be exploited to bring into question or deny the inviolability and the sanctity of each and every human life, unborn or born, healthy or sick any more than they can justify the rethinking of marriage, the family and parents’ rights or the absence of 200 million Asian girls.
Most of you present know, how laws and practices are formed and manipulated through language.
Environmental issues in international negotiations are not about planting trees, but killing babies, the infirm and the elderly. There is no poor family in the world, whose happiness index arises, when they get rid of their babies and grandparents. The human drama and despair that this language is ultimately bound to bring is unspeakable. Yet these ambassadors of the culture of death are welcomed to advise our pope.
The holding of this vitally important conference in the Vatican at this crucial time in- between the two family synods and in the lead-up to the publication of the Sustainable Development Goals, and with the participation of these leading international pro-abortion advocates, is all the more worrying in the light of the most recent statement of Hillary Clinton saying, effectively, that opposition to abortion must cease to exist, even in the teaching of the Church.
Earlier this year the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency’s Secretary, Gina McCarthy visited the Vatican to coordinate their environmental agenda with the upcoming papal environment encyclical. Upon her arrival at the Vatican, McCarthy acknowledged that the Obama administration is “aligned with Francis on climate change.”
Liz Yore writes in the Remnant Newspaper that Tim Wirth, former Clinton State Department population control chief “who proudly displayed a tree made of condoms in his office,” has been among the Vatican’s invited guests this year.
To sum up, the thought that the UN and Obama administration foresee a shared solution with the Vatican for the problems troubling the modern world should set alarm bells ringing for everyone in the pro-life and pro-family movement. It is a schizophrenic situation, where collaboration is pursued between those who see life as gift from God and those who see it as a burden on the planet.
We must remain strong and faithful in the loving truth of Christ also in this storm. We must not despair or be afraid, but we must strengthen ourselves and those close to us to face this turbulence prayerfully and courageously and to insist with all the means at our disposal that any discussion on the environment must stem from understanding that the family, defined correctly, is the key to sustainable development, particularly at this time when the Synod on the Family has been called by Pope Francis to consider problems facing the family.