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“Speaking with compassion, acting with love, and doing everything possible to counter the threats against human life posed by society”: that is the gist of the message launched by Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow, during the national conference of Life, the association that has for years been campaigning in support of life. The conference was held in Northampton in recent days. The Catholic Church of Scotland has declared 2004 “Year of life and of the family”. Faced by the continuous “violations of the most fundamental human relation, that between mother and child”, how can “a society that is founded as ours is on the family not be concerned by the 200,000 children that are aborted in the country each year?” asked the archbishop. According to Conti, “the mere condemnation of abortion is not enough”; we must “try to understand the mentality of the women who are thinking of interrupting their pregnancy by offering realistic alternatives and restoring to them ‘the dignity of motherhood'”. The archbishop of Glasgow expressed further concern about the development of in vitro fertilization and cloning: these are practices, he said, “that subvert the natural order and reduce human life from a gift to a product”. In the view of Msgr. Conti, “by not categorically prohibiting human cloning” the British government “has now fallen out of step with the other European countries and with the USA”. Hence the need for ever greater commitment to “support the right to life of the embryo and, more generally, of every human being” through “convincing arguments but especially through love” because, he concluded, addressing the representatives of the various associations present, “our witness of care and support to mothers in difficulty is the most persuasive argument in favour of the dignity of the human person, the key to changing the hearts of minds of your generation”.
