Category Archives: Moral Theology

My two cents on Theology of the Body, part II

Posted on 8 July 2009 by | 2 Comments

See part 1 here.

2. The Principles.

Every science only extends as far as its principles. If one starts with matter, form, and privation, one can only give a scientific account of the causes and properties of mobile being. Theology of the Body begins from the phenomenological method. That is, in an attempt to meet people where they are at, it appeals to most people’s experience.

The thing is, if one begins with experience, the end will be a scientific explanation of people’s experience. No more, no less. And this is useful. But again, it is not going to answer the nitty-gritty moral questions. Questions about morality are questions about the proper ordering of man’s voluntary acts. How men experience themselves as acting persons is not the proper guide. Some metaphysics will be needed; there will have to be some understanding of what man’s final end is, what the ends of the powers of the soul are, which faculties of the soul are the most important, indeed, what makes man to be man.

The theologian Bernard Lonergan (NOTE: I am referring to the early Bernard Lonergan, when he remained a speculative Thomist; not the later Bernard Lonergan, who turned to a more phenomenological method) mentions this fact in critiquing the work of Herbert Doms, one of the theologians credited, along with Dietrich von Hildebrand, with bringing a more personalistic approach to marital morality.  Lonergan says:

…marriage is more an incorporation of the finality of sex than of sex itself. Of course, it it just the opposite that seems true to phenomenologist scrutiny, for that ignores the metaphysical principle that what is prior quoad se is posterior quoad nos, and that the more ultimate final cause enters more intimately into the nature of a thing than the more proximate…This, I think, touches upon a fundamental methodological error in the analysis presented by Dr. Doms. I agree that sex is to be distinguished from fecundity, as impotence from sterility. I agree with the validity of the question, What is the ontological significance of bisexuality [i.e., the distinction of male and female]. It is only a terminological difference when he asserts that the meaning of marriage is union and I say that the act and end of bisexuality is union, or when in different ways we both place two ends beyond this union. But when he speaks of this meaning of union as immanent, intrinsic, immediate, I distinguish: in the chronological order of human knowledge or of the development of human appreciation, the union is first; but in the ontological order the ordinations to the ends are more immanent, more intrinsic, more immediate to the union than the union itself. For what is first in the ontological constitution of a thing is not the experiential datum but, on the contrary, what is known in the last and most general act of understanding with regard to it; what is next, is the next most general understanding, etc. Thus the proximate end of bisexuality is union; but of its nature, bisexuality is an instrument of fecundity, so that the end of fecundity is more an end of bisexuality than is union… ["Finality, Love, Marriage," Theological Studies 4 (1943)]

Prof. Janet Smith also makes an allusion to this principle in her most recent defense of Christopher West.

Now, in actual practice (as far as I can tell), no TOB advocate actually remains purely at the level of phenomena. We are Catholics, and we have a moral tradition. We all know that certain things are right, and certain things are wrong. And most TOB advocates resort to metaphysical presuppositions at one time or another. For instance, many that I have been exposed to point out that the actions of the body have objective (and not just subjective) significative power. But that only proves one thing: at some point, you have to get to the nature of things. Why is contraception so often referred to as “a lie”?  Because in the nature of things, the spouses are not giving something that is proper to marriage. There is something that they are doing that does not belong to the very raison d’etre of that particular union of man and woman called marriage, a union whose form is not made by their own wills (though it is entered into by their own wills), but somehow belongs to the nature of the rational animal. In the end, it presupposes what marriage is for, and what sex is for. But the phenomena do not tell you that.

I must head off one objection: Does not St. Thomas himself say all knowledge begins in the senses?  Does not every science begin with experience?  This is true. But for St. Thomas, the senses are the beginnings (initia) of intellectual knowledge, not its principles (principia). The senses provide the phantasm, which is knowable in potency, but it is the simple light of the agent intellect that renders a thing’s nature known in act. Knowledge has its beginnings in experience, which is of the particular, but it ends in understanding, which is of the universal. The agent intellect automatically perceives the common in the many, in a confused manner at first, but then, as reason continues its discourse, it can proceed to a more specific concept, and even formulate a definition. This is not phenomenology. Phenomenology looks at men’s experiences and simply describes them, as men’s experiences. Phenomenologists may believe or not believe that there is an actual bridge between the phenomena and the things. A consideration of the things themselves as objects is merely bracketed out. The phenomenological method itself prefers to reflect on the experience itself, as it is in the knowing subject. This has its uses. But it does not answer the questions of morality. At best, it will only tell us a bit of what’s going on in our psyche as we perform good or evil acts.

The future Pope John Paul II himself admitted the limits of the phenomenological method:

If ethical experience essentially consists in this specific becoming of the person, then the only interpretation of it that can be considered adequate is one that apprehends and expresses this ethical becoming. This is what also leads me to believe that we should consider the view of the human act developed by Thomas Aquinas an adequate interpretation of ethical experience. I do not intend here to analyze his view or its adequacy in relation to the complete structure of ethical experience. I only want to draw attention to its origin. St. Thomas based his view of the human act on Aristotle’s theory of potency and act, a theory by which the philosophy of being explains all changes that take place in beings. Every change, whether it is of a material or spiritual nature, whether it takes place in an organism or in the psyche, can be said—in an analogical sense, of course—to be a form of passage from potency to act. A conscious human act is for St. Thomas not merely a stage upon which ethical experience is enacted. It is itself an ethical experience because it is an act of will. An act of will is for St. Thomas a passage from potency, since the will is a faculty (potentia) of the soul. A separate study would be needed to show how the ethical becoming of the person is reflected in this view as a whole.

Nevertheless, the reasons presented in this last part of the essay clearly show that phenomenology of the will alone does not suffice for interpreting ethical experience, even if this phenomenology happens to be as much in harmony with experience as that upon which Ach and his whole experimental school are based. Phenomenology can indirectly assist us in overcoming certain errors in views of the will that arise from an improper relation to the empirical facts, but it cannot serve as a tool for the sort of interpretation of ethical experience upon which ethics as a normative science is based.

***

See part III here

See part IV here

See part V here

See part VI here

See part vii here.

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Posted in Kevin F. Keiser, Moral Theology, Thomas Aquinas

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My two cents on Theology of the Body, part 1

Posted on 4 July 2009 by | 9 Comments

Theology of the Body has been in the Catholic news a lot lately.  TOB is something I have been thinking about for a while.  The following six posts or so will be a collection of many of my thoughts on its merits and liabilities.

