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Prominent pro-abortion personality Stephen Lewis was recently honoured by a Catholic institution by being named the guest speaker at the Providence Continuing Care Centre Foundation fundraising dinner on Sept. 12 in Kingston Ont. The centre is a Catholic long-term care facility that will soon be amalgamated with Kingston General.

Local pro-lifers are concerned with the honour such a platform gives to Lewis who was the first Ontario politician to call for the legalization of abortion in the 1960s and has been a strong abortion supporter ever since. Such advocacy continued while Lewis worked in New York at UNICEF. He now pushes a radical agenda as a special United Nations envoy for AIDS in Africa.

Kingston-based Campaign Life Coalitin national co-ordinator Mary Ellen Douglas has written to the Providence Continuing Care Centre urging them to reconsider honouring Lewis with such a platform. The centre’s vice president of development and community relations acknowledged Lewis’s abortion advocacy but noted that if the Catholic Health Association could have him as a guest speaker in 2001, so could the Providence Continuing Care Centre.

The CHA event in St. John’s, Nfld in 2000 was picketed by pro-lifers, and Douglas promises that so will the Providence Centre fundraiser.

Douglas told The Interim, that when Catholic organizations give such honours and platforms to abortion advocates, it sends a clear signal that life issues don’t matter.

Many faithful Canadian Catholics are becoming increasingly disturbed by the hierarchy’s unwillingness to exercise authority on these and other scandals such as homosexual priests, harmful sex-ed programs in the schools and widespread dissent from Catholic moral and spiritual teachings in Canadian Catholic institutions.