Reverencing Life

Those of us who were blessed to know Jim Skerl ’74 during his all-too-short sojourn on this earth recall his great love for those around him. Jim had the rare ability to make anyone who talked with him feel as though she or he was the most important person in the world.

Because in those moments, that person was.

In the Labre Ministry to the Homeless on Sunday nights, Jim made it a point that volunteers FIRST asked the name of any person they met. While Ignatians brought food, hygiene kits, and socks to those on the streets, it was ultimately the conversations that ensued, and the friendships that developed, that mattered. 

On Labre, Jim didn’t see “homeless people,” he saw “friends living on the streets”—with the emphasis of “friends.” So much so that he welcomed many of the folks he would visit on the streets to his wedding. 

In his life, Jim was a disciple of Jesus who saw all of us the way God does—as people endowed with dignity, worth, and importance. He saw everyone, especially those who struggled, as children of God: people to be held in the highest esteem. People to be shown respect.

October is Respect Life Month in the Catholic Church in the United States. Instituted in 1973 in the wake of the tragic Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion across the country, the month is meant to be one of prayer, awareness, and action on behalf of those whose lives are imperiled by what has been called the “Culture of Death.”

The month of October was selected so that Catholics, exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and Catholic Social Teaching imperative to promote “Family, Community, and Participation,” could witness to the dignity of every human life from “womb to tomb” as they and their fellow citizens prepared to take to the voting booths in early November.

Protecting babies in their mothers’ wombs, supporting those mothers—ensuring that they receive adequate and appropriate health care—and providing children with education and protection in their neighborhoods are simply issues of justice. So too are preserving the rights of workers, minority populations, and migrants (who, Pope Leo said last Sunday, should not face "the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination”). Justice means protecting the lives of the elderly and seriously ill…and even criminals. Justice means giving people—as Plato said—“their due,” the basic rights they are owed as human beings.

Respect Life Month is a call to justice: it is a call to recognize each other’s rights, starting with the fundamental and intrinsic right to life. THAT right, after all, is the sine qua non of all other rights: if we don’t guarantee that one, any other “rights” our government “protects” are, at best, arbitrary. 

As we answer this call, we do well to remember the nature of justice. It is the virtue which helps us live together in society—it says that I don’t have to like you, but I do need to respect your rights. 

Justice is essential. 

As Christians, we Catholics are required not only to personally live justly, but to prophetically call our fellow citizens to do the same: even when that comes at a social cost. “A prophet is not welcomed in his own home town” Jesus warned (Lk 4:24). But, He did remind us that those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness” are “blessed” and will be “satisfied” (Mt 5:6). 

But more than that, we are called to “love one another” as Jesus loved us (Jn 13:34). If justice is the minimum we must do for each other, love (agape, caritas, “charity”—the unconditional, self-sacrificing love of God) calls us to a higher standard. So while we call others to, in justice, “respect” the lives of those around them, we Catholics are called to more.

Italian-German theologian, Romano Guardini—favorite of Popes Benedict XVI and Francis—equated the term “respect” with “reverence” when one speaks of the human person (who is made, we recall, in the image of God). For Guardini, “the qualities of the person demand reverence: his dignity, freedom, and nobility.” As Catholics, showing reverence for others we meet in everyday life is, for him, the very definition of respect.

As we call our nation to respect the rights of all, especially the poor and vulnerable, we are called to a higher standard: to reverence. We need to see the inestimable worth of everyone in our lives—without exception—knowing that each reflects in her or his own unique way, the Lord. This changes the way we see people, of course. We see people as not merely to be tolerated, but positively cherished! It also makes calling our neighbors to treat others with justice more credible. Our reverence to those around us provides the “why” for others being just to them.

There are no accidents in God’s Providence. October—“Respect (or, in our re-visioning, “Reverence”) Life Month” begins with the Feast of St Therese of Lisieux who, we recall, was named a Doctor of the Church for her “Little Way.” Calling on us to “[m]iss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love” the Little Flower reminds us that loving our neighbor need not be demonstrated in heroic gestures, but in great love. And what is reverence, but love?

Respect Life Month, the month in which Jim Skerl entered eternity, ends with Halloween—the vigil of All Saints Day—a reminder of our ultimate destiny. It also serves as a reminder that human beings are made for Heaven—the fullness of God’s Kingdom, the place to which we are heirs (Rom 8:17). That makes everyone royalty: worthy of dignity, of respect,

Of reverence.

 

A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H.