For the sake of fairness, it might be appropriate from the outset to let readers know where I am coming from. First, I am not into Theology of the Body. And this is not only due to the circumstances of my intellectual formation. I remember hearing the usual TOB-inspired arguments against fornication, contraception, etc., as a high school student, and even then, I wondered about their cogency. By way of example, I was never content with being told that contraception was wrong because it did not signify a total self-giving. The terms just seemed too indefinite. I thought things were much clearer and simpler if we just admitted that it was simply because it was not ordered to procreation, which remains the primary end of marriage. I know that Theology of the Body does not deny this. But the Thomistic approach makes it clearer, by going directly to the cause of the disorder of the act, while TOB, as it was presented to me, makes circumlocutions through sign-values. And these would only be cogent if significative power, and not order to an end, was the measure of morality (of course, there are those who define morality as the study of human actions insofar as they are pieces of communication, but I also find this unconvincing).

Second, I consider myself a Thomist, and while many see TOB and St. Thomas as not incompatible, I certainly find that they are very different. TOB is certainly connected with phenomenology and personalism, and many experts in Catholic versions of both of these schools practically begin their treatises by identifying the “shortcomings” of Aquinas. Whether one seems them as compatible or not, one thing is for certain: they are distinct.

Third, I have not read Christopher West. Hence, in what follows, I do not intend to give him particular consideration. I am simply unqualified to do so. However, I am acquainted with the Wednesday Audiences of Pope John Paul II. And I have read them in their more correct translation by Michael Waldstein. I would hazard that I have the gist of it. But I will readily admit that I am no expert.

So let the reader beware. My words here will not satisfy everyone.  C. S. Lewis once said that one who dislikes science fiction is precisely unqualified to be a critic of science fiction. For this reason, the critique of Christopher West himself is better left to those who belong to the TOB school. And they have been doing so.

But, to take the analogy further, it certainly could pertain to an expert in literature to judge the relative merits of the different genres of literature and answer such questions as how science fiction fits in. In fact, it always pertains to the more universal art or science to judge the conclusions of the less universal art or science. Theology of the Body, simply by the addition of that descriptive phrase, is a particulated branch of theology. Thomism is at least an attempt to over the whole, springing from a time when Theology was simply the Theology of God; and that’s as universal as you can get. Of course, one could argue that I am not universal theology incarnate, and neither is St. Thomas; and that is, of course, true. But my study of theology has led me to have a definite opinion of TOB.

1. Theology of the Body is not very useful for discovering or demonstrating moral precepts.

I am a Moral Theologian, and a lot of Moral Theology is talking about what’s right and wrong, what is or is not against reason. For these particular questions, TOB by itself is not very helpful. And this is so for a very simple reason: most moral precepts belong to the natural law. Their proper principle is nature, not Revelation, and therefore, not theology. It is true that God has also revealed many moral precepts, coming to the aid of our ignorance. But most moral precepts, even those that have been revealed, regard the natural law. This is certainly true with regard to sexual matters: the norms that the Church proposes belong to us as men, not as Christians.  The difference between philosophical ethics and moral theology is not to be found primarily in a new set of precepts, proper to believers, but rather, in new principles (grace, the infused virtues, the Gifts of the Holy Spirit), a new end (the Beatific Vision in the glory of the saints), and a new mode (e.g., natural temperance curbs appetites so as not to harm bodily health, whereas infused temperance “chastises the body, and makes it obey” one, and unites one to the sufferings of Christ, etc.). The substance of the acts is the same, though now their form is supernatural charity.

I know that most TOB experts will agree with this. But I think it is worth mentioning again because some have advocated a re-visiting of moral questions to find new solutions through Theology of the Body, as if the natural law has not or cannot give us a demonstrative answer. Or, even further, some speak as if the Catholic Church has been operating under an inability to arrive at a true understanding of sexual morality until Theology of the Body arrived on the scene.

The fact is that when we give an account for the reason that fornication, or contraception, etc. is wrong, to say that it does not adequately express the total personal self-giving of the Trinity will neither convince everyone (for unbelievers are not too concerned about the Trinity, and yet they are bound to the natural law), nor is it the real argument. It may be a true argument, as an added further effect and sign of the disorder of reason entailed in these acts. But such an argument would presuppose a disorder already present in the act. The primo and per se argument, that is, the argument that does not presuppose any other disorder, is the one that manifests the lack of due order to man’s end. The moral precepts that the Church has been defending in the 20th century are precepts of the natural law, not precepts from divine command added to the natural law. One does not need to have recourse to theology or Revelation or the Faith to defend them. They are proposed to all men. Theology of the Body can reinforce the arguments from the natural law. It can be an aid to believers. Indeed, it is often said that Pope John Paul II wrote it to defend Humanae Vitae.  But it cannot do without the arguments from natural law. Indeed, as much as it may try to get away from them, it is actually based on them, for a thing cannot be a natural sign of something unless the reality entails the cause and effect relationship between the signified and the signifying.

***

See part 2 here.

See part 3 here.

See part 4 here.

See part 5 here.

See part 6 here.

See part vii here.

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On Condoms and the Magisterium

Posted on 21 April 2009 by | 3 Comments

From Martin Rhonheimer, The Truth about Condoms, 10 July 2004:

…the Church is thought to teach that sexually active homosexuals and prostitutes should refrain from condoms because condoms are “intrinsically evil” (The Tablet, 26 June). Many Catholics also believe this….But this is not a teaching of the Catholic Church. There is no official magisterial teaching either about condoms or about anti-ovulatory pills or diaphragms…

From the Holy Office, 6 April 1853:

Question: Whether the imperfect use of matrimony, whether onanistacally or condomistically (that is, applying a wicked instrument commonly called a “condom”) may, as in the present case, be licit?

Response: No, for it is intrinsically evil.

Just sayin’…

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On Notre Dame, George Bush, Barack Obama, and the Difference between Abortion and the Death Penalty

Posted on 8 April 2009 by | 1 Comment

Tom Peters has posted an interview with Bishop D’Arcy of South Bend, where the interviewer questions the Bishop’s absenting himself from the upcoming commencement address by President Obama by comparing it to the same prelate’s attendance when President Bush gave the commencement address.  The idea is, just as Obama is for abortion, President Bush was for the death penalty, so what’s the difference?  Are not both the taking of a human life?

The Bishop responds in part by saying that a good Catholic can “disagree with the Church on the death penalty.”  Cardinal Ratzinger expressed the same in a memo to Cardinal McCarrick about withholding Communion from pro-abortion candidates back in 2004.  This certainly implies that the Church’s current negative stance on the death penalty does not regard it as a per se malum like abortion (for on these, a “good Catholic” cannot disagree).

So what about the taking of human life?

With regard to the death penalty, I think the two extremes to avoid are clear.  First of all, we cannot say, as some do, that it is an intrinsic evil.  For one thing,the Church doesn’t teach this.  “The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty…“  But also, we must recall that it is not something that we have to practice either, and we should take Pope John Paul’s Evangelium Vitae seriously.  Prudentially, I think there may be instances (even now) where one should decide not to make use of the right of the death penalty.  But the main point is that we cannot say, as some have, that the Church was wrong to permit the death penalty in the past, and that now, the doctrine has developed.  A development of doctrine can clarify what has always been held, but it cannot contradict it, in matters of faith and morals.

