The Gospel of Life in Our Schools, Implementing A Pro-life Education

The title of Pope John Paul's encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae of March 25 1995 simply means the "Gospel of Life". In themselves, those challenging words can launch us on a positive approach to teaching children and young people the "good news" of the Christian struggle for human life in the Third Millennium. The struggle for human life is "good news", bursting with the hope that is within us.

The Melbourne Archdiocese embarked on a massive project, the introduction of a new text-based curriculum throughout our primary and secondary schools. The gospel of life permeates this syllabus. For example, throughout the primary grades children learn that human life is unique, precious, to be respected and protected. In level 3 (grades 5 and 6) units focus on death and dying, but not in a morbid or unhealthy way (seen in some secular programs), rather with a strong emphasis on the right to life and reverence for human life in God's plan. This theme is also presented in the context of units on eternal life, that is, what happens beyond death, Christian eschatology, a theme that is appropriate in Easter Season and Advent. From that basis it is possible to go on and explore the great ethical issues of abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, artificial procreation etc. in secondary schools.

In this context, the responsible and reverent transmission of human life provides the proper context for a Christian understanding of human sexuality, because this whole area is part of the gospel of life. The Pontifical Council for the Family has set the standard here in its guidelines for parents and all who assist them, The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality. Plans are under way to set up a new approach to education in human sexuality, which is the right and duty of parents, the first educators, and which merits prudent and expert support from schools and other agencies.

The sexual revolution of the late Twentieth Century is inseparable from the assaults on human life and our young people need to be prepared to decode it, debunk it and reject it. I pay tribute to those from groups such as the Billings Ovulation Method who promote the vision of the natural regulation of fertility in upper levels of secondary schools. With films and videos, they have unveiled the beautiful secrets of life in the womb and the need for a God-centered attitude to sexuality and children - procreation rather than reproduction, self control rather than hedonism, chastity rather than promiscuity.

In the context of a curriculum that includes the gospel of life, children are soon aware that the pro-life movement is favored by the Church. They discover that it includes many Catholics, working alongside other Christians, members of other religions and men and women of good will, all united in a glorious cause. In this regard, young Catholics begin with the distinct educational advantage that their Church is openly committed to the pro-life movement, encouraging its members to join the wide range of organizations working under the umbrella of pro-life activities.

However, this advantage also conceals a real problem. There is a danger if the pro-life cause is only based on tribal loyalty or associated sentimental feelings. You are not pro-life because it feels nice to be in the club. You are not pro-life just because you are a Catholic or a Baptist or a Buddhist. You are pro-life because this cause is right, it is true, and it is truly loving.

Nor can you simply base education in the gospel of life on the assertion that "human life is sacred". Children and young people see the sanctity of life violated every day through the mass media. The pro-life cause based on feelings or bald assertions such as "life is sacred" is vulnerable to the apparently consistent and persuasive reasoning of influential people like Professor Peter Singer, which young people certainly encounter in the universities and which constantly enters the schools through the mass media.

We have to go deeper and ask what basic principles need to be inculcated in educating young people in the Gospel of Life? Evangelium Vitae can guide us in discerning the first principles that form the basis for a sound education in reverence for human life and the need to struggle for the right to live.

What is a person?

Respect for life begins here, by asking one of the greatest questions, not only "who am I?" but "what am I?". Am I an animal? Am I a higher ape with computer skills? Or am I something more? If I am something more, my life has an innate value and dignity that involves rights and duties. Young people are asking these questions. We need to offer them a Christian personalist response.

We begin with the revealed truth that God has created each person, male or female, "in his own image and likeness" (Genesis 1:27). This is the basis of Christian anthropology, an affirmation of the unique dignity of us as embodied souls or "ensouled" bodies. It is set out clearly in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 355-373). The human person is "the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake" (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, 24)

The core of the human being is an immortal soul, but anyone who does not believe in the soul or our relationship with our Creator can still be aware that there is a unique quality in the human person. This can be demonstrated by studying human nature, that is, by recognizing our capacity to reflect, to think about our thoughts. This uniqueness is also evident in our artistic and technical creativity but above all in our capacity for human love.

The human person is the supreme and unique created being in this world.

We must counteract the error that reduces people to the level of animals and then, effectively, argues that certain animals may even have more rights than unborn human beings. We need to teach children the traditional ascending hierarchy of being - mineral, vegetable, animal, human, the beautiful creation set out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 337-349.

We must never apologise for saying that the human person is unique and supreme. Certainly we are responsible for creation and not meant to abuse the other levels of life in this world. For example, kindness to animals should be taught from the earliest years and respect for the environment is good, as long as it is never exaggerated. But above all we need to inculcate a healthy Christian humanism to counteract an obsessive environmentalism that confuses rocks, trees, animals and people.

