The Day for Life, celebrated on Sunday June 19, is an opportunity to give prayerful thanks for the wonderful gift of life from God and to raise awareness about how best to care for and build communities where every human person is given the possibility to reach their full potential.
Like an exciting adventure story, the world is to be explored. When Jesus said to his disciples, “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 18:3), he wanted us to rediscover the capacity for wonder and excitement at the beautiful world the Father had created.
So often the labels used to describe migrants, refugees and the disabled are loaded with negative connotations. By using such labels we fail to recognise the uniqueness of each person, the family they belong to, and the story of their lives. Migrants and refugees have often become the scapegoats of our age.
With the gaze of mercy, Jesus looks into the face of a person and sees their beauty. He delights, appreciates and expresses thanks to the Father. St John Paul II captured this attitude of wonder when he wrote many years ago: “Faced with the sacredness of life and of the human person, and before the marvels of the universe, wonder is the only appropriate attitude.”
This year the Day for Life message invites us to open our hearts to the capacity to experience wonder. Wonder evokes a sense of awe and empathy, drawing forth a response of love to care for people and our common home. We gaze with wonder at God’s creation which we are called to share with our brothers and sisters who inhabit our common home with us.
In England, springtime often arrives in early June. A temperate climate brings forth abundant growth and foliage springs from bare stems. But as we long for a hot summer, in many parts of the world people fear the summer climate and its effects: searing heat, drought, mighty storms and flooding. The ecosystem is fragile. As a result, many people’s lives are very vulnerable because of crop failure or loss of their homes through mudslides and flooding. Popes have called upon us all to care better for the planet and find ways to tackle the causes that lead to devastating climate change.
Pope Francis stresses that neglecting the human person, especially the vulnerable, the poor and the unborn, leads to a violent attitude towards creation and a destructive tendency to exploit it for our own ends. Everything is interconnected; we only have one heart and so when we become insensitive towards one part of God’s gift, we lose our tenderness and fail to see with the eyes of God. The whole suffers.
As poorly used technology can destroy a landscape, badly used medical advances can turn against the gift of life. The recent call by the chief executive of the Royal College of Midwives, Professor Cathy Warwick, to decriminalise in Britain all abortion and abandon the 24-week restriction has been deeply shocking, not only to midwives, but also to the public at large. Without consulting her board or her members, Professor Warwick signed them up to the “We Trust Women” campaign run by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. But in every pregnancy there are two persons to be cared for: the mother and
her baby.
The collection taken on Day for Life helps initiatives that practically and emotionally care for women so that they do not feel pressurised into choosing abortion. The collection also helps us to contribute positively to the national conversation and to work with others to press for achievable changes in the law. We can make a difference: the contribution of Catholics up and down the country last year helped to defeat the Assisted Dying Bill.
In the message for Day for Life this year, Catholics are invited to pray and reflect on Pope Francis’s words from Laudato Si’: “Neglecting to monitor the harm done to nature and the environmental impact of our decisions is only the most striking sign of a disregard for the message contained in the structures of nature itself. When we fail to acknowledge as part of reality the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disabilities – to offer just a few examples – it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected.”
Awe and empathy are brought about by a sense of wonder at life, ushering in a fresh approach to many vital issues of our time, from migration to climate change to abortion. We are called to value the dignity of every human life as well as the planet on which we all live. Let our hearts turn to God on this Day for Life, and let us all see the world a little more through the eyes of Jesus, son of the Father who created us all.
Bishop John Sherrington is an auxiliary bishop of Westminster and Bishop for Day for Life
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