Princeton's Robert George reflects on 'Evangelium Vitae' 30 years on

As issues like abortion, assisted suicide and in-vitro fertilization continue to be widely discussed today, looking back on the prescient writing of St. John Paul II on such matters can help the faithful to see the principles behind longstanding church teaching. Robert P. George, McCormick professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, recently spoke with OSV News' Charlie Camosy about how St. John Paul II's encyclical "Evangelium Vitae," released 30 years ago, provided a pro-life vision that remains relevant today.

--Charlie Camosy: Can you remind us of the global context into which Pope John Paul II wrote and promulgated "Evangelium Vitae?" What do you think about this context was motivating him?

--Robert P. George: When "Evangelium Vitae" was published in 1995, the church was navigating both a secularizing culture in the West that had quickly and radically shifted on matters of human life, human dignity, human sexuality and morality, and an unprecedented instability and confusion inside the church over many of the same questions. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, prominent liberal theologians such as Charles Curran, Richard McCormick and Hans Küng were advancing arguments to justify dissent from the firm and constant teachings of the Catholic Church on, for example, the immorality of contraception and of homosexual conduct and relationships.

Pope Paul VI's encyclical letter "Humanae Vitae" in 1968 -- while authoritatively rearticulating and refining the church's stance against contraception -- did nothing to deter those who viewed Vatican II and its call to aggiornamento (bringing up to date) as a permission slip to wholly revise the church's doctrines on fundamental questions of morality.

So, John Paul II in "Evangelium Vitae" was attempting to respond both to a morally broken secular culture -- one in which the instruments of sexual permissiveness (e.g., contraception and abortion) had suddenly become both easily accessible and widely regarded morally acceptable -- and a church that was itself marred by internal divisions on many of these questions.

--Camosy: How was the encyclical received by the U.S. church? In the U.S. more broadly?

--George: I think it's fair to say that those who were regarded as conservatives welcomed the encyclical and were especially glad that the pope's reassertion of the principle of the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions was both forceful and unequivocal. By contrast, liberals in the United States, Europe and throughout the West viewed the encyclical as "reactionary" and an impediment to what they regarded as "social progress."

--Camosy: Though concerns about abortion and euthanasia rightly take pride of place in the encyclical, other issues are clearly part of Holy Father's concern: genocide, for instance. Also the death penalty. Poverty is mentioned nine times. What do you think about the enduring legacy of this pro-life vision?

--George: John Paul II's framing of a struggle between a "culture of life" and a "culture of death" is, I think, prophetic. Social conservatives who defend the dignity and moral inviolability of human life in all stages and conditions are often absurdly accused by progressives of "only caring about human life before birth." But the truth is that every human life is infinitely precious in the eyes of God.

The true Christian teaching is that each and every member of the human family, irrespective of race, ethnicity or sex, but also and equally irrespective of age, size, location, stage of development, or condition of dependency, is the bearer of profound, inherent and equal dignity. Abortion and euthanasia are, therefore, profound injustices. So, too, are genocide and any other action that has as its object the destruction of human life. On the death penalty, I am among those who have defended an absolute (i.e., exceptionless) moral norm against intentional killing. Under that view, the death penalty is morally impermissible.

In "Evangelium Vitae" as well as in other writings, statements and speeches, John Paul II shifted the church's teaching away from the view that capital punishment could be justified retributively (that is to say, as punishment). And we cannot pretend that this was not, in truth, a shift. Historically, albeit not infallibly, the teaching authorities of the church had regarded the death penalty, and indeed its use under the auspices of the church's temporal authority (e.g., the practice of capital punishment in the Papal States), as in certain circumstances permissible.

Those authorities, now above all in the person of Pope Francis, today teach that the death penalty is morally "inadmissible" as a direct assault on the dignity of the human person. Pope Francis often gets the credit -- and the criticism -- for implementing the 2018 change to the catechism, but it was John Paul II who began the project of placing the church on the side of life in all cases without exception.

The church's historic teaching that "the direct killing of an innocent human being is always and everywhere wrong" has been tightened now to "the direct killing of any human being is always and everywhere wrong." (The church does not teach that all killing in war constitutes direct killing, i.e., killing in which the death of the individual who is killed is the precise object of one's act. So, the teaching as developed under recent popes does not require Catholics to embrace pacifism.)

--Camosy: As you say, the encyclical itself was motivated in part by concern for new threats to human life that were emerging 30 years ago. Where do you see emerging threats to human life in 2025 that are in need of more attention and concern?

--George: Many of the threats to human life and human dignity that we faced at the time "Evangelium Vitae" was published are threats we continue to deal with today. The fight over legal abortion continues -- including here in the United States -- and shows no signs of abating or being definitively settled any time soon. The pro-euthanasia and assisted suicide movement has notched significant victories in the past few years, in countries such as Canada and Great Britain and in a small number of U.S. states. At the same time, we do face new threats to human life that were not on the forefront of many people's minds in the 1990s.

One in particular that we should highlight is in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other procedures which, at least as practiced in the U.S., involve the mass production and destruction of human embryos. Quite regrettably, many conservatives -- and even some in the pro-life movement -- have either been silent or even voiced support for protecting and expanding access to IVF.

All of us who believe -- as the Catholic Church authoritatively teaches -- that human life begins at conception and that the worth of a human being in the embryonic stage of his or her life is no less than his or her worth in the infant, child, adolescent and adult stages, must be vigilant and push back hard against current efforts to recast IVF and other embryo-destroying procedures as somehow "pro-life." The "culture of life," as John Paul II put it so well, recognizes the humanity and the inherent and equal dignity of human embryos brought into being by laboratory procedures, just as it does unborn babies, newborn babies and everyone else.