Pope Francis tweeted on Thursday that “to defend the earth and to safeguard water is to protect life,” which has led some pro-life leaders to question whether the Pope is broadening the definition of pro-life to include environmental issues, such as protecting “Mother Earth” that, in turn, undermine the principle life issues that stem from abortion and euthanasia.
March 22 was World Water Day. As Life Site News reported, at a February 27, 2017 “Dialogue on Water” at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope Francis “expressed fear that the planet was ‘moving toward a great world war over water,’ and declared that all people must unite to heed the ‘cry of the earth for respect and responsible sharing in a treasure belonging to all.'”
Life Site News, a pro-life news source, further reported, “many pro-lifers have long warned that statements such as this, explicitly equating such issues with the protection of human life, dilutes the unique moral urgency of the human rights issues of abortion and euthanasia. Coming from prominent religious authorities, critics fear, they also invite confusion on what is and is not intrinsically evil.”
The “seamless garment” argument of liberal clerics seeks to put issues such as immigration, joblessness, and the environment on the same moral plane as abortion and euthanasia, which is illogical because abortion is the direct killing of another human being for no other reason than that the child is an inconvenience. The same moral position holds for euthanasia: murder is wrong.
Policies and laws against murder are not the same, morally, as policies on immigration or wetlands. Human life (and the immortal soul) takes precedence.
In October 2017, as Life Site News reported, the Pontifical Academy for Life, which was dramatically restaffed by Pope Francis, expanded its mission “from abortion and bioethics to include immigration and the environment.”
h/t Life Site News
https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/pope-expanding-pro-life-definition-include-safeguarding-water