The path to attainment of the common good and peace is “above all that of respect for human life in all its many aspects, beginning with its conception, through its development and up to its natural end,” Pope Benedict XVI has said. “True peacemakers, then, are those who love, defend and promote human life in all its dimensions . . . Anyone who loves peace cannot tolerate attacks and crimes against life.”
In his message for World Day of Peace yesterday, he said: “Those who insufficiently value human life and, in consequence, support among other things the liberalisation of abortion, perhaps do not realise that in this way they are proposing the pursuit of a false peace. The flight from responsibility, which degrades human persons, and even more so the killing of a defenceless and innocent being, will never be able to produce happiness or peace.
“Indeed how could one claim to bring about peace, the integral development of peoples or even the protection of the environment without defending the life of those who are weakest, beginning with the unborn. Every offence against life, especially at its beginning, inevitably causes irreparable damage to development, peace and the environment.”
Neither is it just “to introduce surreptitiously into legislation false rights or freedoms which, on the basis of a reductive and relativistic view of human beings and the clever use of ambiguous expressions aimed at promoting a supposed right to abortion and euthanasia, pose a threat to the fundamental right to life,” he said. “There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union; such attempts actually harm and help to destabilise marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society.”
Such principles are “not truths of faith . . .They are inscribed in human nature itself,” he said.
