Vatican Seeks Islamic Allies in Clash With U.N. Over Population Control

A Vatican spokesman says the Catholic Church is seeking out allies in the Islamic world to defend the family and, especially, the unborn.

According to Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, a Colombian, the Vatican will hold a large interreligious conference on the family at the end of September, in which several Islamic delegations will participate.

Rome has already sought assistance from Islamic countries to work at the United Nations Conference on Population and Development to be held in Cairo Sept. 5-13.

That meeting is expected to turn into a kind of showdown between the Holy See and its allies--mostly developing nations--on one side, and the United Nations, the United States and other wealthy nations on the other. The main point of contention is access to abortion and artificial contraceptives worldwide.

“Islamic teaching condemns abortion,” Lopez Trujillo said in an interview with the Rome daily Il Tempo. “But some Arab governments are subject to the influence of political pressure from the West.”

Church officials have on a number of occasions decried the practice of tying aid for developing countries to birth control programs as a new kind of imperialism.

The cardinal said a number of heads of states from underdeveloped countries are in agreement with the Holy See and skeptical of the U.N.’s plans for population control. But their hands are tied, he said, by the funds they receive from international agencies.

“If all the presidents were free from these kinds of pressures, certainly a greater number of countries would be more consciously against the unacceptable and ambiguous points of the preparatory document for the Cairo conference,” Lopez Trujillo said.

The head of the World Council of Churches, General Secretary Konrad Raiser, last week attacked the Vatican’s constant campaign concerning the conference.

Raiser argued that the Vatican’s repeated worries--widespread access to abortion and contraception--risked clouding over another important Catholic interest: social development.

But Catholic leaders have argued precisely that point: More than 90% of the preparations for the meeting have been about population control, they claim, and less than 10% about development.

Lopez Trujillo was especially strong in his attack on the United States, which he said wants to make abortion accessible to all the countries of the developing world.

“The government adds that this should be ‘safe and rare,’ ” the cardinal said. “But what does this mean? Safe for the health of the mother. But what about the child conceived, shouldn’t it be equally respected?”