Gospel of Life & Coronavirus

postcard of Bethany, in the Holy Land

I am the resurrection and the life, says the Lord. (John 11:25) [Spanish]

—

The Gospel of Life is something concrete and personal, for it consists in the proclamation of the very person of Jesus. Jesus is the Son of God who from all eternity receives life from the Father, and who has come among men to make them sharers in this gift. (Evangelium Vitae 29)

That’s a quote from a letter written by a man that we older Catholics remember well. He was born during the Spanish Flu epidemic of the last century.

Here’s another passage from his letter about the Gospel of Life:

Through the words, the actions, and the very person of Jesus, man receives the complete truth about the value of human life. Through Christ, man can accept and fulfill completely the responsibility of loving and serving, of defending and promoting human life. The Gospel of Life has been written in the heart of every man and woman, echoing in every conscience from the beginning, from the time of creation itself.

He then quoted Vatican II:

Christ confirmed with divine testimony that God is with us to free us from the darkness of sin and death and to raise us up to life.

Pope John Paul II wrote this letter and coined the phrase: Gospel of Life. This week we marked the 25^th anniversary of Pope John Paul’s letter.

Pope Francis has emphasized the Gospel of Life message repeatedly. For example, a couple years ago, Pope Francis said to an international association of Catholic health-care professionals:

Your being Catholic entails a greater responsibility, by contributing to the recognition of the transcendent dimension of human life, the imprint of God’s creative work from the moment of conception. This is a task of the new evangelization that often requires going against the tide. The Lord is counting on you to spread the Gospel of Life.

Since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, our nation has had an open wound, literally. Thousands of innocent and defenseless people have bled to death at the hands of abortionists every day. And the wound never heals, because only the truth can heal it.

This is not the reactionary and old-fashioned Church, rejecting something new and modern. It’s the other way around. Roe v. Wade is based on old, debunked ideas. Abortion is nothing new; the ancient pagans practiced it. Violence and cruelty go way back.

The new thing is Jesus Christ’s Gospel of Life. Every human being has immeasurable value and dignity. And God has given us a task: Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Which means: Love yourself, your own life—because God has given it. And love your neighbor with the same love, for God’s sake.

I think we can see clearly how the Gospel of Life offers us the point-of-view we need to get us through the coronavirus crisis. We suffer social isolation, and we have to make many sacrifices. But we do so serenely. Because we affirm the priceless value of every individual human life.

This principle guides the worthy practice of medicine, as well as the decisions made by public officials to protect and preserve innocent people’s lives.

Yes, a day will come when all of us will have to go to meet the Lord, by dying. We Christians do not fear death. We do not regard it as the greatest possible evil. We commend our deceased loved ones to God, looking forward to the resurrection of the dead. Being pro-life does not involve pretending that death doesn’t come for us all, in God’s time.

But Pope John Paul’s letter explained clearly how the Fifth Commandment binds us. Not only must we refrain from murder. We must also use all the skills we possess, to foster the advancement of every human life. Not only may we never act to destroy anyone’s life, we also may never omit to care for anyone who needs such care.

God has entrusted human life to us, not as something we fully understand and can master, but as a mystery that we humbly attend to and care for. Jesus Christ’s Gospel of Life can and will give us the firm foundation that we need to understand our role in this crisis. When we live by the Gospel of Life, we will prosper. That is: we will prosper in the most important way. Morally. We will build up the bonds of trust that hold communities together.

Our job as Catholics is: to stay focused on the message, to stay prayerful about it, and to live always in communion with the good and gentle Savior Who came into this world that we might have life.

The Law of Christian Faith

Lord Jesus said to the royal official in Galilee (with an ailing child), “Your son will live.” Reminds us of when the Lord said to Martha of Bethany, “Your brother will rise.”

Which brother? Correct: Lazarus.

Did Martha believe Christ, that her brother Lazarus would rise from the dead? Yes. She said to Jesus, ‘I believe that You are the Messiah. I believe You when You say, I am the resurrection and the life.’

Did Lazarus rise? Yes. Did the royal official’s son live? Yes. Thus the royal official and his whole household came to believe.

Believe what? In God, and in the One Whom God has sent. At the Last Supper, Jesus told His Apostles, “You have faith in God. Have faith also in Me.”

We will go to the mat for this. The Incarnation. Jesus is God. As Pope Francis put it, in his first encyclical:

Christian faith is faith in the incarnation of the Word. (Lumen Fidei 18)

The Christian faith is a gift from heaven that, as St. Paul taught us, liberates us from the ancient law. But the Christian faith also has a “law” within it, so to speak.

Namely, that we must hold fast to our faith in the Incarnation; that we must hold fast to the entire mystery of Christ—no matter what. Even if you or I face the choice between betraying Christ and dying for Christ.

A Christian would never seek martyrdom. But every Christian must be prepared for martyrdom, and must welcome martyrdom, if it comes. That is the law of Christian faith.

We submit ourselves to that law! Christ reigns over us as our immortal, heavenly King. All of us have to die sooner or later anyway. To Jesus Christ be the glory, whether we prosper or suffer; whether we succeed or fail; whether we live or die.

John 11 Gospel of Life

“I am the resurrection and the life,” says the Lord. (John 11:25) [Click por Spanish]

The Gospel of Life is something concrete and personal, for it consists in the proclamation of the very person of Jesus. Jesus is the Son of God who from all eternity receives life from the Father, and who has come among men to make them sharers in this gift.

That’s a quote from a letter written by a great hero. In the letter, the hero repeatedly cited the gospel passage we read at Sunday’s Mass. Any guesses about who the hero is? And what letter? Here’s another passage:

Through the words, the actions, and the very person of Jesus, man receives the complete truth about the value of human life. Through Christ, man can accept and fulfill completely the responsibility of loving and serving, of defending and promoting human life. The Gospel of Life was present in the revelation of the Old Testament and indeed has been written in the heart of every man and woman, echoing in every conscience from the beginning, from the time of creation itself.

Then the hero quoted Vatican II:

Christ confirmed with divine testimony that God is with us to free us from the darkness of sin and death and to raise us up to life. (Evangelium Vitae 29)

Pope St. John Paul II wrote to us about the Gospel of Life. Jesus declared, “I am the resurrection and the life!” Christ entrusted this solemn declaration to us, and He sustains us in our fidelity to it, by pouring out on us His grace, His life. Pope Francis has emphasized JPII’s message repeatedly. For example, Pope Francis said to an international association of Catholic health-care professionals:

Your being Catholic entails a greater responsibility to contemporary culture, by contributing to the recognition of the transcendent dimension of human life, the imprint of God’s creative work from the moment of conception. This is a task of the new evangelization that often requires going against the tide. The Lord is counting on you to spread the Gospel of Life.

Ok. Ready for a newsflash? We have some problems. As a country, los Estados Unidos. We face profound divisions among ourselves. These divisions make me think of another era. I’ve read quite a few books about the Civil War. And the political divisions we face remind me of the 1850’s.

President James Buchanan

Now, on the one hand, we don’t live like they lived in the 1850’s. Almost all of us can drive a car, and we freely drive all over the country. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, few northerners had traveled down south, or vice versa. These days we live in an America much more integrated by commerce and communication, without the distinct regional divide of north vs. south.

But, on the other hand, back in the 1850’s, Americans, in the north and in the south, had more basic assumptions in common than we have now. They disagreed about how to interpret the Bible, but they all regularly read the Bible. Even as they marched off to war against each other, they agreed on things that we can’t find a way to agree on now.

How did we wind up here, then? Profoundly divided as we are, in America? To me, the heart of the matter seems obvious. In 1973 the Supreme Court abandoned the truth and issued a ruling that has poisoned our national life ever since.

Since Roe v. Wade, our nation has had an open wound, literally. Thousands of innocent and defenseless people have bled to death at the hands of abortionists every day. And the wound never heals, because only the truth can heal it. And Roe v. Wade has banished the truth about abortion from our land.

This is not the reactionary and old-fashioned Church rejecting something new and modern. Roe v. Wade is based on old, debunked ideas. Abortion is nothing new; the ancient pagans practiced it. Violence and cruelty go way back.

The new thing is Jesus Christ’s Gospel of Life. Our heroic popes have given us 21^st-century Catholics the new and invigorating truth of the Gospel. They have articulated our beautiful rallying cry: Every human life has immeasurable value and dignity! And God has given us a task: Love your neighbor! The Gospel of Life looks to me like the one and only thing that could actually heal the dangerous ideological divisions in our country.

This is not Republican over Democrat. The Gospel of Life demands that we revere and love every life–the unborn, the poor, the undocumented immigrant. And the Gospel of Life demands that we make sacrifices in order to protect our environment, our “common home” as Pope Francis calls Mother Earth.

The profound wrongness of Roe v. Wade does not belong to one political party or another. It’s not one party or another that has sinned against the Gospel of Life. We have sinned against the Gospel of Life as a nation. And it’s not one party or another that needs the Gospel of Life in order to find a way forward. The United States of America needs the Gospel of Life in order to find a way forward.

Jesus Christ’s Gospel of Life can and will give us the firm foundation that we need. Standing on that foundation, we can work out our differences and find a way to prosper.

Our job as Catholics is: to stay focused on the message, to stay prayerful about it, and to live always in communion with the good and gentle Savior Who came into this world that we might have life.

Not Reincarnation, But…

One of the world’s great myths holds that our souls travel through many lifetimes in different bodies. People call this idea…Reincarnation.

To give the benefit of the doubt to all the people who have believed in this, and the millions who still do: I, for one, can see why the myth might arise. In fact, I can see two solid reasons why people might come to believe in reincarnation.

1. We human beings have a natural tendency to revere the perfect justice of Almighty God. But we live in a world which we clearly see is not perfectly just. Therefore, God must have a means by which He restores justice in the end. If I do not know about the sacrifice of Christ, which has reconciled the human race to God in one perfectly just act—if I don’t know about this, then I will inevitably try to imagine other ways in which justice might be restored. I will imagine some other means by which a human being might reach purity, uprightness, godliness. I see that this does not generally happen in the course of one given human lifetime. But I might imagine that over an enormous array of well-lived lifetimes, a soul might actually reach union with God.

But: Reincarnation is impossible, as many skilled philosophers have shown. St. Thomas Aquinas argues the point with characteristic clarity and simplicity.