Catholic Church in Mexico Will Deny Communion to Politicians Who Voted for Abortion by LifeNews.com
The Catholic Diocese of Culiacán told politicians who voted to legalize abortions in Sinaloa, Mexico this month that they may not receive communion.
“Can a deputy or any person who professes to be a Catholic, while openly cooperating or legislating against life, receive Holy Communion? No. You cannot approach Sacramental Communion,” diocese official Father Miguel Ángel Soto Gaxiola told lawmakers, according to the Catholic News Agency.
Last week, Sinaloa became the seventh state in Mexico to legalize the killing of unborn babies in abortions up to 13 weeks. Most states still protect unborn babies from abortion, but a ruling by the national Supreme Court last year decriminalizing abortion has emboldened abortion activists to push for pro-abortion laws across the country.
Soto Gaxiola said Catholic lawmakers who voted to legalize abortion may not receive communion or become godparents in the diocese, according to CNA. By voting to allow the killing of unborn babies, these lawmakers placed themselves in an “unworthy state … to receive the Body of Christ,” he said.
“… today we have many people scandalized by the public betrayal of the Church’s teaching on faith and morals by those legislators who call themselves ‘Catholic,’” Soto Gaxiola continued. “Indeed, the questioning of the faithful makes sense: How can a Catholic who openly promotes and is in favor of policies contrary to life come to Mass and approach to take communion?”
He said the church believes in the value of every human life from conception to natural death, and being “personally pro-life” is not a legitimate argument for supporting the legalization of abortion, CNS reports.
“This is an erroneous theory, since ‘no circumstance, no purpose, no law can make an act lawful that is intrinsically illicit, since it is contradictory to the Law of God, which is written in every human heart, known by reason itself and proclaimed by the Church,’” Soto Gaxiola said, quoting St. Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae.
Last year, the federal legislature postponed voting on a bill to legalize abortions throughout Mexico, but pro-life advocates expect lawmakers will resurrect it. Right now, the issue of unborn babies’ right to life is up to individual states.
Previously, Rodrigo Iván Cortés, president of the National Front for the Family, told ACI Prensa that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and other leaders of the National Regeneration Movement are the politicians who are pushing to legalize abortion nation-wide.
Abortion activists have been pressuring Mexican leaders for years to repeal pro-life laws that protect unborn babies, sometimes resorting to violent protests, vandalism and threats. Roman Catholic churches especially have been targets of pro-abortion violence in recent years.
Many of these pro-abortion groups are funded by some of the richest men in the world, powerful figures who want the killing of unborn babies in abortions to be legal world-wide.