30 Years Ago Today, John Paul II Issued His Boldest Battle Cry for Life
National Catholic Register, 25 March 2025
The message of the landmark encyclical, ‘Evangelium Vitae’ is needed now more than ever.
The publication of Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) 30 years ago marked a high-water mark of the pontificate of St. John Paul the Great.
Signed on the Solemnity of the Annunciation (March 25, 1995), the 11th of his 14 encyclicals was a publishing sensation. Paperback copies of the text appeared at supermarket checkouts. Newsweek gave it a cover story in which religion editor Kenneth Woodward praised Evangelium Vitae as the “clearest, most impassioned and most commanding encyclical of the pontificate,” John Paul’s “signature statement” in history.
John Paul was riding high in March 1995.
In the summer of 1994, he had waged a high-profile battle against the Clinton administration, successfully opposing the attempt to make abortion a worldwide human right at the U.N. International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. In the fall, he published Crossing the Threshold of Hope, an interview book that became a massive bestseller all over the world, prompting millions of conversations about the fundamental questions of life, presented by a persuasive Christian disciple.
The year closed with John Paul named Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1994. In January 1995 he went to Manila for the largest World Youth Day ever. Thus, when Evangelium Vitae was issued, John Paul commanded the world’s attention in a singular way.
Synodal for Its Time
Providence was at work in that, for Evangelium Vitae was not rushed out to take advantage of a favorable environment. Although the phrase was not fashionable at the time, the encyclical was very “synodal,” the fruit of a four-year process in which the Holy Father wrote to every bishop in the world, inviting contributions to the text. That consultation followed the process that led to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), the most “synodal” text in the history of the Church, involving six years of worldwide consultations and thousands of concrete suggestions and amendments.
Papal biographer George Weigel considered Evangelium Vitae to be the final panel of an encyclical triptych on the “moral foundations of the free and virtuous society.” They presented a new Christian charter for the world after the Cold War, provided by one of the architects of the defeat of communism.
In Centesimus Annus (1991), John Paul outlined the reason why freedom was the proper arrangement for politics and economics, grounded in a culture that understood the dignity of the human person. In Veritatis Splendor (1993), he argued that skeptical relativism could not provide an adequate foundation, neither for a free society nor to guide individual moral action. Finally, in Evangelium Vitae, the Holy Father directly addressed the attacks on human life prevalent in the democracies.
The triptych, along with the Catechism and Fides et Ratio (1998), made the 1990s the most wide-ranging and comprehensive decade of teaching in the history of the papacy. Evangelium Vitae came at its midpoint.
Doctrinal Affirmations and Applications
John Paul’s encyclical solemnly affirmed Catholic doctrine against murder, abortion and euthanasia. That teaching was not new, but John Paul invoked the fullness of his teaching authority, but without invoking the specific form of an infallible ex cathedra definition. Rather than a narrow doctrinal affirmation, Evangelium Vitae presented a broad vision of human life as always good, a vision rooted in the whole of the biblical witness.
Two specific applications of that doctrine were new.
Regarding capital punishment, the Catholic tradition taught that criminal punishment had two goals — the safety of society and just retribution for the evil done. Capital punishment had both purposes. The Catechism, while presenting that tradition, emphasized the safety of society in its treatment of the death penalty.
In Evangelium Vitae, John Paul did not address the retributive aspect, and narrowed the public safety justification for capital punishment to cases of “absolute necessity,” noting that “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.” The Catechism was subsequently revised in its official Latin text (1995) to include the teaching of the encyclical.
Weigel noted that Evangelium Vitae reflected “Karol Wojtyła’s experience of, and loathing for, the state’s power of execution.” He had lived his entire adult life under the twin tyrannies of Nazism and communism.
Continue reading at the National Catholic Register.