Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
January 31, 2001
Archbishop: live 'courageous' witness
Public citizenship and personal prolife morality cannot be separated
The second of a two-part column from the Archbishop's address at the March for Life Rally at the State Capitol, Jan. 20.
If we want to defend human life, we need to begin by realizing that abortion, euthanasia, exploitation of the poor and all the other acts of violence against human dignity which good people work so hard to prevent, begin right here — in this trinity of pride, fear and anger.
The question is: What can we do about it? How can we build a culture of life? I think we can build it in two ways: one personal and interior; the other public and political.
First, we need to embark on the daily struggle with ourselves to wake up from the culture of death which our own selfishness has helped to create.
We need to pray for humble hearts, because humility is the beginning of sanity. We need to pray for grateful hearts, because gratitude creates joy. We need to pray for faithful hearts, because fidelity is the seed of courage. And we need to pray for repentant and forgiving hearts, because these make justice and mercy possible . . . and justice and mercy are the food for brotherhood and real community — and that's the world God intended for us.
Second, we need to reconnect our personal moral convictions with the way we conduct our lives as citizens. Public citizenship and personal moral beliefs cannot be separated.
If we want prolife officials who act with both intelligence and moral character, the only way we'll get those qualities is by carrying our religious faith and moral principles into the public debate — not just at election time, but week in and week out in dialogue with the people who represent us.
Anyone who reads the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or "The Federalist Papers," understands that the Founders saw America as an experiment in ideas and moral principles. The political leader who claims to be "personally opposed" to abortion and then votes to protect a so-called right to choose abortion, colludes in the destruction of innocent human life. Moreover, he's being untrue to his own convictions, and therefore is unworthy of public service. The same applies to each and every one of us as voters.
We can't simultaneously commit ourselves to human rights, while voting for people and policies that attack the weakest among us. Nor can we practice a commitment to the sanctity of human life only as a private piety. People of religious faith must live their prolife witness courageously, as a matter of public record and civic responsibility — or we'll lose it even as a matter of private principle.
We need to remind ourselves that real democracy is usually impolite. And real pluralism is not a tea party: Real pluralism always involves a degree of conflict. It demands that people of faith will work tirelessly to advance their deeply held beliefs by every legal, ethical, non-violent method available to them. For those of us who are Christians, this is what it means to be leaven in society. If we're leaven, we need to offer our culture the whole truth about the sanctity of the human person, even when the message is unpopular.
We get the elected officials we deserve. Their virtue — or their lack of it — is a judgment not only on them, but on us. Every political choice we make, also affects the persons we are. Private conviction is not a separate universe from public life. If we're prolife, that's the soil from which all our public actions should flower, including our political choices. When we claim to believe one thing, but act in a contrary political manner, we choose a kind of schizophrenia. We contradict ourselves. And the result is the sort of confusion we find in so many of our centers of public life today.
I began with the words of a young German thinker, and I want to return to him as I close.
The same young man wrote, "There is no clearer indication of the idolization of death than . . . when big words are spoken of a new man, a new world and of a new society which is to be ushered in, and yet all that is new is the destruction of life . . . "
He also wrote, "Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon [a] nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not, is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being, and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder." The young German thinker who wrote these words was the great Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred by the Nazis in April 1945. Bonhoeffer gave his life as a witness to his faith in God — and to the sanctity of the human person. Surely we can live our lives — publicly and vigorously — in a way that shares in his witness. And if we do, then the future we help create will be worthy of our children, of our nation's best ideals and of our identity as a free people.
