And a reminder of our responsibility.
And a reminder of our responsibility
I t was 100 degrees as the sun was setting, and a toddler with red curls was running toward the Ferris wheel at the National Mall, installed as part of the Great American State Fair. The kid was trying to get my attention — he seemed to like being the center of things. I looked around to find an adult he belonged to and realized how vulnerable a precocious little one (with an overactive set of legs) can be. His young father found him — too flustered, it seemed, to be worried yet and perhaps still learning how much his life has changed. Each and every one of us is on a journey, and we’re worthy of protection.
“Nothing surpasses the greatness or dignity of a human person,” said Pope John Paul II on the National Mall in October 1979, during a Catholic Mass, right here before God and man and the Smithsonian. The Little Sisters of the Poor, who serve the elderly poor, and the Hawthorne Dominicans, who care for elderly cancer patients, may have had to go to court recently to fight for religious liberty, but we’re still a long way from the days of the infamous anti-Catholic Know-Nothings.
Christian music is playing on “Faith, Values, and Inspiration Day” at the fair, a few days before July 4. People are congregating where the air-conditioning works — even if it’s in a custom 18-wheeler by PragerU that houses an exhibit about American history — or where a state is giving away good swag (Florida wins with a small gator plush), or where there’s beer and soccer: the World Cup viewing area. There are pleasant surprises: artwork from a high schooler that celebrates Nellie Gray, the founder of the March for Life. Other artwork and official displays feature Catholic nuns Katharine Drexel and Elizabeth Ann Seton. There are tourists decked out in red, white, and blue. There’s Students for Life merch emblazoned with “We Are the Pro-Life Generation.”
An the National Mall in 1979, John Paul II said:
If a person’s right to life is violated at the moment in which he is first conceived in his mother’s womb, an indirect blow is struck also at the whole of the moral order, which serves to ensure the inviolable goods of man. Among those goods, life occupies the first place. The Church defends the right to life, not only in regard to the majesty of the Creator, who is the First Giver of this life, but also in respect of the essential good of the human person. . . .
We will stand up every time that human life is threatened. When the sacredness of life before birth is attacked, we will stand up and proclaim that no one ever has the authority to destroy unborn life. When a child is described as a burden or is looked upon only as a means to satisfy an emotional need, we will stand up and insist that every child is a unique and unrepeatable gift of God, with the right to a loving and united family.
There’s nothing like people-watching to recognize that unrepeatableness. There are elderly couples — some of the men are wearing caps that indicate where they have served while in the military. There are young families, apologetic mothers and kids who push through doors in search of freebies. There are friend groups in their 20s. All of them are living displays of something else John Paul had said: “Human life is not just an idea or an abstraction; human life is the concrete reality of a being that lives, that acts, that grows and develops; human life is the concrete reality of a being that is capable of love, and of service to humanity.”
Now we have an American-born pope. A highlight of a new exhibit at the John Paul II Shrine — elsewhere in town — is, in fact, a photo of a young Robert Prevost (the future Pope Leo XIV) with John Paul from 1979. There is also a replica of the replacement stone sent to the U.S. by the Vatican after the Know-Nothings had removed one from the Washington Monument in an effort to “de-Romanize” the nation’s capital. We can pretend to know nothing about the treasures we’ve been given. But just by taking a look back, we can be better civic leaders and secure the future for all those who long to live, as we were made to. You, me, the popes, as well as that red-haired kid running ahead, free of the ideological baggage and experiential wounds that distract us.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.