During his visit to Portugal this week, Pope Francis warned that human life is being placed “at risk by utilitarian drifts that use and discard it”, particularly abortion and assisted suicide.
Last May, Portugal legalised assisted suicide. “Today I am very sad”, Pope Francis commented at the time, “because in the country where Our Lady appeared [at Fátima], a law was enacted to kill. One more step in the long list of countries that have approved euthanasia.”
Visiting the historically Catholic nation this week, marking World Youth Day, Pope Francis reiterated his point, that “in today’s evolved world, paradoxically, it has become a priority to defend human life, which is put at risk by utilitarian drifts that use and discard it…
“I think of so many unborn children and elderly people abandoned to themselves.”
Pope Francis further warned young people that, “if, faced with the torment of living, you limit yourself to offering quick and wrong remedies such as easy access to death, a comfortable solution that seems sweet… in reality is more bitter than the waters of the sea”.
The Pope has repeatedly condemned “throwaway culture… a road down which we cannot go: the road of discarding”.
In a preface to a book, Il miracolo della vita (The Miracle of Life), Pope Francis recently called on all people to defend life “at every stage of existence: in the fragility of the unborn child, in the loneliness of the elderly, in the shameful poverty of so many who are deprived of the essential basics”.
SPUC comment
A SPUC spokesperson said: “The world’s most vulnerable people, especially the unborn and the old, are under mortal threat from abortion and a discarding culture of death that undermines the value and sheer wonder of life.
“It is right and just that Pope Francis calls out this ‘utilitarian’ trend towards death and calls on the youth of today to stand up for those most threatened by it.”
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