Pope Francis spoke out strongly against abortion on Friday during a speech in which he condemned killing unborn children and the so-called right to abortion.
The head of the Catholic Church also spoke out against the leftist music pushing gender ideology.
The Pope tied the two together as joint evils and said ending the lives of babies before birth was a “tragic defeat” for their right to life.
“This is the baneful path taken by those forms of ‘ideological colonization’ that would cancel differences, as in the case of the so-called gender theory, or that would place before the reality of life reductive concepts of freedom, for example by vaunting as progress a senseless ‘right to abortion,’ which is always a tragic defeat,” the Pope said.
He urged European nations to instead focus their laws on the dignity of human beings and their inherent worth and value.
“How much better it would be to build a Europe centered on the human person and on its peoples, with effective policies for natality and the family — policies that are pursued attentively in this country — a Europe whose different nations would form a single family that protects the growth and uniqueness of each of its members,” the Holy Father said.
Earlier this year, the Pope urged researchers to respect the dignity of every person as they work to advance science and technology for the good of humanity.
In his message, Pope Francis urged researchers to “ensure that scientific and technological growth is reconciled more and more with a parallel development … in responsibility, values, and conscience.”
“It is a delicate frontier, at which progress, ethics and society meet, and where faith, in its perennial relevance, can make a valuable contribution,” Pope Francis said. “In this sense, the Church never ceases to encourage the progress of science and technology at the service of the dignity of the person and integral human development.”
He also spoke about the unique value of humanity, including human contact, saying technology never will be able to replace humans.
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“It is evident that the technological form of human experience is becoming more pervasive every day: in the distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial,’ ‘biological’ and ‘technological,’ the criteria with which to discern what is human and of technology become increasingly difficult. Therefore, a serious reflection on the very value of man is important,” he said.
The pope also warned the academy that technological advances can move so fast that their impact is “not always clear and predictable,” according to CNA. He said scientists must remember that technology is for the benefit of humanity.
“It is paradoxical, for example, referring to technologies for enhancing the biological functions of a subject, to speak of an ‘augmented’ man if one forgets that the human body refers back to the integral good of the person and therefore cannot be identified with the biological organism alone. A wrong approach in this field actually ends up not ‘augmenting’ but ‘compressing’ man,” he said.
Pope Francis recently faced criticism for appointing a pro-abortion economist to the Pontifical Academy for Life, which promotes protections for human life at all stages and conducts research on moral and bioethical issues.
However, he also regularly condemns the killing of unborn babies in abortions, often likening it to hiring a “hitman” to kill a child.
