African Cardinal Slams Jesuit Georgetown for Hosting Planned Parenthood Prez

Healy Hall, the flagship building of Georgetown University's main campus in Washingto
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Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.

Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, the outspoken Archbishop of Durban, South Africa, is blasting the Jesuit-run Georgetown University for inviting Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards to address its faculty and students next month.

Last week Breitbart News reported that Georgetown University’s Lecture Fund has invited Richards to speak on campus, followed by a 30-minute question and answer session. The event will be closed to the public, and only “invited” guests and media may attend, as well as those with a Georgetown University identification card.

During Richards’ tenure as president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the abortion giant has killed more than 2.8 million unborn babies.

In his criticism of Georgetown, Cardinal Napier was responding to a Tweet by pro-life advocate Lila Rose, who observed that by giving Richards a platform for her ideas, the university was thoroughly contradicting “the very tenets it was founded upon.”

Napier agreed with the critique, noting that today’s crisis in the Catholic Church stems from an unwillingness to teach the faith of the Gospel in its fullness.

The Cardinal went on to suggest that Georgetown has fallen for the modern secular “obsession” with being broadminded on life issues, meaning an unwillingness to adopt a firm moral position and stick with it, regardless of the consequences.

Cardinal Napier ended the conversation by calling the Jesuit authorities at Georgetown to account, with the stinging indictment that they are more committed to “political correctness” than to the Church of Christ.

The Catholic Church has worked to ensure that universities bearing the name “Catholic” act in conformity with their religious identity and not provide a microphone to those who stand in opposition to Christian principles. In their 2004 document, “Catholics in Political Life,” the U.S. bishops stated that Catholic institutions should not honor those “who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles” with “awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”

Though Georgetown vaunts its status as “the oldest Catholic and Jesuit institute of higher learning in the United States,” it has repeatedly come under fire for having sacrificed its integrity and Catholic identity on the altars of the secularism.

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