Contact:  John Snyder, 703-212-9863

ARLINGTON, Va., June 29 /Christian Newswire/ -- John Snyder, Founder/Chairman of the St. Gabriel Possenti Society, issued the following statement today:

As we approach next week’s 230th commemoration of the signing of our Nation’s Declaration of Independence, we face the reality of three institutional insults to our country’s Fourth of July celebration of freedom.

The first insult comes from a United Nations group meeting in New York, taking place now through July 7, to undermine the traditional, individual Second Amendment civil right of law-abiding American citizens to keep and bear arms.

Although some UN officials deny it, the “UN Conference to Review Progress Made in the Implementation of the Program of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects” in reality is a direct assault on American sovereignty and on the civil rights of our citizens. Included in the UN Program are proposals for mandatory global gun registration to be implemented and enforced at the international level, international regulations for manufacturing, distributing and retailing of guns and ammunition, and UN devised and sanctioned limitations on the possession and use of small arms, including rifles, shotguns and handguns, and ammunition.

Some American legislators in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have become so concerned with these UN developments that a number of them are sponsoring a Second Amendment Protection Act. The proposal would withhold American funding from the UN if it abridges the rights recognized by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The second insult comes from the Vatican Permanent Observer to the United Nations, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, who is working to promote the UN’s anti-gun owner program. Praising “the promotion of disarmament,” he endorsed “the efforts made by the open-ended Working Group to negotiate an international instrument to enable states to identify and trace, in a timely and reliable manner, illicit small arms and light weapons.” The clear objective of these negotiations is to place small arms and light weapons under UN government control.

History has shown that government is the world’s greatest mass murderer, responsible for modern genocide. For example, the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, Soviets and Chinese Communists, were all made possible by first disarming the people. Therefore, we realize how dangerous, if not downright nefarious, these UN negotiations really are.

The third insult, and the one with which we are most directly concerned here, is a collection to be taken up this weekend in Catholic churches throughout the United States to support Vatican activities. And so the Catholic bishops in the United States are asking American Catholics, including millions of Catholic gun owners, to support an entity whose official UN representative works to undermine the rights we Catholics and other American citizens enjoy as recognized by the U.S. Constitution!

And all of this on the Fourth of July!

This is an attack on our right to the means necessary for self-defense, during a period of increasing criminal violence and the ever-present potential threat of terrorist violence. As such, it is an attack on the right to self-defense, on the right to defend life, on the very right to life itself!

We can tell the bishops and the Vatican to keep their hands off our guns!

We can do this by placing into church collection baskets coupons which proclaim, “Millions for charity but not one cent for gun grabbing church bureaucrats!” These coupons may be printed from the website: www.gunsaint.com.

We understand this initiative not as an attack on the Church, but rather as a protest of a terribly misguided secular political initiative undertaken by a Vatican agency and at the very least implicitly supported by equally misguided American bishops.

In fact, members of other denominations who are fed up with gun grabbing secular initiatives undertaken by their clergy may feel free to make use of these coupons as well.

The coupons feature an image of St. Gabriel Possenti flanked by silhouettes of a revolver and a lizard. In 1860, Possenti rescued villagers of Isola, Italy from a gang of terrorizing renegade soldiers with a demonstration of superior handgun marksmanship. His one shot slaying of a lizard so impressed the renegades that he was able to take complete control of a threatening situation and run the terrorists out of town. He died two years later. Pope Benedict XV canonized him in 1920.

The international, interdenominational Society honors Possenti and seeks his official Vatican designation as Patron of Handgunners. We emphasize the historical, philosophical and theological bases for the doctrine of legitimate self-defense.