KINDER'S COMMENTARY: POPE OFFERS WELL-REASONED THOUGHTS ON LIFE

Fruitland's Bavarian Halle has once again proved itself among Cape Girardeau County's finest facilities for hosting large meetings and celebrations. The good and dedicated people of faith who organized and promoted last weekend's "For the Love of Life and Family" conference, held in those friendly environs, should be commended. Honor to them.

Conference organizers are, however, not alone in receiving today's commendations. For a refreshing departure from the common media caricature of pro-lifers as dangerous, even murderous, fanatics, you need have looked no further than a news report on this conference broadcast by KFVS-12 in Cape Girardeau. KFVS reporter Lisa Crain visited the conference Friday evening and did some sound reporting. Her broadcast report was the very model of fair-minded honesty of the kind we would like to expect from the news media but which unfortunately, especially in the national media, we are too often denied. Honor to her.

Dropping by the conference for brief remarks Saturday afternoon, I perused tables that groaned with literature, both books and pamphlets. This pair of United Methodist eyes came to rest on a slick version of a papal encyclical published by Pope John Paul II entitled "Evangelium Vitae" ("The Gospel of Life"). Having never before read any such encyclical, but yielding to no one in my admiration for this pope, I made off with one. Rigorous and formidable in design, this papal letter is Catholic scholarship in the finest tradition and is a profound document indeed. Step by logical, inexorable step, John Paul builds his case, rather in the manner of a skilled bricklayer's carefully erecting a strong and beautifully planned wall.

Just as we need well-built brick walls, today we sorely need of the wisdom contained in John Paul's dazzling and brilliantly written encyclical, or letter. Some excerpts are worth sharing. The pope reprises his remarks delivered at Denver a couple of years ago, saying of our bloody epoch now coming to a close, "The 20th century will have been an era of massive attacks on life, an endless series of wars and a continual taking of innocent human life. False prophets and false teachers have had the greatest success."

Decrying a "war of the powerful against the weak" and warning of "a conspiracy against life," John Paul tellingly observes: "Prenatal diagnosis, which presents no moral objections if carried out in order to identify the medical treatment ... needed by the child in the womb, all too often becomes an opportunity for proposing and procuring an abortion. This is eugenic abortion, ... which accepts life only under certain conditions and rejects it when it is affected by any limitation, handicap or illness.

"Following this same logic, the point has been reached where the most basic care, even nourishment, is denied to babies born with serious handicaps or illnesses. The contemporary scene, moreover, is becoming even more alarming by reason of the proposals, advanced here and there, to justify even infanticide , following the same arguments used to justify the right to abortion. In this way, we revert to a state of barbarism which one had hoped would be left behind forever." (Emphasis original.)

A few such brief excerpts can only begin to suggest the majesty of John Paul's work, the timeless beauty of his insights. In our Kevorkianized culture, "Evangelium Vitae" is an important and enormously refreshing antidote.

Today, as always, the forces of darkness contend against the forces of light. And in that vast and nearly impenetrable darkness, John Paul II and his wisdom stand out like a tenfold beacon in the night. Honor to him.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.