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CNA Newsroom, Jul 18, 2023 / 14:07 pm (CNA).
European bishops on Tuesday released a statement condemning the drafting of a right to abortion in the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, arguing that the propos… […]

Washington D.C., Feb 9, 2018 / 10:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- “Before his escape, when Seong-Ho was being tortured by North Korean officials, there was one thing that kept him from losing hope: over and over again he recited the Lord’s Prayer,” President Donald Trump said in his speech at the 2018 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.

Seong-Ho’s courage and faith were also highlighted by Trump during his State of the Union address in January.

Many North Korean defectors like Ji Seong-ho encounter Christianity through the missionaries who organize the underground railroad that makes it possible for them to escape to China, where they still face the constant risk of being repatriated back to North Korea.

The journey with the Christian missionaries often leads to conversion for defectors. Eighty to ninety percent of North Koreans who pass through the underground railroad identify as Christian after reaching South Korea, according to a 2015 study by Dr. Jin-Heon Jung entitled “Underground Railroads of Christian Conversion.”

One Catholic Church in Seoul baptized 60 North Korean defectors in one day in June 2016, after Father Raymond Lee Jong-nam catechized and assisted them with the transition to life in South Korea, according to UCA News.

“I thank Father Lee for showing us deep love like our father and I will live this new life to the full in this church,” one newly baptised North Korean told the Union of Catholic Asian News.

Ji Seong-ho, whose story gained national attention when he triumphantly raised up his crutches during the president’s State of the Union address last week, told EWTN that prayer sustained him during his escape.

“I offered so many prayers to my God…I started to pray save me, rescue me,” he said.

Ji escaped North Korea in 2006 by crossing the Tumen River into China, and then journeying 6,214 miles across China, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand to reach South Korea on crutches due to an earlier tragedy that left him an amputee.

Now that he has reached freedom, Ji Seong-ho said he feels called by God to rescue other North Korean refugees.

“God’s love needs to be conveyed to the people of North Korea and North Korean souls need God’s salvation. Under that conviction, I am doing what I am doing,” he said.

According to the Korean Ministry of Unification, more than 31,000 North Korean defectors have entered South Korea since 1998.

However, the annual number of North Koreans arriving in the South has declined since Chinese President Xi Jinping assumed power and cracked down on Christian missionaries.

Last year had the lowest figure for North Korean defections to South Korea since 2001, according to the Unification Ministry’s data.

For the more than 25 million people who remain within North Korea, human rights violations abound, according to the U.S. State Department.

“The DPRK regime detains more than 100,000 people, including children in political prison camps, where summary executions, torture, sexual violence, starvation, and other egregious abuses are committed under Kim Jong Un’s direction,” said State Department Spokesperson, Heather Nauert, on Feb. 6.

North Korea has consistently been ranked the worst country for persecution of Christians by Open Doors.

“The Catholic diocese of Pyongyang is vacant and the last bishop was appointed in March 1944. There are no native Catholic clerics in North Korea, but visiting priests occasionally say Mass. In 2008 Father Paul Kim Kwon-soon, a South Korean Franciscan, became the first priest to be granted a residency permit,” according to an Aid to the Church in Need UK report.

One French priest, Father Philippe Blot, has visited North Korea several times. He spoke to Parisians at Notre Dame Cathedral in April 2017 about his perspective on the country that singles out Christians for torture and execution.

“As a missionary and as a Catholic priest, I am speaking here on behalf of all those Koreans who for more than 60 years have been living the longest Way of the Cross in human history,” he said.

Father Philippe asked Catholics to pray “ardently every day for this crucified people.”

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Washington D.C., Jan 28, 2021 / 03:00 pm (CNA).- Leading U.S. bishops decried President Biden’s repeal of pro-life policies on Thursday.

President Joe Biden, a Catholic, issued a presidential memorandum on Thursday afternoon repealing the Mexico City Policy. His act allows for the U.S. to again fund international pro-abortion groups through family planning funding and global health assistance.

The U.S. bishops’ conference (USCCB) warned that, under Biden’s order, the U.S. would be contributing to abortions and abortion advocacy in the developing world.

“It is grievous that one of President Biden’s first official acts actively promotes the destruction of human lives in developing nations,” Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City and Bishop David Malloy of Rockford stated on Thursday. Archbishop Naumann is the chair of the U.S. bishops’ pro-life committee, and Bishop Malloy is chair of the bishops’ international justice and peace committee.

“This Executive Order is antithetical to reason, violates human dignity, and is incompatible with Catholic teaching,” the bishops said.

In his sweeping order “Protecting Women’s Health at Home and Abroad,” Biden stated his administration’s commitment to promoting women’s “reproductive health.”

The Mexico City Policy, named for the location of the UN population conference where it was first announced in 1984, was instituted by President Reagan. It bars taxpayer funding of foreign NGOs that provide or promote abortion as a method of family planning. Presidents traditionally either repeal it or reinstate it as among their first actions upon entering office.

While the policy originally applied to several hundred million dollars of U.S. international family planning funding, the Trump administration expanded it to apply more than $8 billion in global health assistance.

Biden on Thursday repealed those actions and instructed several federal agencies, as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to begin reaching out to global health partners and instructing them that the previous prohibitions on abortion advocacy or referrals no longer apply.

In response, Archbishop Naumann and Bishop Malloy asked Biden to stop funding pro-abortion groups and work with the Church on “integral human development.”

“We urge the President to use his office for good, prioritizing the most vulnerable, including unborn children,” the bishops stated.

“As the largest non-government health care provider in the world, the Catholic Church stands ready to work with him and his administration to promote global women’s health in a manner that furthers integral human development, safeguarding innate human rights and the dignity of every human life, beginning in the womb,” the bishops said.

Through Biden’s order, the administration is also withdrawing from the Geneva Declaration, a statement signed by the U.S. and 31 other countries in October stating that abortion is not an international human right.

Additionally, the administration will once again fund the United Nations’ population fund (UNFPA). The Trump administration had stopped funding the UNFPA because of concerns that it partnered with China on family planning, and thus was complicit in forced abortions and sterilizations.

Pro-life advocates have long warned that China’s one-child policy—now a two-child policy—had resulted in women being forcibly sterilized or having to abort their child if they had too many children.

In a 2011 address at Sichuan University in China, then-Vice President Biden told his audience that “I fully understand” China’s one-child policy and that he was “not second-guessing” it, while also warning of the demographic challenges it posed.

In addition, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently declared that China was committing genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in the northwest province of Xinjiang; Pompeo cited reports of mass forced sterilizations, birth control, and abortion on Uyghur women in making his genocide determination.

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