Despite the media’s wishes.
Despite the media’s wishes
‘T he greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion.”
Mother Teresa of Calcutta famously said this while standing before a dais with President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton during the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., in February 1994. It made big news at the time. Now, it hardly feels like news that, a year into his tenure, Pope Leo XIV — the first pope born in the United States — cited that line by Mother Teresa in one of his many remarks about the sanctity and inviolability of innocent, unborn human life.
Speaking to young people who were participating in the “Political Innovation Hackathon” conference earlier this year, he chose to talk about an inconvenient truth. “No policy can genuinely serve the people if it denies the unborn the gift of life, or if it neglects to support those in need, whether in their material circumstances or in their spiritual distress,” the former Cardinal Robert Prevost said. He explained the concept of peace as a pope would. Peace, he said, “is above all a gift.” Moreover, it is also “a covenant, which binds us to one another and commits us to safeguard it where it exists and to pursue it where it is absent.” Finally, he said, “Peace is a promise, because it opens before us the hope of a better world, a hope shared by all people of goodwill.”
At a moment of nearly universal cynicism about politics, Pope Leo insisted:
Politics plays an indispensable role in this task. For this reason, I encourage you to work together in studying forms of participation that allow all citizens — men and women alike — to take part in the institutional life of their nations. Upon this foundation, it becomes possible to build that universal fraternity which is already taking shape among you young people, a sign of a new era. Your commitment, in fact, reaches its highest fulfillment when it serves a humanity that seeks and attains peace through justice.
“Her words remain prophetic,” Leo said about the fearless, mighty, tiny nun who captured the attention of the world. Her mere presence would challenge us. I remember being just yards from her while I was a student at the Catholic University of America, at a Mass at the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, adjacent to the campus, where new members of the Missionaries of Charity, the religious community she founded, were making their vows to God for life — and eternity with Him.
“The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself,” Mother T said bluntly. I have an unspoken rule: If you’re going to talk to me about something evil, like pornography, I do not want graphic details. I, admittedly, do not have the same rule when it comes to abortion. Mother Teresa’s words needed to be heard by man and politician alike — a well-informed conscience is a beautiful thing to have and a terrible thing to waste. In her speech in Washington in 1994, she had said:
If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.
Such clarity on moral issues is not as radical a departure from Pope Francis as certain media sources would have you believe. “Leo does follow Francis when it comes to speaking out on immigration, the environment, poverty and capital punishment,” according to one CNN analysis. Moreover:
His years in Peru serving among some of its poorest communities have given him a strong sense of social justice. He’s described the treatment of immigrants in the US as “inhuman,” while recently calling for the abolition of the death penalty.
The media have long desired that the pope parrot their politics. In 2014, Rolling Stone put Pope Francis on its cover as if to warn him not to disappoint their desires. But if the media expected Francis to change the church to endorse the whims of conventional society and Western liberal ideologies, they were mistaken. He likened abortion to hiring a hit man to kill your unborn baby, and he talked about gender ideology as the equivalent of a nuclear bomb destroying the nuclear family. He canonized John Paul II, calling him “the pope of the family.”
You could argue that Pope Leo’s condemning abortion as an evil is his simply being Catholic. And yet the archbishop in San Francisco has had to clarify to Nancy Pelosi that her radical pro-abortion position was not courageous but, instead, a violation of fundamental teachings of the Catholic Church. Not only is the pope Catholic, but he has a joy and steadiness about his Catholicism. For all the headlines, he really wants you to take away one thing: the love and mercy of God in Jesus Christ.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.