The French National Assembly on Tuesday voted to introduce a “right to abortion” in the French Constitution, less than two weeks after thousands of French citizens participated in the Paris March for Life.
The plan to write access to abortion into France’s constitution was announced by President Emmanuel Macron in October 2023 and reported by French media as a reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Shortly after the announcement, Archbishop Pierre d’Ornellas of Rennes, the French bishops’ bioethics spokesperson, raised serious concerns in an interview with Vatican News. He noted France would be “practically the only country in the world to have enshrined such a right in our constitution.”
The prelate warned: “What happens when abortion is enshrined in the constitution as a principle? Does this mean that the right to life becomes an exception?”
The archbishop said the abortion rate in France was already “twice as high as in Germany, and I don’t think that enshrining freedom of access to abortion in the constitution will eliminate the fact that it is ‘always a tragedy.’”
As many as 234,000 abortions were registered in France in 2022, 17,000 more than in 2021, and the highest in 30 years, according to official statistics.
The proposed change to the constitution would enshrine a “liberté garantie” — a “guaranteed freedom” — to abort an unborn child.
None of the major political parties in the French Parliament is questioning the “right” to abortion, and the bill received 493 votes for and 30 against.
The country decriminalized abortion on Jan. 17, 1975. Each year, the Paris March for Life is held on the third Sunday of January, remembering the legislation’s date.
This year, according to organizers, 15,000 French Catholics and pro-life activists took to the streets of Paris on Jan. 21 — less than two weeks before Tuesday’s vote in the French lower house.
The march’s organizers presented a list of proposals, including making it compulsory from the sixth week of pregnancy to have an ultrasound to hear the unborn’s heartbeat.
Following Tuesday’s vote in the National Assembly, the French Senate must agree to the exact same wording; that vote is scheduled for the end of February.
Responding to journalists about whether he addressed the issue of euthanasia with Macron — a practice also supported by the government, with a draft law legalizing assisted suicide expected in late February — the pope said: “Today we didn’t talk about this issue, but we talked about it during the other visit, when we met. I spoke clearly when he came to the Vatican; I told him my opinion, clearly: You don’t play with life, neither at the beginning nor at the end. You don’t play with it.”
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Members of the Sts’ailes First Nation at Holy Rosary Cathedral last year for the first Mass to integrate a First Nation language. A Cardus report presents the voices of Indigenous Canadians speaking about their faith and distinguishing it from the traditional spirituality they’re often associated with. / Photo courtesy Nicholas Elbers, 2022
Vancouver, Canada, May 17, 2023 / 14:15 pm (CNA).
A groundbreaking report published by the Ottawa-based Cardus Institute has given voice to Indigenous Canadians who are frustrated by secular society’s unawareness of — or unwillingness to accept — the fact that almost half of them are Christian.
“I find that insulting to Indigenous people’s intelligence and freedom,” Catholic priest Father Cristino Bouvette said of the prejudice he regularly encounters.
Bouvette, who has mixed Cree-Métis and Italian heritage and now serves as vicar for vocations and Young Adults in the Diocese of Calgary, was one of 12 individuals interviewed by Cardus for the report “Indigenous Voices of Faith.”
Father Deacon Andrew Bennett, left, leads a post-production discussion by Indigenous Voices of Faith participants. Photo courtesy of Cardus
Prejudice against Indigenous Christians has become so strong, even inside some Indigenous communities, “that Indigenous Christians in this country right now are living in the time of new martyrdom,” Bouvette said.
Although that martyrdom may not cost them their lives, “they are ostracized and humiliated sometimes within their own communities if they openly express their Christian or Catholic faith.”
Statistics Canada reported last year that the 2021 census found that 850,000, or 47%, of Canada’s 1.8-million Indigenous people identify as Christian and that more than a quarter of the total report they are Catholic. Only 73,000, or 4%, of Indigenous people said they adhere to traditional Indigenous spiritual beliefs.
In a new report, Cardus wants to “amplify the voices of Indigenous Canadians speaking for themselves about their religious commitments, which sometimes clash with the typical public presentation of Indigenous spirituality.” Photo courtesy of Cardus
Ukrainian Catholic Deacon Andrew Bennett, program director for Cardus Faith Communities, conducted the interviews for the think tank last fall. He published his report in March at a time when Canadian mainstream media and many political leaders continued to stir division and prejudice through misleading commentary about abandoned cemeteries at Indian Residential Schools.
The purpose of the report, he writes, “is to affirm and to shed light on the religious freedom of Indigenous peoples to hold the beliefs and engage in the practices that they choose and to contextualize their faith within their own cultures.”
Too often, however, “the public narrative implies, or boldly declares, that there’s a fundamental incompatibility between Indigenous Canadians and Christianity or other faiths,” Bennett said. “[M]any Indigenous Canadians strongly disagree with those narratives.”
Father Bouvette is clearly one of those.
“We did not have Christian faith imposed upon us because of [my Indigenous grandmother’s] time in the residential school or her father’s time in the trade school that he was sent to,” Bouvette said. “No, it was because our family freely chose to receive the saving message of Jesus Christ and lived it and had continued to pass it down.”
Bouvette said his “grandmother was not tricked into becoming something that she didn’t want to be, and then tricked into staying that way for 99 years and 11 months of her life. She was a Christian from the day of her birth, and she remained a Christian until the day of her death. And so that was not by the consequence of some imposition.”
Nevertheless, Canadians continue to labor under a prejudice holding the opposite view. “I do believe that probably the majority of Canadians at this time, out of some mistaken notion of guilt for whatever their cultural or ethnic background is, think they are somehow responsible for Indigenous people having had something thrust upon them that they didn’t want,” Bouvette said.
“We did not have Christian faith imposed upon us,” Father Cristino Bouvette says in a Cardus report on Indigenous faith. Photo courtesy of Cardus
“But I would say, give us a little more credit than that and assume that if there is an Indigenous person who continues to persevere in the Christian faith it is because they want to, because they understand why they have chosen to in the first place, and they remain committed to it. We should be respectful of that.”
The executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, Christian Elia, agrees and says society should grant Indigenous Catholics the respect and personal agency that is due all Canadians.
“Firstly, I am not an Indigenous person, so I cannot speak for our Indigenous brothers and sisters, but neither can non-Indigenous secularists who choose to ignore that Indigenous people in Canada continue to self-identify as Christian, the majority of these Catholic,” Elia said in an interview with The B.C. Catholic.
He said his organization has heard from many Indigenous Catholics who are “growing weary of the ongoing assumption that somehow they have been coerced into the faith, that it is inconceivable that they wish to be Catholic. This condescending attitude must stop.”
Deacon Rennie Nahanee, who serves at St. Paul’s Indian Church in North Vancouver, was another of the 12 whom Bennett interviewed. A cradle Catholic and member of the Squamish First Nation, Deacon Nahanee said there is nothing incompatible with being both an authentic Indigenous person and a Catholic.
“I’m pretty sure we had a belief in the Creator even before the missionaries came to British Columbia,” he said. “And our feelings, our thoughts about creation, the way that we lived and carried out our everyday lives, and the way that we helped to preserve the land and the animals that we used for food, our spirituality and our culture, were similar to the spirituality of the Catholic Church.”
“I believe that’s why our people accepted it. I don’t think anybody can separate themselves from God, even though they say so.”
Interviewed later by The B.C. Catholic, Nahanee said he is not bothered by the sort of prejudice outlined by Bouvette. “People are going to say or do what they want,” he said.
Voices of Indigenous Christianity
Bennett, program director of Cardus Faith Communities, interviewed 12 Indigenous Canadians, most of them Christian, about their religious commitments, “which often clash with the typical public presentation of Indigenous spirituality.” Here is a selection of some of their comments:
Tal James of the Penelakut First Nation in Nanaimo spoke about the relationship between Indigenous culture and his Christian faith:
Tal James and wife Christina. Photo courtesy of Project 620 – James Ministry
“I think … that our [Indigenous] cultures were complete, and in Jesus they’re more complete. I think that’s a big thing and a big step for a lot of us. You’re going to have a lot of non-Indigenous people look at you and question your actions based on your Aboriginal heritage. Don’t take that to heart. They’re the ignorant ones who don’t want you to flourish. Those of you who are Christians, First Nations Christians, you come to the table with the same gifting that non-Aboriginal people have. For them to say, ‘We want to make room for you at the table,’ correct them. You are already at the table, and encourage them to step back and allow your gifts to flourish. Because it’s one in the same spirit.”