Would we dare to go so far as to say that all the rare species of animals in the world would not equal the value of one unborn human being? Yes! Let us firmly repulse cheap ideological arguments that dismiss our "yes" as "speciesism" or another absurd argument that struggling for human life implies that we favour cruelty to animals. Most pro-lifers I know keep pets!

Life is a gift of God.

We are already cultivating an attitude about order and creation to counter the error that everything happens by blind chance, in the flow of haphasard evolutionary forces. Life as gift evokes a sense of gratitude for being a created human being, for being part of a beautiful world, with its harmonious order of creation. The sense that our life is a unique and supreme form of existence on the planet only intensifies this spiritual sense of life as a gift. In the lives of young people, it seems best to cultivate this attitude through meditation, reflection and prayer, and they are open to this spiritual formation.

However this sense of gift must be balanced by a certain caution, because the gift entrusted to us calls for responsibility. The gift of life cannot be thrown in God's face by irresponsible or reckless behavior, by self destructive activity such as taking drugs or attempting suicide. At the same time, we cannot be callous about the life of others once life is perceived as a precious gift shared by all persons, and this leads to the next principle.

We are responsible to the God who guides us with the moral law.

The gift of life shows us that we depend on God, that we should be in a responsible relationship with God. But how are we to live? We perceive the weakness in our nature, that we are fallen beings. We sense the pressure of evil around us. Nevertheless, we cannot help thinking about "right and wrong". That too is part of being a person. We are often preoccupied with moral questions, issues of values and young people frequently argue about ethical matters.

Clear teaching on Natural Law is essential in a personalist educational perspective. God has revealed a moral law (a) within us as created beings, the law in our nature, known as the Natural Law (b) in his particular commandments and precepts, the Ten Commandments and the Law of Love revealed in Christ. The latter crystalizes and clarifies of the former, because we are imperfect creatures, belonging to a flawed creation, hence needing enlightenment.

What we sense deep within our beings and in relationship with others, is proclaimed specifically in God's Word as "You shall not kill." (cf. Evangelium Vitae, no. 41) This moral commandment is a call to love, a call to obedient faith in the life-giving God who loves life, a call to responsibility. This word of life "You shall not kill" is best presented to children and young people as part of the "map of life" God has prepared for all of us, part of his eternal moral law. At the same time it implies that God has his own providential plan for each of us.

We are made for one another.

Human life must be understood in terms of relationships with others. "You shall not kill" requires respect for others, starting with the natural community, the family. Rights are recognized and respected in any well-ordered community and this begins at home, in the family. One of the great presuppositions behind the anti-life forces is an exaggerated selfish individualism. Pope John Paul II warned of this individualism before the Cairo Conference on Population and Development. It is the basis of the ruthless secularist ideology that has permeated the major United Nations meetings of this last decade of the past millennium. Quite logically this is an anti-life, anti-family, ideology.

Once people imagine that they are like self-contained atoms floating around in space, with no responsibility for one another, the callous society of ultra-individualism will trample on the weakest and most vulnerable. Life itself will become a struggle for the survival of the fittest or, at a more subtle level, a contest of wills to carve out the most comfort for an elite. As Mother Teresa put it: "It is a very great poverty to decide that a child must die that you might live as you wish."

Every person has an innate right to life.

Once we get our understanding of the person clear, the most basic right is the right to live. However, it is all very well to affirm the right to life, but there are conflicting understandings of the source and status of human rights. On the basis of a sound and reverent understanding of the human person, rights are recognized as natural and innate. They are simply "there" from the moment each of us exists. But this is very different from other opposing concepts of rights where humans are regarded only as higher animals.

Basically our opponents follow two views, which may overlap.

1. Human rights are worked out by social consensus, that is, what the tribe or community decides. Those rights may be adapted, changed or taken away. This explains the pressures in the media and through legislation to make abortion a "woman's right" or to make euthanasia a right, even a duty.

2. An equally dangerous model hands rights over to a group of experts, who decide the scope and limits of human rights. In a totalitarian system, such a Nazism or Communism, in practice this becomes sheer expedience. Human rights are conferred by the state or the party and may be taken away by the state or the party to meet the situation or the status of rights may be changed in the light of an ideology based on class or race.

Therefore, I believe it is important to offer Catholic secondary school students some understanding of the basis of human rights as innate and inviolable, contrasting this with "rights" that only rest on the changing whims of social consensus, or on the dubious opinions of experts, ideologues or dictators. On the positive side, human rights are presented in the Natural Law perspective in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. In the Declaration, rights are assumed to be innate (what you and I cannot ever lose) because we are persons. Teenagers should be introduced to this useful charter of human rights and dignity.

