No Words for the Unborn: As England Decrimnalizes Abortion Until Birth, Leo XIV Remains Silent
He appoints activist bishops to march for immigration rights, but says nothing as England votes to decriminalize killing the unborn.
Tonia Antoniazzi, a lawmaker for the governing Labour Party, proposed the law to decriminalize abortion in England and Wales.
A Grave Vote, and a Deafening Silence
On June 17, 2025, the British Parliament passed one of the most sweeping pro-abortion measures in the history of the English-speaking world. An amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill effectively decriminalizes abortion for women in England and Wales at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason, including moments before birth.
It was a landslide vote: 379 to 137. The same land once evangelized by St. Augustine of Canterbury, sent by a pope to bring Christ to a pagan island, has now enshrined the right to kill children in the womb.
And Pope Leo XIV said nothing.
No Angelus appeal. No formal condemnation. No statement of sorrow. No urgent call for repentance. Just silence from the man who claims the throne of Peter.
One Bishop Speaks-But Not the One in Rome
Archbishop John Sherrington, the designated “Lead Bishop for Life Issues” in England and Wales, issued a careful and compassionate response. He warned that the law would expose women to coercion, isolation, and late-term at-home abortions without medical oversight. “Our alarm arises from our compassion for both mothers and unborn babies,” he wrote.
It was the sort of statement that once would have been echoed, expanded, and thundered from the Vatican.
Instead, it landed alone. Leo XIV, who finds time to speak at length about synodal listening and ecological conversion, had nothing to say.
Immigration Courts Get Bishops. Abortion Gets Silence
Just three days later, Leo’s new appointee, Bishop Michael Pham of San Diego, made headlines not for defending life, but for intervening in federal immigration enforcement. Leading an interfaith clergy delegation into a federal courthouse on World Refugee Day, Pham and his entourage caused ICE agents to “scatter” and reportedly halted expected detentions.
Activists compared the moment to the parting of the Red Sea. Journalists called it a success. The bishop called it accompaniment.
This is the kind of bishop Leo appoints: not a defender of life, but a disruptor of immigration court.
The New Pastoralism: Performance Over Principle
This is what episcopal ministry now looks like: not doctrinal, but theatrical. The crozier has been replaced by a laminated “Know Your Rights” flyer. The shepherd’s staff now points not toward the altar, but toward the Department of Homeland Security.
The unborn? No laminated flyer. No solidarity walk. No bishops pacing the halls of Parliament. No photo ops. No Red Sea.
Leo’s Moral Megaphone, But Only for the Right Cause
Pope Leo XIV has shown that he is perfectly capable of speaking out, so long as the subject is immigration.
In his first diplomatic address, Leo made the dignity of migrants the centerpiece. Behind the scenes, he has gone further. As a cardinal, he helped draft a Vatican document condemning nationalist immigration policies. He retweeted critiques of Trump’s deportation agenda, including posts attacking the use of El Salvador’s mega-prisons to house U.S. immigration detainees. He reposted quotes accusing others of moral cowardice: “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?”
But now that the British Parliament has voted 379–137 to make it legal for women to abort children up to the moment of birth, Leo has nothing to say.
A pope who publicly mourns deportations now finds no words for legalized infanticide. He can record warm video greetings for a stadium Mass in Chicago. He can send bishops into immigration courts. But for this? Silence.
This isn’t pastoral restraint, it is strategic prioritization.
As one recent article in Newsweek put it, Leo XIV is “Trump’s most effective moral opponent,” not because he shouts, but because he calculates. He sends out Cupich to preach a “sermon on the mound” condemning U.S. immigration policy while he remains above the fray, praised for his “restraint” and “clarity.” His Americanness, we are told, gives him a unique power to critique American politics. Evidently, English law and British abortion policy are beneath his notice.
The unborn may be “vulnerable,” but apparently not in the way that captures the modern Church’s imagination. They do not make for poignant photo ops. They are not safely fashionable to defend.
When a pope can organize moral resistance to deportation but not to legalized infanticide, something is rotten at the heart of Rome.
Conclusion: No Shepherd at the Gate
The faithful are not confused by this. They are demoralized. They are scandalized. And they are leaving.
A Church that sends its bishops to accompany illegal immigrants in federal court, but leaves the unborn without a voice, is no longer shepherding the flock, it’s abandoning it.
Christ wept for Jerusalem. Leo scrolls past Westminster.
41 days from the start of Prevost's papacy until England and Wales officially allow child sacrifice. And silence from "the chair of Peter".
Fulton Sheen warned that this day would come:
"Because his religion will be brotherhood of Man without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect. He will set up a counter church which will be the ape of the Church, because he, the Devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the Antichrist that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ ...."
My English grandmother, Nellie had at least two abortions prior to any state getting involved with her "choice."The laws then in the US and UK and everywhere, but the Soviet Union and satellite Soviet states, criminalized abortion, and rghtfully so. Frankly, it is a grave immoral act to commit an act of violence - murder, against the person under one's skin. My grandmother Nellie was quite capable of aborting her children without the state's yes or no. It was a private sin and now Nellie's decriminalized sin has become a mangled virtue thrust upon everyone's souls to carry for her. Because her horrific act still remains a fact, my grandmother's sin (and so many like her today in the UK) are permitted to pretend that it's not their problem.