Content provided in partnership with

Abortion and the embarrassing saint - Catholic Church's changing position on abortion

Humanist, May-June, 1994 by Stephen T. Asma

<< Page 1 Continued from page 3. Previous | Next

Having acquainted ourselves with Aquinas' theory of "person formation" (a theory which, I hasten to add, might currently land Aquinas in the company of heretics rather than saints), we can turn to the wider and more significant argument. We must ask not whether women's rights outweigh fetuses' rights but whether religious ideology; should ever be allowed to dictate law.

Most Popular Articles in Reference: The importance of understanding organizational culture; Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students; What factors attract foreign direct investment?; Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...; How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques; More »

The current church ideology holds that personhood begins at conception. This ideological (not scientific) "finding" has been written into Missouri law - a secular law which governs not only Christians but Jews, atheists, Muslims, Hindus, and others. But if we want to infuse secular laws with religious convictions, let us see what an alternative set of convictions might produce. We won't pick a different faith, like Hinduism or Buddhism, for that will be too easily dismissed by the Christian right as pagan confusion. Instead, we will pick our alternative set of ideological commitments, from the church fathers themselves. Saint Thomas Aquinas' "findings" could just as easily be dressed up into the form of legal statutes (as they in fact were at the Council of Trent), with the added attraction of being founded - unlike the Missouri findings - on some empirical study of biological development. And if the saint's findings were now codified and sanctioned by the state, then abortion up until the eighth week would be entirely justified and protected.

Christians, it seems, want their religious ideology sanctioned by the state; when "outside" (non-Christian) ideologies are posed, they are often dismissed as heathen and godless. But when a Catholic ideologist of Saint Thomas Aquinas' stature pronounces against the current personhood credo, Christians cannot so easily shout "heretic" and consign him to burn in some obscure level of hell.

Pope John Paul II, in a November 1993 anti-abortion speech given to the U.S. bishops, stated: "Fundamental moral principles, in fact, are an essential ingredient of the formation of public policy, as was clearly understood and intended by your nation's Founding Fathers." But if we take the pope seriously on this point, then we must recognize that the official Catholic "moral principle" at the time of our nation's founding was that abortion was permissible up to the sixth or eighth week of pregnancy. This is in direct conflict with the "fundamental moral principles" of current Catholic thinking - yet the pope seems to suggest that those earlier principles should have been written into law. We must conclude either that the pope is unaware of church history (which is very unlikely) or that he does not mean what he says here.

Therefore, it seems, Christians do not really want their ideology sanctioned by the state, for that would entail the inclusion of an embarrassing contradictory tradition. Rather, they really want to have only their most recent visceral responses and intuitional moral impressions stamped onto the gavel of state authority. Opening the door to this sort of idiosyncratic contingency is death to the secular state.

Abortion and the embarrassing saint - Catholic Church's changing position on abortion

Humanist, May-June, 1994 by Stephen T. Asma

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Business

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference