Nuns issue statement defending billionaire contraceptive campaigner
Gloria.TV – News Briefs 11/05/2012 07:08:26
Nuns issue statement defending billionaire contraceptive campaigner Melinda GatesMay 10, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A group of Ursuline nuns whom billionaire Melinda Gates had claimed in a recent speech supports her campaign to inject tens of millions of women in impoverished countries with Depo-Provera and other contraceptive drugs, has issued a statement defending Gates and the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while simultaneously claiming to support Catholic moral teaching.
Gates recently told Newsweek that the nuns at the Ursuline Academy of Dallas, where she once attended school, were delighted to hear about her plans to initiate a global contraceptive campaign and contacted her to tell her: “We’re all for you. We know this is a difficult issue to speak on, but we absolutely believe that you’re living under Catholic values.”
Melinda Gates speaking at the TedxChange talk.
“It was just so heartening,” Gates said of the phone call, which she says the Ursuline nuns made to her hotel room in Berlin, where she had just announced her intentions at a TEDxChange conference in early April.
In a statement on the matter issued yesterday to “employees, parents, students, alumnae, and other members of our school community” and obtained by LifeSiteNews.com, Academy President Margaret Ann Moser says that the nuns are “proud of Melinda French Gates, her dedication to social justice, her compassion for the underserved, and the great work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”
“Melinda Gates leads from her conscience, and acts on her beliefs as a concerned citizen of our world,” adds Moser, explaining, “The mission of Ursuline Academy of Dallas is to educate young women for such leadership.”
While claiming that “Ursuline is committed to the moral and doctrinal teachings of the Catholic Church” and recognizing that “Melinda’s beliefs on birth control are different from those of the Catholic Church,” the sisters nonetheless say they “respect her right” to “speak from her research and experience of the world we live in.”
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