It’s 15 years since Pope John Paul II issued Evangelium Vitae. This remarkable papal letter was a remarkable exposition of why the Church knows all human life is sacred.
The anniversary of Our Lady of Life on 25 March is a major, but often overlooked or misunderstood Feast of the Christian Year. It marks the Feast of the Annunciation, (sometimes called Lady Day) and the title captures a calling, an announcement and an invitation rolled into one. It marks the Angel Gabriel’s startling visit to a faithful but then unknown Jewish girl, Miriam or Mary.
The angel both announced “God’s favour” and God’s unexpected way of inviting human beings to participate the work of salvation. In this case, the “favour” was an enormous one, and Mary’s response was at once so humble, generous and daring and so full of God’s grace that it changed the history of the universe and the destiny of humanity.
This Feast marks God’s saving entry into human history, by becoming at that tiny yet precious pin-prick point, a human embryo. God chose not the mighty empires of men, nor the great philosophers of Greece, nor even the priests of the Jewish temple but the hidden fragility of a young mother as his partner in salvation. The Blessed Virgin, was utterly “startled” yet fully affirmed both the gift of new life and scale of God’s call, despite the surprise, inconvenience and the untold social and physical risk that this invitation entailed.
This year the Church’s celebration of the Annunciation also marks the 15th anniversary of the ground breaking encyclical (papal letter) Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) one of most important and distinctive of Pope John Paul II’s long and significant Pontificate. The publication date of the Annunciation is apt, because it combines the mysteries of the Incarnation, the Cross (it falls in the Church’s year during Lent) and the devotion Pope John Paul has for Our Lady. It provides a distinctive theological starting point for his deeper reflection upon the Church’s teaching on human life and death.
Both 15 years ago, and even more today, governments, the media and the wider secular world are dimly aware of the centrality and distinctiveness of the “dignity of human life” in Catholic teaching. However many believe that the Church merely persists with a stubborn “organisational policy” which is reflected in uncaring prohibitions and restrictions against the practices of abortion, euthanasia, IVF and contraception. They do not see that these are also linked to the Church’s rejection of torture, genocide, terrorism, unjust war-mongering, human trafficking and economic greed, which they often commend.
With Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II radically widens the focus of Christian bioethics and the Church’s long concern for the lives of the vulnerable, suffering and unwanted. In his document, he attempts to draw together the many different points of Christian tradition, moral teaching, pastoral realism and social mission, so that Christians themselves may be envigorated to the mission of promoting, respecting and defending human lives. He introduces a new language and new outlook by which they can do this.
This landmark document begins with a note of “great joy”, in fact with Christmas Joy. John Paul II, highlights the fact that the Feasts of Jesus’ conception, Mary’s pregnancy and the Nativity are not private Christian celebrations (anymore than the “life teachings” are). The Annunciation and Christmas are great “tidings” for all humanity at two levels. Firstly they show us how intimately God’s saving presence and His “concern” marks the most uncertain and delicate moments of every human life. Secondly these moments in Jesus Christ’s life reveal “the full meaning of every human birth, and the joy which accompanies the Birth of the Messiah is thus seen to be the foundation and fulfilment of joy at every child born into the world” (EV no.1). In the Baby Saviour, human beings are promised not only human life, but the invitation to God’s own life as well.
What is interesting for John Paul’s reflections is that Mary is called, not to a planned “parenthood”, involving the popular (but fanciful) image of the mother designing her immaculate nursery, her perfect figure and her high-achieving career “plan” before she embarks on the adventure of motherhood. She is not full of “grace and freedom” in the commercial or secular vision of “reproductive liberty”. Yet John Paul II is careful to suggest here and in his other “pro-women” writings, that God’s invitation, does involve Mary’s intellect, freedom and her love. It is the very opposite of the sort of violence and abuse which besets women and girls throughout the dis-graceful history of humanity. Her freedom is that freedom St Paul calls “the freedom of the sons and daughters of God” (Romans 8:21) a choice for life out of difficulty, love out of adversity, wisdom out of mystery.
John Paul bookends the Annunciation theme of the first section of his encyclical, by highlighting how the Blessed Virgin, prophetically witnesses to God’s gift of Life against the “Dragon” in the Book of Revelation. This image of the “woman of the Apocalypse” is anything but mute and passive. Although in labour, the woman actively faces down the forces and menace of “the Culture of Death”. “The woman in labour” is both the maternal Church defending the “culture of Life” and the Mother of God bringing forth the Saviour.
This eschatological Marian theme is made explicit in the closing section of the Pope’s encyclical, with a prayer which invokes Mary’s maternal care for vulnerable lives, but also as the Maternal leader of all Christians as witnesses to “life”: “Grant that all who believe in your Son
May proclaim the Gospel of life
With honesty and love
To the people of our time.”
Women, of all the baptised, Pope John Paul II insists, bear a particular witness to the preciousness of human life, and will be the key prophetic voices for both the life of salvation and the “culture of life” in the coming era of the world. The Pope introduces this idea in his earlier Apostolic Letter to Women – Mulieris Dignitatem issued in 1988. It is a key theme, he develops from Catholic writers and activists such as Saint Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) and Dorothy Day, and from the many unsung and hidden generations of Christian women who have defended, healed and nurtured the lives of the vulnerable.
What John Paul II calls a “new” Christian feminism, is one which shares the aspirations for dignity, opportunity and freedom for women but which encourages a more radically Christian and graced reading of what a true “feminism” might mean for women and for the wider “culture of life.” One which promises and lives out the a concrete compassion and solidarity with the suffering, support for the unplanned and difficult pregnancies and dignity and care for the disabled and sick.