Actress Ashley Judd was recently appointed as the Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund Agency (UNPFA). One of the goals of the UNPFA, cited in a press release from the UN News Centre, is “a world where every pregnancy is wanted.” Furthermore, the executive director of the UNPFA, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, spoke of a global need to “empower women to choose when and how to become pregnant.”
These goals are at odds with the “feminine genius” that St. Pope John Paul II spoke of at a United Nations Conference in Beijing in 1995. In his letter to women, John Paul II did not seek to equalize women with men in the way that our world often does.
Instead, he wrote these beautiful words:
Necessary emphasis should be placed on the “genius of women”, not only by considering great and famous women of the past or present, but also those ordinary women who reveal the gift of their womanhood by placing themselves at the service of others in their everyday lives. For in giving themselves to others each day women fulfill their deepest vocation. Perhaps more than men, women acknowledge the person, because they see persons with their hearts. They see them independently of various ideological or political systems. They see others in their greatness and limitations; they try to go out to them and help them. In this way the basic plan of the Creator takes flesh in the history of humanity and there is constantly revealed, in the variety of vocations, that beauty-not merely physical, but above all spiritual-which God bestowed from the very beginning on all, and in a particular way on women.
St. Pope John Paul II, pray for us.
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