c. 1999 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Pope John Paul II urged U.S. bishops Thursday (March 4) to fight”deliberate falsification”of Roman Catholic pro-life teaching by opponents who use”the language of life to promote the culture of death.” The pope leveled his strong attack on supporters of legal abortion and assisted suicide in a letter to Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore, chairman of the Committee for Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Bishops.
It was read at an unprecedented jointly sponsored meeting by the committee and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family on the defense of human life, which John Paul called”a matter of critical importance for society, a matter so essential that no one can remain indifferent.” The March 3-5 meeting at The Catholic University of America in Washington brought together a broad panoply of church and secular leaders in the fight against legal abortion and euthanasia, including diocesan”respect life”directors and such luminaries as film critic Michael Medved and Emory University professor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.
In his letter to the conference, the pope praised the recent statement by U.S. bishops,”Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics,”on the duty to defend and promote human life from conception to natural death.
The statement was one of the strongest yet by the bishops in their long fight against legal abortion, warning Catholic politicians to stop supporting abortion or face the consequences.
In his comments, the pope said the church’s views are often misrepresented.”Christians must act,”he said.”This is not easy in a situation where there is at times deliberate falsification of the church’s teaching and scorn for those who promote it. Yet none of this can be allowed to blur your vision or diminish your energies.” The Roman Catholic Church opposes contraception, abortion, euthanasia and, with very limited exceptions, the death penalty, which John Paul has said belong to”the culture of death.” He said in his letter that the church faces particular problems in the United States from what he characterized as distortions of the ideals of freedom and democracy.”At the end of the 20th century we are witnessing a strange paradox: the sanctity of human life is being denied by an appeal to freedom, democracy, pluralism, even reason and compassion,”the pontiff said.”As the bishops’ statement points out, words have become unmoored from their meaning, and we are left with a rhetoric in which the language of life is used to promote the culture of death.”Freedom is sundered from truth and democracy from the moral values required for its survival; a faulty notion of pluralism loses sight of the common good; reason often refused to engage the truths which transcend empiric experience; and a false sense of compassion is incapable of facing the limits and demands of our nature as created and defendant beings,”he said.”The language of human rights is constantly invoked while the most basic of them _ the right to life _ is repeatedly disregarded,”he said.
The pope noted that the bishops found this”moral confusion”to be an inevitable result of”the gradual restructuring of American culture according to ideals of utility, productivity and cost-effectiveness.””So great is the confusion at times,”John Paul said,”that for many people the difference between good and evil is determined by the opinion of the majority, and even the time-honored havens of human life _ the family, the law and medicine _ are sometimes made to serve the culture of death.” The pope called on the bishops to fight the culture of death with both education and political action.”The choice in favor of life is not a private option but a basic demand of a just and moral society,”he said.”The pro-life concern must be present in every aspect of the church’s pastoral activity.”
DEA END POLK
