A Few Comments on “Select Quotations on Life Issues from
His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI & the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops” -- Part Two of Two

Editor’s note. Please send any comments you may have to Daveandrusko@hotmail.com

The best use of this space would probably be simply to reprint the quotations a second time. But at the risk of failing to do justice to the subtlety, depth, and breadth of what you read in Part One, let me offer three comments.

#1. Ironically, in a document that is inspired by the insights of the most prominent religious figure in the world, it is equally instructive, if not more so, for people who are not Catholic or even religious. The master insight is that we are in this together, that there is continuity of life from the unborn to the elderly that demands respect.  That respect—and the legal protection that flows from it—is not given to each member of the human family but is theirs by right. We don’t dole out rights, we acknowledge rights that already exist.

#2. Many of us appreciate and try to live out the imperative to minister to the poor and the powerless. But not all understand that those people who are “at the most vulnerable stages” of life need that same level of concern and protection, only more so. Moreover, as the USCCB explains so eloquently, “[T]he failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable stages renders suspect any claims to the ‘rightness' of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community.”

#3. Years ago I heard a sermon about the virtue of hospitality in the context of servanthood that made a deep impression on me. Accepting the unborn, particularly those whose arrival is unplanned and unexpected, is the ultimate expression of hospitality and servanthood. That spirit of openness is the sine qua non of societal cohesion. We can never truly be a society at peace with itself so long as we wage war on the unborn. The casual cruelty that makes possible 1.2 million abortions “constitute a direct denial of that attitude of acceptance of others which is indispensable for establishing lasting relationships of peace.”

Part One