God is the author of every human life. He is its protector from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death. He is the One who sustains it at every point in between. Mary visits Elizabeth because both have first been visited by God with the gift of new life. Neither woman resorts to contraception or abortion when, in today’s language, they might have done so: to save themselves social embarrassment or physical or mental health problems. For them, the will of God to create human life had absolute priority. Had they not believed in God, their own will would have been their only measure, and each child would have owed its life or its death to its mother alone.

Are there situations of great complexity around the beginning and end of human life? Of course there are. Do they merit all our compassion and understanding? Of course they do. Is to deprive a human being of life, be it through contraception, abortion or euthanasia, ever the real solution? Of course it is not. Every human life is of God, is a gift of God, is a sign of God, is in the image and likeness of God. For every person, and not just for John or Jesus, God has a unique purpose in His plan of creation and redemption. No-one else can serve that purpose. To prevent or end life without reference to God is to substitute self for God, is to hijack God’s purposes. Responsible parenthood does not mean responsibility before the parents themselves, but their responsibility before God. It means openness to and discernment of the will of God and obedience in keeping it.

The encounter between Elizabeth and Mary is full of the presence and joy of the Spirit of God, the creator Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. They are both exultant with the natural joy of motherhood and with the supernatural joy with which the Spirit invests it. Not everyone believes in God, or in the Spirit of God, but that does not stop the Spirit Himself from rejoicing in the new life He has created. Not everyone receives graces like the Annunciation from an Archangel as both Mary and Elizabeth’s husband, Zechariah, did, but that does not mean that the Spirit does not have a purpose for creating every new life when and where He chooses, even in awkward circumstances like those of Mary or at an awkward time of life as in the case of Elizabeth.

There seems to be abroad today a pathology of saying no to life, as if future human beings were the enemy of those present, or as if sterility and sterilisation were enlightened virtues of modernity, or as if succumbing to death were the remedy for the suffering of which death itself is the ultimate cause. This pathology of no seems to express another pathology, the pathology against self-giving and self-sacrifice. Welcoming new life is costly in almost every way you can think of. It demands money, time, inconvenience, effort – sometimes heroic effort -, and most of all selfless love. It gets in the way of comfort, pleasure, freedom to do as you like, career and so many of what I might call the “self-values” promoted by our times. Caring compassionately for the dying can be even more costly in all these same ways. The no to suffering is resolved in favour of death instead of summoning the deepest moral and spiritual resources of charity to care, to watch and pray. The pain of Mary as she stood at the foot of the Cross was considerably greater than the pain of childbirth. Her example of steadfast and pure love for Jesus whom She would surely have rather seen free of suffering surely offers us the model of abiding patiently and attentively the will of God for the moment of Her Son’s death. The moment of death, like the moment of conception, belongs to the mysterious yet perfect timing of the Lord of Life.

The truth in all these things is that, for centuries now, Western society has built a crescendo of emancipation from God. Its philosophical roots lie most emblematically, perhaps, in the words of Rene Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” It’s not that I am because I have been created by God, but simply because I can think. Man’s thoughts, not God’s truth, become his raison d’etre. As the positive and social sciences began systematically to remove God from their deliberations, and as technology and the industrial revolution developed, man became more and more convinced that the future was a matter of his own decisions, his own thought systems. He could create a new and better world by his own power and without God. The French Revolution dethroned God from Notre Dame Cathedral and replaced Him with the goddess of Reason. Our salvation is not faith in God but the power of our own reason and freedom. Man is his own god and the arbiter of his own life and death.

But without the true God, as Vatican II teaches, man must remain an enigma to himself in his deepest being. Without God, we cannot answer the most fundamental questions about the origin, meaning and destiny of human life. Voltaire, another French philosopher, said that the only reason we need law in society is because, without it, man is a wolf to his fellow man. And this devouring thrust in society is almost literally embodied in abortion and euthanasia, in the demeaning of the human being in gender ideology, people trafficking, in pornography and in the whole murky world of narcotics. Without God, man loses the dignity of his personhood and subjectivity. He becomes an object to devour, to buy and sell, to dispose of like garbage, a curse which Pope Francis repeatedly termed the “throw-away culture.”

This is why the preaching of the Gospel of Life, of the Cross, of Love is so urgent in our time. For only God, through the truth and grace of His crucified and risen Son, can bring good out of the terrible mess we are in today. By His grace, we are of course blessed to witness still great and heroic good in so many ways and places across the world and in our own back yard. But the wolf I mentioned is most certainly at the door and will not be tamed until our society returns to God with a humble and contrite heart. With Mary, we can certainly sing that God will, in the end, scatter the proud in the thoughts of their hearts and bring down the mighty from their thrones. And Christ did warn us that, in the world you will have trouble, but be brave, for I have conquered the world. In the face of the odds against the Gospel of Life, we can lose heart and feel that the cause is lost. But it isn’t and we must not let Satan think that we are done for. So, on this Feast of the Visitation, we ask the Lord and His Mother to visit our hearts and visit our world again today. Christ came that we might have life and have it in abundance. Let us overcome the pathologies of no to life with the therapy of the Cross of Jesus and recommit ourselves again courageously and whole-heartedly to the Gospel of Eternal Life.