032474 Bishop Hurley criticizes insidious morality export

VATICAN CITY (NC) The United States was criticized at the meeting of a Vatican agency for sending its "insidious morality" of secularism as part and parcel of its foreign aid.

The charge was made by Bishop Mark Hurley of Santa Rosa, Calif., at the plenary session of the Vatican Secretariat for NonBelievers.

The 54-year-old bishop is a member of the Secretariat for Non-Believers and also is a moderator of the Secretariat for Human Values, the U.S. bishops' counterpart of the Vatican Secretariat.

Bishop Hurley said the American bishops apologized to no one for the great good U.S. aid has brought to the world, but at the same time he said he wanted to alert leaders worldwide that the "United States, often in deliberate conscious manner, has sent its secular (Godless) ethic along with its valuable assistance."

The bishop charged in his address at the Vatican that there is the "rising suspicion that the acceptance of this secular ethic is not too subtly being posited as a condition or sine-qua-non for such assistance."

He gave as examples aid tied to birth control clinics and the acceptance of sterilization and abortion programs.

Godless morality tied to foreign aid is not only being exported, the bishop said, but is being forced on helpless Americans contrary to "historic U.S. culture and tradition not to mention the natural moral law.

Bishop Hurley praised the "Great Sacrifices, altruistic virtues and genius" of the American people in support of less favored nations, but denounced "foreign aid programs which, under the mantle of the benefits of science and technology, export an insidious morality to other nations which threatens to dehumanize man and society."

Other instances of this American "insidious morality" that could find their way to other nations, the bishop said, include:

The Supreme Court ruling allowing abortion on demand; euthanasia; human engineering, or control through genetics of the type of person born; control of human behavior through electrodes or drugs and invasion of privacy.

Referring directly to the problem of invasion of privacy, the bishop warned that Americans are no longer safe from scrutiny of governments and private businesses, "thanks to that many-splendored animal, the electronic computer, which never forgets and is incapable of forgiving."

This "insidious morality" is not science-fiction, the bishop said, and, if left unchecked, will produce a society that will be "inherently anti-Christian and antihuman."

Bishop Hurley, however, said that despite the growth of secularism, or worship of man, in the United States, religion is not dead.

The California bishop told NC News in Rome that this American secularization, or setting man in the place of God, is a valid target for his secretariat in the United States and the larger, international Secretariat for non-believers of the Vatican.