"A major mistake to avoid is to be taken in by pro-choice semantic gymnastics."

Some food for thought in light of the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade this past Saturday and the recent news of the approaching beatification of Pope John Paul II; from my July 2009 interview with Dr. William Brennan, author of John Paul II: Confronting the Language Empowering the Culture of Death:

Ignatius Insight: How did John Paul II go about confronting and responding to verbal duplicity during his pontificate?

Dr. Brennan: The pontiff exhibited an acute awareness of how much the success of the death culture depends upon the corruption of language and thought. He employed a persuasive discourse of truth-telling for unmasking the extreme abuse of language whereby "words have become unmoored from their meaning and we are left with a rhetoric in which the language of life is used to promote the culture of death." The Holy Father persistently emphasized how the vastness of the destruction perpetrated during the 20th century can be attributed in large part to defective definitions of the human person.

A hallmark of John Paul's campaign against the culture of death consisted of demonstrating the power of reality to overcome a rhetoric that conceals the disconcerting truth about killing defenseless human beings inside and outside the womb. "What is need," he insisted, "is the courage to speak the truth clearly, candidly and boldly, but never with hatred or disrespect for persons." The pope did not level personal attacks against those who were covering up the violence with misleading terminology. Instead, he cut through the rhetoric itself and pointed out the harsh nature of the destructive actions buried beneath the rhetoric, utilizing such phrases as "slaughter of the innocents," "a war of the powerful against the weak" and "unspeakable crimes." These and other stark expressions are part and parcel of his overriding message: "We need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception."

Furthermore, in his call for a new and enduring culture of life, John Paul also relied on a language of humanization and divinization featuring positive, life-affirming images of all human lives founded on both the equality-of-life imperative of the natural law and the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic. Utilizing exalted imagery from sacred and secular sources alike, he forged a memorable array of moving reflections on the innate humanity and worth of prenatal life, the incomparable dignity and genius of women, the unique value of disabled persons, the spiritual wisdom of the elderly, and the categorical pro-life standards embodied in such American founding documents as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Ignatius Insight: How can Catholics and other pro-lifers work to confront and reject the culture of death? What mistakes should be avoided?

Dr. Brennan: No one was more effective than John Paul in exposing how extensively the distortion of language fueling the culture of death has become embedded in medicine, law, and ideology. He left an indispensable legacy—a moral and linguistic compass founded on a masterful synthesis of faith and reason. His profound and eminently practical insights, revelations, and actions furnish a compelling guide for articulating the case against the growing desensitization toward violence brought about by the semantic coarsening of culture.

The challenge for Catholics and other pro-lifers is to become conversant with the Holy Father's discourse of truth-telling and make sure that his opposition to the indefensible and defense of the vulnerable penetrates a public square increasingly bombarded with anti-life policies parading under the banner of compassionate medical rhetoric, pro-choice slogans, and seductive ideologies.

A major mistake to avoid is to be taken in by pro-choice semantic gymnastics. Whenever abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide proponents claim they are simply pro-choice, they should be challenged to specify, "The right to choose to do what to whom?" Such rhetoric needs to be confronted for what it is—an arrogant assumption of the deeply discriminatory power to destroy those who cannot defend themselves. This is not the freedom of choice, but death at someone else's choice.

John Paul responded by emphasizing, "Authentic freedom lies in its necessary foundation in the truth about the human person" and when this truth "is ignored or repressed, the pursuit of freedom can easily become a mere pretext for license, a new form of tyranny," which "ends up by becoming the freedom of 'the strong' against the weak who have no choice but to submit." Another serious mistake involves rarely speaking out against the assaults on the truth about the intrinsic worth of the human person at all stages of development. In many churches, congregants are lucky to hear even one sermon a year regarding human life issues. The Holy Father perseveringly exposed the attacks on "the truth about the human person" as being so relentless that "we . . . must do more than guard this truth. We must proclaim it in season and out of season."

Read the entire interview on Ignatius Insight.

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles, Excerpts, & Interviews:

• John Paul the Great | William Oddie
• Pope John Paul II and the Christ-centered Anthropology of Gaudium et Spes | Douglas Bushman
• The Case Against Abortion | An Interview with Dr. Francis Beckwith
• Abortion and Ideology | Raymond Dennehy
• The Illusion of Freedom Separated from Moral Virtue | Raymond Dennehy
• Introduction to Three Approaches to Abortion | Peter Kreeft
• Some Atrocities are Worse than Others | Mary Beth Bonacci

Comments

[Brad]

Tell a "pro-choice" person, especially a katholic one, that many popular methods of contraception are actually not contraceptive at all, but abortifacient, and stand back, because she will go ballistic.

The pill, a class 1 carcinogen, works in several ways. The chronologically final method it uses to "prevent" pregnancy, is to make the lining of the uterus inhospitable to an extant, viable, embryo (a very small-statured person) that has just descended from the fallopian tube.