Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics
A Four Part Series
- April: The American Century (Reference Notes)
- May: The Abolition of Man
- June: We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident
- July: Living the Gospel of Life: The Virtues We Need
Introduction:
Brothers and sisters in the Lord:
At the conclusion of the 1998 Ad Limina visits of the bishops of the United Stated, our Holy Father Pope John Paul II spoke these words:
Today I believe the Lords is saying to us all: do not hesitate, do not be afraid to engage the good fight of the faith (cf. 1 Tim 6:12). When we preach the liberating message of Jesus Christ we are offering the words of life to the world. Our prophetic witness is an urgent and essential service not just to the Catholic community but to the whole human family.
In this statement we attempt to fulfill our role as teachers and pastors in proclaiming the Gospel of life. We are confident that the proclamation of the truth in love is an indispensable way for us to exercise our pastoral responsibility.
First in a four part series.
“Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics”
– a statement from the U.S. Catholic Bishops first printed in December 1998
Part 1. The American Century
“Your country stands upon the world scene as a model of a democratic society at an
advanced stage of development.
Your power of example carries with it heavy responsibilities.
Use it well, America!”
Quote from Pope John Paul II, Newark, 1995
#1 – When Henry Luce published his appeal for an “American century” in 1941, he could not have known how the coming reality would dwarf his dream. Luce hoped that the “engineers, scientists, doctors . . . builders of roads (and) teachers” of the United States would spread across the globe to promote economic success and American ideals: “a love of freedom, a feeling for the quality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also cooperation.” (1) Exactly this, and much more, has happened in the decades since. U.S. economic success has reshaped the world. But the nobility of the American experiment flows from its founding principles, not from its commercial power. In this century alone, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died defending those principles. Hundreds of thousands more have lived lives of service to those principles – both at home and on other continents – teaching, advising and providing humanitarian assistance to people in need. As Pope John Paul has observed, “At the center of the moral vision of (the American) founding documents is the recognition of the rights of the human person . . . .” The greatness of the United States lies “especially (in its) respect for the dignity and sanctity of human life in all conditions and at all stages of development.” (2)
#2 – The nobility of the American spirit endures today in those who struggle for social justice and equal opportunity for the disadvantaged. The United States has thrived because, at its best, it embodies a commitment to human freedom, human rights and human dignity. This is why the Holy Father tells us: “. . . (As) Americans, you are rightly proud of your country’s great achievements.” (3)
#3 – But success often bears the seeds of failure. U.S. economic and military power has sometimes led to grave injustices abroad. At home, it has fueled self-absorption, indifference and consumerist excess. Overconfidence in our power, made even more pronounced by advances in science and technology, has created the illusion of a life without natural boundaries and actions without consequences. The standards of the marketplace, instead of being guided by sound morality, threaten to displace it. We are now witnessing the gradual restructuring of American culture according to ideals of utility, productivity and cost-effectiveness. It is a culture where moral questions are submerged by a river of goods and services and where the misuse of marketing and public relations subverts public life.
#4 – The losers in this ethical sea change will be those who are elderly, poor, disabled and politically marginalized. None of these pass the utility test; and yet, they at least have a presence. They at least have the possibility of organizing to be heard. Those who are unborn, infirm and terminally ill have no such advantage. They have no “utility,” and worse they have no voice. As we tinker with the beginning, the end and even the intimate cell structure of life, we tinker with our own identity as a free nation dedicated to the dignity of the human person. When American political life becomes an experiment on people rather than for and by them, it will no longer be worth conducting. We are arguably moving closer to that day. Today, when the inviolable rights of the human person are proclaimed and the value of life publically affirmed, the most basic human right, “the very right to life is being denied or trampled upon, especially at the more significant moments of existence: the moment of birth and the moment of death” (Pope John Paul II, The Gospel of Life [Evangelium Vitae], no. 18).
#5 – The nature and urgency of this threat should not be misunderstood. Respect for the dignity of the human person demands a commitment to human rights across a broad spectrum: “Both as Americans and as followers of Christ, American Catholics must be committed to the defense of life in all its stages and in every condition.” (4) The culture of death extends beyond our shores: famine and starvation, denial of health care and development around the world, the deadly violence of armed conflict and scandalous arms trade that spawns such conflict. Our nation is witness to domestic violence, the spread of drugs, sexual activity which poses a threat to the lives and a reckless tampering with the world’s ecological balance. Respect for human life calls us to defend life from these and other threats. It calls us as well to enhance the conditions of human living by helping to provide food, shelter and meaningful employment, beginning with those who are most in need. We live the Gospel of Life when we live in solidarity with the poor of the world, standing up for their lives and dignity. Yet abortion and euthanasia have become preeminent threats to human dignity because they directly attack life itself, the most fundamental human good and the condition for all others. They are committed against those who are weakest and most defenseless, those who are genuinely “the poorest of the poor.” They are endorsed increasingly without the veil of euphemism, as supporters of abortion and euthanasia freely concede these are killing even as they promote them. Sadly, they are practiced in those communities which ordinarily provide a safe haven for the weak – the family and the healing professions. Such direct attacks on human life, once crimes, are today legitimized by governments sworn to protect the weak and marginalized.