Rose-Alma McDonald, a Mohawk from Akwesasne, which borders New York, Ontario, and Quebec, talked about re-embracing her Catholic faith:
Rose-Alma McDonald. Photo courtesy of Cardus
“I surprised everybody, including myself, in terms of embracing Catholicism after 20 years away. So I’ve had a few epiphanies in the sense that this is why my mother made me do so much in the church growing up. When I’m working, volunteering, and doing stuff in the church, I remember that. I keep remembering I’m Catholic and I’m still Catholic. I will stay Catholic because of the way I was raised.”
Jeff Decontie, a Mohawk from the Algonquin First Nations who lives in Ottawa, talked about being a person of faith in a secular world:
Jeff Decontie. Photo courtesy of Cardus
“Secular worldviews can sort of eat up everything around them and accept a whole wide range of beliefs at the same time. For example, you have the prevailing scientific thinking alongside New Age believers, and people in society just accept this, saying, ‘Oh, whatever it is you believe in, all religions lead to the same thing.’ No one questions it. How can these contradictions coexist? … Then we ask an [Indigenous] elder to lead prayer? Any other religion would be a no-no, but you can ask for an elder who’s going to pray a generic prayer to some generic Creator, and it’s not going to ruffle any feathers. I think that’s the danger of secular thought creeping into Canada: It goes unnoticed, it’s perceived as neutral, but at the same time it’s welcoming a whole wide range of beliefs. And it doesn’t just influence Indigenous thought. It’s influencing Christianity.”
Rosella Kinoshameg, a member of the Wikwemikong Reserve on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, spoke about being Indigenous and Catholic:
Rosella Kinoshameg. Photo courtesy of the Catholic Register
“Well, I can’t change being Indigenous. That’s something that is me. I can’t change that. But to believe in the things that I was taught, the traditional things, the way of life and the meanings of these things, and then in a church, well, those things help one another and they make me feel stronger.”
This article was originally published May 10, 2023, in The B.C. Catholic, a weekly publication serving the Catholic community in British Columbia, Canada, and is reprinted here on CNA with permission.
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A constitutional guarantee to murder your prenatal infant is the final testament ending France as a Catholic nation. Restructuring of Notre Dame was simply restoring a museum, as are the countless beautiful spired French Gothic churches doting the landscape from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.
Suave Macron, polished, progressive socialist leading the march to end a great nation. La République En Marche! His Republic on the March is considered center right, that tag understood in the most progressive, secularist terms. A kind of smooth nationalist secularism that reminds this writer of National Socialism [Nazism] without the hysteria.
If I may, I would open a window to an article by a non-Catholic – the Italian journalist Giuliano Ferrara – a very severe article, but one that I would have liked a Catholic to have written.
Overwhelming majority, just two dozen noes, the French National Assembly enshrines in the Constitution the guillotine for conceived but unborn children, abortion or voluntary termination of pregnancy. This would be the fulfillment of the revolutionary homeland of rights, under the aegis (and I’m sorry but it was predictable) of a president who dares not call himself liberal but would be so in economics and society, except for aligning with the most massive, overwhelming wave of gloomy and transversal conformism, no more political, ideological, or cultural distinctions, no discussion, it’s done because it can be done, it must be done because the body is mine, even that of another I have conceived with the decisive and shared, as it is now called, help of a male, under the now evanescent screen of pleasure and love. If in France, beyond the veil of intelligent chatter, a bit of the powerful and bitter moralism of the Grand Siècle, of the seventeenth century, had survived, the deputies of Palais Bourbon would have known that this tribute to the philosophy of so-called rights is only a blasphemous homage to self-love, in its serialized, massified, obligatory version.
