The American-led push for an internationally sanctioned right to abortion at the Cairo conference was also located in a disturbing historical context. As the nascent democracies of east central Europe emerged from under the rubble of totalitarianism, the Pope had urged them not to live their new-won liberties according to the thin notion of freedom as autonomy, which he had quickly recognized as the new threat to the free society. Now, it seemed as if an alliance was being forged by the world’s only superpower, UN agencies, some European governments, and a well-funded group of powerful nongovernmental organizations in order to enshrine this defective notion of freedom in international law, in the name of “reproductive rights.” This was a battle that had to be joined.
The universal pastor of an increasingly Third World Church was aware of yet another dimension to the problem. The Cairo conference threatened to be another example of First World countries imposing their policies and their understanding of morality on Third World countries, using the threat of decreased foreign assistance as a weapon. That, in turn, led to yet another form of corruption at the United Nations, an institution in which the Holy See continued to invest significant hopes.
This was not another public policy disagreement between the Holy See and a national government. It was the crucial human rights issue of the 1990s, and it was being played out on a global stage. In every cultural history, a great, defining question often emerges. The question of slavery was that kind of issue in the nineteenth-century United States, as the question of the Jews was in Germany in the 1930s. For John Paul II, the abortion issue was not one issue, but the issue for the emerging world culture that would sustain, or corrupt, the free societies of the future. Once the premise was granted that some lives were expendable, there was a lethal logic that led in due course to infanticide, euthanasia, genetic manipulation, and coercive reproduction policies. That was what was happening in advanced industrial democracies, where the manipulation of life was being legitimated by intellectuals who insisted that there are no moral truths built into the human condition.68 And these matters were inescapably political, because they engaged what Aristotle had once defined as the central question of politics: How ought we to order our lives together?
At stake in the forthcoming Cairo conference was who “we” were, in that venerable formulation.
An Argument Joined
On March 19, 1994, John Paul sent a personally signed letter to every head of state in the world and to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. It began by noting the Church’s support for the UN’s current “International Year of the Family,” and the “duty” of “civil authorities…to strive to promote the harmonious growth of the family,” a fundamental human institution whose flourishing involved serious issues of morality and spirituality. That was why, the Pope continued, he had found the proposed draft document for the Cairo conference “a disturbing surprise.” There was “reason to fear that it could cause a moral decline resulting in a serious setback for humanity….”
Economic development was the issue of primary concern to most of the world, and development was supposed to be a co-theme of the Cairo conference. Yet development issues had been “almost completely overlooked” in the Cairo draft document, which seemed far more interested in promoting a “totally individualistic” idea of human sexuality, to the extent that “marriage now appears as something outmoded.” Who, John Paul asked, was authorized to do such a thing? “The family is part of the heritage of humanity! Moreover, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights clearly states the family is ‘the natural and fundamental group unit of society’ (Article 16, 3).” It was more than ironic that, in a year dedicated to the family, the family should now be proposed as something dispensable.
The proposed “general international recognition of a completely unrestricted right to abortion” was another grave moral issue raised by the Cairo draft document. The document “leaves the troubling impression of something being imposed: namely a lifestyle typical of certain fringes within developed societies, societies which are materially rich and secularized.” This was imperialism of a new and very dangerous sort.
Finally, John Paul asked the heads of state to think about the future. The draft document was holding up to young people the model of a “society of ‘things’ and not of ‘persons.’” Self-mastery, self-giving, and a sense of responsibility were deemed “notions…belonging to another age…” The world’s leaders were depriving the young of “reasons for living” because they were failing to teach “the duties incumbent upon beings endowed with intelligence and free will.”