But what has been the Church’s reasoning for asserting that the state has such a right?

With regard to the distinction between abortion and the death penalty, there are two key premises that have bolstered the Church’s moral teaching.

1) One is that the state, in its capacity of caring for the more universal common good, has certain rights that the individual doesn’t have.  Antonin Scalia notes that this might be hard to understand today due to the fact that we tend to forget in modern democracy that the state is more than the sum of its voting individuals.  Be that as it may, the state has a more universal role of causality, and participates in God’s own governance of things (Note: in my opinion, Scalia goes perhaps a bit too far in basically giving no weight to Evangelium Vitae‘s injunction against the Death Penalty).

2)  The second is that innocent human life is never detrimental, but always beneficial to the common good.

As for 1)

The traditional teaching has been that when it comes to killing, the private person never has the authority or the right to directly intend killing any human being.  Even in self-defense, the death of one’s aggressor is an unintended effect; the intended action is just due counter-force.  If, in defending oneself, an individual were to directly intend the death of his aggressor or use a means that was excessive, they are not without sin.  The individual simply cannot have the right to take another’s life.

But in the Church’s teaching, the state does have that right.  And of course this right is executed through the officials of the state: the ruler, but also the military and the peace-keeping forces, and even executioners.  When these men act, their role is not only one of self-defense: they are directly intending to kill another man.  They do this, not on their own private authority, but in the name of the state, which, again, because of its more universal causality, extends to more things than the individual can do.  Hence, in both war and capital punishment, the soldiers/state officials are directly intending the deaths of those whom they kill.

Now, of course, there must be a reason for allowing this to happen.  And in the Church’s teaching, one of the principal reasons was moral guilt.  That is, whether it be a criminal, or an invading country that is committing an injustice, those whom the state directly intends to kill must be guilty of something.  This even obtains in war, i.e., even if it seems expedient, a war against a nation that has done nothing morally wrong is unjust, even if it seems better for the common good to go to war with that nation (of course, morally wrong can include preparations for aggression, not just actual aggression).

Some theologians don’t buy this account of the state being allowed to intend direct killing.  They would rather say that no human entity can intend direct killing ever.  Nevertheless, knowing that the Church has asserted that the state has a right to capital punishment, they also know that they can’t say it is an intrinsic evil.  So some have maintained that the death penalty is more a form of self-defense on the community level.  Now, it is true that it can have this secondary effect, i.e., repeated offenders are thereby eliminated.  However, capital punishment is not self-defense for two reasons: one is, it is still clear that the state is directly intending the death of the malefactor.  St. Thomas says as much when he distinguishes between self-defense by a private individual and by a public authority, as well as when he says that a judge simply wills the death of a murderer (scroll to reply to objection 1). Indeed, it is absurd to say that execution is an unintended death.  It’s not as if the state is protecting itself in some immediate fashion, and, regrettably, someone died in the process.  Secondly, seeing capital punishment as punishment, and not just as self-defense, is actually more just.  If the death penalty were primarily seen as a form of self-defense, then it becomes utilitarian, in that guilt for former crime is no longer the determining factor, but simply perceived threat.  If you saw Minority Report, you have an example that precisely shows the problem with seeing the role of the penal system as one of defense instead of punishment: people are “punished” before they have even done anything wrong.

On the contrary, punishment, as such, has as its first end the redress of the disorder caused by the offender.  Just as the offender went against the law according to his own will, the idea of punishment is to make the offender suffer something according to the law against his own will, proportionate to his transgression.  This proportionality makes it so that greater crimes are allotted greater punishments of greater goods being taken away from the guilty.  And this has not excluded his very life, in the Church’s teaching.  Besides this primary end, there are secondary ends of punishment, such as the protection of the state, the correction of morals, and even the correction of the culprit himself.  But these cannot be pursued in such a way as to take away the first end, which depends on the notion of already existing guilt.

Nevertheless, what is true is that, as long as the first end is maintained to any degree, the state may modify punishments to better serve a secondary end.  A key example is the death penalty itself.  Although the crime committed may in a sense “deserve” the death penalty because of its gravity, as long as some retribution to the order of justice is maintained, the state can choose a punishment that would better serve the common good.  Aristotle himself says that the state’s end is justice, but friendship even more so.  The same is true today.  Although we must teach that the state has the right to inflict the death penalty, it can definitely be argued that today, when we are trying to counteract a culture of death, it would be better not to make use of that right.  In fact, more often than not, punishment in human justice is often not judged according to its first end alone, but is modified in accord with a judgment for the common good.  St. Thomas says that the punishments of this life are more medicinal than retributive (scroll down to reply to the second for both links).  And this is fine, as long as they remain retributive (i.e., based on redressing the disorder brought in by previous guilt).

Thus, some read Pope John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae as basically making the prudential judgment that this is not the time to make use of capital punishment.  The common good of society is better served by not using it, in order to promote the culture of life.  Circumstances may change in the future, and even prudential considerations can be flawed.  That’s why a “good Catholic” can “disagree with the Church on the death penalty.”

Of course, we can also say that there may be some development of doctrine with regard to the death penalty.  For instance, it is very reasonable to say that the crimes for which the death penalty could be applied is truthfully less than we might have seen it to be in the past.  This is legitimate development.  What would be an illegitimate development is to say that “Well, before the Church taught that the death penalty was OK, but we know better now.”

Besides being against reason and the tradition, to say that the death penalty is an intrinsic evil also seems to be against Scripture, especially Romans 13:4, and the uncorrected words of the good thief, Luke 23:41.  And there are plenty of testimonies in the Old Testament.

As for 2)

So how does this square with abortion?  Well, simply in that the unborn are always innocent, and though some (like Doug Kmiec, Nancy Pelosi, and  Joe Biden) may think that the common good is served by killing the innocent, that is simply not true.  St. Thomas puts it well.

I answer that, an individual man may be considered in two ways: first, in himself; secondly, in relation to something else. If we consider a man in himself, it is unlawful to kill any man, since in every man though he be sinful, we ought to love the nature which God has made, and which is destroyed by slaying him. Nevertheless, as stated above (Article 2) the slaying of a sinner becomes lawful in relation to the common good, which is corrupted by sin. On the other hand the life of righteous men preserves and forwards the common good, since they are the chief part of the community. Therefore it is in no way lawful to slay the innocent. ST, II-II, q. 64, a. 6

It is the fact that criminals are guilty that gives the state the right to intend their deaths, though it may never intend the death of the innocent.  As for human dignity, it always remains valid.  What must be remembered though is that “dignity” is basically a Latinized word for  “worthiness.”  Hence, different dignities are named in reference to different goods that the subject is worthy of.  All human persons, simply by being human, retain their natural “worthiness” of their final supernatural end if they so choose to remain in God’s grace or turn back to it through repentance.  No creature can take this from them; it is inviolable.  And this is the true property of human dignity (a great book on this, hard to find, however, is The Primacy of the Common Good as the Root of Personal Dignity in the Doctrine of St. Thomas, by Fr. Sebastian Walshe, O. Praem).  But men may lose their worthiness for other goods based on the use or abuse they made of the goods of which they were once worthy.  Hence, St. Thomas actually says that the person who sins in a sense loses some part of his human dignity, and that is why the state can enjoin the death penalty upon him.

