From Father Frank Pavone, National Director
Priests for Life
I just had a
wonderful trip to Rome where I was again with Pope Francis. While there, I
was asked to comment on the controversy caused by his recent interview, in
which he shared some thoughts about the Church’s focus on abortion. I
wrote several articles explaining why we do not need to be alarmed, and am
awaiting some major papers to publish them. Meanwhile, below is another
version of my commentary. Enjoy and pass along!
As the Director of Priests for Life, known
worldwide as a ministry within the Catholic Church that urges more
preaching, teaching, and action against abortion, I was asked by many
alarmed and confused people these past few days about the reported comments
of the Pope that the Church should not be "obsessed" with this issue, and
that there should be "balance" and "context.
Is the pope saying
we should talk less about abortion? Is he saying that the emphasis the
Church has placed on this issue has been a mistaken emphasis?
When I first received these inquiries via emails and text messages, I was
actually in the presence of Pope Francis, in the dining room of his
residence.
I
had spoken just hours earlier, at the invitation of the Vatican, about
the Church's defense of the unborn child, and about the clear and strong
position of the Church, expressed in many documents, that the right to life
is our first right and the foundation and condition for all the others.
So the news came to me with more than a little irony, and I
immediately began to tell worried pro-life warriors that they had no reason
to think that the Pope no longer wanted the Church to focus on abortion.
Pope Francis preaches on pro-life in a very integral way. He gives
strong and clear messages that derive from the very substance of the Faith
and a very broad vision of the demands that Faith places upon us. The
conclusions and applications for the pro-life movement are undeniable, even
if he does not use the specific words “pro-life movement” and
“unborn.”
This was very clear in his homily at his
installation on
March 19, when he spoke of the need to protect every
person, especially children, from the “Herods” of our day who
plot death.
And it was clear again in his Palm
Sunday homily,
which contained the very strong message to have confidence in the victory
of life over death.
He said it this way:
“Let us look around: how many
wounds are inflicted upon humanity by evil! Wars, violence, economic
conflicts that hit the weakest, greed for money, power, corruption,
divisions, crimes against human life and against creation!
"Jesus on the Cross feels the whole weight of the evil, and with the
force of God’s love he conquers it, he defeats it with his
resurrection.
"Dear friends, we can all conquer the
evil that is in us and in the world: with Christ, with the force of
good!"
He mentions “crimes against human life,” using the same word
the Second Vatican Council used in
Gaudium et Spes to describe
abortion (an “unspeakable crime”). He urges us to see evil for
what it is, and then never to lose confidence in the victory we have over
evil, thanks to the death and Resurrection of Christ.
In his
recent interview, he made it clear that the Church should put opposition to
abortion "in context." This is neither new nor unwelcome. The Pope wants to
see the renunciation of abortion put in the context of mercy toward the
mother, and this is consistent with the pro-life movement's emphasis on
"loving them both." In fact, in my personal conversations with the Pope, he
particularly urged me to go forward with the work of Rachel's Vineyard, the
largest ministry in the world for healing after abortion. He called it an
"excellent work."
The Pope wants the teaching against abortion
not to stand alone, as if it were a negotiable moral prohibition, but
rather to stand in the context of our teaching about who God is. He made
this clear in his
June 16 homily at the worldwide "Day of the Gospel of
Life" when he declared,
"The Scriptures everywhere tell us that
God is the Living one, the one who bestows life and points the way to the
fullness of life…The commandments are not a litany of prohibitions
-- you must not do this, you must not do that, you must not do the other;
on the contrary, they are a great "Yes!": a yes to God, to Love, to
life."
"All too often, as we know from experience,
people do not choose life, they do not accept the "Gospel of Life" but let
themselves be led by ideologies and ways of thinking that block life, that
do not respect life, because they are dictated by selfishness,
self-interest, profit, power, and pleasure, and not by love…As a
result, the Living God is replaced by fleeting human idols which offer the
intoxication of a flash of freedom, but in the end bring new forms of
slavery and death."
This approach
radically strengthens the
Church's opposition to abortion, because the Pope is saying not simply that
it breaks the Fifth Commandment ("You shall not kill"), but that more
fundamentally it breaks the
First Commandment
("You shall not have other gods besides me") and that to disrespect life is
to abandon God himself.
Nobody should worry or think that the
Pope is in any way diluting the Church's strong and unchangeable stance
against abortion, or contradicting all that
has
already been said and written, in documents like
The Gospel of
Life, about the urgent priority that this issue deserves. Some 50
million children are killed by abortion around the world each year. If we
want to know how much we should focus on it, we only have to use human
reason and ask what our response would be if 50 million adults throughout
the world were killed each year by terrorism.
Long live the
pro-life movement, and long live the Pope!
