Commentary: Defending life is a culture war worth fighting

February 4, 2019 CNA Daily News News Briefs 1 Print

Washington D.C., Feb 4, 2019 / 04:48 pm (CNA).- In a radio interview last week, the embattled governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, outlined his support for a controversial state abortion bill. Speaking about the bill, he outlined a “discussion” about the fate of children who survived in-labor abortions, appearing to many to support to a measure that would offer infanticide by another name.

Northam remains in the news for other reasons. But the weight of his comments, and the unexpectedly transparent image they offer of “pro-choice” ambitions, will not disappear from the public agenda.

Scientific fact, not just consensus, has long since established that a new life begins at conception.

That children in the womb are “alive” is not a matter of scientific dispute. Leaving aside the bedrock argument that each new zygote possesses a unique genetic code, from the earliest weeks of pregnancy, demonstrable signs of life in a developing baby are obvious: brain function, heartbeat, functioning nervous system are all detectable at early gestational ages.

Medical advances now mean that children can, and routinely do, survive outside the womb at ever earlier gestational ages. Birth at 26 weeks, less than two-thirds of the way through pregnancy, now comes with a near 80% chance of survival.

In the face of these facts, the pro-abortion argument is no longer about about whether developing unborn children are human beings – if it ever really was – but about which people are “persons,” with lives deserving of legal protection.

Personhood was recognized as the essential criterion in the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, in which Justice Blackman conceded that the argument for legal abortion collapses if the unborn child is a person under law.

Thanks to science, dividing human life from human personhood is the last philosophical refuge of the pro-abortion lobby, and one with even darker implications than denying that unborn life exists  in the first place.

For sure, some rights are qualified by our ability to exercise them. Children do not attain full exercise of their rights, like voting, until a certain age, though this does not mitigate their legal personhood. The founding dogma of our nation includes certain “inalienable rights,” the first of which is life.

But if the right to life is not inalienable from conception itself, when then is it acquired?

Popular sentiment, at least among media and cultural elites, now places the right to life as a consequence of birth. But in our medical age, what does that even mean?

The media has no shortage of coverage of babies “born twice” thanks to life-saving prenatal surgery outside the womb: which birth is supposed to confer personhood under law?

If the first, does the baby retain its new rights when it returns to the womb? Most worryingly – can the right to life be lost once attained?

If it is the second, does the child being operated on outside the womb not actually exist in law, and what exactly is different about the second birth – other than the intention of the mother to give birth?

What made Northam’s remarks so chilling was the implication that in some circumstances, a newborn baby might be considered a non-person with regards to the right to life, until mother and doctors had finished “discussing” the fact of his live birth. Personhood, it seems, would be conferred only if they reached consensus that the wriggling, squirming, “comfortably” swaddled, inconvenient newborn child should be accomodated.

Northam showed a terrible kind of honesty by implicitly recognizing that it isn’t the fact of birth but the intention of the mother to give birth that matters to some. He also demonstrated that for many on the “pro-choice” side of the debate, some children are simply “un-viable,” as lives or as persons, in or out of the womb.

In the context of a child already born, as in Northam’s example, the argument against life is clear: some people are simply too disabled to be recognized as people.

In Iceland, children with Down syndrome children are disappearing as a result of enhanced screening offered by their health service.

The results are often equated to “eliminating” the syndrome, such rhetoric is a chilling illustration of the equation in modern progressive thought: “Only the strong survive” has gone from a brutal evolutionary observation to a policy position.

When Roe was decided 40 years ago, the life and rights of “un-persons” in the womb could be debated in a context that was, literally, out of sight. Today this is no longer possible. Once the discussion leaves the ultrasound screen and the delivery room, it is impossible to hide the attack on life behind the rhetoric of “women’s rights.”

The march towards a cultural, legal, and moral acceptance of euthanasia has given rise to a new trend of thought, in which the value and the right to life of undisputed persons is assessed by criteria every bit as nebulous and lethal as the “health and welfare” criteria pertaining to abortion.

Examples from the Netherlands and Belgium are stark, with the elderly and infirm literally fleeing the country in fear for their lives. Persons in law they may be, but if they are old enough, sick enough, unconscious enough, they are treated as sufficiently lesser persons, in order to permit the ending of their lives – killing as curing.

Many in the Church are squeamish about being perceived as “culture warriors” or “politicians.” But the old perception of a culture war fought on grounds of conservatism vs progressivism is long out of date.

The fight isn’t about who is right and who is wrong, it’s about who lives and who dies.

In that, no one can be neutral, no voice silent, and no weapon left unused.

 

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What Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel teaches us about God’s creation, woman and man

November 15, 2022 Catholic News Agency 0
Michelangelo’s The Creation of Eve, from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, c. 1510. / null

Denver, Colo., Nov 15, 2022 / 09:00 am (CNA).

Michelangelo’s artistic masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel broke new ground in portraying the dynamic creative acts of God, but his work also depicts the combined importance of men and women through all of sacred history, art historian Elizabeth Lev has said.

“The spirit of artistic adventure led the artist to experiment with a completely new vision of creation,” Lev said Nov. 12. “He took a book that had been painted, sculpted, mosaiced, and illuminated over and over again in the history of art and created something completely new.”