Reply to Objection 3. By sinning man departs from the order of reason, and consequently falls away from the dignity of his manhood, in so far as he is naturally free, and exists for himself, and he falls into the slavish state of the beasts, by being disposed of according as he is useful to others. This is expressed in Psalm 48:21: “Man, when he was in honor, did not understand; he hath been compared to senseless beasts, and made like to them,” and Proverbs 11:29: “The fool shall serve the wise.” Hence, although it be evil in itself to kill a man so long as he preserve his dignity, yet it may be good to kill a man who has sinned, even as it is to kill a beast. For a bad man is worse than a beast, and is more harmful, as the Philosopher states (Polit. i, 1 and Ethic. vii, 6). ST, II-II, q. 64, a. 2, ad 3

Hence, when we say that “human dignity is inviolable,” I understand that to mean the human dignity that accrues to us insofar as we are “worthy” of a supernatural end if we work with God’s grace, a good that no human power can ever take from us, and a good in comparison to which all other physical evils are not comparable, and even may be beneficial.  But the inviolability of human dignity does not necessarily extend to all other goods, even life included.  Guilt, and only guilt, can make us unworthy of it.  After all, liberty of the body and possession of private property are also natural goods that man is worthy of, but we also take them away from a man when he sins.

One of the best treatments of capital punishment that I have read is an article by the lawyer Pat Laurence.  It’s certainly worth a read for those who are interested in pursuing the topic in greater depth.

In summary:

1.  The state, because of its more universal role in caring for the common good, actually has a right that private persons do not have, namely, the right to directly intend to take another’s life.

2.  This right, exercised for the sake of the common good, never permits us to kill the innocent.  Punishment is only given for guilt.

3.  Abortion is an intrinsic evil because it is the chosen taking of innocent human life, which is inherently against reason, and thus an intrinsic evil, a per se malum.  Nevertheless, the taking of human life, just as a notion in itself, is not inherently against reason, even when it is chosen.  There are cases when it may be done by the proper authority.  Indeed, this is precisely the reason behind the Church’s teaching on the death penalty and just war.

What of the commandment, “Thou shall not kill?”  Take a look at what St. Thomas says about that commandment (scroll down to numbers  [7-9].  St. Thomas also gives a good argument for when the death penalty must be avoided).

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On Condoms, Intentionality, and the Natural Law

Posted on 28 March 2009 by | 6 Comments

My posts on condoms have been generously commented on by Friend of Thomas.  His last one in particular made a very good point, which brings up some things crucial to the question.  I post it here along with my response.

Hi again Kevin,

I’m glad there is a Pope and those upon whom he relies to resolve these questions. Let me just mention 2 points from Aquinas that your post brings to mind, which explain why this is complicated and not settled in all cases.
First, an intention for Aquinas is “an act of the will with regard to an end”; thus, a condom doesn’t have a contraceptive intention, only persons who use them for contraceptive ends. Second, Thomas teaches that an act is unnatural to man, precisely to the extent that it is against reason, which specifies human nature. Thus, there is the question of how we today should understand Thomas’s vice against nature in light of his broader moral theory. It has to at least allow for NFP, which Thomas doesn’t explicitly address; following Thomas, the Church came only slowly to accept this in the 20th century.

Best wishes for this Holy Season

Friend of Thomas,

Thanks for your comments.  Your two points and recognition of their implications are very similar to the points and conclusions brought up by Fr. Martin Rhonheimer of Santa Croce, who has been the leading moral philosopher arguing for the legitimacy of condoms in some cases, striving to do so even from St. Thomas’ own principles, or, as you call it, his broader moral theory.  The arguments, however, I simply do not find convincing.

As you know, the good moral act requires the concurrence of moral goodness in object, intention, and circumstance.  If any one of these is bad, and the agent knows it, the act is a sin, since it indicates a bad will in the agent.  “Good is from the integral cause, evil is from any defect,” as Pseudo-Dionysius says (section xxx).

I actually agree with you that the couple who uses a condom to prevent HIV transmission does not have a contraceptive intention.  Some moral theologians, who are otherwise “on my side” on this issue, disagree with me on that, but I agree with Rhonheimer and you here.  The intention of a serodiscordant married couple that freely engages in sexual intercourse with a condom to prevent disease transmission, particularly if they are already infertile, is no more contraceptive than the homosexual couple that uses a condom.  Nevertheless, the object of the act is wrong, whether you call it objective contraception or the sin against nature.  Rhonheimer, of course, denies this, saying that the object would not be contraceptive either, since “we cannot define the moral object of an act without including in its definition (or description) a basic intentionality” (“On the Use of Condoms to Prevent Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”  National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 5, no. 1 [spring 2005]: 45).

What Rhonheimer points out is true insofar as no act is moral except insofar as is proceeds from the will, which cannot but act with ulterior intentions.  But if this would mean that an exterior action (which, after all, is the first object of the will, making the act to be what it is, ST I-II, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3,  ST, I-II, q. 20, a. 1, ad 1) could have no rightness or wrongness independent of further intended ends, then all of objective morality falls.  St. Thomas says it well:

It happens that in those things which are ordered to something else, that something may be good from the fact alone that that it is ordered to something else, just as bitter potion is good from the fact alone that it is healing.  Wherefore, the goodness of the health and the potion are not two different goodnesses, but one and the same.  But sometimes that which is ordered to something else has in itself some notion of the good, even besides its order to another good, as tasty medicine has the notion of the delightful good aside from the fact that it is healing.  Thus, therefore, it must be said that when the exterior act is good or bad only from its order to the end, then the goodness or badness of the act of the will, which per se regards the end, is completely the same as the goodness or badness of the exterior act, which regards the end by the mediation of the act of the will.  But when the exterior act has goodness or badness according to itself, namely, according to its matter or circumstances, then the goodness of the exterior act is one goodness, and the goodness of the will that is from the end is another, nevertheless, in such a way that the both the goodness of the end from the will redounds to the exterior act, and the goodness of the matter and circumstances redounds to the act of the will (ST, I-II, q. 20, a. 3).

