On Tuesday this week, I was very honoured to be invited to speak with the newly formed young women’s discussion group that met at Campion College in Sydney.

We unpacked the lapidary term, “the culture of life”, first coined by Pope St John Paul II in his encyclical on the vital interaction between theology, Christian anthropology and Catholic social teaching: Centisimus Annus (The Hundredth Year).

This encyclical’s title reflects its vast sweep through Catholic social teaching, honouring the centenary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891), which is considered to be the first encyclical to tackle the “new things” (in the 19th century) of democracy, industrialised work and the importance of family-owned property.

It was startling to realise that all the interested young faces sitting around me would barely have embarked on primary school when the Polish pontiff died in 2005.

The encyclical was published in the era in which the Thomas More Centre was founded over 33 years ago. It confirmed and challenged the first generation of TMC organisers and participants to realise that among many other important principles, the encyclical insisted that life issues needed to be considered far more widely, pastorally and cohesively than as “single issues” or as “matters of private morality”.

Significantly, John Paul II promulgated this encyclical on the Feast of St Joseph the Worker on May 1, 1991 – a rallying point for Catholics involved in social reflection and action. He introduced the umbrella term “the culture of life” through his critical consideration of the theology of culture. He writes in paragraph 51: “All human activity takes place within a culture and interacts with culture.”

John Paul II, with his intimate insight and experience of living under Marxist and Nazi ideology, aimed throughout his pontificate to correct a certain cultural naïveté among many Christians and churchmen in Western societies at the time.

The precise term “the culture of life” is introduced into a pithy discussion about attitudes, values and practices both conscious and unconscious, which are limiting or directly destructive of authentic human life and development.

In paragraph 39, John Paul II states: “In the face of the so-called culture of death, the family is the heart of the culture of life.”

The Pope identifies, in the dislocated polis based on individualism, consumerism and relativism, a situation that disrupts what he calls “true human ecology”. In this setting, the Pope says in a reflection that has gained prophetic traction since 1991:

“People are discouraged from creating the proper conditions for human reproduction and are led to consider themselves and their lives as a series of sensations to be experienced rather than as a work to be accomplished. The result is a lack of freedom, which causes a person to reject a commitment to enter into a stable relationship with another person and to bring children into the world, or which leads people to consider children as one of the many "things" which an individual can have or not have, according to taste, and which compete with other possibilities.”

John Paul II here deftly sets the importance of the dignity and preciousness of human life within the matrix of a theology and sociology of family, alongside considerations of social, economic and cultural justice.

He takes aim at unbridled consumerism, “absolutised economic” ambition and dehumanised notions of efficiency and progress, which become overbearing and oppressive to human beings in both micro and macro cultural settings.

John Paul II would of course go on to expand and deepen his exposition of the “culture of life” in his weighty and comprehensive 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (the Gospel of Life). In this, along with clarifying Catholic teaching on particular bioethical issues, he sets these issues against the vast canvas of scriptural interpretation, international politics, cultural analysis and drills down into the spiritual and personal dimensions of the struggle to defend and promote the dignity of human life at all its stages of development, ability and fragility.

The Thomas More Centre today reaffirms its sensitivity and commitment to the centrality of the “culture of life” in the creative task of encouraging intellectual, personal and spiritual formation. It is also aware that so many new challenges have arisen since the witness and thought of the Polish pontiff strode across the globe.

We are mindful of the teaching of the recent two popes, Benedict XVI and Francis, who remind us that formation in the “culture of life” necessarily involves solidarity, humility and an acute ear which hears the plight of those oppressed by the forces that help to mould attitudes, and practices that destroy life.

Pope Benedict insisted that it is witness and charity that will speak the loudest. In an address to the Pontifical Academy for Life in 2007, Benedict said that while it was important to work with “professionals, doctors and lawyers, to engage them to elaborate a competent judgment of conscience, and if need be, also a courageous objection of conscience ... an equal need rises from the basic level for families and parish communities in the process of the formation of youth and adults.”

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre