Faith and Reason in the Pro-Life Movement

Having concluded the celebration of the Christmas Season recently, we continue to reflect on the significance of the birth rites of the Child Jesus … culminating liturgically with the Feast of the Presentation in the Temple 40 days after his birth (February 2).  This is a time for us to underscore the unique distinction which our Christian religion gives to the world, that is God is no longer known through distant signs and symbols, mere prophetic utterances or through signs of nature, but up close and personal … indeed, so close and personal that He takes on human flesh by means of His greatest creature, a woman.  In the doctrine that God takes on flesh in the Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, we hold dear what no other religion has ever (or will ever) proclaim: God becomes Man at conception in a real and natural womb of a mother. 

All of this bears on the dignity and purpose for each human life, as each human bears resemblance to the divine man, Jesus Christ.  Moreover, that dignity is not something we impose on human nature; rather, it is human nature itself (like all natural beings) which first informs us of what it is: human life begins not when we say so but when it in itself begins.  Biology and all the natural sciences attest to this truth. Since biology and physics can point to the actuality of a unique human cell life at conception, then human nature begins there and not at some later point. 

All the other arguments for “Rights” or “Freedom of Choice” or the bizarre “distinction” between “human” and “person”, etc., stem from a misunderstanding of the biology and physics of natural beings.  It’s important to know that historically this kind of ignorant thinking is the consequence of some pretty strange relativism which has its Western roots in the worst interpretations of Descartes’ “I think, therefore, I am.”  It’s not what I think is the truth; it’s what nature itself tells me is the actual fact.

The pro-life movement is not simply a Catholic thing, a religious thing; that’s exactly how the opposition would like to frame the debate.  It is a debate that can be argued on naturally scientific terms – of course, elevated by the profound supernatural gifts of God and the specific doctrine of the Incarnation of Jesus and the Motherhood of Mary.

As Members of the Order of Malta, we are called to defend the faith against the enemies of religion; I would add that the enemies of religion are also the enemies of true reason.  To this purpose, natural reason can underscore the faith we believe and assist us effectively in explaining the faith intelligently to those who would relegate the pro-life movement and our arguments about the dignity of human life as exclusively “religious” and therefore prejudiced by “faith” alone.  The dignity of human life from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death is not only a faith statement; it is also a natural understanding.  As “grace perfects nature,” then, in God’s taking on human life in Jesus Christ through the Blessed Virgin, that dignity we bear is not only supernatural but clearly naturally endowed and to be safeguarded at every point of its actual existence.