La Rochefoucauld: ‘Self-love is the love of oneself and of everything for oneself; it makes men idolaters of themselves and would make them tyrants of others if fortune gave them the means; it never lingers outside of itself, and it dwells on extraneous subjects like bees on flowers, to draw from them what is necessary. Nothing is more impetuous than its desires, nothing is more secret than its plans, nothing is more cunning than its conduct; its subtleties cannot be described, its transformations surpass those of metamorphoses, its refinements those of chemistry. The depths cannot be fathomed nor the darkness of its abyss penetrated. There it is safe from the eyes most perspicacious; it performs a thousand vicious turns. Often it is invisible even to itself, conceives, nourishes, raises there, unknowingly, a large number of affections and hatreds; it forges ones so monstrous that, when they come to light, it disowns them or cannot bring itself to admit them.’
The idolatry of oneself, the irresponsible and complicit male, and the female who becomes a victim and executioner of her freedom, the Constitution that cuts off any possible conscientious objection, establishes indeed the obligation of conscience to kill future and survival, a metamorphosis of horror, a ruthless and cynical desire for gratification at the expense of life, impetuous, secret, cunning, subtle, chemical, laden with hatred, vicious, invisible even to itself: everything has already been written, only the constitutional sanction in the name of fraternity, equality, and of course, freedom was missing. What endless shame, what disgust, what condemnation to death of an entire sensitivity and culture, what a perverse champion of the ideal of secularism, what an irreligious delirium. And there will be no bishops and priests and holy beguines and intellectuals to barricade, neither people nor their elected nor parties will rise in the name of scientific obviousness, the banal photograph of a chromosomally pure and unique child destined for slaughter. The revolution of homicidal rights has triumphed, l’intendance suivra (the supply will follow).”
This is an immortal, spectacular, and courageous piece that delves deep and highlights what we hide. The author, as I mentioned, does not have faith in God, but I see faith in this article. I would like to add that France is a country notoriously dominated by Freemasonry (cf: https://oraetcogita.substack.com/p/part-two-a-new-study-on-freemasonry, and: https://oraetcogita.substack.com/p/a-new-study-on-freemasonry-how-does).
Just 430 years ago, on February 2nd, the cycle of apparitions of ‘Mary of Good Success’ began as the Holy Virgin appeared to Sister Mariana de Jesús, now a Servant of God, leaving us prophecies – many already fulfilled, others yet to come – about the Church and the present world.The Virgin Mary, appearing in Quito, Ecuador, to a cloistered nun, Mother Mariana Francisca de Jesús Torres y Berriochoa (1563-1635), prophesied the severe crisis that would afflict the Catholic Church and society from the mid-20th century onwards, condemning especially the satanic, destructive, and devastating work of the Masonic sect even before its formal establishment (June 24, 1717).
She said: “… Passions will overflow, and there will be a total corruption of morals, so that Satan will almost reign through the Masonic sects, mainly tending to corrupt children and thereby provoke general corruption. Woe to the children of that time! … The sect, after conquering all social classes, will attack the family and childhood. In those unfortunate times, we will hardly find the innocence of childhood; thus, vocations to the priesthood will be lost, and this will constitute a true calamity.”
However, in the last apparition, which occurred on December 8, 1634, the Queen of Heaven and Earth concluded with these words of hope, similar to those of Fatima: “… the veneration to me under the comforting title of Our Lady of Good Success, in the almost total corruption of the twentieth century, will work for the support and safeguarding of the faith.”
A constitutional guarantee to murder your prenatal infant is the final testament ending France as a Catholic nation. Restructuring of Notre Dame was simply restoring a museum, as are the countless beautiful spired French Gothic churches doting the landscape from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.
Suave Macron, polished, progressive socialist leading the march to end a great nation. La République En Marche! His Republic on the March is considered center right, that tag understood in the most progressive, secularist terms. A kind of smooth nationalist secularism that reminds this writer of National Socialism [Nazism] without the hysteria.
If I may, I would open a window to an article by a non-Catholic – the Italian journalist Giuliano Ferrara – a very severe article, but one that I would have liked a Catholic to have written.
