Right to life
I read with great dismay yet another long missive by Isabel Stabile (October 24) who is fighting tooth and nail for what she calls the ‘right to abortion’.
Since when have human beings acquired this purported right to kill another human being? She proclaims proudly that she has a duty to care. Where is her care to the human being still in his/her mother’s womb? The baby has a right to life and to be cared for.
She shoots down everyone who writes defending life, while she proudly promotes death to the yet-to-be-born developing human being. Why is she so shocked about a gynaecologist who refused to promote death? Such a specialist deserves praise for refusing to aid and abet murder.
What hurt most is her vitriolic attack on the renowned and well-respected John Pace. She denigrates his well thought out, excellent contribution as “lengthy but largely irrelevant”. May I suggest to her that she rereads it carefully and properly without her blinkered eyes. She still has a lot to learn from Pace about what her pledge of “duty of care” means. She need only ask any Gozitan about his outstanding work with all who seek his help and advice but, especially, the sick and the elderly.
Maybe, one day, Stabile will convert to supporting the right to life rather than advocating death. Upon graduation, she solemnly pledged to respect and uphold the universal human right to life. Surely, this supersedes the “duty of care”, especially when she means caring for some mother-to-be who wants to kill her own baby.
Joseph Caruana – Baħar iċ-Ċagħaq
Homosexuality and the Church
Photo: Shutterstock.comI wish to share my experience as a Catholic mother of a son who happens to be gay.
For over a decade, I have shared my story in Church circles and beyond, accompanying many other Catholic parents who, like me, have made their own journey in love not without difficulty, of course. But it’s nice to see that even Pope Francis is now affirming the same conclusions I myself came to, after years of reflecting and listening to people’s stories.
I am pleased with the statement made by Pope Francis because if he thought that homosexuality was indeed sinful, he would not suggest to protect the relationship legally. As my dear friend and theologian Fr James Alison quite rightly puts it: if Pope Francis believed same-sex acts were mortal sins, leading to hell, then he would seek to break up such couples, not stabilise them by suggesting a civil union law, to protect them.
And once somebody like Pope Francis can see this so clearly, it is only a matter of time until more and more Catholics across the world would finally understand what we parents have been trying to say all along: that our sons and daughters have a natural minority variant that shapes the nature of their love relationships and, therefore, a law to protect this would be a just law and an important one too.
Until we see homosexuality as a natural occurrence for those who are born with same-gender attraction we cannot ever understand why the love and security of gay couples must be protected by law.
So, whenever I see something with a title like ‘Homosexuality and the Church’, I wonder what the underlying motivation of that author is going to be: is one going to ignore the reality looking us squarely in the face, almost like saying that the world is still flat? Or, like Pope Francis, is one going to reach out to the LGBTIQ families, offering the love and protection they most truly deserve?
Jesus in the gospel always sought to reach out! As a mother, this reaching out will always be what motivates me and defines me.
Joseanne Peregin – San Pawl tat-Tarġa
It would surely be unwise for anyone who is not a Roman Catholic to get involved with factional disputes within the Roman Catholic Church on the subject of homosexuality, except perhaps to observe once again that Jesus himself says nothing whatever about it.
However, there are at least two good reasons why same-sex partners might wish to contract a civil partnership under state law. One is to obtain the same pension rights as spouses (often worth many thousands of euros per year) and, secondly, to make each other the other’s legal next-of-kin as a spouse would be, with identical rights under the law.
Civil partnerships under state law do not claim to be the same thing as marriage, nor do they say anything one way or the other about the place of sexual relations between two people of the same sex. Perhaps that is why the Pope felt able to support such partnerships.
Alan Cooke – Sliema
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