Our position may be summed up simply when we educate young people. Because we have innate dignity, created as persons in the image and likeness of a personal God, set at the summit of his creation, we enjoy innate rights, and the basic right is the right to life, without which all other rights founder.

Pope John Paul II also makes it clear that "As far as the right to life is concerned, every innocent human being is absolutely equal to all others." Evangelium Vitae, 57. This is important at the years of adolescence. Issues of justice are of great concern to teenagers and questions about life always raise human rights issues. Mid adolescence is the time to challenge their idealism, to invite them into the pro-life cause as the most basic cause and struggle for justice in a new Millennium. If we are not equal in terms of human life, on what ground can we argue for social justice, for solidarity with the oppressed and compassion for the poor and most vulnerable among us?

Other Principles

I have opened a more affective and compassionate dimension of the question of education, because I believe broader or more pastoral principles should also guide our strategies for pro-life education in schools. These rest on a philosophy of what is good and on the loving providence of the Creator who reveals moral law.
Life is good in itself.
This has to be affirmed in order to repulse attempts to make the "quality of life" the criterion why some should live and others die, that is, to eliminate eugenics theories that would eliminate the "unfit" or the "surplus population" because they are suffering, living in poverty or cutting down trees. "Better not to have been born" is not something we should ever say about people whose "quality of life" may be different to ours.

"Life is Beautiful" was the title of an unusual Italian film about a Jewish father who went to the extermination camp with his young son. This brave man never lost sight of the beauty of life, even in a man-made hell. But there are many of these "hells" among our young people today. They face the challenges of youth in despair, the abuse of drugs, teenage suicide, reckless life threatening behavior, violence. The gospel of life must affirm, in the face of all this, "yet life is beautiful "

The life of each of us always has a plan and a purpose from God.

What Cardinal Newman called a "particular providence" is present in everyone's life. This flows from the divine gift of life, for each of us has been created for a reason. This conveys a sense of purpose, plan, destiny, whatever we want to call it, a direction present in the course of the earthly journey every person makes. The gift of life is now seen as uniquely different from person to person in the way the journey of life unfolds. This sense of purpose also promotes respect between people, and means that the choice of a life partner in holy marriage is not to be taken lightly, rather seen within the particular plans God has for two people.

The need for young people to find meaning in their lives is paramount. The famous psychologist Victor Frankl called it our "search for meaning". Here religious faith provides the supreme answer because the words "providence", "plan", "purpose", "destiny" are meaningless in a universe without an intelligent personal Creator. The true God is not merely the "Force" floating out there in space, but the God who is involved among us, wanting relationship with us, calling us in the dialogue believers call "prayer" or what is generally summed up today as "spirituality".

"Spirituality" is a fashionable word with broad meanings, but it is a very good word in itself. Young people, so we are told, want "spirituality" even when they often reject formal religion, going to church, public worship. This spiritual dimension provides a good ground for education in faith, and there is a spirituality of human life itself, expressed with great beauty in the poetry, prayer, story and adventures of people active in the pro-life movement. All this must be made available to young people, for it evinces a great sense of "romance" and mystery and nobility of cause, and young people love the romantic side of a great cause.

Nevertheless, let us never be under any illusion that spirituality by itself can take the place of morals. Faith implies morals, and morals need to be enlivened by faith. Good spirituality only grows with upright living, that is, with a good relationship with God, source of all goodness.

Only now we can come to the conclusion derived from these principles that all Human life is sacred. This rests on a belief in the personal Creator God who created us in his own image and likeness, who give us life, who reveals his moral laws and who wants us to enter a right relationship with Him. In teaching young people, you cannot jump straight to saying "human life is sacred" without this logical basis. The intelligent child and the teenager ask "why?" and we can develop the reasons patiently and clearly, again and again if need be.

Culture of Life versus Culture of Death

The negative side of the struggle for human life should also be presented to young people and older children, that is, the reality of evil and the sin involved in collaborating with evil. The "culture of life" encounters what Pope John Paul calls the "culture of death", in Evangelium Vitae and other documents and allocutions. Children and young people should thus learn that life itself in terms of our choices, moral decisions, commitment, is always a "tale of two cities". St. Augustine presented this as the City of God struggling against the City of this world, or the Kingdom of God against the Kingdom of Satan.

