Militant pro-abortion vicar to speak at formation day for Catholic laity
By John Smeaton | 19 March 2025
Lizzi Green, the Team Vicar of St Mary’s Anglican church in Plympton, Plymouth, UK, has been outspoken in her strong support for abortion for a number of years. The Church of England minister, who sports the rainbow flag on her Twitter account and describes opposition to abortion as being “hate-filled”, will be addressing an online Lenten formation event for Catholic laity, next week on Thursday 27 March, organised by Fr Mark Skelton, the head of ongoing formation of clergy in the Catholic Diocese of Plymouth.
In May 2022, in a BBC story headlined “Priest [sic] who had two abortions says women need choice”, Lizzi Green is quoted saying:
“It is terrifying to me that my five-year-old daughter could have that choice taken away from her when she is older. I also want my ten-year-old son to understand about the implications.
“We need to work out how we talk about abortion, because we’re not going to win people over to the living, loving God by being so hate filled.”
Lizzi Green’s position that opposition to abortion is motivated by hatred, directly contradicts 2,000 years of Christian teaching,1 as set out authoritatively, for example, by Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, on “the value and inviolability of human life”:
“It is therefore a service of love which we are all committed to ensure to our neighbour, that his or her life may be always defended and promoted, especially when it is weak or threatened. It is not only a personal but a social concern which we must all foster: a concern to make unconditional respect for human life the foundation of a renewed society.”2
Elsewhere, Lizzi Green has said:
- “I’ve never said I don’t think abortion is a sin. I think it can be, just as I think sometimes it isn’t. I’m happy to leave it to God to work that one out.”
- “Why can’t we live in the grey? Is it too uncomfortable? Why can’t we say that embryonic human life is sacred and that at the same time abortion may be the world’s most breathtakingly agonising right choice?”
- “Abortion saves lives. But I’ve come to the conclusion that actually people know this. You know the astonishing complexity of pregnancy, you know people get coerced, you know people are simply too poor to cope, you know all the myriad reasons someone might need safe access to abortion. The sickening thing is, you just don’t care.”
Lizzi Green lobbies for an impossible position that seeks to reconcile the Christian dogma that “human life is sacred” with the idea that abortion is sometimes the “right choice”. But as Pope John Paul II teaches in Evangelium Vitae:
“Direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written Word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.
“No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.”3
Green not only upholds the right to abortion on social media, but travelled to New York earlier this month to campaign for abortion at the 69th annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69), a body which promotes abortion worldwide.
In an tweet from CSW69 on 8 March, she wrote:
“Now listening to some of the women who were in Beijing when the Beijing Platform for Action was adopted. Unbelievably humbling to know the steps we walk in.”
One of the world’s leading pro-abortion organisations, the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) has acknowledged that the Beijing Platform for Action, to which Lizzi Green refers, promotes legalised abortion. The Platform for Action, CRR wrote, “link[ed] women’s health to abortion law reform” and “affirmed what has become increasingly clear to governments and advocates worldwide: that removing legal barriers to abortion saves women’s lives, promotes their health, and empowers women.”
Catholic priest, Fr Mark Skelton announced that “Rev” Lizzi Green will be speaking on “Recognizing Hope” on Thursday 27 March, one of a series of five weekly talks on Zoom for the Catholic laity, “reflecting on some of the Holy Father’s signs of hope in this time of jubilee”.
Whatever may be the “signs of hope” in Lizzi Green’s address, we can be sure they won’t be the kind mentioned by Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae:
“To all the members of the Church, the people of life and for life, I make this most urgent appeal, that together we may offer this world of ours new signs of hope, and work to ensure that justice and solidarity will increase and that a new culture of human life will be affirmed, for the building of an authentic civilization of truth and love.”4
On the contrary, Fr Skelton’s guest speaker is undeniably an ardent apologist for the “culture of death” to which Pope John Paul refers throughout the same encyclical.
The kind of dangerous alliance with revolutionary tendencies we witness in the Catholic Diocese of Plymouth is not a new phenomenon. Pope Pius IX, powerfully explained its dangers in a letter to the president and members of the Saint Ambrose Circle of Milan, of March 6, 1873, in which he wrote:
“Although the sons of this world be wiser than the sons of light, their snares and their violences would undoubtedly have less success if a greater number of those who call themselves Catholics did not extend a friendly hand to them. Yes, unfortunately, there are those who wish to walk in agreement with our enemies, who try to establish an alliance between the light and Catholic doctrines, which, based on the most pernicious principles, adulate the civil power when it invades spiritual things and urge souls to respect, or at least tolerate the most iniquitous laws, as if it had not been written absolutely that no one can serve two masters. They are certainly much more dangerous and more pernicious than our declared enemies, not only because they second their efforts, perhaps without realising it, but also because, by maintaining themselves on the extreme limit of condemned opinions, they take on an appearance of integrity and irreprehensible doctrine, beguiling the imprudent friends of conciliations, and deceiving honest persons who would revolt against a declared error. For this reason, they bring about a dividedness of mind, rend the unity, and weaken the forces that should be gathered together against the enemy.”5
In the absence of a bishop currently in the Diocese of Plymouth, it would be opportune for the faithful, with filial reverence and solicitude, to write to His Eminence Cardinal Nichols, the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (cardinalnichols@rcdow.org.uk), and to Diocesan Administrator for Plymouth, Canon Paul Cummins (diocesan.administrator@prcdtr.org.uk), mindful of Canon law 212 §3:
“According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, [the faithful] have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.”
Notes
- The oldest Christian writing which is not part of the Bible, written about 80 years after the birth of Christ, is called the Didache. The Didache, this most ancient of Christian documents, makes the terrible evil of abortion clear by putting it on the same level as killing a born child. It states, “In accordance with the precept of the teaching: you shall not kill … you shall not put a child to death by abortion nor kill it once it is born …” ↩︎
- Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae (25 March, 1995), 77. ↩︎
- Ibid, 62. ↩︎
- Ibid, 6. ↩︎
- Pius IX, Letter to the president and members of the Saint Ambrose Circle of Milan, (6 March 1873). ↩︎