“God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gn 1:27).
My brothers and sisters, as we begin the month of October, devoted as it is to Respect Life, it’s good to remind ourselves of the basis of the Church’s perennial call to respect and uphold the dignity of every human person, from conception to natural death, and that basis is found in the passage above from the very first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis.
The opening chapters of Genesis speak about God’s creation of the cosmos, demonstrating his power and purpose to create all things and to bring order and intelligibility to the universe. As the Church teaches us, Genesis reveals the truth that God is the origin and sustainer of all that exists, meaning that everything that exists, exists according to God’s desire and plan.
This is true in a unique way, though, of humanity, and not just of the human race as a whole, but of each and every human person. As we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Of all visible creatures only man is ‘able to know and love his creator.’ He is ‘the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake,’ and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life” (356).
As we celebrate Respect Life Month, it’s worth pondering and praying with these words from Sacred Scripture and the catechism. Here, I would like to draw our attention to a few phrases in particular.
Man is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake.” These words have become commonplace for many of us, but I would invite you to consider their significance. Of all the things that exist in the world around us and throughout the entire universe, only we have been willed for our own sake. In truth, Scripture and the catechism teach that everything else has been created for our sake, but we alone have been created for no other purpose, no other reason than God’s desire and delight that we each exist.
It is on this basis that the Church teaches that we are called to respect and uphold the dignity of each and every man, woman and child, no matter their age, sex, race or religion, no matter what they believe or how they act.
Of course, there are many issues in our day in which we are called—as much as human beings as Catholics—to speak this truth and stand up for the dignity of the human person. Certainly in our country, one thinks of the ongoing scourge of abortion, and in an ever-increasing way in many parts of the world, we see the spread of the practice of euthanasia.
Today, though, I want to call our attention to another respect life issue: the death penalty. While it is true that capital punishment and abortion do not have the same moral standing (abortion is always and everywhere a grave moral evil, which is not the case for the death penalty), the Church nonetheless calls us to limit if not eliminate the use of the death penalty in the penal systems of modern society.
The catechism speaks to this topic in paragraph 2267, but here, I would also like to draw your attention to the teaching of St. John Paul II in his great document, “The Gospel of Life.” In paragraph 56, Pope St. John Paul II teaches, with regard to the instances in which there are moral grounds to apply the death penalty, that “as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (emphasis added).
He goes on in paragraph 57 to reference “great care must be taken to respect every life, even that of criminals and unjust aggressors.”
To be sure, in many cases where the death penalty can be applied, a grave injustice has been done, and it is right for families and the state to seek to apply maximum justice. However, rectifying the injustice done by the perpetrator does not necessitate a further injustice in the form of the death penalty, especially when the debt to society and the victims can be paid by incarceration.
In our state, we are so grateful that abortions are now illegal.
But work remains on Respect Life issues, and I hope you will join me in standing up for the inviolable dignity of all human beings.
St. John Paul II, pray for us!