The intended end may be praiseworthy, but the exterior act/object chosen under that intention may still have its own disorder.  No one, after all, intends evil per se when they act.  They can’t, since evil is a privation.  The adulterer seeks the good of delight, not the disorder of “not my wife.”  Even if that gives him thrills, he seeks it for the thrills.   And yet, adultery is listed as a per se evil even by Aristotle.

But not every action nor every passion admits of a mean; for some have names that already imply badness, e.g., spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the case of actions adultery, theft, murder; for all of these and suchlike things imply by their names that they are themselves bad, and not the excesses or deficiencies of them. It is not possible, then, ever to be right with regard to them; one must always be wrong. Nor does goodness or badness with regard to such things depend on committing adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way, but simply to do any of them is to go wrong.(Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. II, ch. 6, 1107a9-17).

With regard to contraception, the measurement of whether it takes place or not is more to be measured by the exterior action than by the intention.  Why do I say that?  Well, precisely because of the permitted use of periodic continence, as you point out.  While Rhonheimer does plenty of mental gymnastics to prove that periodic continence is not sinful because it really doesn’t involve an intentional closure to procreation, Pope Paul VI simply disagrees:

It cannot be denied that in each case [i.e., contraception and periodic continence] the married couple, for acceptable reasons, are both perfectly clear in their intention to avoid children and wish to make sure that none will result (Humanae Vitae 16).

So why is it allowed?  Because the exterior act implies no disorder of reason in itself.  The contracepting couple makes use of the marital act while rendering impossible its primary end (as Pope John Paul II still calls it).  The couple practicing periodic continence does not do this.  Indeed, if their intention is excessive, they, too, may be sinning.  This would be the case if, despite their use of periodic continence alone, they have fallen in to what has come to be called the “contraceptive mentality.”  But if its reasonable to forego conceiving for a while, they are not sinning.  Neither in object (exterior action) do they contracept, nor is their intention unreasonable.

Whether you call it objective contraception or the sin against nature (to be honest, with the barrier methods, I see no difference), the exterior action (sex with a condom) is against the natural law.  Investigating the intention will not change that.  It is true that the natural law is a law of reason, as you and Rhonheimer point out.  But reason sees an order in nature that it is reasonable to follow as it strives to actualize the potencies that are present in nature.  After all, the institutor of nature was wise. Furthermore, He gave us our liberty so that we would also be agents in our own journey toward Him, our final end, not so that we could wield it as we will to set ourselves up as deities beside him.  And the order of nature is far more important to follow when certain natural potencies touch upon the common good.

…it must not be counted a light sin if someone procures the emission of seed outside the due end of generation and education, because of the fact that it is either a light sin or so sin if someone uses some part of his body for another use other than that to which it is ordered according to nature, as, for example, if someone should walk with his hands, or do something with his feet that is normally to be done with one’s hands: since through such disordered uses, the good of man is not impeded much. But the disordered emission of seed is repugnant to the good of nature, which is the conservation of the species (Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. 3, ch. 122).

Lastly, I do believe in the development of doctrine.  But in the notion of development, reversals of previous doctrine are not included.  I think Humanae Vitae is very much based on the traditional view of the natural law, just as many of its critics claim.  You say that the Church only permitted periodic continence in the 20th century.  St. Alphonsus permits it in the 18th:

That coitus may be licit in matrimony, it suffices that the act be per se suitable for generation; but that it does not come about, is per accidens…
From the cases mentioned, we consequently resolve that it is licit to use matrimony: firstly, for the sake of generation, although this does not necessarily have to be intended while it is being exercised, as long as it is not positively impeded.  Nay, sometimes it may even be excluded by a simple desire, for example, by a poor man, lest he be burdened too much with offspring (Theologia Moralis, Lib. VI, tr. vi, cap. ii, dub. ii, art. 1, 924, 927).

It was permitted by the Sacred Penitentiary in 1880:

Q.: Whether it the use of matrimony may be licit on only those days in which conception is more difficult?
A: The spouses using the aforesaid mode are not to be troubled… (DS 3148).

This was repeated by Casti Connubii 59, again by the Sacred Penitentiary in 1932, by Pope Pius XII in his Allocution to Midwives, and of course by Humanae Vitae.  Furthermore, while you are correct that Thomas couldn’t address NFP in his time, I certainly think he would see no problem with it.  St. Thomas certainly saw sexual intercourse as a marital right, as long as at least one of the goods of marriage was intended, and none was obstructed:

Just as the goods of matrimony make matrimony decent and holy insofar as they are possessed habitually, so also they make the act of matrimony decent when they are actually intended so far as concerns those two goods which respect the act itself.  Wherefore, when spouses come together for the sake of procreating offspring or so that they may give what is due to each other, which pertains to conjugal faith, they are totally excused from sin. (In IV Sent., d. 31, q. 2, a. 2)

Having said all of this, I am very grateful for your discussion, Friend of Thomas, and I enjoy the conversation.  After all, “there can be disagreement among friends without prejudice to friendship, because to agree or disagree in speculative things is not subject to the will, since the intellect is forced by reason” (In III Sent., d. 27, q. 2, a. 1).

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See, I told you so… but some tell it better

Posted on 25 March 2009 by | 2 Comments

A while ago, I pointed out the misunderstanding that links the Catholic Church’s moral position against condoms to a solitary decision of Pope Paul VI to promulgate Humanae Vitae.  Fr. Kevin Hegarty perpetuates the facile account of the Commission and the Pope in the Mayo News, along with a statement that, at the very least, assumes a dense intellect in Pope Benedict XVI:

…Brian Hall, President of the Australian AIDS Fund, a Catholic AIDS-care agency working in Malawi, wrote that ‘the Pope especially needs to recognise the paradigm shift in the use of condoms over the years. Initially, they were designed as a contraceptive device but, with the arrival of HIV/AIDS, they are a lifesaver as they block the transmission of a fatal disease.

Uh, just historically speaking, au contraire…

Even those who don’t like the Catholic Church’s morality should at least grant the probability that Pope Benedict is not an idiot.  If he continues to say that condoms are not the way to go, it might be because their use in free sexual intercourse is regarded as wrong even if they are used with only a prophylactic intentionality, or, as critics like to put it, when they are used to “affirm life, not avoid it.”

Again, as I mentioned, aside from contraceptive intent, the condom remains an instance of the sin against nature, which has been considered immoral by the Church from the beginning.  And not only by the Church; traditional Judaism had the same interpretation of the sin of Er and Onan:

Fundamental to the rabbinic legal position on contraception is the problem of hotza’at zera l’vattalah [improper emission of seed], known more commonly as hash-hatat zera…. So that its severity as a problem in connection with our subject may be appreciated at the outset, only the following need be noted: if a choice were to be made between so radical a procedure as sterilization, on the one hand, and the use of a device which may be said to thwart the normal course of seminal emission on the other, the former would entail far fewer legal difficulties. The touchstone for the acceptability of a birth control measure is the extent to which it runs afoul of the formidable prohibition of hash-hatat zera.

