As US presidential elections heat up and life issues are expected to figure prominently in the campaign, the Vatican’s top official in the area has cautioned against turning the pro-life cause into an ideological weapon, saying making the protection of life a political football risks doing “great harm.”
“Life is a great gift that comes from God … No one achieves life on their own. We all receive it, and we receive it not to keep it, but to multiply it like those talents in the Gospel,” Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Vatican’s Academy for Life, (pictured) told Crux in an interview.
It is because the life of each unique individual – from its natural beginning to its natural end – is a gift, he said, “that the human person is never a means but always an end. Period.”
Referring to the United States’ current presidential race, where appeals to religion and life issues have become a core strategy for both President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Paglia said issues of ethics and morality are not solely the concern of one nation, but they have become “a global issue.”
Because of this, he said, Christian churches in the U.S. ought to feel “a universal responsibility” toward life, and called for greater engagement on the life issue “in all its dimensions …That is, a perspective of global bioethics, one that engages all the major topics that touch on life, of the individual and of the human family.”
“It would do great harm,” he said, “if some topic of bioethics is extracted from its general context and put toward ideological strategies. It would do great harm.”
“Today we are all called to discover a new alliance that goes beyond politics,” he said, describing it as an alliance in which “all believers and all men and women of goodwill commit to saving all the lives of all the peoples who live in this one common home.”
“This is why I believe that to instrumentalize some topic for political ends or for laziness [in one’s own] horizon” is harmful, he said, voicing hope that the whole of Christianity, not just in the United States, “finds in men and of goodwill an alliance so that the lives of all, particularly the weakest, are defended from the beginning to the end, from the mother’s womb until the moment of death.” Continue reading
Related Posts:
News category: Analysis and Comment.