Overwhelming majority, just two dozen noes, the French National Assembly enshrines in the Constitution the guillotine for conceived but unborn children, abortion or voluntary termination of pregnancy. This would be the fulfillment of the revolutionary homeland of rights, under the aegis (and I’m sorry but it was predictable) of a president who dares not call himself liberal but would be so in economics and society, except for aligning with the most massive, overwhelming wave of gloomy and transversal conformism, no more political, ideological, or cultural distinctions, no discussion, it’s done because it can be done, it must be done because the body is mine, even that of another I have conceived with the decisive and shared, as it is now called, help of a male, under the now evanescent screen of pleasure and love. If in France, beyond the veil of intelligent chatter, a bit of the powerful and bitter moralism of the Grand Siècle, of the seventeenth century, had survived, the deputies of Palais Bourbon would have known that this tribute to the philosophy of so-called rights is only a blasphemous homage to self-love, in its serialized, massified, obligatory version.
La Rochefoucauld: ‘Self-love is the love of oneself and of everything for oneself; it makes men idolaters of themselves and would make them tyrants of others if fortune gave them the means; it never lingers outside of itself, and it dwells on extraneous subjects like bees on flowers, to draw from them what is necessary. Nothing is more impetuous than its desires, nothing is more secret than its plans, nothing is more cunning than its conduct; its subtleties cannot be described, its transformations surpass those of metamorphoses, its refinements those of chemistry. The depths cannot be fathomed nor the darkness of its abyss penetrated. There it is safe from the eyes most perspicacious; it performs a thousand vicious turns. Often it is invisible even to itself, conceives, nourishes, raises there, unknowingly, a large number of affections and hatreds; it forges ones so monstrous that, when they come to light, it disowns them or cannot bring itself to admit them.’
The idolatry of oneself, the irresponsible and complicit male, and the female who becomes a victim and executioner of her freedom, the Constitution that cuts off any possible conscientious objection, establishes indeed the obligation of conscience to kill future and survival, a metamorphosis of horror, a ruthless and cynical desire for gratification at the expense of life, impetuous, secret, cunning, subtle, chemical, laden with hatred, vicious, invisible even to itself: everything has already been written, only the constitutional sanction in the name of fraternity, equality, and of course, freedom was missing. What endless shame, what disgust, what condemnation to death of an entire sensitivity and culture, what a perverse champion of the ideal of secularism, what an irreligious delirium. And there will be no bishops and priests and holy beguines and intellectuals to barricade, neither people nor their elected nor parties will rise in the name of scientific obviousness, the banal photograph of a chromosomally pure and unique child destined for slaughter. The revolution of homicidal rights has triumphed, l’intendance suivra (the supply will follow).”
This is an immortal, spectacular, and courageous piece that delves deep and highlights what we hide. The author, as I mentioned, does not have faith in God, but I see faith in this article. I would like to add that France is a country notoriously dominated by Freemasonry (cf: https://oraetcogita.substack.com/p/part-two-a-new-study-on-freemasonry, and: https://oraetcogita.substack.com/p/a-new-study-on-freemasonry-how-does).
Just 430 years ago, on February 2nd, the cycle of apparitions of ‘Mary of Good Success’ began as the Holy Virgin appeared to Sister Mariana de Jesús, now a Servant of God, leaving us prophecies – many already fulfilled, others yet to come – about the Church and the present world.The Virgin Mary, appearing in Quito, Ecuador, to a cloistered nun, Mother Mariana Francisca de Jesús Torres y Berriochoa (1563-1635), prophesied the severe crisis that would afflict the Catholic Church and society from the mid-20th century onwards, condemning especially the satanic, destructive, and devastating work of the Masonic sect even before its formal establishment (June 24, 1717).
She said: “… Passions will overflow, and there will be a total corruption of morals, so that Satan will almost reign through the Masonic sects, mainly tending to corrupt children and thereby provoke general corruption. Woe to the children of that time! … The sect, after conquering all social classes, will attack the family and childhood. In those unfortunate times, we will hardly find the innocence of childhood; thus, vocations to the priesthood will be lost, and this will constitute a true calamity.”
However, in the last apparition, which occurred on December 8, 1634, the Queen of Heaven and Earth concluded with these words of hope, similar to those of Fatima: “… the veneration to me under the comforting title of Our Lady of Good Success, in the almost total corruption of the twentieth century, will work for the support and safeguarding of the faith.”