#6 – It needn’t be so. God, the Father of all nations, has blessed the American people with a tremendous reservoir of goodness. He has also graced our founders with the wisdom to establish political structures enabling all citizens to participate in promoting the inalienable rights of all. As Americans, as Catholics and as pastors of our people, we write therefore today to call our fellow citizens back to our country’s founding principles, and most especially to renew our national respect for the rights of those who are unborn, weak, disabled and terminally ill. Real freedom rests on the inviolability of every person as a child of God. The inherent value of human life, at every stage and in every circumstance, is not a sectarian issue any more than the Declaration of Independence is a sectarian creed.
#7 – In a special way, we call on U.S. Catholics, especially those in positions of leadership – whether cultural, economic or political – to recover their identity as followers of Jesus Christ and to be leaders in the renewal of American respect for the sanctity of life. “Citizenship” in the work of the Gospel is also a sure guarantee of responsible citizenship in American civic affairs. Every Catholic, without exception, should remember that he or she is called by our Lord to proclaim his message. Some proclaim it by word, some by action and all by example. But every believer shares responsibility for the Gospel. Every Catholic is a missionary of the Good News of human dignity redeemed through the cross. While our personal vocation may determine the form and style of our witness, Jesus calls each of us to be a leaven in society, and we will be judged by our actions. No one, least of all someone who exercises leadership in society, can rightfully claim to share fully and practically the Catholic faith and yet act publicly in a way contrary to that faith.
#8 – Our attitude toward the sanctity of life in these closing years of the “American century” *will say volumes about our true character as a nation. It will also shape the discourse about the sanctity of human life in the next century, because what happens here, in our nation, will have global consequences. It is primarily U.S. technology, U.S. microchips, U.S. fiber-optics, U.S. satellites, U.S. habits of thought and entertainment, which are building the neural network of the new global mentality. What American has indelibly imprinted on the emerging global culture is its spirit. And the ambiguity of that spirit is why the Pope** appealed so passionately to the American people in 1995. “It is vital for the human family,” he asked, “that in continuing to seek advancement in many different fields – science, business, education and art, and wherever else your creativity leads you – America keeps compassion, generosity and concern for others at the very heart of its efforts.” That will be no easy task.
*This was first printed in 1998.
**Pope refers to Pope John Paul II
Part II, The Abolition of May
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Nations are not machines or equations. They are like ecosystems. A people’s habits, beliefs, values and institutions intertwine like a root system. Poisoning one part will eventually poison it all. As a result bad laws and bad court decisions produce degraded political thought and behavior and vice versa. So it is with the legacy of Roe vs. Wade. Roe effectively legalized abortion throughout pregnancy for virtually any reason, or none at all. It is responsible for the grief of millions of women and men, and the killing of millions of unborn children in the past quarter century. Yet the weaknesses of the Supreme Court’s 1073 reasoning are well known. They were acknowledged by the Supreme Court itself in the subsequent 1992 Casey decision, which could find no better reason to uphold Roe than the habits Roe itself created by surviving for 20 years. The feebleness and confusion of the Casey decision flow directly out of Roe’s own confusion. They are part of the same root system. Taking a distorted “right of privacy” to new heights and developing a new moral calculus to justify it. Roe has spread through the American political ecology with toxic results.
Roe effectively rendered the definition of human personhood flexible and negotiable. It also implicitly excluded unborn children from human status. In doing so, Roe helped create an environment in which infanticide – a predictable next step along the continuum of killing – is now open to serious examination. Thanks ultimately to Roe, some today speculate publicly and sympathetically why a number of young American women kill their new-born babies or leave them to die. Even the word “infanticide” is being replaced by new and less emotionally charged words like “neonaticide” (killing a new-born on the day of his or her birth) and “filicide” (killing the baby at some later point). Revising the name given to the killing reduces its perceived gravity. This is the ecology of law, moral reasoning, and language in action. Bad laws and defective moral reasoning produce the evasive language to justify evil. Nothing else can explain the verbal and ethical gymnastics required by elected officials to justify their support for partial-birth abortion, a procedure in which infants are brutally killed during the process of delivery. The same sanitized marketing is now deployed on behalf of physician-assisted suicide, fetal experimentation (stem cell research) and human cloning. Each reduces the human person to a problem or an object. Each can trace its lineage in no small part to Roe.
Obviously Roe is only one of several social watersheds which have shaped the America of the late 1990s. But it is a uniquely destructive one. In the 25 year* since Roe, our society’s confusion about the relationship of law, moral reasoning and language has created more and more cynicism in the electorate. As words become unmoored from their meaning (as in “choice” or “terminating a pregnancy”), and the ideas and ideals which bind us together erode, democratic participation inevitably declines. So too does a healthy and appropriate patriotism.
