Vatican Blasts UN After It Calls Catholic Church’s Pro-Life Teachings “Promoting Torture”

Life News ^ | May 7, 2014 | Steven Ertelt

[NYer]

Vatican officials are blasting the Untied Nations after a UN panel made wild-eyed claims that the Catholic Church’s pro-life teachings “promote torture.” The UN panel is expected to release its report on the Catholic Church at the end of the month.

As international pro-life leader Austin Ruse writes as Breitbart:

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi told committee members, “The Holy See condemns the torture of anyone, including those tortured and killed before they are born.” This was a pointed comment to a committee manned largely by outspoken abortion advocates.

“Late-term abortion constitutes torture,” he said to Felice Gaer, an American and vice-chairman of the committee. Tomasi went on to charge Canada and the United Kingdom with torture for allowing late-term abortions from which children who survive are left to die without medical attention.

Gaer, a fierce abortion advocate, remained “concerned” about the teaching of the Catholic Church on abortion. “Women should have the right to choose abortion,” she told Tomasi. Another committee member compared the Church’s position to “psychological torture.”

Tomasi warned the committee about interfering with freedom of religion, one of the fundamental human rights from the Universal Declaration and insisted the Church has no power to impose its teachings on anyone, including Catholics.

The UN Convention Against Torture is silent on abortion. It does not even mention “reproductive health,” a phrase often used to promote abortion. No UN treaty mentions abortion, and only one mentions reproductive health, yet members of the treaty monitoring system decided years ago to try and force a right to abortion onto signatories of various treaties including the Treaty on the Rights of Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention Against Torture.

Some of the committee members seemed slightly cowed by public criticism of their abortion advocacy. George Tugushi, from the country of Georgia, said, “We all know the position of the Holy See on abortion.” He said the committee was mostly concerned about women being stigmatized after having an abortion.

In an email to LifeNews, Steve Mosher of the Population Research Institute, a prominent pro-life group working on an international level, says he’s not surprised.

“It’s not as if we haven’t been warned. Last January, the chairwoman of another UN committee, this one the Committee on the Rights of the Child, “demanded” that the Holy See change Catholic doctrine,” he recalled, “because the current position of the Church supposedly violates the human rights of children.”

 

“The Committee Against Torture is criticizing the Holy See’s initial report under the “Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.” The problem, according to the “Solidarity Center for Law and Justice”, is that the Committee against Torture relies upon information that it receives from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (“OHCHR”) and various anti-Catholic NGOs,” Mosher explained. “What NGOs? The Center for Reproductive Rights, to name just one. And the CRR, as it is called, is in the forefront of groups which maintain that the position of the Catholic Church on contraception and abortion constitute a kind of torture.”

The chairman of the Committee on Torture, Claudio Grossman, has a long history of abortion and population control activism, Mosher noted. In 1994 he participated in a conference that examined possible strategies for ensuring that reproductive rights are respected in practice at the local, national, and international levels — and reproductive rights is the catch-phrase for abortion.

[NYer]

Torture, ping!

[DoughtyOne]

Paging global moving services... paging global moving services... please pick up the blue courtesy phone...

[SandRat]

[Sun]

Does the U.N. call Islamic terrorists torturers?

[IronJack]

So let's see ... Burning a helpless child alive with chemicals, or dismembering it in the womb, or partially delivering it then punching a hole in its skull and sucking its brains out is NOT torture, but standing guard over the right of that child to be born IS.

Got it. Certainly goes to enhance the UN's credibility.

[mountainlion]

UN Kill Steal and Destroy?

[teacherwoes]

I think having the UN within the US is a kind of “psychological torture”.

[miss marmelstein]

There’s a curse on that most beautiful building, sadly, one of my very favorite architectural structures in the whole wide world. I hope one day to see it housing good old American businesses...

[Prospero]

The UN under-belly, their fleet of Third World "NGO's" flaunt the United Nations' own imprimatur at the direct behest of the Islamic oil sheikhs.

Those already mislead have their prejudices reinforced by a ridiculous headline.

It's the very essence of "drive-by" journo-lism.

Anyone who still collects money for these awful people, for UNICEF, et al., really ought to engage in a "searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves."

[Salvation]

**Vatican Blasts UN After It Calls Catholic Church’s Pro-Life Teachings “Promoting Torture”**

How about another blast for the U. N.?

And a lot of births for the babies that are now being tortured.

[NYer]

There’s a curse on that most beautiful building,

I once had a neighbor who was part of a group that would periodically commute down to Manhattan and sprinkle miraculous medals around the exterior of the building. That was before 9-11. Interesting that the UN was spared in the attack on the WTC.

[miss marmelstein]

Well, every building was spared on 9/11 except those downtown. I don’t buy into any conspiracy theories about that.