Many Catholics and others were puzzled by the appearance of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs and former Senator Tim Wirth as speakers or honored guests at a Vatican sponsored conference on global warming.
All three have spent years actively undermining Church teaching on questions of abortion and UN-style family planning, which includes active population control.
In recent weeks, Ban issued a report calling for women in conflict situations to have access to abortion even if it’s against the law, ignoring the issue of national sovereignty.
Jeffrey Sachs, professor at Columbia University in New York, ran a global campaign for more than a decade to get abortion code language into the Millennium Development Goals, an important document that guided the spending of billions of dollars over the past 15 years.
Former Democratic Senator from Colorado Tim Wirth was U.S. Under-Secretary of State during the Cairo Conference on Population and Development. He, along with Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, was in open war with the Vatican over so-called “reproductive rights.” Wirth famously had a Christmas tree in his office that was festooned with condoms.
Stefano Gennarini, Director of Legal Studies at the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), a UN-accredited NGO, got an exclusive interview with the archbishop who sponsored the meeting at the Vatican and who invited these opponents of Church teaching. Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo is a progressive Argentine Bishop who heads the Pontifical Academies for Science and Social Sciences, which together hosted the “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity” workshop.
Gennarini asked Sanchez if he knew Sachs had written that abortion is a “low-cost” way to to reduce fertility. Sanchez brushed off the question, “The climate crisis leads to poverty and poverty leads to new forms of slavery and forced migration, and drugs, and all this can also lead to abortion.”
Gennarini pressed Sanchez on collaborating so closely with abortion proponents such as Ban Ki-moon and Jeffrey Sachs. Sanchez once again deflected by attacking the Tea Party and making accusations of dishonesty:
“The Tea Party and all those whose income derives from oil have criticized us, but not my superiors, who instead authorized me and several of them participated,” he said.
Gennarini wanted to know how the questions of abortion and population control were resolved prior to the Vatican meeting.
Sanchez said, “..the draft SDGs [new development goals replacing the MDGs] don’t even mention abortion or population control. They speak of access to family planning and sexual and reproductive rights. The interpretation and application of these depends on governments.” Sanchez seemed unaware that it is precisely the phrase “reproductive rights” that is used to promote a right to abortion.
Later in the interview Sanchez once more smeared American conservatives, when asked whether Pope Francis agrees that climate change can be assigned to human activity:
This I do not know. But I suppose yes, because he would not write an encyclical just to say that man is responsible for the earth but that everything is fine! Perhaps, you believe, like those who live off oil, that everything is fine? The Academy says otherwise, as do all the rest of scientific academies in the world. Only a few scientists paid by lobby groups think differently.
Gennarini challenged Sanchez on the science, specifically on the lack of temperature change over the past 18 years and the difficulty in finding any definitive correlation between human activity and large-scale climate change.
Sanchez proceeded to accuse Gennarini, C-Fam and others of making “false accusations against us.”
You can rest assured that the two academies of which I am chancellor are against abortion and against population control simply because we follow the Magisterium of the Popes, on which we directly depend. I hope that you too will follow this teaching, when it speaks of the gravity of the economic situation, which is all geared towards profit, and when it will speak of the gravity of human responsibility for changes in the climate, as I hope the next encyclical will say.
It has been reported that the controversial document has been delayed, quite possibly because of the push back the Vatican is getting from American and other political conservatives and global warning skeptics.
Follow Austin Ruse on Twitter @austinruse
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