ROME — Pope Francis said Wednesday the life of every “conceived child” is “sacred and inviolable” while calling for the defense of the unborn.
The pope’s words take on particular significance because they were directed to the Polish pro-life group “Yes to Life” that has been engaged in a battle with the European Union over Poland’s abolishment of eugenic abortions of children with Down syndrome and other disabilities.
“At the request of the Polish foundation ‘Yes to Life,’ today I blessed the bells that bear the name: ‘The voice of the unborn,’” Francis said following his weekly General Audience in the Vatican.
Noting that the bells would be sent to Ecuador and Ukraine, he expressed his wish that they might be “a sign of commitment for these nations and for all to defend human life from conception to natural death.”
“May their sound proclaim to the world the ‘Gospel of life” and awaken people’s consciences and the memory of the unborn,” he said. “I entrust to your prayers every child conceived, whose life is sacred and inviolable.”
Pope Francis (L) is cheered by children during the general audience in Paul VI Hall at the Vatican on October 27, 2021. (FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP via Getty Images)
In October 2020, Pope Francis had already thrown his support behind Poland’s pro-life movement as radical feminists and European bureaucrats allied in attacking the country for its legal protections of unborn life.
Invoking the memory of Saint John Paul II, the first Polish pope, Francis told Polish pilgrims that John Paul “always called for a privileged love for the last and the defenseless and for the protection of every human being, from conception to natural death.”
“Through the intercession of Mary Most Holy and the sainted Polish pontiff, I ask God to instill in the hearts of all respect for the lives of our brothers and sisters,” he continued, “especially the most fragile and defenseless, and to give strength to those who welcome and care for it, even when this requires heroic love.”
Francis’s words followed a period of social unrest in Poland over a ruling by the nation’s Constitutional Tribunal striking down an allowance for abortions on the basis of fetal anomalies such as Down syndrome.
There can be “no protection of the dignity of an individual without the protection of life,” the court declared.
In its decision, the court argued that aborting a child because of probable birth defects constituted eugenics, an effort to rid society of the weak and undesirable, notoriously practiced by the Nazis against Jews and disabled persons, and advocated by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger against blacks and minorities in the United States.
In the aftermath of the ruling, demonstrators interrupted Catholic Masses around Poland to protest the decision. In Poznan, Warsaw, Wroclaw, Krakow and other cities, protesters stormed into churches while services were taking place, “confronting priests with obscenities” and spray-painting churches with slogans and phone numbers of abortion providers, Associated Press (AP) reported.
Poznan Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki praised the ruling, calling on Poles to unite behind efforts to defend all human life.
“The position of the Catholic Church on the right to life is unchanged; obscenities, violence and disrupting services as well as profanation are not the right method of action,” the archbishop said.
Cardinals and bishops during a prayer lead by Pope Francis in Saint Peter’s basilica at the Vatican, as part of the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, on September 1, 2015. Francis called on priests to pardon women who have abortions, and the doctors who perform them. (ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP/Getty Images)
The Church “cannot cease to defend life, nor can she fail to proclaim that every human being must be protected from conception until natural death,” he noted. “On this point, the Church, as Pope Francis often says, cannot compromise, because it would be guilty of the culture of rejection that is so widespread today, always affecting the most needy and vulnerable.”
“I am asking all the faithful for prayers for unborn children, for parents expecting children, and for the conversion of those who use violence,” he said.
That same week, Pope Francis released a letter to Europe laying out his “dream” for the continent’s future that included the elimination of legalized abortion.
I dream of a Europe “that protects life at every stage, from the time it arises unseen in the womb until its natural end, since no human being is the master of life, either his or her own life or the lives of others,” Francis wrote.
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