Population and development were indeed serious issues, John Paul concluded. They could not be seriously addressed without a “sense of the sacredness of life” and an understanding of the human “capacity for love and self-sacrifice.” That, at bottom, was what was missing in the Cairo draft document.69
The day before his letter was formally dispatched, John Paul met with Mrs. Nafis Sadik, the Pakistani head of the UN Fund for Population Activities, who would play a large role at the Cairo conference. John Paul gave her a lengthy memorandum of objections to the Cairo draft document, and tried, as he said later, to explain to her the Church’s teaching: “She didn’t want to discuss it.”70 Years later, Nafis Sadik would describe an angry, belligerent Pope to journalists, a description of Karol Wojtyła that made little sense to anyone who had ever known or worked with him. On the evidence of her own testimony, Mrs. Sadik misrepresented both the work of the agency she headed and the implications of the Cairo draft document in her conversation with the Pope, going so far as to suggest that the UNFPA was not involved with abortion.71 Mrs. Sadik’s conclusion about her forty-minute discussion with John Paul—“He doesn’t like women. I expected a little more sympathy for suffering and death”—was simply bizarre.72
The following week, every ambassador accredited to the Holy See was called to a briefing at which Cardinal Sodano, the Secretary of State, Cardinal Etchegaray, the President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, the President of the Pontifical Council on the Family, and Archbishop Tauran explained Vatican objections to the Cairo draft document in detail. What the diplomats call a “full and frank exchange of views” was not, evidently, desired in some quarters. The U.S. embassy to the Holy See had recently received a message from Undersecretary of State Timothy Wirth’s office, reiterating that U.S. policy at Cairo was to promote an unrestricted abortion right, but suggesting that this need not be mentioned to the “host country” if its reaction might be negative.73
Abuse in New York, Surgery in Rome
The confrontation now moved to New York, where the third meeting of the preparatory commission for the Cairo conference (Prep-Com III, in the jargon) met from April 4 to 22, 1994. Undersecretary Wirth and his international allies took no chances that open debate might result in substantive changes in the draft document for Cairo. The chairman of Prep-Com III, as he would be of the Cairo conference itself, was Dr. Fred Sai, usually introduced as “the representative of Ghana,” but in his non-UN life, the President of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. When Monsignor Diarmuid Martin of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, a Holy See delegate to the meeting, criticized the proposed draft document for its ethical shallowness, Dr. Sai berated him publicly from the chair and complained that the Vatican was trying to foist its notions of sexual morality on the world. Sai’s remarks were loudly applauded by a gallery packed with population-control activists. At an earlier session in preparation for the Cairo conference, Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway had criticized what she regarded as the obstructionism of the Vatican, “a small state with no natural inhabitants.” The United States Catholic Conference, a registered nongovernmental organization at the UN, was denied space to hold a seminar in the UN, and organizers of the event were forbidden to post notices of the meeting.74
Prep-Com III produced a genuinely radical draft document for Cairo. Only six of
118 pages were devoted to the conference’s ostensible topic of“population and development.” The rest of the document adumbrated a lifestyle revolution sanctioned and enforced by international law. “Marriage” was the dog that didn’t bark in the Cairo draft document. Indeed, the only time the word “marriage” appeared in the document’s chapter on “the family” was in a passage deploring “coercion and discrimination in policies and practices related to marriage.” The document did speak about “the family in its various forms,” but it said nothing about the importance of families rooted in stable marriages for the physical and mental well-being of children. Nor did the draft document discuss the natural and moral bond between parents and children and its importance for achieving such important goals as better education and health care for the young. The document also severed the moral relationship between parents and teenagers by treating sexual activity after puberty as a “right” to be exercised at will, and by suggesting that state-based population and “reproductive health care agencies” be the primary counselors of young people coming to grips with their sexuality.
The document was full of Orwellian euphemisms: coercive state family planning policies became “fertility regulation” abortion on demand was transmuted into “safe motherhood” and “reproductive rights.” Even more ominously, the draft document mandated a large-scale program of state coercion in the service of “reproductive rights” and family planning. States were mandated to override parental prerogatives in the education of adolescents and to ensure that health-care providers had the proper “attitudes” toward their teenage patients. Governments were instructed to “use the entertainment media, including radio and television soap operas and drama, folk theater, and other traditional media” to advance the draft document’s program of action. They should also introduce programs to “reach men in their workplaces, at home, and where they gather for recreation,” while adolescent boys “should be reached through schools, youth organizations, or wherever they congregate.” There was to be no area of life—home, workplace, gym, ballpark—into which state-sponsored propaganda on what the document termed “reproductive rights and reproductive health” did not reach. Those who had thought that this approach to public policy had been consigned to the trash heap of history in 1989 were, evidently, mistaken.75
Two days after Prep-Com III closed in a crushing defeat for the Holy See, John Paul beatified a woman whose life and death stood in sharpest contrast to the Cairo draft document’s image of marriage and the family. Forty-year-old Gianna Beretta Molla, a pediatrician and mother of three, was two months pregnant with her fourth child when a fibrous tumor developed in her ovary. She had three choices. Surgical removal of her ovary and uterus would save her life but kill her unborn child. The tumor alone could be surgically removed and the unborn child aborted, and she could probably bear more children later. Or the tumor could be removed while attempting to save the pregnancy—an option that posed serious risks to her own life. She chose to save her unborn child, and instructed the surgeon to operate in such a way that the pregnancy was saved. The tumor was successfully removed, but as Dr. Molla knew, she now faced a dangerous delivery. A few days before the birth, she told her doctor, “If you have to choose, there should be no doubt. Choose—I demand it—the life of the baby.” Gianna Emanuela was born on April 21, 1962. Gianna Beretta Molla died of complications from the birth on April 29, 1962 and was beatified on April 24, 1994, in the presence of her husband and children, including thirty-two-year-old Gianna Emanuela.
Four days later, on the night of April 28, John Paul fell in his bath. After remaining in the papal apartment overnight, he was taken to the Policlinico Gemelli the following day, where an artificial hip joint was surgically implanted to compensate for the damage done to his femur in the fall. The surgery was not completely successful. John Paul II, who had led a physically vigorous life for almost three-quarters of a century, would never walk easily again.