[from David. M. Feldman, Marital Relations, Birth Control and Abortion in Jewish Law (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 109. Reprinted as Birth Control in Jewish Law.]

And classic Protestantism held the same view.

The Pope is both custodian of the deposit of the Faith, and Supreme Pastor.  It’s his job to expound the moral law, even the natural moral law.  As the non-Catholic Mark Davis says so much better than I, what were people expecting?

What a paper-thin sham Catholicism would be if the pope were to cave and conclude: “You know those centuries we’ve spent teaching against anything that obstructs the sacred method by which life is created? Well, we’ve thought about it, and because millions are engaging in behavior that spreads a fatal disease, we’ve decided to shelve that basic belief and instruct people to do something we’ve considered a moral abomination pretty well forever.”

Anyone repelled by a pope who refuses to buckle this way should remember that no one is forced to be Catholic. If this bar is too high, there’s the door. But if Catholicism has withstood anything, it’s expectations that doctrine should bend to public will.

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Update on the Brazilian Excommunications

Posted on 24 March 2009 by | Leave a comment

Amy Welborn rightly points out that when it comes to the Anglo-Saxon secular media’s reporting on things Catholic, especially in non-English speaking countries, the whole picture is rarely given the first time around.  Indeed, we were lead to believe that the mother of the girl and the medical personnel had desired an abortion from day one, and that a “hasty” Archbishop Cardoso Sobrinho (as his own fellow Archbishop Fisichella labelled him) relished the opportunity to drop an  excommunication on them “like an axe.”

In such cases, I personally always appreciate details and firsthand accounts.  While the story is a difficult one, where the rubber of the Church’s moral teaching really hits the road of the world’s opinion, it is only fair to hear the words of those involved.

Amy provides a link to John Smeaton, who reports the point of view of Archbishop Cardoso Sobrinho, and, to be fair, of one of the doctors who performed the abortion.

And what about the biological father of the nine-year old girl?  Amy also links to a Catholic News Agency article that mentions his involvement, as does the website of the French diocese of Frejus-Toulon.  This latter includes a letter from Bishop Dominique Rey, who had just returned from a trip to Brazil, and a testimony from Fr. Rodrigues, the pastor of the girl and her family.  I have provided an English translation of Fr. Rodrigues’ testimony, which is certainly well worth reading.

The gist of these latter sources of information is twofold: that “Carmen’s” biological mother and father, as well as some medical personnel, were originally against the abortion, and that the sad situation of “Carmen” has been used by the pro-abortion lobbies of Brazil as an opening for manifesting the need to liberalize the abortion laws of that country.  But I would add not only: the situation itself has been exploited by the media to attack and/or ridicule the Catholic Church’s “tough stance” on abortion, as Tom Peters predicted way back when the news first came out.

What is truly sad in all this, however, is the lack of unanimity in the Church’s pastors, as the ever-informed Sandro Magister points out (kudos to Matthew Sherry for his translations of this invaluable source of information).  Archbishop Fisichella’s intervention in L’Osservatore Romano is of course the most egregious example.  In such a situation, one might wonder what the reaction of Pope Benedict has been to this whole thing.  The Italian newspaper La Stampa seemed to think that this was hinted at when the Pope spoke these words in his discourse to the political and civil leaders of Luanda:

I must also mention a further area of grave concern: the policies of those who, claiming to improve the “social edifice”, threaten its very foundations. How bitter the irony of those who promote abortion as a form of “maternal” healthcare! How disconcerting the claim that the termination of life is a matter of reproductive health (cf. Maputo Protocol, art. 14)!

While the jumping to conclusions of La Stampa may have been quite irresponsible (in that it is very likely that Pope Benedict did not have the Brazilian incident in mind at all), the same newspaper’s self-correction, so to speak, in a following article reporting the “modifications” of spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi is very confusing as well:

He was absolutely not speaking about therapeutic abortion, he did not say that it always has to be refused: the Pope is against the concept of reproductive health that broadly introduces abortion as a means of birth control.

One wonders where Fr. Lombardi learned theology.  At least the words of a former Pope should have given him pause.

I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written Word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.
No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.

According to Sandro Magister, Fr. Lombardi also referred to Archbishop Fisichella’s intervention:

In this regard, the considerations of Archbishop Rino Fisichella apply, when he lamented in ‘L’Osservatore Romano’ the hasty declaration of excommunication by the archbishop of Recife. No extreme case should obscure the true meaning of the remarks by the Holy Father, who was referring to something very different.

All in all, it would be nice if the pastors of the Church could agree on this whole matter.  Officials in Rome, far away from the situation, are saying that Archbishop Sobrinho was not acting pastorally.  Those bishops and priests who had any contact with the situation think the contrary (even excommunication is a pastoral remedy).  The former go even further and begin to blur the lines on abortion.  The latter hold firm to the principle that we may never intend direct killing of the innocent.

Proving once more that pastoral-ness should not be identified with “progressivism.”

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Translation of the Testimony of the Parish Priest of the Nine-Year Old Brazilian Girl

Posted on 24 March 2009 by | Leave a comment

In addition to an excellent letter from its bishop, Dominique Rey, who had recently returned from a visit to Brazil, the French diocese of Frejus-Toulon has posted the testimony of Fr. Rodrigues, the Pastor of the nine-year-old girl and her family.  My own translation of the French version of his testimony (which I imagine is itself a translation of the Portuguese version) is below:

Testimony of Fr. Rodrigues, Pastor of Alagoinha

“What the press doesn’t tell you.”

10 March 2009

Our village was shaken by tragic news: a nine-year old child, victim of sexual abuse by her stepfather, was pregnant with twins.  Her older sister, age 13, had suffered the same physical abuse.  This horrible story had been going on for almost three years.

When the council of Alagoinha discoverer the facts, it tried to put everything in place to help the children and the parents.  On February 27, the court entrusted the children to the Medical Institute of Caruaru in the state of Pernambuco.  Some other complementary tests were performed (by sexologists, psychologists) afterwards at the Children’s Medical Insitute of Recife.  It was at this place that the victim met a social worker by the name of Karolina Rodrigues, and her colleague Marie-José Gomes.  This latter refused the hypothesis of abortion in the name of her Christian conscience.  Karolina Rodrigues decided to bring the case for this before the council of Alagoinha.  The five village councillors refused for the same reasons.  They sent their judgment to the Medical Institute of Caruaru.  One copy was given to Karolina Rodrigues in my presence and in the presence of the father of the victim, Mr. Erivaldo.

