ROME — Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former papal nuncio to the United States, has called out the “scandalous claims” by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, regarding Italy’s Law 194 legalizing abortion.
Archbishop Paglia “defined the infamous Law 194 on abortion ‘a pillar of our social life,’” Archbishop Viganò said in a declaration, “scandalizing millions of Italian Catholics.”
Paglia’s support of the Italian law, which has overseen the death of “over six million innocent creatures” since its passage in 1978, has produced “just indignation” among believers, Viganò said, since the institution he leads was founded by Saint John Paul II “precisely to combat abortion.”
On the other hand, Paglia has been applauded by “the advocates of ‘reproductive health’ and ‘termination of pregnancy,’” Viganò said, who are “always ready to accuse the Church of interference when it speaks with the voice of Christ, but to praise it as soon as its worst exponents prostitute themselves to groupthink.”
File/Vatican official, Italian Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia speaks during a press conference at the presidential house in San Salvador, on March 11, 2015. (RECINOS/AFP via Getty Images)
“As pastor and successor of the Apostles, I cannot fail to condemn with the utmost force the scandalous words of Paglia, which contradict the Gospel and the teaching of the Roman Pontiffs,” Viganò said.
It is the New World Order and its acolytes who “consider the barbaric killing in the womb of an innocent person as a right, as a ‘pillar of social life,’” he added.
Viganò said he found it revealing that “the sect of apostates that infest the Catholic Hierarchy and have occupied its top are aligned with the ideological positions of the enemies of Christ,” which stand “in denial of the very foundations of Natural Law, including respect for life from conception to natural death.”
The former nuncio went on to say he finds it “disconcerting” that none of his brother bishops “dares to raise their voice to condemn Paglia’s delirious words and ask for his immediate resignation from the Pontifical Academy for Life.”
The Vatican’s former doctrinal czar, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, has sharply criticized Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich for his unwillingness to call out President Joe Biden on his support for abortion. https://t.co/JxCHAh1W88
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) February 1, 2021
In the face of pushback for his words, Archbishop Paglia has doubled down, insisting that criticisms of his statements are “specious” and “offensive,” since they take his words out of context and disregard his many statements defending life.
In a declaration released Monday by his spokesman, Archbishop Paglia said he had not intended to offer “a judgment on the value of the law,” but merely the observation that it is practically impossible to abolish it since it is a “structural element of legislation.”
“I believe that at this point Law 194 is a pillar of our social life,” the archbishop stated on Italian television last Saturday night, adding that the law is “absolutely not” up for debate.
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