The Church proposes what is called a “consistent ethic of life”. It must, of course, do so because it is bound by sacred tradition to the proposition that all human beings, without any exception whatsoever, are made in the image and likeness of God and that Jesus Christ died for all human beings, without any exception whatsoever. Therefore each human person—without any exception whatsoever—is sacred and is the only creature that God wills for its own sake.
This simple fact is one that our civilization has tremendous difficulty grasping. All sorts of social and political groups have all sorts of human beings they wish to exempt from this truth—often for purely utilitarian purposes that subjugate the good of human beings to some strategic, political, or economic need. So, for instance, the good of the unborn baby is subjugated to economics and the child is killed in order to spare the parent economic hardship. Criminals deemed to have “forfeited the right to live” are put to death for the express purpose of “teaching a lesson” to others, or because it is thought to be cheaper to kill them—in short, for a utilitarian purpose. Wars in which thousands of combatants and civilians die are launched in order to obtain economic security or to extend some ideological vision. And economic systems are constructed and maintained which reduce whole populations to little more than slavery and poverty while wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a small oligarchy—because, in the final analysis, wealth and power are deemed more important than human beings.
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