The Church's Culpable Silence
Some Thoughts From Dr. Xavier Dor, Founder, SOS Tout-Petits
Dr. Xavier Dor (b. 1929), is one of France’s leading pro-life activists. In 1986 he founded SOS Tout-Petits, which initially adopted tactics patterned on Operation Rescue. Till 1995, he participated in several dozen raids on abortion clinics, where the activists would gain entrance and pray until the arrival of the authorities. He was found guilty several times for his actions, especially after a law adopted in 1993 criminalized such activity, and for organizing demonstrations without the proper permits. He was jailed briefly in 1997 and spent a month in prison in January 1998.
Dr. Dor has authored one book, Le Crime contre Dieu (Paris, 1998) and contributed a chapter, “Contraception, Abortion, and Ideology,” to The Black Book of Abortion in France by the group 30 ans, ça suffit (Paris: Téqui, 2006). This year Dr. Dor’s organization will celebrate its 25th anniversary. The French District conducted an interview with this leading Catholic activist last November.
The Church’s Silence
The priests do not talk about life, and they don’t want to talk about it because they have been told not to talk about it. I’m afraid that there are Freemasons among the bishops and cardinals…and homosexuals, and all that–the wretches. We must pray for them.
I am unable to tell you who is who, and even if I knew, I would not tell you. But the fact seems pretty certain, because things are going too far. The silence of the Church is more than suspect…
I’m going to tell you something terrible. I am not making anything up. I could not make up something like that. It was in 1995. We were outside the Georges Clemenceau Hospital in Caen. The anti-life demonstrators were pouring in; there were just 40 or 50 of us. They were throwing eggs at us, shouting, all of that, you can well imagine. The remarkable thing is that there were priests against us. That is certain. They had circulated a manifesto, a manifesto signed by 28 priests–not just two or three, but by 28 priests. They were all from the region of Caen. The 28 priests had signed a manifesto in alphabetical order to the effect that they would oppose any retraction of women’s rights! I know the name of the second on the list–I won’t tell it. He is in prison now for pedophilia, the poor wretch. How we must pray for them. How we must pray for the bishops.
The great problem is the silence of the Church, and even of traditionalists. The latter do not say much about abortion; nothing is ever said about contraception even though it is more deadly and death-dealing. But it is a duty to talk about it. If I had to get down on my knees and ask, I would.
Once a bishop received me, not too willingly. He is dead now, so I can talk about him. I could see that he was thin and that he was sick. I knew or else I found out later that he had colon cancer. And I told myself, He’s not got much longer to live. And I prayed for him.
Without even greeting me, he told me, “Sir, you condemn women.”
I knelt down and said, “Monsignor, the thought never occurred to me.”
He did not believe me. He said that we were awful chaps, that we condemned women, that we were a bit fascist–that’s what the Left thinks, obviously–that we were people who fought against liberty and against the dignity of women. I’m not sure exactly what he thought, but that we were in disrepute, even and especially among the bishops. We were spoil-sports, counterproductive intruders, and what have you. We’re guilty of all the sins.
But, the unfortunates, the unfortunates. Why don’t they speak up about it?
It is the worst of silences. In the final analysis, the sin is not so much the Left’s as the Right’s, isn’t it? I would say that the Left obeys itself, but the Right should in principle obey an order, recognize an order of things. The Left, that’s Rousseau, the cult of self, and the Rights of Man and all that. But the Right recognizes an order of things. If there is an order, they ought to follow it, but they do not. So, I would say that the sin of the Right, of Catholics, is graver than that of the Left because they acknowledge the moral order and they do not uphold it. Thus, I would say that it is graver because on the one side there is an aversion–that’s the Left. And on the other side, there is betrayal, which is worse. Betrayal is worse than aversion. Ah, poor, wretched Judas, what did he do? So, I think that the Right and the Church must repent and do penance.
On the Pope’s Recent Statement
The Pope spoke recently about the use of condoms–he shouldn’t have. I do like this Pope, I do admire this Pope, who has said wonderful things about Western civilization and on the search for God–querere Deum; it’s marvelous. The basis of Western culture is the search for God. This is exactly what needed to be said. But about condoms, he is mistaken.
What’s more, there is a moral deviation: the use of condoms separates sexuality and fecundity, and that goes against the divine law. If God made sexuality, it was for the sake of fecundity. I do not say that there is no love. But the condom is an encouragement to promiscuity, thus it is an encouragement to debauchery and even murder. That’s what is happening.
