Educational duties in regard to the value of human life

Gonzalo Herranz, Departamento de Bioética, Universidad de Navarra
Round Table in the II Meeting of Institutes for Studies on the Marriage and the Family and of Centers of Bioethics
Pontifical Council for the Family
Roma, October 6, 1995, 10:30 a.m.

Introduction

I wish to express my thanks first of all to His Eminence Cardinal López Trujillo, to Monsignor Elio Sgreccia and to the other members of the Pontifical Council for the Family for their kind invitation to speak at this Round Table. It is a privilege to be in the company of such distinguished people as Professors Fleming and Della Torre.

The topic I am presenting to you is far removed from my usual interests. As the organizers know well, I am not an expert in advanced Pedagogy. I profess some deep convictions about the role of ethics and the humanities in university education. I am a medical doctor who, driven by those convictions, changed some years ago from my position as a Professor of Pathology to the absorbing and rewarding second career of full-time student of Medical Ethics. This history explains the many deficiencies in my contribution.

Evangelium vitae is presented to us as an urgent invitation to teach the value of life. In his Letter, the Holy Father shows us a limitless panorama for reflection and action, and invites us to engage in a strongly needed and multi-faceted educational task. From this abundant matter, I must choose only a few points with the aim of encouraging our dialogue.

1. Teaching the value of life, a permanent duty

My talk is built on two main ideas. The first is very easily expressed and, with the help of God, put in practice: namely, a joyful and faithful acceptance of the teachings of the Church’s Magisterium. The second is a strong persuasion that nowadays all of us –those working in institutions devoted to research and higher education on the privileged areas of family and marriage, and those whose interest is the study and application of health care ethics– must make an coordinated effort to reach out everywhere, divulging our knowledge, and to be tireless and for a lifetime labourers in the weighty task of constructing the culture of life.

The Pope, in his Encyclical, invites us again and again to teach indefatigably, to be like leaven which tries to transform society from within, the leaders and the masses alike. This means that for the rest of our years, each one of us must devote a substantial part of his time and energy to a challenging and permanent task: to proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life, through his/her profession and charisma. For the foreseeable future, we must place Evangelium vitae high in our research agenda, in the schedule of our meetings, in the list of topics to teach. We cannot allow the impact of the Encyclical to be dampened or extinguished or shortlived.

2. The duty of firmness in faith

To follow the papal teaching, we must first of all develop in ourselves the dispositions of a true follower of Christ, so forcefully stressed in the Encyclical. It means that we ought to receive the saving truth with a firm and creative acceptance. At the same time we must reach a compassionate understanding for our own and our neighbours’ human frailties. The Pope is seen in the Letter as a true and compassionate father. His address to the women who had an abortion is a model for every teacher, realistic in the appreciation of evil, but full of the forgiving compassion of a good shepherd. Realism and compassion are two important attitudes to teach the Gospel of life.

We strike the correct note in our work as teachers if we are aware that the life of Jesus was that of a realistic and compassionate Teacher. And our Mother the Church, who prolongs Christ’s presence among us, is a Teacher and an Expert in humanity. The first condition for acting as true disciples of Christ and teach the others, is a sincere assent to the doctrine of the Church; in our case, a grateful respect and firm intellectual adhesion to the moral teachings of the Pope.

In Veritatis splendor, John Paul II tells us that one of the most acute pastoral concerns of the Church amid today's growing secularism, is the attempt of so many to set freedom in opposition to truth, to separate faith from morality. This separation leads many people to think and live “as if God did not exist”.

The union of faith and moral convictions in the hearts and minds of people is becoming a badly needed requirement to build a culture of life. It is urgent –says the Pope– that Christians rediscover the novelty of faith and its power to judge through a new and original criterion for thinking and acting in personal, family and social life. We must not contribute to more on-going confusion. Instead, with limitless patience and love, we must help many of our fellow Catholics to rediscover the authentic reality of the Christian faith, which is a lived knowledge of Christ, a living remembrance of his commandments, and a truth to be lived out.

3. The duty to do research in education

We must not be satisfied with giving, with the grace of God, a warm acceptance to the whole content of the Encyclical. A further and specific response is required from each of us at this Meeting: to make an intellectual effort to deeply understand the Pope’s thinking; and then, to search for appropriate ways to communicate to others the hidden wealth it contains.

Action and contemplation must go together in our life. As John Paul II has written in Chapter 18 of Crossing the threshold of hope, evangelization cannot be reduced to the living teaching of the Church, the announcement of the faith, or the catechetic instruction: evangelization is also the vast effort of reflection on the revealed truth.

