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Email: "Two Years Later: Pope John Paul II Especially Remembered as Greatest Defender of Life and Family"

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BY LifeSiteNews.com By Peter J. Smith  VATICAN CITY, April 2, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Two years after his death, a Vatican investigation concludes today on the life of a leader pro-life advocates will remember as perhaps the Catholic Church’s most ardent defender of the sanctity of human life and the family.  Officials of the Catholic Church marked a milestone in the process of sainthood for Pope John Paul II on Monday, ceremoniously completing an investigation into the well-loved Pope’s life on the second anniversary of his death.   The same day, the Vatican received a dossier detailing the miraculous cure of a nun suffering from Parkinson’s disease, which she and her community attributed to the intercession of John Paul. The miracle means the Pope is one step closer to beatification, the last step before canonization in the sainthood process for perhaps the world’s greatest missionary of the Gospel of Life and ardent defender of innocent human life and the family.  For a much of his life, the late Pope John Paul II had lived under two regimes that embraced ruthless ideologies opposed to life and opposed to God. He experienced firsthand the Nazi regime in Poland that denied human life and dignity to countless millions, including the Jews and his own Polish people, and lived through the atheist satellite regime of the Soviet Union which banished God from public life and encouraged anti-life and anti-family attitudes in its populace for over 70 years.   However, until his dying day, Pope John Paul II dedicated his pontificate to rallying the world to fight against a new “ideology of evil” that seeks the destruction of human life and the human family.   John Paul II warned in his 1994 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, “the Gospel of Life”, that an ever-growing “culture of death” was devouring civilization through artificial birth control, abortion, euthanasia, and other attacks on the sanctity of human life.   The Pope summoned all people of good will to champion the “culture of life”, to defend relentlessly the unborn, the disabled, the terminally ill, the elderly, and the defenseless as having the right to life and an inherent human dignity no matter their condition.  John Paul opposed UN fear mongering about population control, defending large families as a blessing from God and rejecting any measures coercing families to limit the number of children. In this, he found himself abandoned by former Cold War allies, US President George H.W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who went to the table with former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev to discuss the threat of overpopulation.   However, John Paul would not believe that the world’s population constituted any sort of danger, when rich nations in the West could help poorer nations economically lift up their populations by sharing the abundance of their wealth.   Instead, he pointed out that many powerful and influential leaders “haunted by the current demographic growth” were behaving like the biblical Egyptian Pharaoh, who killed the Hebrew male children to stunt a population he perceived as a threat to Egypt’s interests.“Consequently, rather than wishing to face and solve these serious problems with respect for the dignity of individuals and families and for every person’s inviolable right to life, they prefer to promote and impose by whatever means a massive programme of birth control,” said the Pope. “Even the economic help which they would be ready to give is unjustly made conditional on the acceptance of an anti-birth policy.”  In his last book, Memory and Identity, the Pope also suggested that besides abortion, the world-wide push for same-sex unions may be “perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man.”  In 2003, the Pope approved a document prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith run by his friend Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, reasoning the Church’s opposition to same-sex unions.  The Pope opposed homosexual unions and adoptions saying children needed to grow up and find nurturing in a family with a father and a mother. He lamented that same-sex unions distort “what should be a communion of love and life between a man and a woman in a reciprocal gift open to life.”  On his deathbed the Pope asked Catholics and people of good will to protect the rights of the unborn, and also expressed solidarity with Terri Schiavo and her right to be kept alive on food and fluids through the feeding tube which she was denied. He would follow her death 48 hours later.   Just the year before, the Pope had settled the question that food and fluids were morally obligatory to all human beings, and said that all persons were owed recognition of their inherent human dignity regardless of their cognitive state.   Above all, the Pope was what biographer George Weigel called a “Witness to Hope”, and he had hope in young people, who responded enthusiastically to his message, and he knew that they could renew the world into a better place for life and family. No more fitting words represent this than his last words to the youth as he lay dying: “I have called you and you have come, thank you.”  http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/two-years-later-pope-john-paul-ii-especially-remembered-as-greatest-defende/

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