And the unfortunate thing is that the faith has no part in all that. Neither has reason. You know that bacteria and sperm are on the order of three to five microns, that is to say, a millionth of a meter. The AIDS virus must be about 100 to 150 nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. That is very, very small. The AIDS virus is about 30 times smaller than sperm, so it gets through.
I, who love the Pope, follow him as much as I can, but sometimes I cannot follow him completely. In this, I think he is encouraging condom use, even if he does not mean to. He said that it was not good, but even so he said that people could use it, and that, at least for a homosexual, it is a lesser evil. But the lesser evil is worse. It is going to help spread AIDS.
I have a grandson in South Africa, and I can tell you a very interesting testimony. The sister of my grandson’s father lives near Durban. With her husband she bought a hotel with twelve personnel. Well, in two and a half years, ten of them were dead, all from AIDS. Her little Zulu maid, a very charming Zulu girl, died of AIDS. The lady mourns her. She was the only European at her funeral. Nobody wanted to talk about AIDS because for them, it is shameful. There is a dreadful epidemic. So, absolutely no condoms! Abstinence, absolutely!
You know that Uganda is the only African country to have lowered the incidence of AIDS by 60 to 70 percent. The president; the churches; the Pope was there; the Protestant churches–everybody joined in to advocate abstinence, chastity, self-control!
When we go out on Fridays to distribute our tracts to 15-year-old boys and girls, and sometimes older, we tell them: nothing before marriage! We give them miraculous medals. In parentheses, the miraculous medal is accepted more readily than the tract.
LPL: Tell us about yourself
It is always difficult to talk about oneself, but I will tell you my age: I’m 81 years old. I was a doctor, and I practised as a pediatrician. I liked my work very much, first in Africa, on the Ivory Coast for six years. It was very, very busy. We received patients from everywhere and sometimes in very extreme conditions. Sometimes we’d hear cries in the stairwell–we were on the second floor of the clinic–and we could tell the child was dying or nearly dead. Sometimes, they were dead on arrival. Which is all to say that the pathologies were often extreme. But it was very interesting and attaching work. We had black nurses whom we liked very much. And then there was a wonderful European nun, Sister Leone. I cannot forget Sister Leone, a quite remarkable woman: reserved, gentle, kind, attentive–she had all the qualities.
At this time, it was 1962-68, the political atmosphere was quiet. I could even cross Africa on foot. I was the only European at Darfur. It was still the post-colonial era, and things were quiet. Africa was quite inhabitable.
When I was in Nigeria, I saw a man, a handsome man of the northern type; he was a beggar, about 25 years old. He had a kind of water bottle like you use for warming the bed over his hands, which were wrapped in rags. I removed the cloths and the water bottle, and what did I see, or rather what did I smell: a horrid odor. He had terrible, putrid sores over a large part of his hands and fingers missing. They were oozing. It was frightful. I must say because it’s true, I saw this in ex-English Africa. Once a young man of 17 or 18 shook my hand. He was missing fingers, but his leprosy was dry, so to speak; it was no longer contagious, it was no longer evolving. For if [in French-speaking Africa] we had the great endemics, what was remarkable was the network of trucks and dispensaries and infirmaries scattered all over, with nurses and doctors. Leprosy was being managed, like the other major endemics: tuberculosis, yellow fever, sleeping sickness… I must tell you I was proud of France, and the nurses were, too. They would say, “We regret Independence.” I recall their saying that. I have a very high opinion of French colonization. There was also the religion and language, and that’s considerable. I don’t know if it still remains.
I had a job as project head under Christian Cabrol. He was well known at the time: He was the first person to do a heart transplant in France. So he was very well known, and he mentored me. Thanks to him I was a project head. At that time I was no longer working as a pediatrician, but I worked in research. I spent nearly 25 years at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where I worked [in the field of cardiac embryology], studying cardiac malformation in the embryos of chickens. It was very interesting work. We could take the egg a few days after an intervention; an electron microscope was used. We could see exactly what was happening, and could follow the deformation. I have very good memories of this period.
I left the Salpêtrière in 1995. I was 66 years old. I would have stayed on willingly for a few more years, and they would have kept me on, but my eyesight was failing.
