Society must be re-sensitized to God's 'sculpture' of every life

“Things have a price and can be for sale, but people have a dignity that is priceless and worth far more than things.”
Among the many challenges humanity faces is the need to become resensitized to the intrinsic beauty of human life — born and unborn — to all human suffering and misery, and to all injustice and wrong. Tragically, many have become desensitized to the incomparable worth of human life and indifferent toward their neighbor. Denying the inherent and immutable dignity of the human person, the culture of death purports that life has value only to the extent that it is productive or brings pleasure and well-being. This ill-guided and corrosive mentality treats a person as an object to use, rather than as an object of love and to be loved — a creation willed by God for his or her own sake, a marvelous gift that is unique and unrepeatable, deserving of loving care and veneration.

Pope St. John Paul II reminded us that we must reaffirm “the value of human life and its inviolability.” Through word and deed, we are to be as leaven in the world, teaching others how to “respect, protect, love, and serve life, every human life,“ emphasizing that “only in this direction will you [the world] find justice, development, true freedom, peace, and happiness!” (Evangelium Vitae, 5)

To unseat the culture of death and its tyranny against the sanctity of human life requires a strong antidote. Caritas is the remedy. “As I have loved you,” says Jesus, “so you also should love one another (Jn 13:34). The human person is called to love, and this love must be transformed into a gift of self to the other. “To love someone,” said Pope Benedict XVI, “is to desire that person’s good and to take effective steps to secure it” (Caritas in Veritate, 7). Thus, the culture of life becomes rooted when we love and serve our neighbor, cherishing and respecting without exception his or her inalienable dignity.

“True compassion,” said St. John Paul II, “leads to sharing another’s pain” (EV, 66). Solidarity “is not a feeling of vague compassion,” the saintly pope asserts, but “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.” He underscores that “these attitudes and ‘structures of sin’ are only conquered — presupposing the help of divine grace — by a diametrically opposed attitude: a commitment to the good of one’s neighbor with the readiness, in the Gospel sense, to ‘lose oneself’ for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to ‘serve him’ instead of oppressing him for one’s own advantage.” (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 38)

Love implies concern for everyone. Ours, then, is the daily task to manifest to others a radically different vision of the human person and of human relationships, where every human life is recognized as a sacred gift from God worthy of protection and care from the moment of conception until its natural end. To realize the kind of community that values every person unconditionally, not for what they have, do, or produce, involves a process of conversion, “sensitization,” which begins in our own hearts and is demonstrated in our choices and attitudes.

During Respect Life Month, let us unite our intentions with St. John Paul II, who prayed, “May the ‘people for life’ constantly grow in number, and may a new culture of love and solidarity develop for the true good of the whole of human society.” (EV, 101)

FATHER SHENAN J. BOQUET is the president of Human Life International and a priest of the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, LA.