Manifesto from Católicas pelo Direito de Decidir – Brasil on the Catholic Church’s Brotherhood Campaign 2008

The 2008 Campaign of Brotherhood – whose topic is “Brotherhood and Defense of Life” – will, once again, mobilize the Brazilian Catholic community to reflect upon Christian values and think about the significance of life.  For this topic to be relevant, it is necessary that all Catholic voices be heard, and we as Catolicas pelo Direito de Decidir feel obliged to offer our own contribution.

We reiterate, along with the Church, that all people have the right to a full and dignified life, as is stated in the Gospel of John, 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”  With that verse, we remember the urgent necessity of reversing human destruction of natural resources, which, certainly, puts the lives of future generations in danger.  With that verse, we reaffirm that to defend life is to fight against poverty, exclusion, and the extreme social injustices that plague our country.  Along with the Church, we understand that to defend life would be to cultivate conditions so that one may live his or her life without violence, without inequality of any kind, without oppression, without exploitation, without fear and without prejudice.

However, as Catholics, holding Christian tradition and evangelical values as references, we believe that there are fundamental questions when peoples’ lives are in play.  For this reason, we wish to interrogate the Church with regard to the eminent contradictions between their speech and practice, especially regarding what they present as “defense of life”.

• May one purport to defend life while ignoring the millions of people throughout the world that die as victims of preventable diseases such as AIDS? To continue to prohibit the use of condoms that save so many lives with a brutal indifference to so much pain?

• May one purport to defend life while condemning people to indefinite suffering on their deathbeds, prohibited from free and premeditated access to a dignified death by euthanasia?

• May one purport to defend life while condemning the stem-cell research that encourages millions of people with disabilities with the possibility for a dignified life?

• May one purport to defend life and condemn racism when a display incorporating indigenous and Afro-Latino religious rituals was prohibited from Catholic liturgy?

• May one purport to defend life and condemn deadly intolerance when one affirms Christian superiority to relation to other beliefs?

• May one purport to defend life while eliminating the beauty of human diversity with intolerant attitudes and speeches directed towards free expressions of human sexuality, condemning a loving relationship between two people of the same sex?

• May one purport to defend life while putting more value on ecclesiastical rules than love, impeding the renewal of life that may come from a second marriage?

• May one purport to defend life and denounce inequality, when the same Church maintains a state of violence towards women, submitting them to rules decided by others, impeding them from fulfilling their call to a religious vocation and relegating them to second tier status underneath the men of the Catholic hierarchy?

• May one purport to defend life, when one attempts to impede the implementation of public health policies – such as projects promoting family planning and the qualified distribution of emergency contraception – that work to prevent those situations that put people’s lives at risk?

• May one purport to defend life while disrespecting the fundamental principal of living a free, happy and dignified life, which is the right to autonomous decision over one’s own body?  To condemn women to inaction when faced with a pregnancy resulting from rape, to not interrupt a pregnancy that puts a woman’s life in danger, or when the fetus has no way of survival?

• May one purport to defend life while closing off the free exercising of thought, impeding any true expression of the diversity that already exists within the Church?

In this manifesto, Catholics pelo Direito de Decidir stands with all of those that, within the Church and Brazilian society in general, strive not only to make “defense of life” understood in its complexity, but work to provide everyone with the right to live in