The Vatican on Wednesday said it was suspending all financial aid to Amnesty International and called on all Catholics to stop supporting the human rights group, accusing it of promoting abortion.
"No more Catholic financing of Amnesty International after the organization's pro-abortion about-turn," a statement from the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace said.
The council's president, Cardinal Renato Martino, said the "suspension of all financing of Amnesty by Catholic organizations and by individuals" is the "inevitable consequence" of the group's recent decision to support access to abortion for women who had been raped or whose health was endangered by their pregnancy.
Amnesty Italy promptly said it did not receive any Vatican or Catholic Church funding anyway.
In a statement, Amnesty Italy said it had decided in April to involve itself in issues relating to abortion "to the extent that they are directly linked to its actions for the right to health and against violence against women."
As a result it will call for an end to the penalization of women who have abortions and the right of women who are victims "of sexual violence or incest" or run health risks to have abortions.
But it will not conduct any worldwide campaign in favor of abortion or its general legalization and "will not make any judgement on whether it is right or not."
"Thanks be to God, there is no internationally-recognized right to abortion," Martino said, before attacking "the pro-abortion pressure groups which continue their propaganda in the framework of what [the late pope] John Paul II called `the culture of death.'"
"It is extremely worrying that an organization as worthy as Amnesty International bends to the pressures of these groups," he said.
The Vatican statement reproduces statements by Martino on the US Internet site National Catholic Report.
The site also quotes Widney Brown, one of the heads of Amnesty International, who said that 68,000 women die each year from backstreet abortions.
Brown said that Amnesty's views on abortion were inspired by its international campaign to combat violence against women.
But, Martino said, "the Church teaches that the murder of a human being can never be justified."
"Abortion is murder and to justify it selectively, in the event of rape, that is to define an innocent child in the belly of its mother as an enemy, as `something one can destroy,'" he said.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has