The visit of Pope Francis to the US this week has prompted an amazingly good article by Michael Dauphinais in Crisis Magazine which begins,
The recent revelations surrounding the selling of fetal body parts by Planned Parenthood highlight a crisis in contemporary society depicted in Pope Francis' Laudato Si'. With uncanny insight, Pope Francis had written, "the culture of relativism is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects…. Is it not the same relativistic logic that justifies buying the organs of the poor for resale or use in experimentation, or eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted?" (LS 123).
Pope Francis' recent encyclical has been referred to as the "climate-change encyclical," or described as an encyclical on the environment, which is surely a narrow understanding that may leave readers to wonder why the Pope speaks so often in defense of universal moral truths and man's unique nature and dignity. I suggest that a clue may be found in the subtitle of Laudato Si': "On Care for Our Common Home." The encyclical's focus may be viewed from the human virtue of caring. If we approach the encyclical through the lens of human caring, we will find help from an at-first unlikely source, the twentieth-century Christian writer C.S. Lewis. We will see that Laudato Si' has much to say about the ethical crises of our age.
The article is long but well worth the read, http://www.crisismagazine.com/2015/laudato-si-and-the-selling-of-body-parts
Reminder: Public Meetings on Doctor-Prescribed Suicide bill, H 1991, today in Chicopee. tomorrow in Westfield
Chicopee Library, Wednesday, 9/23, 7:00 – 8:00 pm Sen Eric Lesser district
Westfield Athenaeum, Thursday, Sept 24, 6:30 Rep John Velis district
Walpole Public Library, Monday, Sept 28, 7:00 – 800 pm Sen James Timilty district
Danvers Public Library, Tuesday, Sept 29, 7:30 – 8:30 pm Sen Joan Lovely district
Leominster VFW, Wednesday, Sept 30, 7:00pm Sen Jennifer Flanagan district
Plan to attend and bring a friend! Anne
No comments:
Post a Comment