She spoke at the closing keynote Saturday evening at the fall conference of the University of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. Lev teaches at the Rome campus of Duquesne University and the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. Her speech, “Creation, Complementarity, & St. John Paul II in Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling,” focused on one of the key artistic treasures of Vatican City.

The 16th-century Florentine artist Michelangelo was commissioned by Pope Julius II to paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling and the upper section of its walls. This was the artist’s focus from 1508 to 1512. He later finished the Last Judgment above the chapel altar from 1535 to 1541.

The ceiling frescoes show the creation of the heavens and the earth, the creation of Adam and Eve, their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the great flood, and the rebirth of humankind through Noah.

Lev cited St. John Paul II’s description of Michelangelo’s work in his poem “Meditations on the Book of Genesis at the Threshold of the Sistine Chapel.”

“It is the book of the origins — Genesis,” the pope said. “Here, in this chapel, Michelangelo penned it, not with words, but with the richness of piled-up colors. We enter in order to read it again, going from wonder to wonder.”

Lev reflected on the first three panels depicting the creation of the world. These show “the mighty dynamic figure of God the Father at work.”

“It’s not what God creates, it’s that God creates,” she said. Michelangelo broke ground in portraying God as “physically engaged in creation.” For Lev, this offers “a preview of the Incarnation.”

Turning to Michelangelo’s famous depiction of the Creation of Adam, Lev noted that the artist depicts “just God and the creature formed in his likeness.” Adam is shown as “somewhat listless” in contrast with God’s energy. Adam is “sentient and awake but he has no will or strength or purpose to rise,” she said. “He looks completely passive and dependent despite that incredibly beautiful form.”

“It’s God who reaches towards man,” she continued. For Lev, the outstretched finger of God makes the viewer “almost lean forward in his seat waiting for that final Act of Creation, the divine spark, the Breath of Life that will release that latent energy and allow Adam to take his place as the greatest of creations.”

“This is the joy in humanity that permeates the Renaissance,” Lev said.

Michelangelo's The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise from the Vatican's Sistine Chapel (1508-12).
Michelangelo’s The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise from the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel (1508-12).

There is academic debate over a female figure shown in the Creation of Adam. As God the Father stretches out one arm to Adam, his other arm curls around a female figure. Some have identified this figure as Wisdom, some as Mary.

Lev suggested it is best to identify this figure as Eve, both because the figure provides visual balance to Adam and because her gaze “connects her more intimately with Adam.”

The creation of Eve from Adam, depicted next on the chapel ceiling, shows Eve emerging from Adam’s side with her hands clasped in prayer, an image of the Church and the personification of Mary, the “Second Eve.”

Lev cited St. John Paul II’s 1999 homily inaugurating the newly restored Sistine Chapel, after centuries of grime and soot were removed. The pope called the chapel the “sanctuary of the theology of the human body,” alluding to his catecheses offered from 1979 to 1984. The pope suggested that Michelangelo allowed himself to be guided by the Book of Genesis’ depiction of mankind in Eden: “the man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.”

Before the fall, Lev commented, Michelangelo depicted Adam and Eve in the state of grace as “two of his most beautiful figures.”

“They are filled with dynamism. They’re buoyant. They’re luminous,” Lev said, adding that their bodies “suggest immortality.” After the fall, however, both of their bodies “lose their luminosity” and appear heavier, like a burden. Adam’s shoulder seems to force Eve into the background, “subjugating her.”

For Lev, the artistic depiction of the genealogy of Jesus Christ also deserves attention. The portrayal of the ancestors of Jesus Christ shows “a genealogy of men and women struggling from generation to generation.” These figures seem “more approachable” and “much more similar to candid family photographs.” Even though 22 women in Jesus’ genealogy are not named, Michelangelo pairs them with their husbands.

Lev noted that Michelangelo broke with artistic convention both by including mothers and by showing them as busy, everyday women “tending to toddlers, toilettes, and tasks.” His style of painting them with “incredible immediacy” adds observations of human nature: Eleazar’s wife holds the purse strings and the key to the house, and her husband looks “startled” as she surveys their son. Other depictions are “tender and intimate,” like the portrayal of the wife of Manasseh, who cradles a swaddled son while rocking an infant’s cradle.

Here, Lev drew on John Paul II’s 1995 “Letter to Women.” He wrote that womanhood and manhood are complementary at the physical, psychological, and even ontological level.

“It is only through the duality of the masculine and the feminine that the human finds full recognition,” the pope said. “To this unity of the two, God has entrusted not only the work of procreation and family life but the creation of history itself.”

Lev noted that the passing of generations “necessarily emphasizes the begetting of children.” This means that the complementarity of the sexes is essential for a population to form and for creation to continue.

In Michelangelo’s portrayal of the Last Judgment, the artist still looks back to creation but also breaks new ground. He placed Mary next to Christ, as “a foil to Christ’s sternness.”

“She is the picture of mercy gazing down towards the elect, placed by the wound in Christ’s side whence the Church sprang,” Lev said. “Mary is transfigured into the Bride of Christ, for whom he gave his life and to whom he cannot say no. She is the conduit to Christ, as Eve was the link between God and man in the creation of woman.”

For Lev, the Sistine Chapel shows the “incredible gift of creation” from the beginning of the world down through the generations, “through which all of us today are a part of that continuation of creation.”

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