Photos: 15,000 Canadians march for life in Ottawa

Mexico City, Mexico, Nov 9, 2018 / 12:42 am (ACI Prensa).- The new umbrella group Suma de Actores Sociales (United Social Actors) is calling citizens to stand up against efforts by president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador to legalize abortion, euthanasia and marijuana.

SUMAS was launched November 6 in Mexico City and unites 700 organizations from throughout the country.

Speaking with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language sister agency, Juan Dabdoub Giacoman, president of the Mexican Council for the Family and a founding member of SUMAS, said the new group seeks “to join together the greatest number of associations possible who are willing to fight to defend life, the family and the freedom of Mexicans.”

Dabdoub Giacoman denounced an “ideological onslaught” by the López Obrador’s transition team and their members in Congress.

Lopez Obrador won the Mexican presidential elections July 1 with 53 percent of the valid votes and will take office December 1.

The Morena party, of which the president is a member, gained the majority in both houses of the federal Congress. The new lawmakers took office September 1. Party members have introduced initiatives to legalize abortion throughout the country. Currently, abortion is illegal on the federal level except in case of rape.

Olga Sánchez Cordero, a Morena senator whom the president has appointed as the next Secretary of the Interior, assured that in the coming months she would promote the legalization of abortion, marijuana, and euthanasia measures.  

Dabdoub Giacoman said SUMAS is urging López Obrador “to make his position clear because until now all these statements have been made by his collaborators or by Morena party members in the legislature, but he has remained silent.”

Members of SUMAS come from all religious backgrounds, he said. “Everyone is welcome as long as they have the same convictions regarding life, the family and the defense of freedom.”

Arturo Segovia Flores, president of the More Life and More Family Council of Veracruz, told ACI Prensa that the organizations that make up the new group are not just advocacy groups, but “the vast majority of them are businesses and industrial corporations, (as well as) NGOs.”

Mexican society “is at war” against the president’s agenda, Segovia Flores said. “We have therefore called for resistance from this moment on, we’re not going to let them succeed.”

Pedro Novo, of the Governing Citizen platform, said that although López Obrador got a majority of votes to secure the presidency, “it is not a blank check.”

Mexico’s laws must be reformed, he said, to “empower the citizen so he can govern his public employees. Otherwise, the public employee is a dictator and we will continue to be subjugated servants.”

“As there are no laws that oblige candidates to fulfill their campaign promises, they get in office and become dictators,” he said.

Abortion has been legal on-demand for up to 12 weeks in Mexico City since 2007. Now is the time to act to prevent a similar fate for the entire country, Novo said.

“If we don’t have the right to life guaranteed, we cannot aspire to any other right.”

This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

[…]

The Vatican flag and the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. / Credit: Bohumil Petrik/ACI

ACI Prensa Staff, Mar 20, 2023 / 17:00 pm (CNA).

The Holy See reported on Saturday that the Vatican’s diplomatic headquarters in Nicaragua was forced to close.

“Yesterday, March 17, the chargé d’affaires of the apostolic nunciature in Nicaragua, Monsignor Marcel Diouf, left the country for Costa Rica. The closure of the diplomatic headquarters of the Holy See occurred as a result of a request from the Nicaraguan government on March 10, 2023,” Vatican News reported.

The Vatican news outlet indicated that “by virtue of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, custody of the apostolic nunciature and its assets was entrusted to the Italian Republic.”

“Before his departure, Diouf was greeted by diplomatic representatives accredited in Nicaragua from the European Union, Germany, France, and Italy,” it said.

Diouf was the last Vatican official in Nicaragua and assumed the role of business manager after the government of Daniel Ortega expelled the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, in March 2022.

On March 12, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that it was considering suspending diplomatic relations with the Vatican.

This occurred two days after an interview with Pope Francis was published in which he harshly criticized the Ortega regime — where the Catholic Church is persecuted — and compared it to “the communist dictatorship of 1917 or the Hitler dictatorship of 1935.”

He also mentioned the bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez, who was sentenced to 26 years in prison for his opinions against the regime. “A very serious man, very capable. He wanted to give his testimony and did not accept exile,” the Holy Father said.

