CV NEWS FEED // George Weigel, the official biographer of Pope St. John Paul II, claimed during the II International Bioethics Summit in Rome that the current Pontifical Academy for Life, headed by Archbishop Vicenzo Paglia, has betrayed the original mission and vision of the Academy founded by the late pope to defend, protect, and promote a true culture of life.
Weigel delivered a keynote speech via video conference to the hundreds of participants attending the academic event organized by the International Chair of Bioethics Jérôme Lejeune in Rome. The conference was held at the Augustinianum just feet away from St. Peter’s Square on May 17 and 18.
As CatholicVote previously reported, the event was organized on the 30th anniversary of Lejeune’s dies natalis and is set to highlight “the richness, depth, timeliness and fruitfulness” of Lejeune’s work.
During the video conference, titled “St. John Paul II and Jérôme Lejeune: Two Lives at the Service of Life,” Weigel recalled that, as John Paul II “put it in a letter to Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, on the day after Dr. Lejeune was called home to the Lord,” the renowned doctor “had a ‘charism:’ a gift of God that empowered him to ’employ his profound knowledge of life and its secrets for the true good of man and of humanity, and only for that purpose.’”
“‘Jérôme Lejeune,’ John Paul continued, had become ‘one of the ardent defenders of life, especially of the life of preborn children,’” Weigel recounted.
According to Weigel, John Paul II and Lejeune shared four crucial convictions related to the defense of life:
First, the conviction that there are truths inscribed in the world and in us, truths that we can know by both philosophical and scientific reason in a searching process that can be facilitated by attending to divine revelation;
second, a clear reading of the signs of these times, in which humanity was putting itself in grave jeopardy by losing its grip on those truths, and most especially the truth that every human life is not merely an aggregate of biological materials but rather the life of a person, a spiritual being with an infinite value and an eternal destiny;
third, a firm commitment to defend the uniqueness of every human life, in whatever condition and at whatever stage of development;
and fourth, an equally firm commitment to mount that defense of life in terms that could be engaged by those who were losing their grip on the truths inscribed in nature and in us.
“It seems painfully obvious that, in the years since the deaths of these two great souls who dedicated their lives to the service to life, the threats to human dignity and the sanctity of life that Jérôme Lejeune and John Paul II strove so mightily to resist have intensified, as you have discussed over these past two days,” Weigel said.
He then celebrated that for decades, the Academy for Life and the John Paul II Institute for Life and Family “did creative, innovative work in developing a Catholic moral theology and pastoral practice capable of meeting the challenge of the 21st-century assaults on the dignity and sanctity of life.”
However, Weigel lamented that today the Academy for Life, under the leadership of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, “has published a book with the ironic title La Gioia della Vita (“The Joy of Life”), authored by theologians who can only be described honestly as dissenting from the authoritative teaching of Evangelium Vitae.”
Weigel argued that the current “anti-biblical and anti-metaphysical anthropology” displayed by the Academy’s current leadership “would have been completely foreign, indeed abhorrent, to both Jérôme Lejeune and John Paul II.”
“And as the Pontifical Academy of Life betrays its founding president, Dr. Lejeune, by publishing and promoting such an ill-informed and poorly-argued book,” Wiegel continued,
so does the reconstituted John Paul II Institute, now largely bereft of students, betray the intention of the saint and scholar who founded it, and who called Catholic moral theology to a renewal that would not surrender to the spirit of the age.
“We may hope and pray that Jérôme Lejeune’s heroic virtues will be officially recognized by the Church, so that he may join his friend, John Paul II, among the ranks of the beatified and canonized,” he concluded.
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