Loading...by Patrick J. Buchanan – August 29, 1994
Anti-Catholicism, as has often been observed, is the anti-Semitism of the in intelligentsia.
Thus, when word leaked that the Vatican, in seeking out allies at the U.N. population conference in Cairo, had contacted the Islamic states, including Libya and Iran, one knew the scribbling class would not let slip such an opening for some good old Catholic- baiting.
“Against all odds”, intoned Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, “the Vatican has topped its recent act of awarding Kurt Waldheim a papal knighthood…. The Vatican now finds a moral nadir below even the feting of the Austrian ex-president and Nazi trooper…. Throughout history the Vatican has had to sup with the devil.”
Speaking of supping with devils, in Desert Storm, did not we warmly welcome the services of one Hafez Assad? And if it is morally permissible to enlist the Butcher of Hama to help recapture a few oil wells, why is it a “moral nadir” for the Holy Father to seek votes where he can to prevent a holocaust of Third World children?
And was not Mr. Hoagland lead drummer boy in Desert Storm?
To defeat Adolf Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt embraced the greatest killer of Christians in all his history, Josef Stalin. To maneuver in the Cold War, President Nixon went to China and toasted Mao. Now, a columnist who praised Mr. Nixon for dealing with his adversaries abroad with “practical idealism and enlightened realism” is more than just a hypocrite when he assaults the pope for making diplomatic contact with Tripoli and Tehran.
John Paul II had better consider the “political consequences of a jihad on abortion”, warns Mr. Hoagland. Well, Bill Clinton had better consider the consequences of what his crowd is up to in Cairo.
Notes Reuters, Islamic groups “have worked themselves into a frenzy over the conference, warning that a draft version of its final declaration violates Islamic morals and encourages promiscuity and homosexuality. Look for big trouble in Cairo in September. after all, we asked for it.
There, America’s moral authority is being put behind abortion on demand, sterilization, homosexuality. While this may be a bold agenda at D.C. dinner parties, to traditional societies in Latin America, Africa and the Islamic world, it is the essence of decadent, godless Western materialism. The new face Bill Clinton’s America is presenting the world is causing millions who once looked to us with affection and admiration to recoil in contempt and disgust.
No, friends, it is not the American Right that is “isolating’ America.
In the early years of the Cold War, we had no more formidable an ally than Pius XII. In the final years of that struggle, Ronald Reagan had no more resourceful and powerful a friend than John Paul II. Whose fault is it that the pope is against us in Cairo?
Nor is he alone. Here at home, Catholic cardinals normally sympathetic to Democrats have turned bitterly against the Clintons on moral issues. Evangelical Christians who had kept aloof from politics are going down into the arena, drawn there by revulsion over the causes embraced by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
In Cairo, says Mr. Hoagland, the U.N., “strongly supported by the the Clinton Administration, has produced a pro-feminist agenda devoted to ’empowering’ women to exercise control on family planning and reproductive rights.” . That’s one way of putting it.
Reality: In 1983, the United Nations gave its first Family Planning Award jointly to Indira Gandhi, overthrown in 1977 for forced sterilization of Indian men–and to Beijing’s “family planning minister.”
This was four years after China adopted its one-child policy that has produced forced sterilizations, abortions running to 10 million a year, infanticide, a family planning gestapo agent in every village, floggings for men whose wives refused to abort, and “missing” girls.
A free-lance writer in Hong Kong wrote in the LA. Times in 1992: “The Government-run China News Service reported last year the drowning of baby girls had revived to such an extent in Guangxi Province that at least 1 million boys will be unable to find wives in 20 years. And partly because of the gender imbalance, the feudalist practice of selling women has been revived.”
Is drowning baby girls “empowering” women?
Because Pope Paul II is willing to use all the weapons of moral suasion at his command to combat such evil, he is savaged.
Once America stood for freedom, liberty and a Judeo-Christian moral order. Next month in Cairo, the U.S. delegation will offer the world’s poor lUDs, suction pumps, condoms and Norplant.
Why should they listen? “While birthrates among Western women are declining to an average of 1.7 children born per woman”, writes staffer Paul Likoudis in the Wanderer, “Moslem women have an average of six children each.”
Why should the black, brown and yellow peoples who look to inherit the Earth follow the example of self-indulgent Westerners who are committing racial suicide?
Promiscuity, contraception, 1.6 million abortions a year have given us new epidemics of VD, AIDS, soaring divorce rates, 80 percent illegitimacy in our cities, family collapse and falling birth rates– all leading to levels of violence we have never known before.
Why should any nation follow such an example?
Mr. Hoagland quotes an Iranian diplomat after his visit from a Vatican envoy: “The future war is between the religious and the materialists.” What is astonishing is not that the Holy Father is seeking allies where he can in his fight for life, it is that America, at Cairo will be lined up beside regimes whose “family planning” programs one formerly thought were exclusive to the Third Reich.