Archbishop Lori says attacks on life, liberty directly linked

There is an inherent connection between the right to life and liberty, said Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, and the faithful must be vigilant in defending against secularist attacks on both.

We must recognize “that a culture of life is also a culture of freedom and that a culture of death is a culture of oppression, indeed a dictatorship of relativism,” he stated.

Archbishop Lori delivered his remarks in his homily for the Oct. 14 Mass for Life and Liberty, before an overflowing congregation at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.

The Mass was part of a pilgrimage that drew both local attendees and groups from out of state. The pilgrimage also included Eucharistic adoration and the recitation of a Rosary to begin a Novena for Life and Liberty.

“Indeed, wisdom tells us that the decisions facing us these days are not just economic,” said the archbishop. “Instead, they go right to the heart of who we are, and they go right to the heart of our freedom to put into practice what we know to be true.”

“For some time now, both life and liberty have been under assault by an overarching godless secularism, replete with power and money but sadly lacking in wisdom, both human and divine,” he observed.

Archbishop Lori warned that this secularism “relentlessly seeks to marginalize the place of faith in our society.”

“In rejecting the wisdom of religious faith, in seeking to contain and to diminish it, secularism has at the same time foolishly devalued human life,” he told the congregation. “When man and woman are no longer perceived to be created in the image of God, then sooner or later their lives and their liberties become dispensable.”

For four decades the secular culture has ignored science, reason and faith in allowing for unborn human life to be killed by abortion, he said, and now the “secularist assault on human life” is turning towards the elderly and terminally ill through efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide. [More]

SOURCE

CNA/EWTN News