This is my penultimate address to you all as MCFL chairman, so my thoughts are valedictory.

I have finally read through Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas. Though many of us are Catholic, MCFL is non-sectarian: we welcome any person who affirms the equal dignity of each human life without exception and who recognizes that those at the margins of life (threatened by abortion and assisted suicide) demand preferential care. 

I was raised a Baptist in Arkansas. My Taiwanese mother moved us near my father’s family in Pine Bluff after his passing when I was six, and Aunt Mildred attended a small independent Baptist church in the pines. I joined the Catholic Church in 1998, not a year after I actively joined the pro-life movement. Through torturous years, while leaving my faith intact, God has wrenched me from the jingoistic folly of what I call the Catholic bubble. I am able to reaffirm even more fully the pro-life movement’s wide-open ecumenism. So if I take up some passages from Pope Leo, it is not, as it were, to pontificate. 

Catholic social doctrine is, of course, resolutely pro-life. But it also broadens our perspective in ways that become ever more urgent as we sail out farther into the post-Dobbs ocean. Threats to human dignity ramify unimaginably in an age when a technocratic oligarchy augments its power with no end in sight. The temptation they proffer, as we pro-lifers well know, is to gain control over life. The only catch: we must overlook the human cost to those on the margins. The powerful want the rest of us to learn their cruelty: of course, we are to deploy it not against them, but against our fellow sufferers. To resist that temptation, we have to reaffirm, at an ever-deeper level, our commitment to safeguard the dignity of each and every human without exception, all ideology and nationalism notwithstanding—even if it costs us dearly. So, I commend these words to our consciences: 

Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity. (Magnifica humanitas, 120)

We pro-lifers are committed to loving the least of these because we want to love each and all. That imposes a limit on us: we are no longer free simply, say, to pledge loyalty to a political party. Our interests are relativized by our responsibility to care for human dignity in each and every case. In an age of radicalized selfishness, please continue to help MCFL display the wonders of the soul to a world that needs the warmth of loving solidarity.

For the love of life,

J. David Franks, Ph.D., Chairman