Pope John Paul II sends prayers and
words of support to Western Australian prolifers

 

This is the full text of the message Pope John Paul II sent to the Archbishop of Perth, Barry James Hickey, through the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, in support of the WA pro-life cause.

Your Grace,

With grave concern, His Holiness Pope John Paul has received news of the legislation being considered in Western Australia to provide much freer access to abortion than is allowed by the existing laws.

He fully supports you and the Bishops of Western Australia in opposing these efforts and in defending those who cannot defend themselves. He joins his voice not only with yours but also with the voice of the unborn who have no voice of their own.

Yours is a witness to the incomparable value of human life and to the inviolable right to life which belongs to every human being. It is a witness which recognizes that human life must be defended from the moment of conception and cherished always as the most precious of gifts.

In the season of Lent some years ago, the Holy Father spoke words which in the meantime have become more pertinent still.

"If a society concedes the right to kill a human being when still in the womb," he said, "then that society starts down a slope with incalculable consequences in the moral order.

"If it becomes licit to take a human life when it is weakest, wholly dependent on its mother, on its parents, on the strength of human conscience, then what dies is not only an innocent human being but also human conscience itself. And who knows how widely and quickly the cancer of this destruction of conscience will spread (Homily, Fifth Sunday of Lent, 1981)."

It is only by silencing the voice of human conscience that one can silence the voice of the unborn child. And a society in which conscience is silenced is a society where there can be no culture or progress worthy of the human person. It will be instead a society where the strong wage war relentlessly on the weak.

During his visit in 1986, His Holiness glimpsed the great future which lies before Western Australia, but he insists that a society which permits the killing of the weak and defenseless, especially a society which kills its own children, has no real future.

This is an issue which goes to the very heart of human society and he therefore urges the Catholic people of Western Australia and all men and women of good will to defend both the unborn child and human conscience in a way which respects the most basic demands of the moral law, which no one has the right to ignore.

Praying most fervently to God, the Giver of life, that the voice of conscience will prevail and that the rights of the unborn will be respected, His Holiness imparts to you, to your brother Bishops and to all the Catholic people of Western Australia his Apostolic Blessings.

Yours sincerely in Christ,

+Angelo Cardinal Sodano

Secretary of State

 

Other statements of the Holy Father and Bishops on Abortion