As a result of such reflection, helped by prayer, each of us can identify the ways in which he or she can help to explore and spread the value of human life: with new and original insights, with new and convincing reasons, with new and creative ways of expressing love for human life.

To be truly a servant of life means, in the words of the Pope, that one must propose these truths constantly and courageously in personal dialogue and in all educational activity. Teachers, catechists and theologians have the task of emphasizing the anthropological reasons upon which respect for every human life is based. In this way, by making the newness of the Gospel of life shine forth, we can also help everyone discover in the light of reason and of personal experience how the Christian message fully reveals what man is and the meaning of his being and existence. We shall find important points of contact and dialogue also with non-believers, in our common commitment to the establishment of a new culture of life.

All of us have immediate experience of how challenging and demanding this programme is, but at the same time how gratifying, with its difficulties, successes and failures. One thing is clear: the life of a teacher of the Gospel of life is free from of the risks of boredom, inaction, or superficiality.

“Be unfailing in patience and in teaching”: this exhortation of the Apostle Paul ought prompt us to use every means (from theological reflection to personal narrative) to move the hearts and minds of our contemporaries. Research in our case means to search for the best method of showing the singular value of every human life.

For example, nothing could be more demostrative of the value of a severely handicapped prenatal life than that story of a pregnant woman who passes in a few days from the hopeful expectation of becoming the happy mother of a wanted and beautiful child to the shattering experience of receiving the very bad news that the child has multiple abnormalities and in all probability the pregnancy will not reach its term. True love for life whimpers inside her that a damaged life is also precious and cannot be abandoned. A mother can teach us that a malformed child who will never live outside her womb can be intensely loved. The birth and short life of a severely handicapped child is an opportunity to experience a strong and invigorating mixture of real pain and real joy, indescribably far from the moral tragedy and affective void of eugenic abortion. This mother gives us the hopeful message that termination of pregnancy is not the best way of helping the parents of a severely handicapped fetus. Respect and love for life in these extremely hard circumstances makes pregnancy and giving birth a very special event. We must teach that there is an enormous difference between an aborted fetus and a baby born dead. It is not possible to give thanks and grieve for an aborted fetus as it is for a much wanted and ever to be missed member of the family. For a dead newborn baby it is possible to have a funeral to celebrate his or her short life and pay tribute to him or her as a loved one, and to visit the grave, leave flowers there and plant bulbs. It is possible to talk about him or her as a person and do many things which soothes the pain of loss.

In my view, the culture of life must be built and tought with the help of theological reflection, philosophical abstractions and sociological research. But also with personal stories, with songs and plays on the beauty of real life, on the resilience of love, on the greatness of ordinary things, on deeds of common courage which are the heritage of humankind.

4. Teaching and public action

The Pope points also to a painful political sore in our individualistic societies: One of the specific characteristics of present day attacks on human life consists in the trend to demand a legal justification for them, as if they were rights which the State, at least under certain conditions, must acknowledge as belonging to citizens. Consequently, there is a tendency to claim that it should be possible to exercise such rights with the safe and free assistance of doctors and medical personnel.

Here the Pope follows an obviously political approach to the problem, and gives it a setting which puts in question the politically correct and power driven approach. The Pope demands from us Catholics (as Prof. D’Agostino has emphasized a few moments ago) a very active participation in the framing and improvement of laws. But I think that, beyond the area of rights and laws, the words of John Paul II are an invitation to a extensive and bold cultural action to rescue a genuine sense of the relation between truth and freedom. This is probably the most decisive issue in contemporary politics.

I suppose that all of us are proud of professing the teaching of Centesimus annus, the most sincere and radical programme of social justice in history. Evangelium vitae is equally bold in the defense and promotion of justice regarding respect for life and in denouncing the individualistic concept of freedom, which ends up by becoming the freedom of the strong against the weak who have no choice but to submit.

I suppose that politicians and philosophers of goodwill have, as the Pope urges them, the duty to teach the people the radical wisdom of respecting man and nature, the duty to offer, from the standpoint of political philosophy, a convincing foundation for authentic human rights and true democracy, and the possibility of offering a place in this world to anyone who, like the unborn or the dying, is a weak element in the social structure, completely at the mercy of others and radically dependent on them, and can only communicate through the silent language of a profound sharing of affection.

