Quebec: Association financed by donations from Catholics suspected of promoting abortion
The Canadian Catholic organization Development and Peace is in a full-scale crisis. This charity, financed to the tune of millions of dollars by collections in parishes, is said to be in fact providing funds to Third-World associations that militantly promote abortion…. The North American website www.lifesitenews.com reported this for the first time in 2009 in an investigative article which has made waves ever since within the Canadian Bishops Conference. In all, LifeSiteNews listed 50 associations in Mexico, the Philippines, Latin America and Africa which receive financial assistance from Development and Peace and which militantly support abortion, contraception, homosexual marriage and even prostitution….
Despite these revelations, which are supported by many conclusive documents, the Canadian bishops have long denied the scope of the problem. Today Québec-Vie, a pro-life group, decided to launch a petition drive to ask the bishops to “review from top to bottom” the manner in which this supposedly Catholic non-governmental organization (NGO) is functioning. One of the first remedial measures called for would be to oblige Development and Peace to obtain a letter of support from the bishops in the countries receiving assistance before starting its financial programs. To this day the local bishops are never informed about the doings of the groups financed by Development and Peace. The Canadian organization can therefore act without their approval and with no transparency whatsoever.
The accusations against the NGO and the pressures on the Canadian bishops have recently prompted the latter to cancel a series of conferences that were to have been given this past spring in the Dioceses of Ottawa and Alexandria-Cornwall (Ontario) by a Mexican Jesuit, Fr. Luis Arriaga, director of the “Center for Human Rights”. This Center, which has official ties with Development and Peace, is said to support actively many pro-abortion groups in Mexico.
Fr. Claude Lacaille claims that this campaign is the result of “groups with a conservative ideology who pretend to be ‘the real Catholics’ and who call into question the moral authority of the bishops by harassing them and by viciously attacking Development and Peace for years, which has disastrous consequences for our partner groups in the Southern Hemisphere.” Quoted by Radio Ville-Marie in its online edition dated April 24, this priest from the Society of Foreign Missions opined that “the Ordinary of Ottawa, Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, is refusing hospitality to a Jesuit confrere…, and thus denying and insulting the courageous, persevering work of his own Congregation in recent decades in a country torn by assassinations and violence!”
In France the equivalent of Development and Peace, the Comité contre la faim et pour le développement (CCFD) was likewise called into question in 2009 by a former reporter from Le Figaro Magazine, Jean-Pierre Moreau. In a book entitled Le Terrorisme intellectuel (Éditions Fol’Fer), he explicitly denounced the doings of that official organization of the French episcopate, which has a monopoly on the Lenten fundraising drive in France. The journalist sees in its activities a resurgence of the liberation theology that had had it heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s in Latin America while exploiting the Gospel for subversive ends. “What the Canadian NGO and the CCFD are doing is pretty much the same thing,” Jean-Pierre Moreau declares today on his blog, www.terrorismepastoral.blog4ever.com. Indeed, he denounces the financing of Latin American groups such as the association Equipo Pueblo in Mexico, or Indeso Mujer in Argentina, which under the pretext of helping “women in difficulties”, campaign for sexual liberty and abortion with the implicit approval of the bishops and the financial support of French Catholics. (Sources: apic/radio Ville-Marie/ terrorismepastoral.blog4ever.com – DICI no. 236 dated June 11, 2011)
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