In the light of the Vatican publication of the new rites for exorcism, there has been a revived interest in the Christian belief that the devil is real, active and menacing and that evil spirits literally are at work among us. This Catholic teaching rests on centuries of pastoral experience, unfortunately raked up and turned into "entertainment" by the media. Yet the reality of evil remains and the Church is engaged in Christ's battle against "it". But when we impart the gospel of life it is important to get across one strong scriptural principle: Satan hates human life.

In 1993, in Ottawa, Canada, I was walking in a pro-life prayer march when we were suddenly confronted by screaming pro-abortion feminists. One was bearing a placard that I can never forget: "The godess loves abortion." I wondered "Who on earth is that godess?" Not "she" surely, rather we should in all fairness say "it", for this feminist, whether she knew it or not, was carrying a banner for Satan the genderless enemy of life, a "murderer from the beginning", as Jesus says in John, 8:44. But the insult to all women implicit in the word "godess" emerges from a neo-pagan "New Age" movement. The "New Age" has its dark side: "value free", permissive, cruel and destructive, and that too should be explained in our schools and colleges for many young people are attracted by the "New Age", quite unaware of its sinister links with the "culture of death".

Does that sound over dramatic? Perhaps. We certainly want to avoid hyperbole in education. Young people soon see through an "overkill" approach. So we need to introduce another calmer more objective perception of the "culture of death", that while it is very dangerous and sinister, it is very ordinary. Anti-life evil may be banal, dull, literally lifeless and it is always sterile. It is important to help children and young people recognize this deep negativity of the culture of death for themselves.

You may have seen the film Schindler's List, a convincing story of the Nazi Holocaust. You probably remember the SS officials. Only one of them looked evil and he turned out to be a raving psychotic. The others were ordinary, almost faceless men, petty bureaucrats, pale boring little men, but they were the mass murderers. They ran the death machine, crossing each "t" and dotting each "i" as they sent the well-timed trains rumbling off to Auschwitz bearing the little ones of Europe to their "termination" in the gas chambers and furnaces.

Therefore we need to guide children and young people never to imagine that we may expect to see "monsters" staring at us from the abortion clinics. We need not demonise those who kill. They are mainly ordinary people doing something very wicked - and they entangle many other ordinary people, mainly women, led into the victimhood of pain, emptiness and suffering by consenting to certain deeds.

Compassion

This leads to the need to temper all education in life issues by encouraging compassion for all the victims of abortion, first of all the unborn children and then for the women involved in their deaths. Teenagers should be made aware of the caring agencies that assist women who are the "second victims" of the abortion tragedy. They should be invited into the schools to speak about their work.

It is also important to let young women in our secondary schools know that abortion does have a deep impact on many women who have allowed it to happen to them, not forgetting other parties involved. Education thus needs to confront two contrasting lines of anti-life propaganda directed at teenagers: (1) that there are no harmful consequences to abortion, expressed in the feminist line "I'm a big girl now and I can take it" and (2) that women contemplating abortion or who have had an abortion have nowhere to turn, the ignorant line "What does the Church care about women anyway?

The same strategy of education through compassion and information applies in a slightly different way to the euthanasia issue. Here we need to back up the right to life of the people who are targets for euthanasia with information such as: descriptions of what a hospice is, how palliative care works, how pro-life medical personnel do not discriminate between people because they happen to be old, mentally handicapped, or because they look "different".

We also need to explain that compassion is not "mercy killing". Compassion is to share in suffering, to "suffer with" someone by carrying the burden - and at this point young Christians can be introduced to the ethic of Christ crucified, the school of his cross. I would reserve that approach to the last years of high school education, when maturity and some experience of suffering provide a better ground for an adult perception of true solidarity with the suffering and marginalised people who are the targets for abortion and euthanasia. The idealism and romance of a grand cause is revealed in this compassion, and respect for this cause must be conveyed to our young people so that they may become apostles of the gospel of life.

The euthanasia issue raises the need to teach children and young people that "being sincere" is no excuse for committing a crime against life. It is not enough to arouse enthusiasm for a cause. Commitment must be based on a pro-life conscience. To form a pro-life conscience we dare not resort to subjective notions of conscience, as if the conscience were a smorgasbord of opinions or a range of feelings "on special" in the supermarket of values. A pro-life conscience is informed, guided by the objective and compassionate principles I have outlined.

However, pro-life compassion can only begin in the earliest years, by teaching little ones to love their sisters and brothers, to reverence the life of the new born babe, to respect that aged aunt or precious grandmother. Whatever the school hopes to achieve can only be accomplished if the family itself is a citadel of life and love. Ultimately this is our greatest challenge and I leave it with parents and grandparents. We will do our best through the Catholic schools, but the real ground work is up to you - in the home.