At Baltimore’s Camden Yards, Pope John Paul spoke prophetically when he said: “Today the challenge facing America is to find freedom’s fulfillment in truth; the truth that is intrinsic to human life created in God’s image and likeness, the truth that is written on the human heart, the truth that can be known by reason and can therefore form the basis of a profound and universal dialogue among people about the direction they must give to their lives and their activities.
*The “Living The Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics was released in 1998. Now 38 years have passed since Roe was made law in 1973.
Part III, WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT
“For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
We believe that universal understandings of freedom and truth are “written on the human heart.” America’s founders also believed this to be true. In 1776 John Dickinson, one of the framers of our Constitution, affirmed: “Our liberties do not come from charters; for these are only the declaration of pre-existing rights. They do not depend on parchments or seals, but come from the king of kings and the Lord of all the earth.” The words of the Declaration of Independence speak of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and proceed to make the historic assertion: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness . . . .” Today, more than two centuries of the American experiment have passed. We tend to take these words for granted. But for the founders, writing on the brink of armed revolution, these phrases were invested not just with their philosophy but with their lives. This is why they closed with a “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” The words of the Declaration of Independence illuminate the founding principles of American Republic, principles explicitly grounded in unchanging truths about the human person.
The principles of the Declaration were not fully reflected in the social or political structures of its own day. Then human slavery and other social injustices stood in tension to the high ideals the Founders articulated. Only after much time and effort, have these contradictions been reduced. In a striking way, we see today a heightening of the tension between our countries founding principles and political reality. We see this in diminishing respect for the inalienable right to life and in the elimination of legal protection for those who are most vulnerable. There can be no genuine justice in our society until the truths on which our nation was founded are more perfectly realized in our culture and law.
One of those truths is our own essential creatureliness. Virtual reality and genetic science may give us the illusion of power, but we are not gods. We are not our own, or anyone else’s, creator. Nor, for our own safety, should we ever seek to be. Even parents, entrusted with a special guardianship over new life, do not “own” their children any more than one adult can own another. And therein lies our only security. No one but the Creator is the sovereign of basic human rights – beginning with the right to life. We are daughters and sons of the one God who, outside and above us all, grants us the freedom, dignity and rights of personhood which no one else can take away. Only in this context, the context of a Creator who authors our human dignity, do words like “truth” and “self-evident” find their ultimate meaning. Without the assumption that a Creator exists who has ordained certain irrevocable truths about the human person, no rights are “unalienable,” and nothing about human dignity is axiomatic.
This does not make America sectarian. It does however, underline the crucial role God’s sovereignty has played in the architecture of American politics. While the founders were a blend of Enlightenment rationalists and traditional Christians, generations of Jews, Muslims, other religious groups and non-believers have all found a home in the United States. This is so because the tolerance of our system is rooted in the Jewish-Christian principle that even those who differ from one another in culture, appearance and faith still share the same rights. We believe that this principle still possesses the power to enlighten our national will.
The Second Vatican Council in its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spec), praises those women and men who have a vocation to public office. It encourages active citizenship. It also reminds us the “the political community . . . exists for the common good: this is its full justification and meaning and the source of its specific and basic right to exist. The common good embraces the sum total of all those conditions of social life which enable individuals, families, and organizations to achieve complete and effective fulfillment.” In pursuing the common good, citizens should “cultivate a generous and loyal spirit of patriotism, but without narrow-mindedness . . .(they must also) be conscious of their specific and proper role in the political community: they should be a shining example of their sense of responsibility and their dedication to the common good . . .”
As to the role of the Church in this process: “. . .The political community and the church are autonomous and independent of each other in their own fields. They are both devoted to the personal vocation of man, though under different titles . . .(yet) at all times and in all places, the Church should have the true freedom to teach the faith, to proclaim its teaching about society, to carry out it task among men without hindrance, and to pass moral judgment even in matters relating to politics, whenever the fundamental rights of man or the salvation of souls requires it.”
Pope John Paul II elaborates on this responsibility in his 1988 apostolic exhortation. The Vocation and the Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World (Christifideles Laici): “The inviolability of the person which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life. Above all, the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights – for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture – is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition of all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination . . The human being is entitled to such rights, in every phase of development, from conception until natural death; and in every condition, whether healthy or sick, whole or handicapped, right or poor . . .(Moreover, if) indeed, everyone has the mission and responsibility of acknowledging the personal dignity of every human being and of defending the right to live, some lay faithful are given particular title to this task: such as parents, teachers, healthworkers and the many who hold economic and political power…..”
We believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a “Gospel of life.” It invites all persons and societies to a new life lived abundantly in respect for human dignity.
We believe that this Gospel is not only a complement to American political principles, but also the cure for the spiritual sickness now infecting our society. As Scripture says, no house can stand divided against itself (Lk 11:17). We cannot simultaneously commit ourselves to human rights and progress while eliminating or marginalizing the weakest among us. Nor can we practice the Gospel of life only as a private piety. American Catholics must live it vigorously and publicly, as a matter of national leadership and witness, or we will not live it at all.