It took some time, but the Pope eventually grew used to his new physical circumstances, prodding visiting friends with the cane he now used, pretending it was a pool cue or a rifle, and twirling it, almost like a vaudevillian, before audience crowds and participants in his monthly First Saturday rosary in the Paul VI Audience Hall. He even joked about his difficulties. After it had taken him some time to walk several dozen yards to the presider’s table at a Synod meeting in October 1994, he looked at the assembled bishops and remarked, quoting Galileo’s muttered comment about the earth’s rotation around the sun, “Eppur’ si muove” [Yet it moves… ].76 Nonetheless, growing older and accommodating himself to new physical limits was not an easy business for John Paul II. “I used to be a sportsman, you know,” he said wistfully on one occasion, leaning heavily on his cane.77
In the immediate aftermath of his hip surgery, John Paul read his personal history, as he read all of history, through the lens of his conviction that there were no coincidences in Providence. In this instance, the noncoincidence was between his pain and the confrontation over the forthcoming Cairo conference. A Christian grappling with the mystery of the cross, he reflected aloud on all this on May 29, at his first Sunday Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square after his return from the Gemelli. After thanking Christ and Mary for the “gift of suffering,” which he had come to understand as “a necessary gift,” he described his recent thoughts: “I meditated on all this and thought it over again during my hospital stay…. I understood that I have to lead Christ’sChurch into this third millennium by prayer, by various programs, but I saw that this is not enough: she must be led by suffering, by the attack thirteen years ago [i.e., Agca’s assassination attempt] and by this new sacrifice. Why now, why this, why in this Year of the Family? Precisely because the family is under attack. The Pope has to be attacked, the Pope has to suffer, so that every family and the world may see that there is…a higher Gospel: the Gospel of suffering, by which the future is prepared, the third millennium of families, of every family and of all families.”
That, John Paul concluded, was the witness he wanted to make “in the presence of the world’s powerful ones.”78
From May 29, 1994, on, the way of the cross would ever more visibly mark the pontificate of John Paul II.*
Meanwhile, President Bill Clinton was under severe criticism from the Catholic leadership of the United States. Although Timothy Wirth continued to insist that “we have no fight with the Vatican,” the Undersecretary of State himself undertook a tour of the U.S. hierarchy, focusing particularly on the cardinals; it would not be unrealistic to suggest that he was looking for a weak link in the chain of opposition to the Clinton administration’s Cairo policy. He did not find one. Instead, a letter from the six resident U.S. cardinals, cosigned by the President of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, was hand-delivered to the White House on May 29. The letter deplored the administration’s “promotion of abortion, contraception, sterilization, and the redefinition of the family,” and urged the President to reverse the “destructive” American agenda for Cairo. The following month, the bishops’ conference as a whole adopted a resolution in which the prelates, “as religious leaders and U.S. citizens,” declared themselves “outraged that our government is leading the effort to foster global acceptance of abortion.”80
President Clinton was in Rome in early June and spoke with John Paul on June 2 in the Vatican. After the audience, the President met with a group of American seminarians and told them that he had had a wide-ranging review of the global situation with the Pope. It seemed to many present an implausible description of what had just transpired, given John Paul’s passionate concern about the Cairo conference.
On June 19, the executive board of the newly organized and lay-dominated Pontifical Academy for Life, an international group of physicians, medical ethicists, and philosophers, issued a declaration on the Cairo conference. At its heart was a judgment the Academy regarded as beyond reasonable scientific dispute: “From conception to the last moment of life, it is the same human be
ing that develops and dies.” That biological fact led to certain moral judgments: “We affirm that every member of the human species is a person. The care owed to every individual does not depend on either his age or the infirmity he may suffer…. Personal rights are absolutely inalienable. The fertilized human egg, the embryo, the foetus, can be neither donated nor sold. It cannot be denied the right to progressive development in its own mother’s womb. No one can subject it to any kind of exploitation. No authority, not even that of the father or mother, can threaten its life.”81
An extraordinary consistory of all the world’s cardinals, held on June 13–14, issued a statement, proposed by New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor, expressing solidarity with the Pope’s teaching on the nature and rights of the family, “and his insistence that the family be free of coercion, particularly in regard to questions of procreation.” The “failed social policies of many developed nations,” the cardinals concluded, “should not be foisted on the world’s poor.”82
The Pope’s Campaign
Eight days later, on June 30, John Paul began a sustained public campaign in the court of world opinion, aimed at rallying an opposition to the political juggernaut that those who had run Prep-Com III now planned to unleash in Cairo. It was not a voluble campaign and had none of the trappings of either democratic politics or international advertising blitzes. It consisted of twelve ten-minute audience addresses, at the weekly general audience or the Sunday Angelus. There was no shouting. But by identifying the ethical errors of the Cairo draft document and by defining a moral alternative to the libertinism it embodied, the Pope set in motion another resistance movement, this time international in scope, that would prove to have considerable potency.
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