Celebrate and give thanks for life in its many manifestations

by Joseph Nangle, OFM
Pax Christi USA 2023 Teacher of Peace

With the conclusion of the Season of Creation on the Feast of St. Francis this past Friday, it is entirely appropriate that this is Respect Life Sunday. For the past five weeks of a quasi-official Liturgical Time, we have been invited to “Hope and Act With Creation” (this year’s theme for the Season). Our attention has centered on celebrating this gift of God to humanity, our Common Home – and countering the deadly violences
endangering it. Clearly humanity’s response to these challenges and obligations is barely underway as almost daily we learn of yet another frightful sign of Earth’s degradation.

[On September 25, 2023 the Washington Post published “Antarctica is experiencing a record low in sea ice – by a lot!” According to Prof. Gail Whiteman, “Polar ice is the world’s biggest insurance policies against runaway climate change.”]

This Respect Life Sunday, and indeed every day of the year, calls us before all else to celebrate and give thanks for the reality of life – in its myriad manifestations. Creation is the divine initiative wherein we share life in the One who is Life itself. Once again, the words of Bernadette Farrell’s hymn come to mind: “All around us we have found You.” Indeed, life continues to burst forth everywhere, from tiny blades of grass pushing through cracks in our cement sidewalks, to new stars being born in faraway galaxies. We worship and give thanks today and always to the “Lord and Giver of Life, maker of all things visible and invisible.”

At the same time Respect Life Sunday reminds us again that our vocation as beneficiaries and caretakers of Mother Earth continues and places yet more demands on us as we discover the harm that humanity continues to do to her. It is of supreme importance that we understand what the call to “respect life” entails. For too many our Catholic/Christian sisters and brothers, and yes, our bishops, confine this understanding to “life before birth” and the horror of abortion. They give this sin virtually exclusive importance in forming consciences and currently in making political choices. The phrase “intrinsically evil” often refers exclusively to abortion by so-called pro-life advocates. In reality, respecting life over against threats to it is ever-so-much broader than that.

Here is how Pope St. John Paul II understands the pro-life challenge. In his 1993 encyclical, “Splendor Veritatis”* the Holy Father wrote: “Acts intrinsically evil include:

• Whatever is hostile to life itself such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide;
• Whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit:
• Whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as sub-human living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children;
• Degrading conditions of work which treat workers as mere instruments of profit, and not free responsible persons.

“All these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as the affect human civilization, they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.”

Today with new, unprecedented findings, the pope would have included as intrinsic evil the harm being done to our Home.

The catalogue of sins against God’s Creation is seemingly unending, beyond our comprehension, not to say our efforts to confront them. Here it is good to remember the words attributed to Archbishop St. Oscar Romero: “We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in that. This enables us to do something and to do it very well.”

Every one of these “intrinsic evils” is being challenged, as best as humans can by groups, coalitions, movements (Pax Christi), religious and secular, trying to mitigate them. We can join with one or the other of these.

*Veritatis Splendor, August 6, 1993, #80

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Joe Nangle OFM is a Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace and the 2023 Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace. As a member of the Assisi Community in Washington, D.C., he is dedicated to simple living and social change. Joe also serves as the Pastoral Associate for the Latino community at Our Lady Queen of Peace, Arlington, Virginia.