The Pope asks bishops to protect the innocence of children

Pope Francis.

On January 2, 2017, the Holy See published a letter that had been sent by Pope Francis to the bishops throughout the world, on the feast of the Holy Innocents, December 28, 2016. The successor of Peter lists the evils endured by children: child labor, an underground existence [as an undocumented immigrant], slavery, prostitution, exploitation and wars that destroy their innocence.

“An innocence robbed from them by the oppression of illegal slave labour, prostitution and exploitation. An innocence shattered by wars and forced immigration, with the great loss that this entails.... To illustrate this point, there are at present 75 million children who, due to prolonged situations of emergency and crisis, have had to interrupt their education. In 2015, 68% of all persons who were victims of sexual exploitation were children. At the same time, a third of all children who have to live outside their homelands do so because forcibly displaced. We live in a world where almost half of the children who die under the age of five do so because of malnutrition. It is estimated that in 2016 there were 150 million child labourers, many of whom live in conditions of slavery. According to the most recent report presented by UNICEF, unless the world situation changes, in 2030 there will be 167 million children living in extreme poverty, 69 million children under the age of five will die between 2016 and 2030, and 16 million children will not receive basic schooling.”

Vatican Radio goes on to explain that the Supreme Pontiff renews the Church’s commitment against pedophilia and recalls the “zero tolerance” policy that the leaders of the Catholic Church must implement in responding to cases of sexual abuse.

Nevertheless, Anne Dolhein emphasizes on the website of Réinformation.tv on January 3, 2017, “with more than a billion victims of abortion [worldwide] over the course of the last 50 years, the most important massacre of innocents even known, which had had more victims than all the wars that humanity has known, one might expect a denunciation of the abominable crime that has been made legal is so many countries throughout the world. But there is none.” And she explained: “It is astonishing to see the Pope cite UNICEF, which participates in its way in the culture of death by signing documents asking for the legalization of abortion.”

“Since it is a question, and rightly so, about the massacred innocence of children,” Anne Dolhein concludes, “why not mention this wave of destruction of souls that is pornography, to which children and youngsters have such easy access? Why not mention the so-called ‘sex education’ to which so many youngsters are subjected and which is so often a veritable incitement to debauchery? The loss of their souls, or the attempt to push children ever earlier and faster toward that death of the soul—isn’t that more serious than the harm done to their bodies?”

(Sources: cath-info/imedia/réinformation.tv – DICI no. 348 dated January 20, 2017)