09/30/01

Respecting life while responding to deadly attack

The Church in the United States celebrates October 7 as Pro-Life Sunday. This year we do so in the wake of an attack on our country by people who considered their own cause more valuable than innocent human life. The orchestrated killing of more than 6,500 people and the planned destruction of buildings and cities by killers who deliberately killed themselves shocked civilized people everywhere.

The difference between suicide for a cause and self-sacrifice for others is the difference between pilots who steer a hijacked plane into a building and firefighters who enter that same building to save those trapped in it. It is the difference between terrorists and heroes. It is the difference between those who hold human life in contempt if it doesn’t serve their own purpose and those who give their own lives so that the innocent may live.

This year especially we have to sort out our thoughts as we celebrate Pro-Life Sunday. The Gospel that tells us we may never take innocent life also permits us to defend that life, but to do so in a way that does not destroy the distinction between good and evil. In other words, one may not use an evil means to attain a good end. We can and must defend ourselves and others against being invaded or murdered; but how we do so will determine whether or not life has been justly defended. There are individuals who have a vocation to non-violence in all circumstances, and their lives of constant forgiveness are a blessing and a contribution to all of us. But God knows the difference between good and evil and does not expect those responsible for the public good here and now to ignore that difference. So far, our public rhetoric has avoided expressions of hate, especially against our Muslim fellow citizens, and for that we should be thankful. Now our actions must be similarly careful, discriminating against bringing those responsible for the deaths of September 11 to justice, which is necessary for preserving public order, and lashing out to create martyrs to an unjust cause.

Violence does beget violence. But not every use of force is simply violence. The difference between violence and a just use of force is the difference between acting according to law (not just human law, for human laws can protect injustice, but also divine law) and acting as if each of us was a law unto himself, a law unto herself.

This is why the pro-life movement vehemently condemns the use of violence against abortionists. Violence will beget and justify violence, and other means to oppose abortion are still available and should be used.

This is why the pro-life movement asks if we really need the death penalty to defend our society. Its use is legal and is moral in itself, unless there is another way to defend ourselves without killing. We should, as in a just defense, exhaust non-violent ways first to defend ourselves.

This is why the pro-life movement pleads that we not use public funds to experiment on embryonic human beings. We can not destroy others even for scientific experiment and the chance of medical progress, a chance far more certain, in fact, when stem cell research doesn’t use embryonic cells. Violence will beget violence, and we have opened a Pandora’s box with research on human embryos. Violence doesn’t only occur when a plane hits the Pentagon. It occurs in laboratories and medical clinics as well.

Now we have been told we’re at war, but most of us don’t know who the enemy is beyond a few names in the press. As we try to figure out a response consistent with our own pro-life moral beliefs, questions without easy answers come to mind: how much cooperation from a government is necessary before it is right to hold them accountable as “proxies” for terrorists? How do you deter suicidal warriors who desire to die for their cause? How do you know when this kind of “war” is won? How do you distinguish between a police investigation under our laws, with its own questions about burdens of proof and due process, and acts of war which presuppose that we are in a different legal order? These are important questions precisely because the pro-life movement is against violence but for a moral and legal order that can distinguish between right and wrong and hold people accountable.

Unfortunately, we no longer have a legal system with such integrity in the United States. In the case of human beings not yet born, our laws have destroyed the distinction between right and wrong. In one generation, abortion has passed from being a crime to being a rare and tragic occurrence to being a human right. If a person does not defend “abortion rights”, nationally and internationally, that person loses his or her own right to participate in public life. He or she will never be a candidate sponsored by the Democratic party for public office and will be regarded with suspicion by the press and the entertainment world. He or she will have a very difficult time being appointed a judge. He or she will be considered an opponent of freedom and an oppressor of women. Because we are at this point, Pope John Paul II, in receiving the new U.S. ambassador to the Holy See this month said: “When some lives, including those of the unborn, are subjected to the personal choices of others, no value or right will long be guaranteed.”

Not only the terrorists of September 11 have lost the sense of who human beings are in God’s plan. Each of us can look into his or her own soul and recognize how we have been accomplices to evil. This pro-life Sunday, faced with massive destruction of human lives in shocking fashion, let us commit ourselves again “never to intentionally kill or collude in the killing of innocent life, no matter how broken, unformed, disabled or desperate that life may seem.” (Pope John Paul II, The Gospel of Life, 25). Let us pray for ourselves, for our country’s enemies and for all who are involved in the killing of innocent human beings.

As we look to God for comfort in these terrible days, we know also that, once admitted into our lives, God will call us from comfort to conversion. For the grace to cooperate with God’s desires for us and for all human beings, let us keep one another in prayer. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.

Back to Archive 2001