CV NEWS FEED // On March 25, the Solemnity of the Annunciation and the 30th anniversary of the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the Vatican Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life published a pastoral framework for protecting human life and dignity.
Titled “Life is Always a Good,” the framework is a response to violations of human dignity around the globe, according to the Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life. The website adds that it is the result of an ongoing dialogue with bishops.
The guide is composed of 10 main sections, including themes for pastors to address, means of instructing the faithful, and the mission of spreading hope.
It first says that the pastor should identify challenges to the sanctity of life. Next, he should envision what a better future looks like, followed by setting general and specific goals. After that, he should carry out specific lines of action to achieve his goals, setting up a program to continue those objectives and a way to ensure that the program is meeting them.
“In a time marked by extremely serious violations of human dignity,” Cardinal Kevin Farrell wrote in a presentation for the framework, “with many countries afflicted by wars and all sorts of violence — especially against women, children before and after birth, adolescents, people with disabilities, the elderly, the poor and migrants — we must forge a genuine Pastoral Care of Human Life to put into practice what is also reiterated in the recent Declaration Dignitas Infinita.”
The last section of the framework, titled “Mission: Sow ‘Seeds of Hope,’” offers a step-by-step guideline for discerning how to protect life on a diocesan and a parish level.
In the framework’s presentation, Cardinal Farrell encouraged bishops and priests to read the framework in order to help form workers, educators, teachers, parents, young people, and children in understanding the dignity of human life.
The cardinal also spotlighted Pope Francis’ views on how abortion, euthanasia, and other human rights abuses are attacks on life.
“The plague of abortion is an attack on life,” the Pope said to the Science and Life Association in 2015. “Allowing our brothers and sisters to die on boats in the strait in Sicily is an attack on life. Dying on the job because the minimum safety standards are not respected is an attack on life. Death from malnutrition is an attack on life. Terrorism, war, violence; so is euthanasia. Loving life means always taking care of the other, wanting the best for him, cultivating and respecting her transcendent dignity.”
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