In Evangelium
Vitae, St. Pope John Paul II identified a sinister paradox in
contemporary culture. “Precisely in an age when the inviolable rights of
the person are solemnly proclaimed and the value of life is publicly
affirmed,” he lamented, “the very right to life is being denied or
trampled upon, especially at the more significant moments of existence:
the moment of birth and the moment of death.”
This
“strange contradiction,” he warned, means that in practice a great deal
of the lofty talk about human rights spoken in legislatures, courts and
conference rooms around the world amounts to little more than a “futile
exercise of rhetoric.” In this blistering passage, the pope singles out
one instance of the hypocrisy of many ostensibly liberal modern
democratic states...