5. The duty to imbue joy and hope in teaching

I think that one of the more insidious dangers menacing the preachers of the Gospel of life today is to succumb to the temptation of sadness. Some members of pro-life movements are putting in their actions and words more bitterness and anger than joy and hope, more antagonism than love. It is understandable that those acutely conscious of the massive, arrogant and unrepentant destruction of life we are seeing in the world have an understandable reason for feeling affliction and grief at so many lives destroyed, at so many sins committed.

But we must realize in every circumstance that the Gospel of life is good news, full of joy and hope, that must be offered with bright eyes and smiling lips, with a heart overflowing with love and understanding, with consummate candor and courage, with vigor and resolve, and also with a touch of humour. The Encyclical opens with the declaration that the Gospel of life is to be preached with dauntless fidelity, but also with the joy of Christmas, because the Birth of the Saviour reveals the full meaning of every human birth. The New Law, the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus is a law of freedom, joy and blessedness, the Pope teaches us, and adds: God’s commandment is never detached from his love, it is always a gift meant for man’s growth and joy. The Gospel of life is for the Church not only a proclamation of joy, but also a source of joy. It is the gratitude and joy we feel at the incomparable dignity of man what impels us to share this message with everyone. With this joyful disposition in our hearts we need to bring the Gospel of life to the heart of every man and woman and to make it penetrate every part of society. The celebration of the Gospel of the life must inspire us, the new people of the redemption, to sing songs of joy, to praise and give thanks for the priceless gift of life, for the mystery of every individual’s call to share through Christ in the life of grace and in an existence of an everlasting communion with God our Creator and Father. The force of our teaching on the value of life is the overwhelming joy each of us feels when he realizes the wonderful way we are built in body and soul.

This wonder makes the believer exclaim, as the Pope asserts with words of Psalm 139: “I give you thanks that I am fearfully, wonderfully made; wonderful are your works. You know me through and through.” When we teach our students human biology, psychology, medicine we must make use of every opportunity to instill in them an attitude of wonder and veneration. This is an attitude typical of every scientist of good will and common sense, open to the marvels of creation. Commenting on the birth of the first test-tube baby, Lewis Thomas wrote these refreshing lines:

“For the real amazement, if you want to be amazed is the process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg, this divides in two, then four, the eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which will have as its all progeny the human brain. The mere existence of that cell should be one of the astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell. It is an unbelievable thing, and yet there it is, popping neatly into its place amid the jumbled cells of every one of the several billion human embryos around the planet, just as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do. If you like to be surprised, there is the source. One cell is switched on to become the whole trillion cell, massive apparatus for thinking and imagining and, for that matter, being surprised. All the information needed for learning to read and write, playing the piano, arguing before senatorial subcommittees, walking across a street though traffic, or the marvelous act of putting one hand and leaning against a tree, is contained in that first cell. All the grammar, all syntax, all arithmetic, all music”. This is, in my opinion, an example of the cheerful mood we ought to show when we argue on the value of human life, on the respect for everyone, even for the early human embryo. The reason I read you this long quotation is not only the masterful description of biological facts Thomas offers us (they are in some measure tinged with biologism): we ought to use the exciting enthusiasm and love for life they convey in conversations with friends and with people we meet.

In conclusion: we ought to be less anti-abortion activists and much more evangelists of life.

6. The forging of character

Not only knowledge and information are needed to be an active promoter of the culture of life. The educational process must also be directed to enhancing virtue and love. The culture of life is one of generosity and service, which means a selfless devotion to life. We have before us, “a patient and fearless work of education aimed at encouraging one and all to bear each other’s burdens, to promote vocations to service, particularly among the young”). Such an educational task is badly needed in the present social context. In an analysis of the crisis of humanity the practice of Medicine is experiencing in our days, a Jewish doctor affirms that such a crisis is the direct result of the impoverishment in moral and ethical values introduced in their educational systems by western democratic societies. He invites us to calculate how good candidates for the medical profession can be young men or young women who as children or adolescents were reared in a relatively affluent and permissive environment, who are accustomed to getting what they want, when they want, and who are taught as their ultimate goal to strive for happiness and self-fulfillment at very low moral cost. Is it reasonable to expect that such children will develop into moral and ethical adults giving their energies for the betterment of society –even if they choose medicine as their calling?

A lot of research must be done to discover the best way to teach self-control to our adolescent girls and boys; much skill and a serious commitment are needed to imbue them with a sense of respect for themselves and for the others.

I must finish. My poorly articulate intervention had an only purpose: to remind all of us that our specific academic contribution to the spreading of the Gospel of life requires to put in action for our lifetime our Christian minds and our loving hearts, our analytical capacities and our broad human understanding.