Abortion, embryonic research parallel Aztec human sacrifice: UK Catholic bishop  

(from LifeSiteNews)

Bishop Mark Davies. Diocese of Shrewsbury, UK

By Lisa Bourne

May 15, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - The culture of death in the West mirrors the declining civilization of the Aztecs, with its widespread human sacrifice, a Catholic bishop in Birmingham, England has said.

Aztec society and the western world today has the belief that some human lives can be discarded, Shrewsbury Bishop Mark Davies told the UK’s Catholic Herald, while on a tour around the country with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, considered the patron of unborn.

“We can see a resemblance with the declining civilisation of the western world which in similar ways sacrifices and discards the lives of millions of human beings in abortion; in embryo experimentation and fertility treatments; and now threatens the lives of those who pose the greatest financial burden – the sick and the aged in assisted suicides and euthanasia,” the bishop said.

“We cannot regard any human life as inferior to our own whether we meet them in the helpless refugee, the unborn child or the abandoned elderly person.”

Bishop Davies has spoken in the past in support of the unborn and also in defense of natural marriage.

The bishop made his remarks at Shrewsbury Cathedral before a relic image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which was touched to the original tilma with the Our Lady of Guadalupe image given to St. Juan Diego in Mexico by the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1531 when she appeared to him. The apparition marked the end of the human sacrifices and prompted the conversion of some ten million native people to Christianity over the subsequent 10 years.

Bishop Davies recalled how the Aztec culture had degraded life on an immeasurable scale.

"Today we welcome on pilgrimage this replica image of the Virgin of Guadalupe so revered across the Americas,” said Bishop Davies. “We glimpse Our Lady anew…in the way she appeared amid a dying civilisation, the Aztec world, which had become a culture of death which saw the well-being of society as being sustained by the cruelty of human sacrifice on a vast scale.”

“We note that Mary always appears in history beside the little ones, the poorest and most vulnerable. This image reminds us where we should always expect to find her,” he said.