Likewise, in reference to Ortega, the pope pointed out that “with great respect, I have no choice but to think there’s an imbalance in the person who leads” Nicaragua.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

[…]

Toronto, Canada, Aug 18, 2017 / 02:54 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Conscience protections for Catholic hospitals and other organizations could soon come under fire in the Canadian province of Ontario, with one assisted suicide group saying they may challenge this legislation in court.

Deacon Larry Worthen, executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada, warned that it becomes very difficult to defend objections to assisted suicide once it becomes legal.

“Of course our position would be that there should be no requirement for faith-based institutions to be involved in assisted suicide or euthanasia,” the deacon said. “It’s appropriate that not only the institution, but the individuals should be protected as well.”

“I think that conscientious objection in Canada, unfortunately, hangs by a thread,” he told CNA Aug. 17. “There are many of us fighting for this right, but the concern is that in a society where killing a patient is seen to be a compassionate and merciful act, then those who refuse to do it are by definition uncompassionate and uncharitable.”

“When you legalize euthanasia, and killing becomes moral, then that quickly becomes the norm, and those who deviate from that are seen to be outliers and unprofessional in their approach,” he added.

More than 630 people have killed themselves in Ontario under legal assisted suicide, but not at Catholic hospitals, CBC News reports. In Ontario, the law requires hospitals, hospices and long-term care centers that will not take part in assisted suicide to transfer the patient to a facility that will.

But Shanaaz Gokool, CEO of pro-assisted suicide group Dying With Dignity Canada, claims that the current Ontario law “gave an opt-out to basic and essential health care to hospitals that don’t want to provide for the dying.” She said transferring patients may not be easy for people nearing the end of life, the older, the frail, and those already in pain.

Gokool’s group presently says individual doctors or nurses should be able to choose not to take part in assisted suicide, but organizations should not be able to do so.

For Deacon Worthen, however, the rights of individuals and of facilities are linked “very closely together.”

“Doctors, nurses, and other health professionals spend their whole lives being at the beds of the sick, with the point of view of helping them, supporting, them, helping them with their pain. To ask the same individuals then to participate in the deaths of those patients strikes me as being totalitarian and inhumane,” he said.

“No individual should be forced to go against their conscience, especially in something as personal and emotional as the taking of human life.”

Similarly, Deacon Worthen backed the right of faith groups to have facilities to provide health care according to their faith, culture and tradition.

“In order for that facility to have that ethos or mission, it needs to be able to be free to follow the tenets of its faith without any coercion from the state,” he said. “A diverse society would require that.”

Deacon Worthen added that there are good inherent reasons to oppose assisted suicide, dating back to the ancient physician Hippocrates.

When people find themselves wanting to end their lives, he said, “the doctor should be there to provide the support that that person needs, so that they can feel that life is worth living, as opposed to agreeing with them, and participating in ending their lives.”

Ontario health minister Eric Hoskins said he is confident there is sufficient access to assisted suicide.

“We’re obviously monitoring it very, very closely and currently don’t have those concerns in terms of access,” he said, noting that many assisted suicides take place outside an institutional setting. Hoskins said “about half of medical assistance in dying happens at home.”

Dying With Dignity Canada is also challenging rules against freedom-of-information officers releasing the names of facilities that do or do not assist in suicides. The present policy differs from the Alberta province, which requires public health institutions that do not assist in suicides to publish data each week showing how many patients are transferred for medically assisted suicide.

Deacon Worthen also warned of cases where physicians pressured patients into ending their lives, where they had not already made the decision to do so.

“We’ve heard stories where health care practitioners are already suggesting assisted suicide to patients, and even encouraging that, and discouraging family members from aiding the person continuing their lives,” the deacon said.

At least one Canadian medical school has incorporated the issue of conscientious objection to assisted suicide into its admission process. One applicant was asked by an actor to help them commit suicide. When the student recoiled from this, the actor continued to press until finally the student assented.

Some are reportedly advocating that conscientious objectors to assisted suicide should not be allowed in medical school.
 

[…]