Delivered to a Morning of Recollection on the Gospel of Life, 23 January 2021.
In these late pandemic days, as we all become obsessed with the efficacy of new vaccines for COVID-19, I am reminded of the origin story of the first vaccine, the first antibiotic, penicillin.
The popular version of the story, of course, involves the Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming. Seems Dr. Fleming, who was doing research on flu viruses, returned from a two week vacation to find a plate of staphylococcus culture which he had mistakenly left on his workbench. In his absence, something had begun to grow on the glass petri dish, something which appeared to have killed the staphylococcus and was soon to become the first antibiotic, which he named penicillin.
But then, as Paul Harvey used to say, there’s the rest of the story.
After publishing his discovery, Fleming abandoned penicillin, judging that it was just too difficult to produce in mass quantities.
It was not until ten years later that his research was picked up and completed by Howard Flory and Ernst Chain, who injected mice with the antibiotic, which cured scarlet fever, meningitis, diphtheria and bacterial pneumonia. Today it is “the most widely used antibiotic in the world.”1
But what if Fleming had simply left penicillin on the shelf? What if Flory and Chain had not brought their own insights to the problem? Well, the world would have been a very different place.
For first flush discoveries are by definition preliminary, foundational and incomplete. No human being ever sees the full picture right away. And the best way to perfect something is for a second set of eyes to get involved.
That’s because each of us has our own unique history, with our individual strengths and weaknesses and our own way of looking at things. And no one of us have the last word…just the latest word, awaiting the refinement of future generations.
So it is with the Gospel of Life. The great work of Pope Saint John Paul II in writing his Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae would not have been possible without Pope Pius XII’s 1945 Gratissimam sane, the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes, and Pope Saint Paul VI’s Encyclical letter Humanae Vitae. Each Pope’s proclamation of the Gospel, then, is built on the foundation of his predecessors, brick by brick.
For not only is each pope a different person, each is called to speak to a different world than his predecessor knew. And so it is with Pope Francis.
The context of life for JPII and Francis could not be more different.
Karol Józef Wojtyła’s mother died when he was nine. A strong Polish patriot, he became an accomplished philosopher, a linguist and an actor. By the age of twenty had lost his mother, his father and his brother and was, in a real sense, all alone. His world view was formed by the rise of Nazism and after it communism. Reamarkably, he was ordained a Bishop at 38, made a Cardinal at 47 and become Pope at 58.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, born 16 years after Wojtyła, could not have been more different,. There were five kids in his big Italian family. He grew up in Argentina and worked as a chemist, a janitor and a bouncer in a bar. At 21 he had half a lung removed and became the following year joined the Jesuits. Bishop at 56, a Cardinal at 65 and pope at 77, he reached each of those ministries at an age nearly twenty years older than his saintly predecessor.
Pope John Paul II was an academic who saw the world through the lens of the Second World War and Poland’s struggle with communism. Pope Francis is a practical Jesuit who spent most o his life working with the poor, living a polarized world intoxicated by digital data.
But the one thing that makes them both the same is their dedication to the Gospel of Life, seen albeit through the lens of their times.
Which is why I am equally amused and dismayed by a media which portrays Popes Francis and John Paul II as believing different things. In the words of Pope Francis, both are Catholic and both simply believe what the Church teaches.
Listen, for example to these words of Pope Francis, which could have as easily come from the pen of Pope Saint John Paul II;
Our defense of the innocent unborn…needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development.2
Another example: Last November 22nd, on the occasion of the recent and tragic liberalization of Argentinean abortion laws, Pope Francis sent a handwritten note to a group of women working to defeat the law, asking in regard to abortion: “Is it fair to eliminate a human life to resolve a problem? Is it fair to hire a hitman to resolve a problem?”3
And again:
I cannot stay silent over 30 to 40 million unborn lives cast aside every year through abortion. It is painful to behold how in many regions that see themselves as developed the practice is often urged because the children to come are disabled, or unplanned. Human life is never a burden. It demands we make space for it, not cast it off. ... Abortion is a grave injustice. It can never be a legitimate expression of autonomy and power. If our autonomy demands the death of another, it is none more than an iron cage.4
Like his Polish predecessor, Pope Francis’ disdain for abortion is closely connected to his love for the mothers this act so deeply wounds. Once, reflecting on how to care for a mother who has repented of aborting her child, the Holy Father recalled:
“The problem is not in giving forgiveness, the problem is in accompanying a woman who has come to the realization she has had an abortion. …Because many times – indeed always – they have to meet with their child. And many times, when they cry and have this anguish, I counsel them: ‘Your child is in heaven, talk to him, sing him the lullaby that you did not sing, that you could not sing to him.’ And there is found a way of reconciliation for the mother with her child. With God it’s already there: it’s God’s forgiveness. God always forgives. But mercy also means that she needs to work this through.”5
From the child unjustly killed to the mother who mourns him, Pope Francis’ love for human life extends to all whose dignity is disrespected by an uncaring world. I return to his words:
“Equally sacred…are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection.”6
But why, Pope Francis has asked repeatedly, why do we neglect such persons? Why do we fail to appreciate their inherent, and irreducible value?
