MORE TRIPS PLANNED
In addition to a three-city tour in the United States this year, Pope Francis said Monday will visit South America and Africa. he outlined his 2015 travel plans during an in-flight news conference on his way back to Rome from the Philippines. The pope said he wDill visit Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay as well as the Central African Republic and Uganda. In the United States, he is planning on visiting New York, Washington and Philadelphia. Francis said he plans to canonize the 17th-century missionary Junipero Serra, who established nine missions in California, The Catholic News Agency reported that the U.S. trip will take place Sept. 22-27 and include a visit with President Barack Obama and an address to a join session of Congress.
— Los Angeles Times
Speaking to reporters en route home from the Philippines, Francis said there are plenty of church-approved ways to regulate births. But he said that, most importantly, no outside institution should impose its views on regulating family size, blasting what he called the “ideological colonization” of the developing world.
African bishops, in particular, have long complained about how Western ideas about birth control and gay rights are increasingly being imposed on the developing world, often as a condition for development aid.
“Every people deserves to conserve its identity without being ideologically colonized,” Francis said.
His comments, taken together with his defense during the trip of the Catholic Church’s ban on artificial contraception, signal that he is increasingly showing his more conservative bent, which has largely been ignored or obscured by a media narrative that has tended to highlight his populist persona.
On the trip, he gave his strongest defense yet of the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which enshrined the church’s opposition to artificial birth control. He warned against “insidious attacks” against the family — a reference to gay marriage proposals — echoing language often used by overwhelmingly conservative U.S. bishops. And he insisted that “openness to life is a condition of the sacrament of matrimony.”
At the same time, however, he said it is not true that to be a good Catholic “you have to be like rabbits.” On the contrary, he said, “responsible parenthood” requires that couples regulate the births of their children, as church teaching allows. He cited the case of a woman he met who was pregnant with her eighth child after seven Cesarean sections.
“That is an irresponsibility!” he said.
The woman might argue that she should trust in God. “But God gives you methods to be responsible,” Francis said.
He said there are many “licit” ways of regulating births that are approved by the church, an apparent reference to the Natural Family Planning method of monitoring a woman’s cycle to avoid intercourse when she is ovulating.
During the Vatican’s recent meeting on the family, African bishops have denounced how aid groups and lending institutions often condition their assistance on a country’s compliance with their ideals: allowing health care workers to distribute condoms, or withdrawing assistance if legislation discriminating against gays is passed.
“When imposed conditions come from imperial colonizers, they search to make people lose their own identity and make a sameness,” Francis said. “This is ideological colonization.”
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