By Hilary White
SEOUL, South Korea, January 24, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Catholic Archdiocese of Seoul has awarded its first annual Mysterium Fidei (Mystery of Faith) Grand Prix award for outstanding pro-life work to George Cardinal Pell, the archbishop of Sydney, Australia.
In his address at the award ceremony January 17, the Cardinal gave a comprehensive examination of the issues surrounding abortion, euthanasia, artificial procreation and the destruction of the traditional family. Cardinal Pell urged the pro-life movement “to draw society into deeper reflection about the mystery, wonder and value of human life,” and reject the new utilitarian morality.
The award included a prize of more than $104,000, which Cardinal Pell said will go to fund pro-life initiatives.
In his address, he warned against the growth of the materialistic “post-modern” and environmentalist ethic which he called “a minority neo-pagan, anti-human mentality,” that reduces human value to issues of “efficiency, functionality and usefulness.”
The cardinal rejected the materialist philosophy that supports the anti-human environmental movement, saying that such “extreme” proposals as taxing new parents to compensate for the “carbon footprint” of their offspring “are often expressions of modern society’s deep confusion about the place and value of the human person in the world.”
“They should set off warning bells for us. If we have learnt anything from the atrocities of the last century, it is that wide scale attacks upon human life and dignity both stem from and sustain reductive understandings of the human person.”
It is not only the physical, biological ecology that is of concern to humanity, but the “moral and social ecology of the earth also calls for urgent attention”.
Pell, who has long been one of the world’s deepest and most articulate Catholic defenders of the comprehensive life ethic, said, “We need to promote an alternative to the technological outlook which seeks to control and manipulate birth and death, to reduce nature to ‘matter’, to elevate having over being, to depersonalise the body and sexuality, and to replace the criterion of personal dignity with the criterion of efficiency, functionality and usefulness.”
Taking an all-inclusive approach, he touched upon most of the issues that pertain to the pro-life and pro-family movement, showing that abortion is only one grave threat of many against human life. Summing up the goals and challenges of the pro-life movement, the cardinal elucidated the ways pro-life people can make a case for the entire ethical tradition of the Judeo-Christian west.
Apart from abortion and euthanasia, the cardinal pointed to the apparent paradox of the massive destruction of human life involved in the new reproductive technologies. “Where anti-life practices once largely involved the taking of human life, today they may also involve the making of human life”. He cited recent Australian research that concluded that, of embryos created by fertility labs, the overall survival rate is about 3.5 per cent.
The deeper problem, he said, is the reduction in the value of human life and dignity. As pro-life advocates have long pointed out, the cardinal said that the manufacture of children in fertility clinics, “however much they will be loved by their parents,” reduces these children’s dignity. They “do not come into being as an equal third party to their love, but as an object of scientific technology”.
“Children are no longer seen principally as gifts in their own right, but primarily as commodities to satisfy adult wants.”
He linked so-called “same-sex marriage” to this anti-life principle, saying that giving the social equivalence of marriage to same sex relationships “says that there is no right of a child to be known and raised by their biological mother and father”.
In all of this apparent ethical chaos, the cardinal called for pro-life people to take their principles and set about the re-ordering of the “moral ecology of society”.
“It can be tempting,” he said, “to think that this is too hard.” But he clearly laid upon his hearers the task of re-presenting the traditional ethical principles that created the national and international laws protecting human life.
“We need first of all to foster, in ourselves and in others, a contemplative outlook. Such an outlook arises from faith in the God of life, who has created every individual as a ‘wonder’. It is the outlook of those who see life in its deeper meaning, who grasp its utter gratuitousness, its beauty and its invitation to freedom and responsibility.”
Read the full text of the Cardinal’s address:
https://www.zenit.org/article-21581?l=english