{"id":586,"date":"2011-10-08T20:04:18","date_gmt":"2011-10-09T00:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/?p=586"},"modified":"2011-10-08T20:04:18","modified_gmt":"2011-10-09T00:04:18","slug":"respect-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/respect-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Respect Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

October is Respect Life Month for the Catholic Church in America.\u00a0 Life is an awesome gift from God.\u00a0 Pope John Paul II wrote the Gospel of Life <\/a>recognizing the gift.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Life is indeed a gift.\u00a0 Life is more than just existence.\u00a0 We are not just machines.\u00a0 Life is more than the biological existence we know in our human form.\u00a0 We are given an\u00a0individual\u00a0soul by God.\u00a0 No two people share a soul.\u00a0 We are unique.<\/p>\n

We are also unique individuals in our biological form.\u00a0 Life begins at conception when an egg cell and a sperm cell come together.\u00a0 At that point, a unique individual with a unique combination of genes is formed.\u00a0 At that point in time, we are entirely dependent on our human mothers for existence and nutrition.\u00a0 The fact that we are completely dependent for our physical existence does not mean we do not have rights of our own.\u00a0 Our right to life comes from God and is given at conception.\u00a0 The fetus is a gift, not an inconvenience to be eliminated.<\/p>\n

The gift of life begins at birth and continues till our natural death.\u00a0 If we respect life, we never act to\u00a0cause death<\/em> even when we are old and weak.\u00a0 That would be euthanasia (check out the paper<\/a> I wrote on euthanasia).\u00a0 When it doesn’t seem to help we are not obliged to use extraordinary means (cf. “The Ethics of Medical Research”) <\/a>but we can never act to end life.<\/p>\n

Then there is the subject of the death penalty.\u00a0 We punish a person who kills by killing\u00a0them.\u00a0 Doesn’t make sense to me. \u00a0 Yes, the Old Testament says an eye for an eye but Jesus cautions us against retaliation.\u00a0 Read more at\u00a0“Social Teaching and the Respect for Life”<\/a><\/p>\n

When we suffer life may not seem like a gift but it is indeed a precious gift from God.\u00a0 May we always respect and cherish life.<\/p>\n

Peace,<\/p>\n

Fr. Jeff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October is Respect Life Month for the Catholic Church in America.\u00a0 Life is an awesome gift from God.\u00a0 Pope John Paul II wrote the Gospel of Life recognizing the gift.\u00a0 Life is indeed a gift.\u00a0 Life is more than just existence.\u00a0 We are not just machines.\u00a0 Life is more than the biological existence we know …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Respect Life’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pMTPk-9s","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":587,"href":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions\/587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.renewaloffaith.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}