Pastoral letter on right to life from Bishop Brennan
PRIESTS around the county will be introducing a pastoral letter on the right to life from Bishop Denis Brennan at masses this weekend.
Copies of the letter will be available in all churches after mass so that parishioners can bring them home to read them and consider his message.
Bishop Brennan said: ‘Life is a sacred gift, it is God given. As parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins – we are asked to reflect on the blessedness of the life we have been given, and the gravity of the decision we now face.
‘In a world where people fight so hard to win human rights, we in Ireland are being asked to take a right away, and the most fundamental right of all at that, the right to life. ‘ That a person might consider the termination of pregnancy as the only option they have in difficult circumstances challenges us all to discern an ever more supportive approach that lovingly penetrates the frightening and lonely places in which some mothers and fathers find themselves, especially in those cases where they believe they have no other choice but termination.
‘What repeal would mean is very clear, namely that the unborn boy or girl whose heart beats at 21 days - and the older unborn baby who has all of her/his vital organs at twelve weeks - will have no rights at all in Irish law, should people vote yes to repeal. This twelveweek-old unborn baby - who is now enjoying for the first time the ability to kick, to move and to yawn – would, in the first stretches of young life, be without the basic protection of the right to life itself.
‘No referendum can change moral truth. The direct and intentional killing, of an unborn human being, would be just as immoral the day after it was ‘ legalised’, as it had been, the day before. That any person, at any age, would have no rights at all is not, I believe, what a majority of Irish people want. This is what repeal proposes and will come to mean were it to pass’, he said.