Vatican Has Harsh Words For Clinton

In an unusually sharp attack, the Vatican on Friday condemned President Clinton’s veto of a bill banning certain late-term abortions as “shameful” and said it supported efforts to override it.

The Vatican called the presidential action to allow so-called partial-birth abortions an “incredibly brutal act of aggression” against human life.

It declared its full support for the position taken by American cardinals, who said they would urge Roman Catholics and others to appeal to Congress to override the veto.

The statement by Pope John Paul II’s spokesman, Joaquin NavarroValls, was a rare Vatican attack on a national leader, but not its first clash with the Clinton administration over abortion, which the Vatican opposes in all cases.

With Clinton standing beside him in Denver in August 1993, the pope condemned abortion. The Vatican also singled out for criticism Vice President Al Gore over American pro-abortion positions at a U.N. population conference.

The Roman Catholic church in the United States, while supporting many of the social programs espoused by the Democratic Party, has attacked Democratic candidates who support abortion rights.

The U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Raymond Flynn, said he had urged Clinton not to veto the bill.

“The veto is predictably causing a great deal of anxiety and concern” among Catholics, Flynn said.

In vetoing the bill, Clinton said the procedure was a “potentially lifesaving, certainly health-saving” measure.

The bill vetoed would ban a rarely used, late-term procedure that involves partially extracting a fetus, legs first, through the birth canal, cutting an incision in the base of the skull and then draining the brain, causing the skull to collapse.

Friday’s statement called Clinton’s action “a shameful veto that in practice is equivalent to an incredibly brutal act of aggression against innocent human life and against the inalienable human rights of the unborn.”

The veto legalizing the “inhuman procedure endangers morally and ethically the future of the society that allows it.”

The Vatican often speaks out on issues in various countries through editorials in its daily newspaper or leaves it to national bishops’ conferences.