Gary Wills is a Roman Catholic. His following fails to mention Rwanda is (was?) seventy percent Roman Catholic.

Think he didn't know ?

From .............. Anchorage Daily News

August 14, 1994

By: Garry Wills (nationally syndicated columnist and adjunct professor of American history and culture at Northwestern University)

VATICAN ILL-QUALIFIED TO DEFEND HUMAN RIGHTS

The conditions of disease and starvation in Rwanda were triggered by political turmoil, but they could not have reached their advanced state of horror but for the imbalance between the population and its means of support.

The population of the world could almost double in the next 20 years, making life a hell for those who survive such tragedies, living on with brains damaged and bodies twisted .

The effort to control population is one of the most pressing humanitarian concerns. That is what makes my own church's war against such measures so disheartening.

The Vatican has denounced the draft U.N. proposals for a world conference on population because the proposals include provisions for safe abortions where they are desired.

Opposition to abortion is to be expected from the Catholic Church.

But it also opposes the free distribution of contraceptives around the world Ñ the very thing that could make abortions less frequent.

The drafters of the world conference paper say they hope to cut down on abortions, even safe ones, by allowing people to avoid conception of unwanted, illegitimate, ill nourished children.

The Catholic Church could not achieve a consensus of its own chosen intellectuals on the subject of contraceptives; back in the 1970s, the pope overruled his own board of loyal Catholics. The faithful have by and large ignored the condemnation of contraceptives ever since. Yet the discipline that even Catholics do not observe is to be imposed on the poor of the world, if the Vatican gets its way.

There was something ludicrous yet tragic in the defense of the rights of unborn children by a Vatican that, in the same week, made news because of an honor given to Kurt Waldheim, a man complicitous in the most massive rights violation of modern times, the Holocaust.

The pope bestowed a papal knighthood on Waldheim making the former soldier for the Nazis an honored "soldier of the faith. "

The papal nuncio in Vienna placed on Waldheim the highest degree of the Order of Pius IX (a conservative pope the current pontiff wants to canonize). A knight's cross on a sash can now be worn where Waldheim used to wear the decorations he won in Nazi units that were shipping Jews to death.

The Vatican stands in a line with the Nazis who first recognized Waldheim's "services to man-kind." Spokespersons for human rights should have better qualifications than this Vatican has earned.

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From ........... National Catholic Reporter

May 27, 1994

page 9

RWANDANS INVOLVED in the widespread slaughter of their fellow citizens will be judged by history and by God, Pope John Paul II said. The fighting in the African nation involves "a real and true genocide for which, unfortunately, even Catholics are responsible," the pope said. The country is about 70 percent Catholic.

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***> " RWANDA IS ABOUT 70 PERCENT CATHOLIC " <*****

(unfortunately: Ireland, Nicaragua, Croatia, Ustashi, Mafia, Inquisitions, Crusades,....)

------ POPE VISIT TO BURUNDI 1990 --------

From ....... National Catholic Reporter

September 14, 1990

page 5

POPE: SELF CONTROL CAN HELP SOLVE POPULATION PROBLEM

Pope John Paul II, traveling deep into Burundi's crowded interior, said the answer to overpopulation was improved agriculture and sexual self-control among couples.

The pope, during his first full day in the East African country Sept.6, celebrated MAss in the central city of Gitega and afterward met with the region's laypeople.

The problem of rapid population growth requires "above all the maximum effort so that the land of Burundi can nourish its children," the pope told 50,000 people gathered at a Mass site outside Gitega.

Agriculture, he said, "must be developed so that your fields produce more and produce better, without exhausting the land.

Tiny Burundi is the most crowded African country after Rwanda and is also one of the fastest-growing, with an annual population increase of 3.3 percent.

The pope challenged Catholic couples to take personal responsibility for over-population through natural family planning methods promoted by the church. "Fertility control must remain profoundly human," he said.

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