The following comes from an August 5 Catholic News Agency article:

Too many social trends treat the human person as nothing sacred, but Catholic pro-life efforts are part of an effort to change that, Los Angeles’ Archbishop Jose Gomez said last Wednesday.

“The beautiful truth [is] that every human life matters — because every human life is sacred and created by the loving plan of God,” the archbishop said in his keynote speech at the National Diocesan Pro-Life Leadership Conference in Kansas City, Kansas.

He noted such grave crimes against human life as widespread abortion, experimentation with human embryos, and the euthanasia of the elderly and the sick.

“In a society without God, the human person becomes ‘nothing special,’ nothing sacred. The value of a human life is judged according to whether it is ‘productive’ or ‘efficient’,” he said. “Without God we don’t know who we are, or where we come from, or what we are here for.”

He credited God’s grace for a pro-life victory in California, when the state legislature withdrew a bill to legalize assisted suicide. He also credited the victory to a coalition of doctors and health care professionals, advocates for the disabled, advocates for the poor, and African-American and immigrant community leaders.

He explained that assisted suicide had “dangerous implications” for the poor and those without adequate health care access.

Archbishop Gomez also denounced the injustice of racial discrimination, unemployment, homelessness, environmental pollution, bad prison conditions, and the death penalty.

He particularly noted injustices related to immigration, such as family detention, deportation, and deaths in the desert of people trying to enter the U.S.

However, he said that these issues are not all equal.

“The fundamental injustice in our society is the killing of innocent unborn life through abortion and the killing of the sick and defenseless through euthanasia and assisted suicide,” he said.

“If the child in the womb has no right to be born, if the sick and the old have no right to be taken care of — then there is no solid foundation to defend anyone’s human rights.”