VANCOUVER, British Columbia, December 7, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Despite attempts by some to twist the meaning of the Catholic Church’s social teaching, pro-life work is essential to the Church’s efforts in the area of social justice, urged Archbishop J. Michael Miller of Vancouver late last month.
Speaking at St. Thomas Aquinas High School on Nov. 25th, the archbishop warned that the notion of social justice “can degenerate into shortsighted political activism,” but insisted that Christians should not allow the term to be “stolen from us” by “extremists in the Church.”
“We can’t give an inch to anyone, especially one posing as a Catholic, who would distort the Church’s social teaching,” he said.
The Gospel “transcends the artificial separation of the ‘pro-life’ and ‘peace and justice’ camps that we sometimes find in the Church,” he added.
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The archbishop insisted that social justice is rooted in the natural law and the Catholic Church’s rich heritage, and is a “necessary feature” of evangelization. But when the Church’s social justice effort is twisted, he said, “the authentic quest for human development becomes co-opted by agendas that are opposed to Church teaching and the good of the human person.”
“It is true that sometimes pro-abortion forces use the language of social justice,” he added.
According to Archbishop Miller, the effort to secure protections for children in the womb is based on the same ideal espoused by advocates of peace and social justice: “that all human beings are of equal value, and hence that discrimination is never justified.”
“The unborn child is equal in dignity to the born, and … the dependency of one still in the womb is no justification for considering him or her a ‘non-person’,” he said.
“If, in fact, a government claims authority to designate unborn human beings as ‘non-persons,’ it has also claimed authority to make the same declaration about those already born,” he insisted.
Quoting John Paul II, the archbishop said that all other human rights are “false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition of all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination.”
“The right to life, from conception to its natural end, is the condition for the exercise of all other rights and, in particular, implies the illicitness of every form of procured abortion and of euthanasia,” he continued.
While Canadians pride themselves on living in a just society founded on the dignity of the human person, the “silent violence of abortion” is opposed to this ideal, he said.
Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to life for “everyone,” he observed, “and yet unborn humans, whether minutes after conception or seconds away from their birth, have continued to be utterly excluded from these basic protections.”