The Vatican Should Reaffirm the Culture of Life
The Catholic Thing
By Alden Abbott The Catholic bishops of Arlington and Richmond, Michael Burbidge and Barry Knestout, urged Virginians to reject Ballot Question 1 next month, a proposed constitutional amendment that would expand legal access to abortion. The bishops warned that the measure would establish a so-called fundamental right to abortion "all the way up to birth and for every individual," including children; endanger women's health and safety; exclude parents from decisions affecting minor daughters; and protect those who assist in abortions from legal consequences. Their conclusion was blunt: the proposal is "extreme, dangerous, radical, and horrific." That statement is a much-needed reminder that the culture of death is not an abstraction. It appears whenever the law treats the deliberate destruction of innocent human life as a right, a service, or a form of compassion. It appears in the normalization of abortion and in the growing acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide. It also appears when disability, dependency, age, and illness are made to seem like reasons why a human life has become less worthy of protection. The bishops' intervention, therefore, raises a question reaching far beyond Virginia: Is it time for the Vatican to renew the Church's public proclamation of the culture of life? Saint John Paul II answered that question in 1995 with extraordinary clarity in Evangelium vitae. Human life, he taught, is a gift from God, possessing a sacred and inviolable dignity from conception until natural death. The Gospel of Life is not a narrow political program. It is part of the Gospel itself because every person is made in the image of God and called to communion with Him. Abortion and euthanasia are not merely unfortunate social choices or matters on which the Church happens to have a distinctive preference. They are grave violations of the moral law because they directly attack innocent life. No government can transform such an attack into a genuine human right. Evangelium vitae also insisted that defending life requires more than condemning particular acts. A culture of life must protect mothers, children, the disabled, the elderly, and the dying; support families facing hardship; provide genuine care rather than abandonment; and resist the temptation to measure human worth by productivity, independence, or health. Public authority has a duty to defend the common good, and the right to life is the foundation on which all other rights rest. The encyclical thus joined moral truth to mercy, and legal protection to a civilization of solidarity. Nearly three decades later, the need for that teaching has become more urgent. In many jurisdictions, abortion has moved from being tolerated under limited circumstances to being described as a fundamental constitutional entitlement. Chemical abortion and abortion tourism have made the destruction of unborn life easier to conceal. At the other end of life, euthanasia and assisted suicide have spread from exceptional proposals to accepted features of public policy. (Five percent of Canadians already die of MAID – "Medical Assistance in Dying" – a number that's only going to increase.) In some places, families are increasingly asked to regard death as a solution to suffering, cost, dependence, or social inconvenience. The language of autonomy can obscure the reality that vulnerable people may feel pressure to choose death so that they will not burden others. In light of all this, Pope Leo XIV should issue an encyclical devoted specifically to renewing Evangelium vitae for the present age. There is a venerable precedent. John Paul II's Centesimus annus revisited and updated Leo XIII's Rerum novarum a century after its publication, applying enduring principles to changed economic and political circumstances. A new encyclical could do the same for the Gospel of Life. It could reaffirm the central teachings of Evangelium vitae while addressing new technologies, constitutional claims, medic...