The Bishop of Pasto (Colombia), Mons. Juan Carlos Cárdenas Toro, warned that abortion and euthanasia are not worthy acts, but that they threaten the lives of people whose dignity are to have been created in the image and likeness of God.
The Prelate made this clarification during the Mass for the feast of Our Lady of the Merced, in which he encouraged to approach the Virgin Mary, who is “the companion of all those who seek dignity and freedom.”
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The bishop denounced that for many today the word dignity “means getting God out of his place” and becoming “the creator of his norms and limits.”
Humanity “has forgotten that the dignity it has comes from being the image and likeness of God,” he said. Today there is “respect for life, but only of certain lives,” he said.
In that sense, he clarified that “it cannot be worthy to eliminate the life of those who have not yet been born simply because it bothers” and because “we avoid the responsibility of our irresponsible way of living our sexuality.”
“We cannot call dignity to choose when we have to die. Dignified death is to live as God has wanted it and die as God has wanted it,” he added.
The bishop of Pasto reiterated that for Christians “dignity means that we were created in the image and likeness of God, dignity means living under the project and will of God without pretending to supplant it.”
Mons. Cárdenas Toro encouraged Catholics to “recover the true sense of dignity, which means from our faith and from what God has revealed us.”
To do this, the prelate encouraged them to look at Maria at the foot of the Cross. “That beautiful scene in Calvary: a dignified woman, sore with a broken heart, but worthy. He was standing, not defeated,” he said.
The words of the Bishop of Pasto arrive days after the Laboratory of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – which is in favor of euthanasia -, said in a report that between 2015 and 2024 1,044 euthanasias have been practiced in Colombia, with a considerable increase in 2024 of 352 procedures.
For its part, in February the abortion clinics network Profamilia said that in the last three years more than 150,000 women accessed abortion in Colombia and that in 2024 were “more than 56,000”.
Neither of the two practices is legal in Colombia, however, they are held protected in sentences of the Constitutional Court that decriminalized them.
Eduardo Berdejo
Professional in Social Communication of the National University of San Marcos in Peru, I have more than 20 years of experience in Catholic digital journalism. As part of ACI Press, I have been sent to cover the trips of Pope Francis to Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Peru, in addition to the Synod of Sinodality in the Vatican in 2023.