THE GREAT ABSENCE :

Pope Says Modern Mankind Is Usurping 'God's Place' (Frank Bruni, August 19, 2002, NY Times)

Pope John Paul II, at the highlight event of a profoundly emotional visit to his native land, told a crowd of at least two million Poles here today that mankind was going dangerously astray by letting scientific advances and cultural liberalism eclipse God's will.

"Frequently man lives as if God did not exist, and even puts himself in God's place," the pope said, using his homily during an outdoor Mass of breathtaking dimensions to make the most pointed and topical remarks of his three-day homecoming.

"He claims for himself the Creator's right to interfere in the mystery of human life," he added, speaking in Polish and referring to a range of issues that clearly included abortion, cloning and euthanasia. "Rejecting divine law and moral principles, he openly attacks the family."

The blame for this, he went on to say, lay partly with "the noisy propaganda of liberalism, of freedom without truth or responsibility." [...]

In his homily, he deplored the way that modern civilization, in his view, "wishes to determine life through genetic manipulation and to establish the limit of death."

He said people were trying "to silence the voice of God in human hearts" and to "make God the great absence in the culture and the consciences ofpeople."

It's quite common to read in libertarian and leftist defenses of things like cloning that the opposition of Christians and other conservatives is a function of our fear of the new. That's quite accurate. I for one do fear that the world they seek to make will be a loathsome place.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 20, 2002 11:31 AM