© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
(Fr Augustine H.T. Tran attended seminary at the North American College in Rome, Italy and was ordained to the priesthood in 1998. He serves in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, and is currently in residence at St. John Catholic Church in McLean, Virginia, while he completes a Canon Law Degree at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He may be contacted via e-mail at atran@alumni.nd.edu.)
That dignity, which is the basis for all of our rights, belongs to all men from conception to death. Every serious scientist today believes that the embryo is a human being in his earliest stages. That is no longer conjecture, it is a proven scientific fact based upon our understanding of genetics. It is just one more case of the natural philosopher climbing the mountain of truth only to find a theologian sitting at the top.
The question is no longer whether we have a human life in the womb, the question is whether that life is valuable, whether that life has any rights; but once we start placing anything other than intrinsic value on human life, then we are back to the functionalistic view again. Even those who would favor abortion today concede the fact that the embryo is a human life. They simply argue that the mother's right to choose to kill her unborn daughter supersedes that daughter's right not to be killed by her mother.
Consider the message that gives to our children. Every child born in this country since 1973 is an abortion survivor. Every child born since 1973 is reminded by our laws and the pro-abortion rhetoric that he is alive not because of his intrinsic value, not because of his inherent dignity as a person created in the imago Dei, but because of someone else's choice, because someone else chose to let him live. That someone else could just as easily have chosen to kill him in her womb. Well, if we can kill an innocent in the womb for the sake of convenience, then why can we not kill an innocent outside the womb for the sake of convenience?
That is where we are today. For the past 30 years, we have not respected the life of the unborn. We now no longer respect the life of the partially born. We are on the verge of losing our respect for the life of the long born through euthanasia. We have prominent Ivy League ethicists telling us we should not respect the life of the newborn. We play with human beings in a petri dish, killing them for their body parts, or freezing them until it is convenient for us to implant them in a womb, and then selectively aborting them if too many survive the implantation process. If that is not treating human beings as objects, then I do not know what is. So where does it end?
It does not end! As long as we see life as functional rather than intrinsically valuable, it will never end. Respect for the sanctity of human life must extend from conception to death. To exclude anyone is to exclude everyone.
Now, the argument is often put forth that we cannot really stop someone from obtaining an abortion. That may be true, but we also cannot stop someone from stealing, or murdering, or lying under oath, yet we have laws that prohibit all those things. Hence, it is perfectly reasonable to have laws that protect human rights, the most fundamental of which is the right to life.
Therefore, the Church calls all men of good will to end the culture of death, as our Holy Father has called it. She calls those who have performed abortions, those contemplating an abortion, those who have procured abortions, and even those who vote in support of abortion to come to the healing power of Christ, to receive the mercy and forgiveness that He offers to anyone with a contrite heart and to find peace and comfort in His loving providence. When we are hurting, when we have made mistakes, when we have nowhere else to go, we should always come to the foot of the cross, where we shall find our Lover and our Savior, the Bridegroom who loves us from the moment of our conception to the moment of our death and even unto eternity.
In the past few weeks, we have heard that Bishop Raymond Burke of La Crosse, Wisconsin — who is also the Archbishop-elect of St Louis — and Archbishop Alfred Hughes of New Orleans have told Catholic politicians they should not receive Communion if they support abortion or euthanasia.
This comes as we remember the thirty-first anniversary of Roe v. Wade today. In their authority as sacred pastors entrusted with the care of souls, these bishops are calling Catholics to be faithful to the teachings of their Church in matters pertaining to the dignity of human life, undoubtedly the most pressing issue of our time. The faithfulness that they are espousing is not only for the protection of the innocent, but also for the salvation of those who would scandalize the faithful by their actions. For they, like the rest of us, will have to face judgment for their actions, not before their constituency, but before their God, the God who reminded us in this past Sunday's first reading that He is our Builder, He is our Creator, and, hence, He is the one who endows us with our inalienable right to life.
If in honesty, reflectively examining our conscience, we have concluded that we may reject this teaching of the Church, then we do not have a Catholic conscience, and, hence, we have no right to the sacraments. To honestly follow one's conscience is not to call oneself Catholic and yet reject Catholic teachings. It is even less honest to accept Catholic teachings privately and act contrary to those teachings publicly. We cannot reject our communion with the Church through what we say out of one side of our mouth and then expect a right to receive Communion in the other side of our mouth. The world might find that acceptable, but the God in that host is not so easily fooled.
We are all sinners and we may fall to temptations to do things that we know are wrong, but that is not publicly espousing those wrongful acts. In fact, as Catholics we know that when we sin mortally, we, too, are excluded from the sacraments of the living; we, too, must confess our sins and reconcile ourselves with our Lord before approaching His altar and receiving His most precious Body and Blood. For we realize that if we do otherwise, then, we do not receive the grace of the sacrament and we are committing the sin of sacrilege. Hence, these shepherds are not holding Catholic politicians to any higher standard than they are holding any other Catholic: the standard of fidelity.
Since this teaching is so important, let us look at it and ask ourselves a very fundamental question. Why is human life sacred? We use that expression frequently, but what makes human life unique? Why is it any different from animal life or plant life? (Since angels rarely come into this dialogue, we are excluding them from our analysis.)
Following the example of our Holy Father, we need to go back to the Book of Genesis to see what makes human life sacred. There we see that man was created in the imago Dei, in the image and likeness of God. That is not said of any other creature. Man is the only creature who has his origin and his end in God. This is what in theology we call a Christian anthropology. It is the basis for everything the Church teaches about the human person.
If we reject this view of man, then not only will we not understand what the Church teaches, but we are also left with a purely functionalistic view of mankind. These are the two views vying for dominance in our society. Is human life intrinsically valuable, that is, valuable by its very nature, valuable because human beings are made in the image and likeness of God; or is human life valuable because it has achieved some arbitrary level of functionality, because it can do certain things, or contribute a certain amount to society?
Unfortunately, if we have a functionalistic view, then someone is going to be excluded, and someone already has been, the unborn. In this functionalistic view, someone will always be excluded because there is no such thing as equality. As much as we want to worship equality in this country, there is no such thing as equality outside of dignity.
Every spelling bee, every college entrance exam, every sporting event proves that if we push the parameters far enough, we shall always find a hierarchy, not equality. The only equality is in dignity. All human beings are equal in dignity because we are all made in the imago Dei. That dignity does not come from our government officials and it certainly does not come from “nine un-elected lawyers.” It comes from our Builder. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Declaration of Independence). Without that right to life, there is no right to liberty or to the pursuit of happiness. Obviously, when our founding fathers penned these most profound words, they did not believe that all men were created with equal athletic ability or with equal intelligence. They were talking about being created with equal dignity.
