Last Sunday, Cardinal Norberto Rivera (pic'd here), archbishop of Mexico City and primate of the country, suspended his customary press conference as a way of protesting efforts by legislators of four political parties to shut up the Church.They are demanding the Catholic Church stop expressing its opinion about the pro-abortion reform the parties are about to approve, first in the local Assembly of the Federal District (DF) and afterwards in the national Senate.
On April 13 the senators of these four parties – headed by the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) -- accused the Catholic Church of “exceeding the limits imposed by our Constitution in its article 130” through “political campaigns that harm the laical State, polarize society, generate intolerance and provoke violent manifestations.”
According to several polls -- Mitofsky and others -- more than 70% of the Mexican population oppose abortion legalization, even in very liberal Mexico City, the main electoral bastion of PRD.
In other states the percentage of those who are against abortion goes as high as 80%. “How big is PRD’s fear?” was the title of an article published in the Archdiocese of Mexico’s web site as a response to the anti-democratic attitudes of the PRD and its allies.
Father Hugo Valdemar, the archdiocesan spokesman, commented that pro-abortion legislators feel a “paranoid fear” toward the Catholic Church, so they want to impose a “gag law.” “In a democratic society, where you are supposed to enjoy freedom of speech, it is not possible that those in charge of guaranteeing that freedom are the first to obstruct it,” said Fr. Valdemar.
And he warned, “We as priests have a very clear mission and we don’t care how high the cost to be paid is; if they try to shut us up with authoritarian and persecuting attitudes, they are very wrong.”
Valdemar added that these legislators apparently don’t know the Church’s history -- and they ignore that “martyrs for the Church are not a disgrace but are its glory.”
Separately, the president of the Catholic Attorneys Bar, Armando Martínez, accused the legislators of displaying a “notorious anticlericalism” and “hate” toward the Catholic Church when they try to restrict its freedom of speech. Martínez said that trying to restrict religion to the private sphere is a “historic mistake” because the State is not only seeking to establish itself as the sole and ultimate source of law, but also of public morality, which would lead to “unsustainable totalitarianism.”
Martínez announced that several private organizations are collecting signatures to demand that the DF government permit a referendum on abortion legalization. As of late last Sunday, they had already collected more than 20,000 signatures of the 36,000 required by the DF Citizens Participation Law to allow a referendum.
Since pro-abortion legislators have already announced they will not accept any referendum and the DF Human Rights Commission is also demanding that Catholics shut up, the Catholic lawyers’ president said his group will file a demand before the Inter-American Commisison on Human Rights.
The signatures will be handed over to the DF Assembly on April 24, when the pro-abortion legislators -- who have 46 of the 66 votes in the Assembly -- are planning to legalize abortion, even though majority opinion is against it and the vote would violate the Citizens Participation Law they themselves approved years ago.
But the Church won’t shut up.
Catholic lawyers say they are already preparing a case to bring before Mexico’s Supreme Court.
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