ROME – Abortion, which leads to the deaths of innocent humans, is just as evil as killing innocent bystanders in a suicide attack, said the secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Some evil, like the shootings at Virginia Tech, are obvious and visible, said Archbishop Angelo Amato in an April 23 speech on terrorism and evil.
“To the daily ration of evil” reported in the news, there must be added the evil that remains almost invisible and usually is presented “as an expression of the ‘progress’ of humanity,” the archbishop told a Vatican-sponsored seminar for airport chaplains.
As examples of evil presented as progress, Archbishop Amato cited “abortion clinics, authentic slaughterhouses of budding human beings” or “the laboratories where, for example, RU-486, the morning-after pill, is made or where human embryos are manipulated as if they were simply biological material.”
Evil also is present “in the parliaments of so-called ‘civil’ nations where they promulgate laws contrary to the nature of the human person, like the approval of marriages between persons of the same sex or euthanasia,” he said.
The archbishop described this phenomenon as “‘terrorism with a human face,’ which also occurs daily and is equally repugnant” with the actions of a suicide bomber. It often is masked with “expressions that hide the tragic reality of the facts. For example, abortion is called (the) ‘voluntary interruption of a pregnancy’ and not the killing of a defenseless human being.”
In every generation, he said, people continue to commit acts of evil with disastrous results.
“In fact, despite progress in every field, despite the conquests of science, the existence of evil behaviors remains stable: wars, hatred, killings, betrayals, abuses, injustice and conflicts,” he said.
“Evil today,” he said, “is not only the action of individuals or well-defined groups, but comes from dark centers, laboratories of false opinions, anonymous powers that pound our minds with false messages, judging as ridiculous and retrograde behavior conforming to the Gospel.”