The responsibilities fell on Giulio Andreotti and Aldo Moro and on the entire Christian Democrats (and of the moderate intervention of the CEI and the Movement for Life)
Of Roberto de Mattei
The attention of all the media in Italy has focused in recent days on the fortieth anniversary of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. Il 16 March 1978, in an ambush in via Fani, the Christian Democrat politician was kidnapped and his escort exterminated by the Red Brigades. Il 9 maggio, after an imprisonment of 55 days, his body was found riddled with bullets in the trunk of a car in via Caetani. No one has yet remembered that though, in that same spring of 1978 the law was discussed and approved by Parliament 194 on abortion that, since then, it caused six million victims in our country.
In the 1991 the honorary president of the Movement for Life, Francesco Migliori, revealed that it was the then secretary of the Christian Democracy Aldo Moro who «in the National Council of 1975 had expressed the opinion that, so as not to prevent the meeting with other popular parties (i.e. the Socialist Party and the Communist Party ed.) these problems should remain closed to the conscience", so it was Moro's intervention that convinced the DC not to engage in the anti-abortion battle of the 1970s. L’on.Aldo Morohe was the strategist of the historic compromise with Enrico Berlinguer's Communist Party and the agreement provided for the disengagement of the DC on abortion.
THE DEFECTIONS OF THE DC ARE DETERMINANTS
During Moro's imprisonment, il 15 April 1978, the law 194 on abortion was promoted to the Chamber with 308 votes in favor and 275 against «a slim majority made up of communists, socialists, liberals, social democrats, Republicans and left-wing independents and strengthened, if he says, from the votes of a group of Christian Democrats who would have thus averted the referendum" (the Republic, 15 maggio 1998). «The figures of the final vote – Francesco Damato wrote in Il Giornale del 10 maggio – prove that abortionists, despite having a majority on paper, they would have lost their battle if the opposing front had been all in place".
Reached the Senate, the text was approved, il 18 maggio, con 160 votes in favor e 148 opposite, out of a total of 308 senators. They were decisive, once again, the defections of the DC. In the Official Gazette of 22 maggio 1978, law no. 194 which authorizes the murder was promulgated under the signature of all Christian Democrat parliamentarians: the President of the Republic Giovanni Leone, the Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and the ministers, all Christian Democrats, Tina Anselmi, Francesco Bonifacio, Thomas Morlino, Filippo Maria Pandolfi.
Andreotti defended himself in a letter to Father Rotondi, saying that his was "a necessary act". An act perhaps due according to the principles of legal positivism, but certainly not according to those of Catholic morality, for which the only absolute duties we have are those towards the divine and natural law which, in the specific case, forbids killing the innocent.
The Prime Minister, on the other hand, he didn't limit himself to this: his government officially assumed responsibility for the law before the Constitutional Court: in fact in the hearing of 5 December 1979, the State Attorney General, on government mandate, while having the ability to raise exceptions, defended the constitutional legitimacy of the law. At the beginning of June the President of the Republic Giovanni Leone, that he had not felt the need to resign when the law was signed, he was forced to do it, following the controversy over the Lockeed scandal.
WHEN CATHOLIC CIVILIZATION WAS CATHOLIC
After a few weeks, the socialist Sandro Pertini was elected to the same position. Andreotti, on the other hand, had a long political life, marked, however, by stains that the trial acquittal did not erase, such as the accusation of having instigated the murder of Mino Pecorelli and his complicity in mafia crimes. We doubt the truth of these accusations, but even if they were true, we are certain that the responsibility of having signed the law on abortion is enormously greater than the complicity in the mafia murders. These crimes indeed, like the killing of Moro by the Red Brigades, they do not constitute a denial in principle of the right to life and are therefore less serious than the introduction of mass murder into our legal system.
Il 20 maggio 1978, in one of his editorials, La Civiltà Cattolica wrote: «Right, the terrible and shocking story of the Hon. Moro and the ruthless killing of his escort attracted everyone's attention so strongly that other problems took a back seat; but if we reflect more deeply we find that what is happening in the Senate these days with the definitive approval of the legalization of abortion is more serious, from a general point of view and with regards to the future, not just the immediate one, but also far from our country, of what happened on 16 March in via Fani. Here a horrendous crime was committed, but the principle of the right to life and liberty was not affected, on the basis of which that crime was unanimously condemned; in Parliament, Instead, for the first time in the history of our country, the principle of the right to life is undermined, that is, the fundamental principle on which not only social life is based, but also the Italian legal system" (notebook 3070 of the 20 maggio 1978, p. 313). La Civiltà Cattolica rightly underlined how the legalization of murder is much more serious than a single homicidal act, such as the murder of Moro and the massacre of his escort, but fails to mention that the approval of abortion is very serious, not so much because it undermines the principle of the right to life on which the Italian legal system is based, but above all because it publicly contradicts the doctrine of the Church and natural and divine law. The responsibilities for the passage of the abortion law fall, Furthermore, as well as on Christian Democracy, on the Italian Pastors who discouraged the opposition in Parliament and after the introduction of the law tried to prevent its complete repeal through the instrument of the popular referendum.
