What Is Pro-Life Education?
Any student attending a Newman Guide institution can immediately discern a departure from the “Culture of Death” that pervades secular society and most college campuses.
In my experience, students and educators in faithful Catholic education are more joyful, generous, pro-family, and committed to pro-life values, behaviors, and public policies.
Catholic educators hoping to replicate such pro-life commitment may wonder where to begin. The influence and witness of a pro-life student club is laudable. A school leader’s pronouncements can help form the ethos of an institution. But these alone are not sufficient.
A pervasively pro-life education must be more.
Below are four marks of pro-life education. Not surprisingly, they align with The Cardinal Newman Society’s Principles of Catholic Identity in Education, which synthesize the main themes across Vatican teachings on Catholic education. If education is pro-life, it imparts respect for human life and an understanding of human dignity. Its graduates are motivated to protect and serve human life at all stages.
- Rooted in Catholic anthropology
Understanding the human person—What is man? For what purpose was man created?—is necessary for an integral Catholic education. It’s also necessary for a pro-life education.
In today’s culture, we greatly need graduates of Catholic education who can persuasively explain the dignity of human life and defend God’s divine authority to govern conception, birth, and death. Catholic anthropology provides students the only solid foundation for their pro-life views, in contrast to flimsy political and rights-based arguments rooted in Enlightenment thinking.
For Catholics, human dignity is found in our unique calling to be united with God. It is for this that we were made in His image with the gift of reason, by which we understand deeply, love deeply, and devote ourselves freely to Him. We know ourselves best by contemplating God, man’s beginning and final end:
In today’s pluralistic world, the Catholic educator must consciously inspire his or her activity with the Christian concept of the person, in communion with the Magisterium of the Church. It is a concept that includes a defense of human rights, but also attributes to the human person the dignity of a child of God; it attributes the fullest liberty, freed from sin itself by Christ, the most exalted destiny, which is the definitive and total possession of God Himself, through love. (Lay Catholics in Schools: Witnesses to Faith, 18)
A pro-life education does not simply assert a person’s right to happiness or a right to be free from violation, which pits the mother against her child. It teaches the justice and freedom of conforming to God’s will, which is our salvation in Jesus Christ. This is why a mother, even in a crisis pregnancy, has no right to end the life of her child—and why the life of every person, regardless of age or circumstance, is most precious to God.
Catholic anthropology also affirms that God made humans male and female, oriented toward union in marriage. The fruit of that marriage is family. Abortion, then, is a denial of the human love to which God calls every parent and spouse and a sin against marriage.
- Aimed toward salvation
“Catholic education is an expression of the Church’s mission of salvation and an instrument of evangelization: to make disciples of Christ and to teach them to observe all that He has commanded.” Thus begins the Principles of Catholic Identity in Education.
Recognizing that every human life has priceless value and dignity, because it is intended for communion with God, a Newman Guide Recommended institution must not only tend to the souls of its students but also teach them to love every other person. Faithful Catholic education—pro-life education—teaches students to respect every person’s equal dignity while refusing to measure worth according to age, disability, race, or other accidental traits.
A faithfully Catholic, pro-life education also guides students to make salvation their priority, even over physical suffering or death. A pro-life education should include much prayer for the souls of those who have gravely sinned by participating in abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization, or other signs against marriage and children. Although babies are the bodily victims of abortion, we should be most concerned by the mortal sin of abortion, putting thousands of souls at the risk of Hell.
A Catholic, pro-life education teaches the wages of sin and the opportunity for redemption in Confession. We rely on our graduates to lead those wounded by sin to His mercy, which is what society needs to overcome the Culture of Death.
- Pro-life across the curriculum
A Catholic education is distinguished by its integration of the truths of revelation and the insights of our Catholic faith—including our understanding of the dignity of human life—within every course of study.
Pro-life themes can be addressed directly in catechesis and theology courses by reading Church documents on abortion, in literature with themes about human dignity, in history courses considering the politics of slavery, in civics courses concerning natural law and civil rights, and so on. Ethics courses across the curriculum teach respect for human dignity.
There are plenty of other ways to creatively instill pro-life values in students.
Pro-life essay and speaking competitions, guest lectures, research papers, field trips to pro-life organizations, etc. are great educational opportunities. A pro-life institution will generously support pro-life clubs, services, and fundraisers for mothers in crisis pregnancies, attending pro-life rallies and marches, and other student activities.
Catholic education should include substantial prayer for the lives of the unborn, the well-being of their mothers and fathers, the conversion of those who promote or engage in abortion, and God’s mercy upon those who have died in a state of mortal sin. Such prayer can be incorporated throughout the day, in Masses, and special prayer services.
- Critical of the Culture of Death
Although Catholic educators need to be cautious about turning education toward a social or political agenda, Catholic education is tasked with “a critical, systematic transmission of culture in the light of faith and the bringing forth of the power of Christian virtue by the integration of culture with faith and of faith with living” (The Catholic School, 49).
All education transmits to students the culture in which they live. Catholic education, however, which is ordered to the higher culture of God’s Kingdom, maintains a critical perspective on human culture with an eye toward building the Kingdom. It is appropriate that faithful Catholic educators display disgust with abortion and other threats to innocent life.
Pope St. John Paul II writes, “If need be, a Catholic University must have the courage to speak uncomfortable truths which do not please public opinion, but which are necessary to safeguard the authentic good of society” (Ex corde Ecclesiae, 32).
Scholarly research and publication can contribute greatly to the pro-life effort. Catholic scholars are called to “a study of serious contemporary problems in areas such as the dignity of human life…” (Ex corde Ecclesiae, 32).
A Newman Guide education strives to form students to fulfill God’s calling in them, to know Him and His creation, and to serve Him in this life and the next. When they do this, they provide the very best of pro-life education.