ROME (AP) — Pope Francis ushered in the New Year with a renewed appeal for the faithful to reject abortion, calling for a “firm commitment” to protect and respect life from conception to natural death.
Francis, 88, celebrated a New Year’s Day Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on Wednesday that was dedicated to Mary, the mother of Jesus.
In his homily, he prayed that everyone learns to care for “every child born of a woman” and to protect “the precious gift of life: life in the womb, the lives of children, the lives of the suffering, the poor, the elderly, the lonely and the dying.”
“I ask for a firm commitment to respect the dignity of human life from conception to natural death, so that each person may cherish his or her own life and all may look with hope to the future,” he said, using the terminology of the church’s opposition to abortion and euthanasia.
In recent years, the Argentine Jesuit has been speaking out more emphatically about abortion than he did at the start of his pontificate. After two doctrinaire popes, Francis complained in the first months of his papacy in 2013 that the church had become obsessed by “small-minded rules” about hot-button issues such as abortion.
Francis now regularly refers to procuring an abortion as “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”
He recently sparked outrage in Belgi …