debate

The Method to Cultivate Life

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

The recent 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s affirmation of a Constitutional right to abortion in Roe vs Wade was a reminder of how the dominant culture has successfully resisted the efforts of the pro-life movement. The annual March for Life has become an “institutionalized” protest and does not pose any surprising threat to the dominance of the pro-abortion forces. On the other hand, this year the pro-life movement hopes that President George W Bush and a Republican majority in Congress will finally make it possible to bring about significant progress for the cause, leading to the panicked reaction of the pro-choice movement. Still, we should not forget that, however important, such a political victory will not change the situation which gave rise to the problem to begin with. What is needed is the creation of a culture of life, that is, a culture where the immeasurable value of human life is structured into the very way reality is perceived and judged. It is a change in judgment, not political action, which creates culture.

It is not surprising that abortion periodically surfaces as the ultimately decisive issue in the political expressions of our current cultural clashes. Culture is how we cultivate life–how we experience, value, and nourish it. The struggle against abortion is thus a crucial element of that dramatic encounter between faith and the dominant culture that the Holy Father and the bishops have identified as an essential part of a “new evangelization.” The term “evangelization of culture” has thus become popular, so it is important to understand what exactly it entails.

The most pivotal point to remember is that we have no need to design methods for the evangelization of culture that best suit our particular circumstances. The method is already given in the very Revelation of the Gospel. That is why it is so important to understand well the historical origins of our faith and the way it spread around the world at that time.

Revelation is not the disclosure of religious, moral, philosophical, or political information. It is an event. It is something that happens, that occurs. It happened first in a particular place at a particular time. When it happened, it was not the result of human ingenuity or effort. Evangelization occurs when what happened then is proclaimed and perceived as something happening now. The event is absolutely the same, and it always happens the same way; the method is always the same. The method is “dictated” by the event itself. The event creates its own method of transmission, so to speak. The event proclaimed by the Gospel is, of course, the Incarnation, the becoming flesh, (the “stuff” of which human life is made) of the Mystery of God in Christ. Evangelization occurs when an encounter with this event (not just information about it!) is proposed as possible to those who enter into a particular personal relationship with those for whom this event has occurred, a relationship “in the flesh.” The relationship through which evangelization occurs is that of a personal following. “Come and see,” Jesus said to the first apostles who asked Him where they could find Him, where He “stayed.” “Follow me,” he says to the young man who asked Him what to do to find what his heart desired. This is the method through which the Revelation of the Mystery has occurred since Abraham.

The following through which evangelization takes place is a form of belonging. This is a “belonging” created by the attraction of friendship, the attraction of a “being with,” of a shared destiny, of the experience of communion.

This is exactly how culture is born. “A cultural expression is always born of a belonging,” Father Giussani reminds us. “It flows out of that to which one belongs” through the experience of following. It begins to grow long before we are fully conscious of it (cf “Presa di coscienza di un cristiano oggi” in L’uomo e il suo destino, Genova, 1999, Marietti). That is why faith, which is the affirmation of the Presence that enters into our world through the event of the Incarnation, always generates a cultural expression. When it fails to do so it is because the experience of the event is not present, and the Gospel has been reduced to theory, sentimentality, legalism, or politics. As Pope John Paul II has insisted, “A faith which does not become culture is a faith not fully received, not entirely thought through, not faithfully lived” (cf Address to the “Congress of Ecclesial Movements for Cultural Involvement,”1982)