October is Respect Life Month.
Sponsored by the bishops of the United States, the theme for this Jubilee Year of Mercy is, appropriately enough, “Moved by Mercy.”
That theme reminds us that God’s love and mercy, when properly recognized and shared, strengthen our love for Him that we find in every person. The deepest source of human dignity is that each of us is made in the image and likeness of God.
Each October, then, we highlight our year-round efforts to teach a deeper respect for human life. And as we look around our beloved country and our challenged society, don’t we sense the need to recover respect for life as a fundamental value?
We cannot avert our gaze or concentration from the fact that our country and our laws permit and even facilitate the destruction of life when it is most vulnerable. Estimates about the number of children who have perished because of abortion since the Supreme Court made that procedure legal in the United States back in 1973 range from 55 million to 60 million.
There is no question that our societal respect for life has eroded. Consider how often we read stories about efforts to pass laws that would outlaw, as a first step, at least the most egregious methods of late term abortion such as partial birth abortion. Even these are often blocked or declared contrary to our Constitution.
Recently, an ad campaign appeared in newspapers that went so far as to suggest that Catholic social teaching would support the use of tax dollars to pay for the taking of the life of the unborn. The deceptive slogan that accompanied those ads was “Public funding for abortion is a Catholic social justice value.”
Of course the pre-born child in the womb is not the only focus of contention about respecting life. The movement to legalize physician assisted suicide is also advancing.
According to the New York Times, the states of Oregon, Washington, Vermont, California and Montana currently allow physicians to deliberately administer a lethal dose of pain killers to terminally ill patients. New York, Colorado and the District of Columbia are considering following suit.
Physician assisted suicide is a further step in severing the recognition of God’s role in the gift of life, both in when it is given and when we are called back to Him. Part of the beauty of our human life in the context of creation is the entrusting of ourselves to God.
The task, both discerned by faith and by reason, when confronted with those who suffer, is to assist them, not to take their lives.
Physicians have always been on the front line of such assistance that strives for comfort and healing. If it is now mixed with the intention to deliberately take life, the healing science and the trust it has always merited, is diminished.
If these are the underlying signs of disrespect for life that are creeping into family and daily life, is it any wonder that other failures to respect life follow?
We have been bombarded this summer with countless stories of indiscriminate shootings, night after night. Recently, even in the mall in Cherry Valley near Rockford, shoppers have witnessed shootings that endangered both those targeted and the innocent nearby.
Even the scourge of terrorism reflects a failure to love and respect life. And this on an international scale.
October is not, however, a month simply to count up and acknowledge all that is going wrong, especially in regard to life. It is, rather, a time to renew our commitment to life. That is best done by prayer, by constantly talking about God’s gift of life, and by serving the lives of those in need.
As we recite our rosaries in this season dedicated to Mary, we can entrust mothers and their unborn children to her care. We can sacrifice so as to be able to make an offering, of time or money, to assist single mothers or those with difficult pregnancies.
We can become involved with the poor, to assist them with their children and with the elderly.
Respect life month. It’s really all year-round. And it is at the heart of our faith and our love for God who is the giver of life.