WHAT (NON) HE MADE THE ITALIAN EPISCOPAL CONFERENCE
Among my memories of that period is a meeting we had, In the 1979, con mons. Luigi Maverna, secretary of the Italian Episcopal Conference, to ask for support, also tacit and indirect but benevolent, to the collection of signatures that Alleanza Cattolica intended to launch for a referendum to repeal the law 194 on abortion, just approved. As an answer, the prelate expressed his total unavailability to us, present and future, of the CEI against anyone who intended to promote a referendum against abortion. To our objections, he replied with "You do it", shrugging his shoulders. The reason was clear. At CEI, then presided over by Cardinal Antonio Poma, he discreetly supported the historical compromise and wanted to avoid the politics of the “fences” o, like today, if he says, of the “opposing walls”. The referendum “divided” and the strategy that has been followed from then to today, it was that of mediation and compromise.
The line of the Episcopal Conference was the same as that of the Secretariat of State and John Paul II, despite his categorical opposition to abortion, he couldn't change it. During the eighties, thanks to Professor Wanda Poltawska, very close to John Paul II, I met the Pope's secretary several times, mons. Stanisław Dziwisz, who always listened with courtesy and attention to my pleas in favor of repealing the law 194. However, John Paul II did not want to interfere in Italian political affairs and had delegated this task to the Secretariat of State.
In the morning of 22 maggio 1980, I met, with Giovanni Cantoni and Agostino Sanfratello of Alleanza Cattolica, upon presentation by Msgr. You're surprised, mons. Achille Silvestrini, Secretary of the Council for Public Affairs of the Church. Silvestrini had succeeded in 1973 to Cardinal Agostino Casaroli in the role of secretary of the Council for Public Affairs for the Church and was a close collaborator of Casaroli, but above all it was “spiritual son” of Msgr. Salvatore Baldassarri. archbishop “rosso” of Ravenna, deposed by Paul VI for his ultra-progressivism.
During the conversation we exposed the urgency of a repeal referendum supported by the indispensable cooperation of at least an adequate part of the Italian bishops, for the purposes of collecting the 500.000 required signatures. Mons. Silvestrini, in a mellifluous tone, he opposed the consideration of the inappropriateness of such an anti-abortion referendum, because it would have caused, according to his expression, a harmful one “counter-catechesis” abortionist, in the sense that, as a reaction to Catholics' anti-abortionism, abortionists would have multiplied their commitment in favor of abortion. But the Catholic world – we made the monsignor observe – is not already suffering from growing pro-abortion aggression today? And if defending the truth and doing good is an opportunity for counter-catechesis, we should then abstain from proclaiming the truth and doing good?
Mons. Silvestrini observed that a second reason for the inopportuneness was the still burning memory of the defeat of the referendum against divorce. But maybe that wasn't true – we replied – that this battle had been lost because it had not been fought adequately and generously? And if the memory of this defeat was bitter, the memory of the inertia that had been its cause should not have been even more bitter.?
Mons. Silvestrini said that “the party too” (he was referring to the Christian Democrats) he would have been against the idea of an anti-abortion referendum. How to be surprised, we replied, if this party favored the law in parliament and some of its leading exponents signed this law, assuming full moral and political responsibility? In reality we spoke two different languages and there was no possibility of dialogue. In the end, the Secretariat of State and the Episcopal Conference weakly approved a referendum request from the Pro-Life Movement that accepted therapeutic abortion and contraception.
In the referendum that took place on 17 maggio 1981, the law proposed by the Pro-Life Movement did not pass 32 percent. Abortion continued to claim its victims in Italy. […]
The moral decadence of the Church and Italian society is not a matter of recent years, but it comes from afar and must be analyzed in its remote causes, if you want to find the remedies.
Note from BastaBugie: we hear that Giulio Andreotti later regretted having signed the abortion law, but things are different as the following article aims to demonstrate.
THE HOAX THAT ANDREOTTI REGRETS HAVING SIGNED THE ABORTION LAW
The Italian law on abortion is the only one in the world promulgated with the signature of only Christian Democratic politicians (accustomed to the compromise that has destroyed Italy from lesser evil to lesser evil)
by Vincenzo Gubitosi
http://www.bastabugie.it/it/articoli.php?id=5533
Original title: Forty years after abortion in Italy (1978-2018)
Source: Roman correspondence, 21/03/2018
Published on BastaBugie n. 601
