At Catholic Vote, on the twentieth anniversary of John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae, it’s time to make everything about life.

Tomorrow, on the Feast of the Annunciation, we mark also the 20^th anniversary of the promulgation of St. John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae. In that encyclical, the Polish pope insisted that “everyone has an important role to play” in proclaiming the Gospel of Life:

Together with the family, teachers and educators have a particularly valuable contribution to make. Much will depend on them if young people, trained in true freedom, are to be able to preserve for themselves and make known to others new, authentic ideals of life, and if they are to grow in respect for and service to every other person, in the family and in society.

This is what it means to build a culture of life in the broadest sense, the implications of which reach far beyond opposition to grave evils like abortion or euthanasia: human freedom must be directed toward truth, toward “authentic ideals” of life in the family and in society itself.

I’m so confused.  Is this about life and death or about freedom, truth, ideals, family and society?

The culture of life, in which the dignity and worth of every human person is protected and cherished, is the only sure foundation upon which to build an authentic civilization of love. The full dignity and worth of the human person is revealed in the light of the Incarnation: we were made by God, in the image of God, for communion with God.

Dignity and worth?  Authentic civilization?  Love? God?  Are all these things really the same as condemning abortion and euthanasia, tied together in a some great karma in the sky?

Continuing with three popes on Life, CV’s Stephen White quotes Pope Benedict next, where he talks about the worth of every human being and how the dictatorship of relativism leads to murder.

Pope Benedict XVI understood this very clearly. When we lose sight of the truth about the human person, we lose both a proper sense of the worth of every human life, but we also lose the proper understanding of what it means to be person. A person is not just an isolated individual; a person always exists in relation to other persons, and finds fulfillment in the giving and receiving of love.

Obscure the truth of the human person and what remains is, in then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s famous words, “a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” The dictatorship of relativism arises when we become untethered from the truth about who we are and what we are destined for. In this state, we are not free; quite the opposite. We are left with only ourselves, cut off from the common ground of truth, with no ability to recognize the true dignity of others. The culture of death and the dictatorship of relativism are thus intertwined; indeed, they are two facets of the very same problem.

Benedict was clear.  But next we get Francis, the third Pope on ‘life.’

Pope Francis picks up on this theme, too, linking it definitively to his great theme of solicitude for the poor. Shortly after he was elected pope, Francis spoke to various ambassadors and diplomats. He spoke of the significance of his chosen name, Francis, for understanding the Church’s closeness to the poor. Then the Holy Father continued:

But there is another form of poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously. It is what my much-loved predecessor, Benedict XVI, called the “tyranny of relativism”, which makes everyone his own criterion and endangers the coexistence of peoples. And that brings me to a second reason for my name. Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace. But there is no true peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.

To summarize: Rich people suffer from spiritual poverty. The dictatorship of relativism endangers co-existence. I picked the name Francis because he said we should work for peace. There’s no peace without truth and there’s no truth with relativism, where everyone claims their own rights without caring for others.

There’s a line running through things but this is a reach.

Here we see the common thread which runs from the culture of death, through the dictatorship of relativism, straight to what Pope Francis has dubbed, the culture of waste:

This “culture of waste” tends to become a common mentality that infects everyone. Human life, the person, are no longer seen as a primary value to be respected and safeguarded, especially if they are poor or disabled, if they are not yet useful — like the unborn child — or are no longer of any use — like the elderly person.

Pope Francis goes on to tie this “culture of waste” to a lack of respect for material goods and nature itself. As I’ve highlighted before, when we lose sight of our proper relationship with the creator—our origin and end—our relationship with all of creation suffers.

Finally, and for this reasons, what Pope Francis calls the culture of waste, is intimately connected to that materialism—as common in consumerist societies as in socialist ones, according to John Paul II—that reduces man to the sum of his economic choices and ignores the fullness of his freedom and, indeed, the fullness of his humanity. In Centesimus Annus, John Paul II connects our disordered relationship to the material world back to the dangers of thinking about man in primarily economic terms:

When… man is seen more as a producer or consumer of goods than as a subject who produces and consumes in order to live, then economic freedom loses its necessary relationship to the human person and ends up by alienating and oppressing him.

So here we are again.  Attacks on life and the Dictatorship of Relativism have caused us not to care for others, to treat each other like throw away material, to waste each other, to hurt nature.  Because of our careless ‘consumerism’ we’re as materialistic as the cruel socialists or ruthless ‘capitalists’ JPII lamented.

Two of these three popes, John Paul II and Francis, are both mistaken to fault capitalism for being as materialistic as socialism since the ‘capitalism’ they deride is not one of too much freedom and too little government control.  The ‘capitalism’ they fault is our current western economies, where small groups of powerful men own the means of production or ‘capital’, and most people must come to them or to the government for work.  That is materialistic, but it’s not a need for even more regulations and state controls.  It’s a need for less regulation and more freedom.

More regulation and more control just means more socialism, yes?

Either way, none of these things have anything to do with abortion or euthanasia, unless you’re talking about evils foisted on people by rulers with too much power and no love for God or the Faith.