On Febuary 28, I was invited to participate in the council of the Children’s Medical Institute of Recife in company with Marie-José Gomes and two members of our parish.  We took advantage of the opportunity to go visit the victim and her mother.  They were on the fourth floor of the establishment, in isolated quarters.  Access was very restricted.  I was obliged to remain in the corridor, but I did manage to speak with the mother of the little girl.  She admitted to me that she “had signed some papers.”  I was worried, since this woman was illiterate.  As she was unable to write her signature, her fingerprints were taken.  I asked her what she thought of the proposal of abortion.  She showed some very motherly sentiments and above all an extreme preoccupation for her daughter.  She answered: “I do not want my daughter to abort…”  The mother spoke to me of the state of her daughter’s health: “It’s going well, she is playing with some dolls that people have given her.”  We left with the firm conviction that the mother was totally unfavorable to the abortion of her little grandchildren.  “No one has the right to kill a person,” she added.  “Only God can have command of life…”

On March 2, we returned to the Institute of Recife.  We were authorized to ascend to the fourth floor to visit the victim.  But, having arrived at the first floor, an official of the institute forbade us from going up any further.  He asked us to see the social worker in aonother building.  We came face-to-face with Karolina Rodrigues.  I was in the company of Marie José Gomes and Mr. Erivaldo, who was opposed to “the abortion of his little grandchildren.”  When the social worker discovered my identity, she said in front of everybody: “We are dealing with a medical matter, even if the priest here feels that we are dealing with a moral question.”  We asked Karolina Rodrigues about the state of the child’s health.  She affirmed that everything was already resolved with the agreement of the mother.  The medical procedure would follow its course.  She insisted on her critical condition without providing any facts from a doctor’s point of view.  She also backed herself with the law: “In this case, the better thing is to save the life of the child.”  We answered: “There’s not just one life to save, but three!”  She didn’t want to hear any of it.  Karolina Rodrigues asked Mr. Erivaldo to speak with him privately.  For about 25 minutes.  On leaving, this latter revealed to me that he had changed his mind with regard to the abortion.  “The social worker has warned me that my daughter was threatened with death… If she is in danger, it is necessary to save her…  Even if it means removing the fetuses from her,” he murmured.

Thus, everything seemed finished.  It is at this point that the Archbishop of Recife, dom José Cardoso, and the bishop of Pesqueira, dom Francesco Biasin, got involved in the procedure.  Monsignor Cardoso convoked a group of doctors, attorneys, psychologists, and lawyers in order to study the legality of this matter.  At this meeting on March 3, at the residence of the Archbishop, the director of the Children’s Medical Institute of Recife, Antonio Figueiras, was also present.  He publicly acknowledged the pressures that were exerted by Katerina Rodrigues.  He contacted the hospital to suspend the abortion.

A little later, the archbishop of Recife received a call from Mr. Figueiras informing him that a feminist group—Curumin—had convinced the mother to accept a transfer of her daughter to another hospital.  We returned to the spot with Maria Gomes.  They had made her wait under the pretext of the rotation of the teams (the child was already transferred).  No one dared tell her anything.  How was a person in danger of death able to obtain a permit of leave?  How was the state of the victim able to change so rapidly?  What could Curumin have said to the mother?

On March 4, we learned that the child was committed to the CISAM hospital (the Amaury and Medeiros General Health Center, specializing in pregancies at risk).  This hospital is located in the north of Recife.  Our hope of seeing the two babies alive brutally disappeared.  All because of a manipulation of conscience and a lack of respect for human life.  I have recounted all this so that people may know the truth.

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On Archbishop Fisichella’s Intervention, the Responses It Received, and Who’s Really Applying the Circumstances

Posted on 20 March 2009 by | 1 Comment

Lifesitenews has published a translation of a letter of a number of officials of the Diocese of Recife in response to the intervention of Archbishop Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, regarding the excommunications that were declared in their diocese.  While the entire letter is certainly worth reading (particularly due to its explanation of pastoral closeness to the girl and her family in the days leading up to the March 4th event), I will only quote part of it here for those who do not have time to read the whole letter:

The affirmation [in the article] that the fact was made public in the newspapers only because the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife rushed to declare the excommunication is false. It suffices to notice that the case was made public in Alagoinha on Wednesday, February 25; the Archbishop made his pronouncement to the press on March 3; and the abortion was performed on March 4. It would be too much to imagine that the Brazilian press, before a fact of such gravity, would have silenced during the period of six days. Therefore, the news of the pregnant girl (“Carmen”) was made public in the newspapers before the consummation of the abortion. Only after that, when asked by journalists, on March 3 (Tuesday), the Archbishop mentioned canon 1398. We are convinced that the disclosure of this therapeutic penalty (the excommunication) will do much good to many Catholics, making them avoid this grievous sin. The silence of the Church would be very prejudicial, especially considering that fifty million abortions are being performed every year around the world, and in Brazil alone one million innocent lives are ended. The silence may be interpreted as collusion or complicity. If any doctor has a “perplexed conscience” [as the article says] before performing an abortion (which seems extremely improbable to us), he should – if he is a Catholic and wishes to follow the law of God – seek a spiritual director…

The author believed he could speak about [a situation] he did not know, and, what is worse, he did not even have the trouble of first speaking to his brother in the episcopate, and, for his imprudent attitude, he is causing great scandal among the Catholic faithful in Brazil who are believing that Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho was rash in his pronouncements. Instead of seeking his brother in the episcopate, he chose to believe in our openly Anti-clerical press.

Senator Cossiga’s earlier open letter to the Archbishop, the whole of which may be read below, already responded in a similar vein

You have wished to join the chorus of condemnations pronounced upon the poor bishop of Recife from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, beginning with the federal president of Brazil, President Lula, a great populist leader formed in the school of Liberation Theology.  Among the proponents of this theology was Dom Helder Camara, [former] bishop of Recife, great Christian utopianist, who did much good for the lower classes of South America, but who is also responsible, along with many others, for the great confusion that reigns in that continent, not only at the theological level, but also among simple faithful, regarding the nature and mission of the Church in the world, bringing many Catholics to respond with violence to the violence of the ruling classes and dictatorships, and objectively contributing to that spiral of violence that still lays waste to that suffering continent between dictatorships and terrorism, even “Christian” terrorism.

These statements are particularly pertinent because the Archbishop’s own intervention, which may also be read below, despite its protestations of the need to stick to the essentials, seemed to imply that Bishop Sobrinho was rash in declaring the excommunications, not taking adequate account of the very particular circumstances that, in Fisichella’s judgment, have made this declaration inopportune.

