by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
(April 22, 2008) One of the world’s staunchest supporters of human life, Alfonso Cardinal Trujillo, died at a private hospital in Rome on April 19 of complications due to diabetes. He was 72 years old.
As President of the Pontifical Council for the Family since 1990, the Colombia-born prelate was renowned for his dedication to the cause of marriage and the family life. In a letter of condolence to the Cardinal’s brother, Pope Benedict XVI said Cardinal Trujillo’s wide-ranging ministerial work “is clear evidence of his profound love for the Church and his dedication to the noble cause of promoting marriage and the Christian family.”
Born in 1935 in Villahermosa, Colombia, Lopez Trujillo moved with his family when he was a young boy to the capital, Bogota. While a university student, he decided to attend a seminary, and later received a philosophy degree from Rome’s prestigious Angelicum university. He was ordained a priest in 1960 and made a bishop in 1971 by Pope Paul VI. He later headed the Latin American bishops’ conference, CELAM. It was while serving as archbishop of Medellin in 1979 that John Paul II attended a CELAM meeting and, in 1983, elevated him to Cardinal. Seven years later, he was appointed to head the Pontifical Council for the Family.
Cardinal Trujillo helped to lead the Vatican’s worldwide campaign against abortion and frequently made headlines in the process. In 2003, Cardinal Trujillo drew international condemnation when he said that condoms do not prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
“The Aids virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon,” he told the BBC program Sex and the Holy City. “The spermatozoon can easily pass through the ‘net’ that is formed by the condom. These margins of uncertainty . . . should represent an obligation on the part of the health ministries and all these campaigns to act in the same way as they do with regard to cigarettes, which they state to be a danger.”
When confronted, Trujillo courageously offered the facts, which included many studies in support of this position. He also revealed how some of this information was being suppressed, such as by the Centers for Disease Control, which covered up their own research because it proved the ineffectiveness of condoms to prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.
Cardinal Trujillo made headlines once again in 2004 when he called homosexual civil unions a “grave sign of dehumanization” and told the media a year later that gay marriage was “a crime which represents the destruction of the world.” He said that governments which “open the way for same sex ‘marriage’ . . . destroy piece by piece the institution of the family the most valuable heritage of peoples and humanity. In these unions there are no promises for the partners or for the children, no stability, nothing before society or God, but they demand all the benefits of authentic marriage.”
In an interview with LifeSiteNews, Fr. Frank Pavone, head of Priests for Life, called the Cardinal “one of the Church’s strongest advocates for the dignity of the human person and the family . . . and both his friends and his enemies knew it.”
He added, “He knew and often said that the Church’s pro-life stance was not just a teaching, but a battle, and he willingly undertook the sacrifices of that battle in his own life.”
John Smeaton, head of the UK’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, called Cardinal Trujillo, “one of the world’s greatest defenders of the sanctity of human life.”
Smeaton credits Cardinal Trujillo with launching the international pro-life effort. “In 1994, when the United Nations threatened to reach an international agreement supporting the right to abortion, the cardinal sparked a lightning storm of activity around the world which transformed the pro-life battle at an international level.”
In 1995, Trujillo’s activism resulted in a remarkable turn-around at the now famous Cairo Conference where an alliance of religious groups organized to stop the threat against the unborn which was growing at the U.N.
“Hundreds of delegates from pro-family and pro-life NGOs from around the world, including the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, personally encouraged by the Cardinal, went to the United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo to lobby. The pro-abortion lobby’s objectives for the Cairo conference were defeated,” Smeaton wrote.
Just this year, Cardinal Trujillo announced the start of a push by the Vatican to have the United Nations declare a universal moratorium on abortion. He told the Italian media that he planned to lobby the heads of governments, beginning in Latin America, to support the move.
Pope Benedict XVI rightly referred to him as a “tireless pastor, so generously committed to the service of the Church and of the Gospel of life.”
The Pope will preside at the funeral liturgy, which will be held on April 23 at the altar of the Cathedra in the Vatican Basilica.
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