On the Value and Inviolability of Human Life

Although you don't have to be a parent to know this, that does make it easier to understand that just because something is a part of your history it might well be Greek to a younger person. This enduring truth was brought home to me yesterday.

This summer, probably for the last time, we have all our kids at home. Clothes, books, sporting equipment, electronic gismos are everywhere. There is maybe a foot and a half of unoccupied space.


Squeezing another box into an already over-maxed space, one of my daughters found an old paperback. "What's this?" she asked. Well, the "this" in this case was a still-in-pretty-good-shape copy of Pope John Paul's magnificent encyclical, "Evangelium Vitae"--"The Gospel of Life."

While a lexus nexus search might find a greater number of references to the Pope's memorial phrase, "The Culture of Death," it would be difficult to exaggerate how thought-provoking, timely, and powerful was the Pontiff's 1995 encyclical. The subtitle of "The Gospel of Life" tells it all: "On the Value and Inviolability of Human Life."

Author of "Witness to Hope," George Weigel was the Pope's official biographer. Interviewed by Nationalreview.com upon the Pontiff's death in 2005, Weigel said, "This was the most intellectually consequential pontificate since the Council of Trent." Weigel then added something about the Pope's teaching ministry that extends beyond Catholics: "The Church will be digesting the teaching of John Paul II for at least a century, and possibly longer."

I had to rush this morning, but I took the time to re-read the introduction. Instantly, I was captured yet again by the Pope's extraordinary depth of insight and breadth of compassion. If I didn't fully understand it before, after re-reading the Introduction to "The Gospel of Hope," I really grasped how abortion has shaken our culture to the core.

Like an airplane violently tossed by a terrible storm, the abortion whirlwind would have unriveted the wings of our culture, had it not been for giants like the Pope and the grassroots transdenominational pro-life movement. [Entire Story]

Comments

  1. When Cardinal Pell was interviewed on EWTN a while ago, he confessed that when Evangelium Vitae was first issued he thought JPII's use of the phrase "the culture of death" was rather over-the-top and extreme. Now, what JPII saw coming over a decade ago is perfectly clear.

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