I am leaving aside right now the other shortcomings of the Archbishop’s intervention, adequately pointed out by both of these responses, in that, while the intervention repeats that abortion is an intrinsic evil, it definitely makes it seem that if a doctor is anguished enough, he is sometimes right in choosing it.  Indeed, the closing of the Archbishop’s intervention is hard to interpret in a way that indicates that the Archbishop really believes his own words on the intrinsic evil of abortion.  This made for sensational headlines in the secular media.  But if, abstracting from this, we pretend that the intervention was just on the innopportuneness, based on the circumstances, of declaring the excommunications, we now have two responses to the Archbishop’s letter that suggest that maybe he was the one not taking the circumstances into account.

Sometimes in public actions, the circumstances also include the possible good done to the community, and not just the individuals in question.  This is part of the notion of the remedial aspect of justice (See Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 87, a. 3, reply to the second).  And while this could be reprehensible if concern for the individual were completely steamrolled, such was certainly not the case in the Brazilian event.   On the contrary, the pastoral attention to the girl and her family was quite extraordinary, as the letter of the Diocesan officials recounts.

But then, of course, there is the question of the global scandal, aggravated mostly, I think, by the fact that there is no canonical penalty for the girl’s nefarious stepfather.  That brings us into the whole moral discourse on scandal given, scandal taken, etc.  That will have to be the subject of a future post.  For now, suffice it to say that I think we better get used to the fact that the Brave New World is going to be scandalized by the Catholic Church quite often, even when Her pastors are not at fault.

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Translation of Archbishop Fisichella’s Intervention on the Brazilian Excommunications

Posted on 20 March 2009 by | 6 Comments

***

HUGE UPDATE:

THE CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH ORDERS PRINTING OF A RETRACTION REGARDING FISICHELLA’S INTERVENTION

***

President of the Pontifical Academy for Life Archbishop Rino Fisichella wrote an intervention in L’Osservatore Romano regarding the Brazilian excommunications in connection with the abortion of the twin children of a nine-year old girl.  I was not able to find a complete English translation on the Internet of Fisichella’s letter, so I offer my own below.

On the side of the Brazilian girl

Often the debate on some questions is carried out in a closed manner, and different perspectives do not always allow us to consider how high the stakes really are.  It is precisely in these moments when we must look to the essentials and leave aside for a moment whatever does not touch upon the problem directly.  The case, in all of its drama, is simple.  There is a nine-year old girl—they call her Carmen—whose eyes we must look into without distracting our gaze even for a moment, to make her understand how much she is loved.  At Recife in Brazil, Carmen was repeatedly raped by her young stepfather, she became pregnant with twins, and she would no longer have an easy life.  The wound is deep because the utterly gratuitous violence destroyed her on the inside, and made it so that only with difficulty would she ever again look at others with love.

Carmen represents a story of daily violence, and she has had a place on the pages of the newspapers only because the archbishop of Olinda and Recife was swift in declaring excommunication for the doctors that helped her to interrupt her pregnancy.  A story of violence that, unfortunately, would have gone unobserved, accustomed as we are to the occurrence of facts of an incomparable gravity every day, if it weren’t for the sensation and the reactions aroused by the intervention of the bishop.  The violence on a woman, already grave in itself, takes on an even more appalling character when the one who suffers it is a child, with the aggravating circumstances of the poverty and social decay in which she lives.  There are no words fit to condemn such episodes, and the feelings that arise from them are often a mixture of anger and rancor that only die down when justice has really been done and there is the certainty that the punishment inflicted on the delinquent in question will be served.

Carmen should have in the first place been defended, embraced, sweetly caressed, to make her feel that we are all with her; all, without any distinction.  Before thinking about excommunication, it was necessary and urgent to safeguard her innocent life and bring it up to a level of humanity for which we men of the Church should have been the professional heralds and teachers.  It did not happen so, and unfortunately, this has affected the credibility of our teaching, which in the eyes of many appears as insensitive, incomprehensible, and bereft of mercy.  It’s true, Carmen bore within herself other innocent lives like her own, even if they were the fruit of violence, and these lives were suppressed.  Nevertheless, this is not sufficient reason to give a judgment that falls like an axe.

In the case of Carmen, life and death confronted each other.  Due to her very young age and her precarious health conditions, her life was in serious danger because of the pregnancy under way.  How to act in these cases?  It is a tough decision for the doctor and for the moral law itself.  Choices like this one, even if under different case studies, are repeated daily in intensive care units, and the conscience of the doctor finds itself all alone in the act of having to decide what might be the better thing to do.  Yet no one arrives at a decision of this kind nonchalantly.  It is unjust and offensive even to think so.

The respect owed to the professionalism of the doctor is a rule that has to involve everyone and cannot allow us to arrive at a negative judgment without first having considered the conflict that has been created in his inmost self.  The doctor carries with him his own history and experience.  A choice such as that of having to save one life, knowing that this will put another at serious risk, is never gone through easily.  Certainly, some are so accustomed to these situations that they no longer even experience emotion.  But in these cases, the choice to be a doctor is reduced to a mere trade, lived without enthusiasm, and soon only passively.  Nevertheless, to stereotype would be unjust, let alone incorrect.

Carmen has again presented a moral case that is among the most delicate.  To treat it hurriedly would not render justice either to her fragile person or to those who were involved in different capacities in the event.  Nevertheless, like every unique and concrete case, it deserves to be analyzed in its particularity, without generalizations.  Catholic morality does have principles from which it cannot turn away, even if it would like to.  The defense of human life from the moment of its conception belongs to one of these principles and is justified by the sacredness of existence.  Every human being, in fact, bears the image of the Creator impressed upon it from the first instant, and hence, we are convinced that the dignity and the rights of every person must be recognized as belonging to it, primarily that of its untouchableness and inviolability.

Procured abortion has always been condemned by the moral law as an intrinsically evil act, and this teaching remains unchanged from the very origins of the Church into our own day.  In the constitution Gaudium et Spes—a document of great openness and forethought in reference to our contemporary world—the Second Vatican Council unexpectedly uses unequivocal and very hard words against direct abortion.  Formal cooperation in it constitutes a grave fault which, when it is performed, automatically takes one outside of the Christian community.  Technically, the Code of Canon Law uses the expression latae sententiae to indicate that the excommunication is implemented precisely in the moment itself in which the deed takes place.

There was not a need, we believe, for so much urgency and publicity in declaring a fact that is carried out in an automatic manner.  A need is more greatly felt for the sign of a testimony of nearness to those who suffer, an act of mercy which, while firmly maintaining the principle, is capable of looking beyond the juridical sphere to arrive at that which the law itself foresees as the goal of its existence: the good and the salvation of those who believe in the love of the Father and of those who receive the Gospel of Christ like the children that Jesus called to his side and squeezed in his arms, saying that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.

Carmen, we are on your side.  We share with you the suffering you have experienced, we would like to do everything to restore to you the dignity which you have been deprived of and the love which you will need all the more.  Other people deserve excommunication and our forgiveness: not those who have allowed you to live and who will help you to recover hope and trust, despite the presence of evil and the wickedness of many.

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