Pope Francis: ‘International Solidarity Appears to Be Cooling’

Pope Francis bemoaned a “cooling” of international solidarity in his message for World Food Day Tuesday, while calling the U.N.’s dubious 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development a “rallying cry” for all people of good will.

In his message to Professor José Graziano da Silva, Director General of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the pope endorsed the U.N.’s Agenda for Sustainable Development and hailed the text as “a rallying cry to wake us from the slumber that often paralyzes and inhibits us.”

The U.N. agenda is a “plan of action” that goes well beyond addressing world hunger, however, and encapsulates “17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets,” some of which directly contradict the Catholic Church’s core beliefs regarding human life.

“We are committed to ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including for family planning, information and education,” the agenda declares.

The document also laments the uneven progress in achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), noting that some of the MDGs remain off-track, “in particular those related to… reproductive health.”

To take just one example of how the United Nations goes about putting this plan into action, one need look no further than Ireland and its recent referendum legalizing abortion and removing constitutional protections for the unborn.

In the years leading up to the referendum, the United Nations repeatedly attacked Ireland for its pro-life laws, using its international muscle to demand that the predominantly Catholic nation repeal the Eighth Amendment to its constitution that bans the procedure.

In 2014, a U.N. committee in Geneva charged with examining state compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights alleged that by declaring the right to life of unborn children the Irish constitution violated international law.

Members of the committee told Irish Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald that the eighth amendment defending the unborn child represented “unacceptable cruelty.” One member asked, “Can the delegation [from Ireland] explain how it reconciles its current laws on abortion with its obligations [under the treaty] — which is, I may remind you — an absolute right?”

Two years later, another ruling from U.N. human rights “experts” said that Ireland’s abortion ban “subjects women to discriminatory, cruel and degrading treatment.”

This committee, consisting of experts from 17 nations, alleged that Ireland’s law violated the U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and demanded that Ireland provide “timely and accessible procedures for pregnancy termination.”

The so-called U.N. “experts” specifically ruled that Ireland must provide abortion access for cases involving fatal fetal abnormalities.

Again in 2017, the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) committee attempted to pressure Ireland into relaxing its abortion laws, stating that the Eighth Amendment violated women’s human rights because it “unduly restricts access to abortion.”

The U.N. committee insisted that Irish law be changed to allow “the introduction of amendments to current legislation governing access to abortion.”

The publication of the “Concluding Observations” was reportedly timed for release just ahead of International Women’s Day on Wednesday, March 8, 2017.

After the release of the U.N. report, Cora Sherlock of the Irish Pro-Life Campaign suggested that CEDAW was violating its own charter, since it was established to highlight and eliminate discrimination. Abortion, Sherlock stated, “is the ultimate discrimination as it targets the most vulnerable in society, namely unborn babies.”

Noting that that there is no right to abortion in international human rights law, Sherlock observed that Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the “right to life, liberty and security of persons” and does not arbitrarily exclude unborn persons.

If Pope Francis is correct in saying that international solidarity is “cooling,” the U.N.’s inexorable push for abortion on demand under the guise of “reproductive rights” is a central cause of the frost.

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