Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday recalled the Second Vatican Council’s condemnation of abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide as acts “against life itself,” and said Catholics should use that teaching to judge today’s political projects.
The pope spoke at his general audience in St. Peter’s Square, continuing a series of catecheses on Vatican II.
He turned to the chapter of Gaudium et Spes on “the human community” and quoted the council’s list of “practical consequences of greater urgency,” beginning with respect for the human person.
“Everything that is opposed to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, and even voluntary suicide; everything that violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilations, tortures inflicted on body and mind, psychological coercion; everything that offends human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary arrests, deportations, slavery, prostitution, the trafficking of women and young people, or also the ignominious conditions of work, in which workers are treated as mere instruments of profit and not as free and responsible persons: all these things and others like them are certainly shameful,” he said, citing Gaudium et Spes 27.
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Leo said the council’s vision of humanity as a “community of persons” still guides discernment.
“It helps us all to carry out personal and communal discernment, to responsibly evaluate today’s social and political projects, according to the criteria of the dignity of the human person, social justice, and free participation in building the common good,” he said. “Because the future of humanity depends on the commitment of each one to collaborate with God and with brothers in building a more human world.”
He also warned that technology and artificial intelligence can make relationships “increasingly less personal, more virtual,” and that people may grow used to “delegating to algorithms decisions that belong only to the human conscience.”
Those concerns appear as well in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which says AI “threatens to normalise an anti-human vision” and criticizes a “futuristic vision of an ‘enhanced human being’ or ‘human-machine hybrid.’”
“Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today,” the encyclical says. “Every thing that appears as a ‘limit’ – incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability – tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens it to relationship.”
The pope repeated the council’s teaching that “the human person, who by his very nature has absolute need of social life, is and must be the principle, subject, and end of all social institutions.” He also cited its call to overcome “every form of discrimination in the fundamental rights of the person.”
By placing abortion and euthanasia with homicide and genocide as things opposed to life itself, Pope Leo restated the Church’s judgment that those acts are not private medical options. He tied that judgment to politics: social programs, he said, are to be measured by whether they protect the dignity of the human person and the common good.
