Brazilian Priest Ordered to Pay Thousands for Preventing Abortion, Says He's Honored to Suffer for Christ

Matthew Cullinan Hoffman : Nov 3, 2016
LifeSiteNews.com

Fr. Lodi da Cruz said he had sought to save the life of the unborn child "because human life is not valuable for its quality, nor for its duration. A human life is valuable in itself."

(Brazil)—[LifeSiteNews] A Brazilian Catholic priest has been convicted of "impeding" a legal abortion and ordered to pay the equivalent of $18,537 USD (60,000 Brazilian Reals) in damages for successfully petitioning a court to prohibit the killing of an unborn child in 2005. (Photo: Fr. Luiz Carlos Lodi da Cruz/via LifeSiteNews.com)

Fr. Luiz Carlos Lodi da Cruz was judged liable by the nation's Supreme Tribunal of Justice last week for "moral damages" after requesting a court injunction against an abortion of an unborn child regarded as "inviable" outside the womb because of deformities in gestation.
 
Although the lower court accepted Lodi da Cruz's arguments against the abortion and issued the requested injunction in 2005, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice ruled that the priest acted "recklessly" in filing his motion and caused suffering to the parents of the child.
 
However, Fr. Lodi da Cruz has expressed no regrets and thanks God for the privilege of having successfully intervened to save a child from the abortionist's knife. "To be condemned on account of Christ and with Christ ... is an honor for me," he told the Globo television network. "I don't deserve it, but I am grateful."
 
Fr. Lodi da Cruz said he had sought to save the life of the unborn child "because human life is not valuable for its quality, nor for its duration. A human life is valuable in itself." The child, he added, "was condemned to death by a judicial sentence, a sentence that was illegal and an abuse of power, and the judge recognized that. That's why I, who at that time was a law student, decided to ask for habeas corpus in favor of the child, so that the abortion wouldn't be carried out."

"In saying that human life is sacred, I acknowledge that either we accept that as a universal truth or we are going to fall into the atrocities of Nazism," he told Globo.
 
Fr. Lodi da Cruz is a parish priest in the state of Goias and the president of one of Brazil's best-known pro-life organizations, Pro-Life of Anapolis. His campaigning against the killing of the unborn has attracted legal harassment in the past from Brazilian leftists, including a successful lawsuit against him for calling an anthropologist, who supports the legalization of abortion, "pro-abortion."
 
The 2005 abortion prevented by Lodi da Cruz's motion had been approved on the request of the parents after they discovered their child was suffering from...
 
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