ARCHDIOCESE OF PHILADELPHIA

Dear Brothers and Sisters in the Lord,

I welcome all of you who have come to celebrate this important commemoration of God’s precious gift of life. We come together today to thank God for His gift of life and to pray for a change of heart of those who do not respect life from its very beginning to its natural end.

Today’s gospel reminds us that, "whoever is not against us is for us," and "whoever gives you a cup of water because you belong to Christ...will surely not lose his reward" (Mark 9:40-41). We belong to Christ, we are Christians because we are the baptized. Just as the Lord bestowed the Spirit on the seventy elders in the Old Testament and they prophesied, as we heard in our first reading today, so we also have received the Holy Spirit at our Baptism. By our baptism we are called to bear prophetic witness to Christ. We are charged to spread the Good News of freedom—the freedom to choose life, to hold each life precious and to protect each life from conception to natural death. We are charged to respect human life in every condition: in that of the healthy, the sick, the whole, the handicapped, the rich and the poor. To the seventy elders in our first reading who complained, God speaking through Moses said: "Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets. Would that the Lord might bestow his Spirit on them all" (Numbers 11:29). Today God speaks to our hearts. Would that all of us who are baptized in Christ would act in His name. Acting in the name of Christ means resisting a culture which promotes unbridled freedom. Each of us is called to embrace wholeheartedly the work of building a culture of life.

At the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI said: "Each one of you is the fruit of a thought of God. Each one of us is loved...." Every human being is indeed created, loved and redeemed by God. Truly, every human being is priceless. This year, the Respect Life Sunday theme "Created, loved, redeemed by God, priceless," plays upon these two cultures, two understandings of human freedom. The one culture promotes purchasing so called priceless moments and pleasures with money, while the other calls us to act in the name of Jesus who paid the price on the cross for our redemption and eternal life. Every human being is priceless and precious to God because he or she has been created by God and redeemed by His Son, Jesus Christ.

In the second reading from James, the evils of our unbridled freedom are made clear and condemned, such as the pursuit of individual gain, often at the expense of those who provided the goods we consume. "Behold the wages you withheld from the workers who harvested your field are crying out" (James 5:4). All life—at the beginning, in the middle and at the end—is sacred and all persons must be treated with justice. For as our Holy Father has said, "God does not differentiate between the newly conceived human infant still in his or her mother’s womb and the child or young person, or the adult and the elderly person" (Address to the 12th General Assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life, February 27, 2006).

Today we gather as a community of faith in this Cathedral Basilica, our mother church, giving special witness to our commitment to respect and protect, to love and serve life at every stage. It is a commitment that distinguishes our way of life in society. As Catholics, we believe that one God exists and we live by one moral code given to us by God. In the Second Vatican Council documents we read that the "supreme rule of life is the Divine Law itself, the eternal, objective and universal law by which God out of his wisdom and love arranges, directs and governs the whole world and the paths of the human community. God has enabled man to share in this divine law..." (Dignitatis Humanae, 3). We know this to be the natural law of God which, as St. Paul tells us, is "written" on the human heart.

Our God has given us the gift of freedom. Not a freedom to choose whatever we wish. Rather it is a freedom to choose to do what is right and just and to avoid that which would in any way inflict harm on others. Respect Life Sunday celebrates this gift of freedom to choose life. Today’s Responsorial Psalm proclaims: "The precepts of the Lord give joy to the heart. The decree of the Lord is trustworthy, giving wisdom to the simple, the ordinances of the Lord are true, all of them just" (Ps. 19:10-12).

I offer for your reflection the following observations on the value of life:

There are those who call for a freedom of choice because they say every child must be wanted in order to be worthy of life; and hence so many feel free to abort innocent human life.

There are those who say that the elderly, the suffering and the disabled should have the freedom to choose when they will die; or that others should have the freedom to choose death for them because they themselves no longer have any worth.

There are those who believe we should have the freedom to destroy the human embryo for the possible good of another because those embryos are not wanted and are only surplus.

There are those who claim that there is a justifiable right to take another’s life by violence, terrorism and unnecessary capital punishment.

Another great evil that destroys life is war. Even if it is in self-defense and justifiable, it is always, as Pope John Paul II has said, "a defeat for humanity."

There are those who argue that we should not welcome the stranger, or feed, clothe and house immigrant or migrant workers because of their undocumented status.

There are those who believe that there is a civil right to marriage between persons of the same sex, and not exclusively between a man and a woman as ordained by God.

There are those who claim the freedom of the individual or of a class of people to pursue wealth or material good without respect for the human dignity of the people who may be constrained to work in conditions unworthy of society.

Today, dear friends in Christ, we gather to celebrate the precious gift of life. As we do so, we give thanks to god for all those who work tirelessly to spread the message to respect and protect, to love and serve life in all its stages. May the Lord bless our pro-life activities with good fruit, and bestow his Holy Spirit on all, so that the true notion of freedom will bring about a culture of life and a civilization of justice and love in our time. Amen.