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The right to life as the foundation of all rights

Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King

This article is an abridged version of a speech delivered at the annual dinner of the Pro-Life Campaign in Dublin in 2023

75 years ago, in 1948, as the world emerged from the horrors of the Holocaust and the second of two World Wars, enlightened leaders crafted two hugely important international documents, the Convention on the Crime of Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Laudate Deum – a summary

On 4^th October, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis published an apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum (Praise God). This is a summary of that document.

Child euthanasia – the next stop on the slippery slope

Talk to Oxford University Students by Lord Alton of Liverpool

I want you to imagine Marie. It is 2025 and Marie is a 15-year-old Canadian girl. Three months ago, her relationship with her first boyfriend ended and she remains heartbroken. Life doesn’t seem worth living anymore. Her self-esteem has plummeted. She feels less popular, less attractive and less talented than most of her friends at school. And, in her state of distress, she reasons the rest of her life will be worthless and miserable. Not uncommon for girls her age, Marie has been ill with anorexia in recent years. Her recent circumstances have led her to relapse. So, her parents take her to the local psychiatric hospital to see a doctor.

When your mother’s not your mother: the problems of normalising surrogacy

For most couples, the desire to have children is deeply imbedded in their relationship. After all, human beings are made for love and children are a real expression of love. So, when couples discover that they cannot have children this can be devastating. On the other hand, some couples, notably same sex couples, enter their union knowing from the outset that having their own children together is impossible, yet they still yearn to be parents, as do some single people who are not in any relationship. ‘Welcoming’ a child via a surrogate mother seems to provide the answer. Influential celebrities who use surrogate mothers have become role models for surrogacy and hold out this as an option for all. However, the desire to be a mother or father does not justify any right to have a child. Children have the right to be born in their own real families with their own mother and father.

Organ harvesting and trading

In his encyclical, Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis highlights the related practices of slavery, trafficking in person, women subjugated and forced to abort and kidnapping for organ harvesting or organ trafficking. He notes that, whether by coercion, deception, or by physical or psychological duress, human persons, created in the image and likeness of God, are deprived of their freedom, sold, and reduced to being another person’s property.

Culture, compassion, consistency and conscience – addressing public policy challenges

In this longer article, Archbishop of Southwark, Most Rev John Wilson, argues that re-evangelisation and the revival of a Christian culture is necessary if we are to successfully make progress in addressing public policy challenges

World Day of the Poor

This week’s blog post is an extract from Pope Francis’s message for the World Day of the Poor on 4^th November 2022. The full message can be found at: https://www.cbcew.org.uk/papal-message-world-day-of-the-poor-2022/

Pope Francis and lobbying – a new theme in Catholic social teaching?

Following the recent post on this blog about corruption, we thought we would follow up by one on the related theme of lobbying.

The subject of lobbying has had very little sustained treatment in Catholic social teaching, though Pope Francis has started to address the question. If anything, Catholic writers tend to regard lobbying in a rather positive way. And there is no doubt that lobbying has its positive dimensions, for example where Christian organisations are lobbying on behalf of the oppressed.