It is, he suggests, because we fail to see them as persons. Rather, we mistake them them as things to be used, traded and disposed of when they become inconvenient or burdensome.
Such a throwaway culture, the Pope suggests fosters
“a mentality in which everything has a price, everything can be bought, everything is negotiable…[and makes] room for only a select few, while it discards all those who are unproductive.” Such a mentality reduces a person to a “a mere product in a marketplace which can be discarded as so much trash.”7
So how do we combat such a culture of death, a culture which reduces people to products to be bought and sold and disposed of for our own convenience?
The antidote, the Holy Father proposes, is what he calls a “Culture of Encounter.”
In such a culture, each and every person is treated with a deep and profound respect, with humility and love. It is not enough to lecture the world on what is right, the holy Father suggests, as if I were the perfect person and all they need to do is to be perfect like me! It is not enough to just yell at the world: “Don’t do that….be perfect like me!”
No, I must see in each person I meet, and especially in those whom I find hard to love, the presence of Christ and I must love and respect and be humbled by their presence. In the poor and the prisoner, in the one who constantly contradicts me and who tries to cast me as their enemy…in them I must see Christ, in them I must, as the Pope prescribes “seek above all else to love them no matter how troublesome or inconvenient they may be.”8
For it is only by such a face-to-face encounter with others that we can dismantle the structures of disrespect and discord which so burden out world.
Such humble love and respect accomplishes so much more than enacting laws or donating money or publishing books. For it is only the physical presence of the other which changes us and, again to quote the Pope, “challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction.”9
From such personal encounters grows a love of all who are marginalized, monetized and forgotten. Such a personal encounter, again in the Holy Father’s words, leads us to hearts which ache for:
“vulnerable children on the pavements of a large city, at the bottom of a boat overladen with immigrants; children who are not allowed to be born, who cry because no one satisfies their hunger with no toys in their hands, but weapons, victims of war, abortion and poverty.”10
Thus, the Holy Father calls us to begin to live the Gospel of Life by extinguishing hatred and violence in our own hearts, before we seek to cure the hearts of others. Listen to what he says about the landscape of cyberspace:
“Even Christians can be caught up in networks of verbal violence through the internet and the various forums of digital communication. Even in Catholic media, limits can be overstepped ... and all ethical standards and respect for the good name of others can be abandoned…Here we see how the unguarded tongue, set on fire by hell, sets all things ablaze.”11
The disciple of the Gospel of life, then, must be dedicated to a “consistent ethic of life,” and must also be a disciple of a Gospel of Reconciliation, which seeks to evangelize not by force, but by love, calling us to “confront every form of polarization which would divide…”12
This is how Pope Francis, like Pope Saint John Paul II before him, proclaims the Gospel of Life from his own experience and to his own world, teaching us that along with the need for just nations, just laws and just societies, freed from the corruption of using others, along with promoting a common recognition of the dignity of each human person from conception to natural death, we must strive to recognize the infinite dignity of the human person standing right in front of me, the one whom God has put into my life.
Such a Gospel of Life is not primarily political, although it is rightly committed to political ends. Nor is it primarily theoretical, although it is grounded in a philosophical and theological system.
Rather, as Pope Francis teaches us, the Gospel of Life is profoundly personal and it calls us to love like Jesus. For it is only with the language of love that the Gospel can be proclaimed and understood.
Allow me to conclude with some of the most beautiful words our Holy Father ever spoke in this regard.
“Love for the other cannot be reserved for exceptional moments, but must be constant in our lives. That is why we are called, for example, to safeguard the elderly like a precious treasure and with love even if they cause economic difficulties and inconveniences, but we must protect them. This is why we must give all the assistance possible to the sick, even in the final stages of their lives. This is why unborn children are always to be welcomed; this is why, ultimately, life is always to be protected and loved, from conception to its natural end. And this is love.”13
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1 - https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20120325/penicillin-an-accidental-discovery-changed-the-course-of-medicine
2 - Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exultate, no. 101.
3 - Pope Francis, 22 November 2020.
4 - Pope Francis, Let Us Dream, page 115. November 28, 2020.
5 - Pope Francis. 27 January 2019.
6 - Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exultate, no. 101.
7 - Pope Francis, July 13, 2015.
8 - Pope Francis, October 20, 2017.
9 - Pope Francis, Evangelium Gaudium, no. 88.
10 - Pope Francis, 29 March, 2019.
11 - Pope Francis, 18 April 2019.
12 - Pope Francis to U.S. Congress, September 25, 2015.
13 - Pope Francis, 6 May 2018.
