Pope St. John Paul II could well be called the “apostle of life.” He spent his entire pontificate boldly proclaiming the inviolability of innocent human life.
On his first pastoral visit to the United States in 1979, he stood on the Mall in Washington amid the symbols of U.S. institutional power and he called on all Americans “to stand up for life.” Throughout his reign, the pope never hesitated to declare the right to life in the presence of heads of state, power brokers and arbiters of national social policy.
When it came to the life issues, this pope was best known for his powerful 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” (“The Gospel of Life”). This year marks its 30th anniversary, but it is no less relevant. St. John Paul spoke of “atrocious crimes” and “murderous violence” in contemporary societies. He said that those who would choose abortion have an attitude that “is shameful and reprehensible.”
What is distinctive about the pope’s teaching on life issues, however, is that they do not deal simply with personal morality. They are always placed in a cultural context. Above all else, “The Gospel of Life” is a penetrating analysis and critique of contemporary “advanced” societies.
In the encyclical, the pope spoke of “attacks, affecting life in its earliest and its final stages, attacks that … raise questions of extraordinary seriousness. It is not only that … these attacks tend no longer to be considered as ‘crimes’: paradoxically, they assume the nature of ‘rights,’ to the point that the state is called upon to give them legal recognition and to make them available through the free services of health-care personnel.” He says we have come “to interpret … crimes against life as legitimate expressions of individual freedom, to be as acknowledged and protected as actual rights.”
The cultural decline, the loss of social protections for innocent life, are what seemed to baffle and dismay the pope above all else. “How did such a situation come about?” he asked. “In the background there is the profound crisis of culture, that generates skepticism in relation to the very foundations of knowledge and ethics, and that makes it increasingly difficult to grasp clearly the meaning of what man is, the meaning of his rights and duties.”
The pope saw civilization itself faced with the danger of its own self-destruction. He writes elsewhere that “we are facing an immense threat to life: not only to the life of individuals, but, also, to that of civilization itself.”
St. John Paul told us that nations once considered civilized are reverting “to a state of barbarism.” Whenever we see legally sanctioned abortion, we are dealing with a “tyrant state” engaging in a “tragic caricature of legality” through such actions as Supreme Court rulings.
These developments, the pope told us, “have a perverse and evil significance” as we suffer “the most alarming corruption and the darkest moral blindness.” The pope’s words were not hyperbolic. Since abortion was legalized nationwide in the U.S. with Roe v. Wade in 1973, around 65 million children have died from abortion. While the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturned Roe, it has not stemmed the numbers of abortion in the U.S. Available data actually points to a slight increase in the number of annual abortions in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, when compared to the years immediately preceding Dobbs.
The problem, of course, is that the social threat to innocent human life is not fundamentally a political or juridical problem at all. It is, as the pope showed us, a cultural problem.
When the pope visited Los Angeles in 1987, he gave a description of culture as “all those things that reflect the soul of a nation.” He asked, “How is American culture evolving today? … Your music, your poetry and art, your drama, your painting and sculpture, the literature that you are producing — are all those things that reflect the soul of a nation being influenced by the spirit of Christ for the perfection of humanity?”
A nation’s culture reflects its deepest beliefs. And it is fundamentally religion that gives rise to culture.
Our nation has always afforded protection to the vulnerable in our midst because we cherished each individual human life. At one point, unborn children were protected by law because we cherished children. Infanticide and euthanasia were unspeakable — indeed, unthinkable. There was an underlying respect and love for human life that came to be reflected in the law. This love and respect did not arise from the law, however. Its roots were much, much deeper.
Our nation in its origins was Christian, a fact that the pope acknowledged repeatedly during his second pastoral visit to the United States. We afforded profound respect to human beings because we believed each person was the very image and likeness of God himself.
In “The Gospel of Life,” the pope reminded us that the Incarnation “reveals to humanity not only the boundless love of God who ‘so loved the world that He gave His only Son’ (Jn 3:16), but also the incomparable value of every human person.”
The dignity of every person can be seen in the fact that each is the image and likeness of God, and each has been redeemed “at a great price” by Jesus Christ. It is this profound religious insight that gave rise to the reverence shown the innocent in the laws of our nation.
St. John Paul taught us that the most fundamental place to begin to restore legal safeguards to human life is in deepening the religious beliefs of our people, and that God is the ultimate source of the dignity of the human person.
Following the teachings and example of St. John Paul, there is absolutely nothing more important that our bishops and priests can do to restore a sense of the sacredness of human life than to celebrate Mass with devotion and reverence and to offer this greatest of all prayers for the protection of innocent life.
In “Evangelium Vitae,” the pope taught us the Eucharist is the infinite gift of love. If we can instill once again, in the people of God, a sense of wonder and awe in the presence of Jesus Christ in the most holy sacrament of the altar, then we shall begin to see a culture of death begin to crumble, and we will witness the emergence of a culture of life and a civilization of love.
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