The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity

2: The Gospel of Life and the Culture of Death

7 Evangelium Vitae, or The Gospel of Life, is probably the most famous of John Paul II’s many encyclicals. By directly and decisively addressing two highly controversial issues of widespread interest—abortion and euthanasia—the document generated an extraordinary amount of comment beyond the Catholic community and thus achieved a public prominence that is unusual for papal pronouncements. Moreover, in naming the phenomenon he discerned and condemned, John Paul II introduced to the wider culture an expression of remarkable durability: the term “culture of death” has found a lasting place in our public discourse and is now commonly invoked even by non-Catholic politicians and commentators , especially those concerned with what they perceive as the threats to human life posed by modern medicine and biotechnology.1 But what is “the culture of death”? To raise this question is to suggest that John Paul II’s most famous encyclical, as well as his most celebrated trope, are more commonly recognized than profoundly understood.2 Most obviously, “the culture of death” refers to abortion and euthanasia . In Evangelium Vitae John Paul II reiterates the traditional Catholic teaching that “the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral,” that it “can never be licit either as an end in itself or as a means to a good end,” and that no human authority can Chapter 2 THE GOSPEL OF LIFE AND THE CULTURE OF DEATH 8 / The Way of Life “legitimately recommend or permit such an action.”3 He then proceeds explicitly to condemn abortion, euthanasia, and suicide as specific cases of the immoral taking of innocent human life.4 Moreover, he reaffirms these principles with the full authority of the Church’s teaching office.5 Mere condemnation of these particular phenomena, however, is surely not the pope’s primary purpose. After all, insofar as these condemnations represent the restatement of a teaching that was already well established and well known, Evangelium Vitae’s unique contribution must lie elsewhere. The surface organization of the encyclical suggests as much: its definitive statements on the morality of murder, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide require only three sections out of a total of hundred and five. The pope’s more philosophic aims come to light in his discussion of the Bible’s account of the first murder, the story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis. In response to Cain’s fratricide, the Lord poses to him a question, “What have you done?”—a question that invites him to go beyond the fact of the crime itself to face “the gravity of the motives which occasioned it and the consequences that result from it.”6 This question, John Paul II insists, is addressed also to us today, not only to make us realize the seriousness of contemporary attacks on human life, but also to invite us to “discover what causes these attacks and feeds them” and to “ponder seriously the consequences which derive from these attacks for the existence of individuals and peoples.”7 Evangelium Vitae’s primary purpose, then, is not merely to invoke authority in order to condemn contemporary attacks on human life, but to invoke reason in order to understand their meaning, to grasp why these attacks occur and what they portend. The pope acknowledges what we might call the proximate and ultimate causes of such actions: on the one hand, the free choice of the will, sometimes influenced by difficult material circumstances, and, on the other hand, the wound original sin has inflicted on human nature, which is now somewhat inclined to evil.8 The core of the encyclical’s argument, however, is directed instead to a kind of intermediate cause— not to these perennial and in some sense natural aspects of the human condition, but to a new climate of thought, the unwholesome fruit of a misunderstanding of man and his obligations, that believes that attacks The Gospel of Life and the Culture of Death / 9 on innocent human life are in some cases permissible. Evangelium Vitae, then, is addressed not just to the problem “of the destruction of so many human lives still to be born or in their final stage,” but to a darkening of the conscience that makes it “increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what concerns the basic value of human life,” to a “problem which exists at the cultural, social and political level”: an...