So, I was working at the Pitié, and opposite there was a gyneco-obstetrics clinic where abortions were done. I may be mistaken, but smoke came out of a big chimney. I would think, that is where they put the poor aborted babies… How many times I wondered: of what use is it to them to kill these children? I believe that I can answer that question at last.
People have answered it long ago. I wondered, of what use is it to amass all these crimes, for, you know, never have so many been killed. In the history of humanity, never have so many been killed, and all the victims are innocent. Communism caused hundreds of millions of deaths, but here there are billions of deaths; it numbers in the billions. There are the official numbers put out by the UNFPA [United Nations Population Fund]; they declared in the year 2000 that there were 50 million abortions annually in the world. I believe that it is far higher because they do not count all those killed by contraception. This is something that I did not understand right away, I must tell you. Many of my colleagues were more perceptive than I on this subject. But one may say that everything began, legally, in 1967, and not in 1975 with the horrible law of Mme Veil. Everything began in 1967 under De Gaulle, signed by De Gaulle. This needs to be said. He perhaps did not fully realize what he was doing.
It is worth noting that it was on December 28, the feast of the Holy Innocents, that the 1967 Neuwirth law was signed. Neuwirth was a hard-core Freemason. You know that the Masons’ politics aims at killing God, as it were. They wanted to kill God through the deaths of children. They wanted to kill the Creator through His creation. It puts one in mind of ritual killing. That is to say that Satan–it is satanic, naturally–offers the sacrifice of innocents to the devil himself.
Never in the history of the human race has the evil been so immense, because the innocent are dying by millions. In France, the death penalty was abolished. I don’t know if you remember last Saturday [during the public recitation of the Rosary at Place St. Michel in Paris], there was a big billboard showing the terrible results of an abortion at ten weeks. It showed the remains of a child that had been aspirated at this moment of its gestation. You could see a foot attached to a leg, a hand vaguely, an arm…these are obviously horrible images. Beside it was written: “The death penalty has been abolished,” and just below: “Never have so many been killed.”
They have “medicalized” crime, that’s what they’ve done. That is to say, if you have an evil, it is necessary to fight this evil efficiently. You have to choose a marksman, so to speak, to aim well. To commit the crime, you are going to choose a telescopic rifle; you are going to do things right. That way, there are no blunders.
So it is a crime, a perfect crime, an assisted crime. And that is how they have wrecked the medical profession. Now, doctor means killer, hired killer. The doctor has become a hired killer. They have even recently increased his wages, as Sarkozy wished, who closes his eyes and who probably has not seen anything; or else, rather, he does not wish to see anything, he and his Minister of Health.
People have disconnected sexuality and fecundity. This came about through a change in the definition of contraception. In the beginning, when you opened up the Larousse dictionary in 1981–I have one–you found contraception defined as “a reversible procedure for avoiding fertilization.” Now you open the 2003 or 2002 edition of the Vidal [a physician’s desk reference] and it gives this definition of contraception: “a procedure for avoiding pregnancy.” There is a difference between fertilization and pregnancy. If you act before fertilization, obviously there is not a human life, but if you act after fertilization, there is an egg, there is a pregnancy, there is a human life.
Never, never have so many been killed as by abortion. But contraception, or what they call contraception, kills two or three times as many more. I say two or three times, but it may be four or five times as many. Nobody knows. Why? because the pill taken 20 days a month, especially in a minidose, atrophies the intrauterine viscosity so that it does not always prevent fertilization….It is true that the pill can prevent fertilization, but if fertilization occurs, it impedes implantation, because when the egg arrives in the womb, its lining is not prepared to receive it. Implantation normally occurs about the fifth, sixth, or seventh day, but in unfavorable conditions the egg is eliminated. The woman notices nothing. However, it is actually an early abortion. The woman does not know whether she eliminated an ovum or an egg, but if it is an egg, then there is a crime obviously because it involves a human life. Since the abortion is very early, they can tell her that it is contraception, that she is regular, that everything is fine, and that she has not committed murder. Nobody knows the exact figures for early abortions since the woman herself does not know what has happened.
There are intrauterine devices: these are always abortifacient every time. How many women use one? More than a million women wear an IUD in France. It causes an abortion every time. There are officially 220,000 abortions in France every year. This is without counting the number due to contraception, which is more and more often abortifacient. The numbers are countless, and no one will ever know, except perhaps in the hereafter. There is no more effective way to reduce [raid] a population than by contraception.
Current Issue
