In a new speech, Pope Francis condemned today’s self-centered culture where babies with disabilities are killed in abortions. Pope Francis decried how “the unborn with disabilities are aborted” in a speech to a Vatican conference on disabilities.
The Catholic News Agency has more on the speech:
The pope warned that “the throwaway culture” turns into “a culture of death” when people “presume to be able to establish, on the basis of utilitarian and functional criteria, when a life has value and is worth being lived.”
He pointed out that we see this today especially on the two extremes of the spectrum of life — “the unborn with disabilities are aborted and the elderly close to the end are administered an ‘easy death’ by euthanasia.”
“Every human being has the right to live with dignity and to develop integrally. Even if they are unproductive, or were born with or develop limitations, this does not detract from their great dignity as human persons, a dignity based not on circumstances but on the intrinsic worth of their being,” Pope Francis said in the Apostolic Palace’s Clementine Hall on April 11.
Pope Francis underlined that “vulnerability and frailty are part of the human condition and not something proper only to persons with disabilities.”
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He said that “combating the throwaway culture calls for promoting the culture of inclusion” by “forging and consolidating the bonds of belonging within society.”
The speech follows on the heels of a new document that affirms the value of human life.
Pope Francis this week issued a landmark statement called “Infinite Dignity” that condemns concerning practices such as surrogacy and euthanasia.
The new 20-page declaration Dignitas Infinita, or “Infinite Dignity,” has the Catholic Church proclaiming that “gender theory” plays into “the age-old temptation to make oneself God” as well as that “sex change” surgery is a threat to human dignity.
“In the light of Revelation, the Church resolutely reiterates and confirms the ontological dignity of the human person, created in the image and likeness of God and redeemed in Jesus Christ,” the document declares at its beginning.
“Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God,” the document stated.
“This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.”
The Catholic Church also opposed surrogacy, “through which the immensely worthy child becomes a mere object.”
Quoting from Pope Francis, the document stated, “I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.”
“A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract. Consequently, I express my hope for an effort by the international community to prohibit this practice universally,” the document read.
On the controversial issues of assisted suicide and euthanasia, the document continues the longstanding Catholic teachings against ending human life. The new document says both are not “consistent with respect for the dignity of the human person.”
“There is a special case of human dignity violation that is quieter but is swiftly gaining ground. It is unique in how it utilizes a mistaken understanding of human dignity to turn the concept of dignity against life itself. This confusion is particularly evident today in discussions surrounding euthanasia,” the Vatican said.
The document comes on the 75th anniversary of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Catholic Church emphasized a need to place “respect for the dignity of the human person beyond all circumstances” to be placed in the “center of every legal system.”
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