There is an urgent need to counter secularist
ethics which has been “violently” imposed on “cultures and people across
the world through the use of political, legal and cultural mechanisms.”
This has fuelled “a negative and destructive vision of men and women,”
and is now coming dangerously close to creeping into Church charity.
The President of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum,
Cardinal Robert Sarah, strongly condemned the world’s ethical model as
thought out by certain international organisations.
It ends up heavily
conditioning the lifestyles of entire populations.
During the opening of the dicastery’s plenary
session this morning, the cardinal condemned the way in which presumed
financial and technological aid for development is used as an instrument
that is subject to specific conditions set by providers of the aid.
A
typical example of this is that linked to the Western idea of
contraception and the disregard for man and woman who are created in the
image of God and have taken on various legal forms in different parts
of the world, such as the laws regarding the much-talked-about ideology
on gender.”
The cardinal expressed particular pastoral concern
for those who have been called to bring Christian charity to the world.
He condemned the imposition “of political and cultural laws which
transmit ideologies and forms of secularism that are aggressive,
intolerant and destructive towards cultures and above all faith.”
He
spoke out against the “cultural, political and legal” attack against the
identity of man and woman as people, against their nuptial identity and
against their wonderful complementarity in love.”
What the Council will need to reflect on during its assembly is “the
realisation that some members of the Church who work in the field of
charity, have let themselves be seduced and defined by the purely
secularist ethics of International government aid agencies. They have
even gone as far as forming unconditional partnerships and adopting the
same aims of anthropological deconstruction, the same language and the
same slogans.”