cruelty caught on film

By Diogenes ( articles ) | May 10, 2004

Touching the debate among pro-lifers about the screening in the U.K. of a filmed suction abortion, my files turned up the following remarks by Pope John Paul II, part of an address given in Radom, Poland, June 4, 1991 (from L'Osservatore Romano 6-17-1991):

Vast areas of our continent became the graves of innocent people, victims of crime. The root of such crime is imbedded in man's usurpation of the divine power over the life and death of others. ...

Pardon me, dear brothers and sisters, but I shall go even further. That cemetery of victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn, of the defenseless whose faces even their mothers had not seen before allowing, or being pressured into allowing, that their lives should be taken away from them before their birth.

They were alive, they had been conceived and were growing in their mothers' wombs, unaware of the moral threat which was looming large. And when that threat had become a fact, those defenseless human beings tried to defend themselves. A film camera had recorded a desperate defense against aggression by an unborn child in its mother's womb. I once saw such a film and to this day I cannot free myself from what I saw. I cannot free myself.