The following is the text of a great "teaching" given by Proffessor George. Share it with your children and grandchildren. It would be great if we could get Catholic politicians to read it.
Bill Miller
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Political Obligations, Conscience, and Human Life
Robert P. George
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence
Princeton University
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Robert P. George
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence
Princeton University
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The Catholic Church proclaims the principle that every human
being—without regard to race, sex, or ethnicity, and equally without regard
to age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency—is entitled
to the full protection of the laws. The Church teaches that human beings at
every stage of development—including those at the embryonic and fetal
stages—and those in every condition—including those who are mentally
retarded or physically disabled, and those who are suffering from severe
dementias or other memory and mind-impairing afflictions—possess
fundamental human rights. Above all, each of us possesses the right to life.
Now this teaching is disputed by some. There are those, including
some Catholics, who deny that human embryos are human beings. They
assert that and human embryo is merely "potential" human life, not nascent
human life. The trouble with this position is not theological but scientific. It
flies in the face of the established facts of human embryology and
developmental biology. A human embryo is not something distinct in kind
from a human being—the way that, for example, a rock or potato or alligator
is something different from a human being. A human embryo is a human
being at a particular, very early, stage of development. A human embryo,
even prior to implantation, is a whole, distinct, living member of the species
Homo sapiens. The embryonic human being requires only what any human
being at any stage of development requires for his or her survival, namely,
adequate nutrition and an environment sufficiently hospitable to sustain life.
From the beginning, each human being possesses—actually and not
merely potentially—the genetic constitution and active disposition for self-
directed development from the embryonic into and through the fetal, infant,
child, and adolescent stages and into adulthood with his or her distinctness,
unity, determinateness, and identity intact. In this crucial respect, the
embryo is quite unlike the gametes—that is, the sperm and ovum—whose
union brought a new human being into existence. You and I were never
sperm or ova; those were genetically and functionally parts of other human
beings. But each of us was once an embryo, just as each of us was once an
adolescent, and before that a child, an infant, a fetus. Of course, in the
embryonic, fetal, and infant stages we were highly vulnerable and dependent
creatures, but we were nevertheless complete, distinct human beings. As the
leading textbooks in human embryology and developmental biology
unanimously attest, we were not mere "clumps of cells," like moles or
tumors. So the basic rights people possess simply by virtue of their
humanity—including above all the right to life—we possessed even then.
Another school of thought concedes that human embryos are human
beings; however, it denies that all human beings are persons. There are,
according to this school of thought, pre-personal and post-personal human
beings, as well as severely retarded or damaged human beings who are not,
never will be, and never were, persons. Proponents of this view insist that
human beings in the embryonic and fetal stages are not yet persons. Indeed,
logically consistent and unsentimental proponents say that even human
infants are not yet persons, and therefore do not possess a right to life;
hence, the willingness of Peter Singer, Michael Tooley, and others to
countenance infanticide as well as abortion. Permanently comatose or
severely retarded or demented human beings are also denied the status of
persons. So euthanasia is said to be justified for human beings in these
conditions. Although some who think along these lines will allow that
human individuals whom they regard as "not yet persons" deserve a certain
limited respect by virtue of the purely biological fact that they are living
members of the human species, they nevertheless insist that "pre-personal"
humans do not possess a right to life that precludes them from being killed
to benefit others or to advance the interests of society at large. Only those
human beings who have achieved and retain what are regarded as the
defining attributes of personhood—whether those are considered to be
detectable brain function, self-awareness, or immediately exercisable
capacities for characteristically human mental functioning—possess a right
to life.
The trouble with this position is that it makes nonsense of our
political, philosophical, and, for many of us, theological commitment to the
principle that all human beings are equal in fundamental worth and dignity.
It generates puzzles that simply cannot be resolved, such as the puzzle as to
why this or that accidental quality which most human beings eventually
acquire in the course of normal development but others do not, and which
some retain and others lose, and which some have to a greater degree than
others, should count as the criterion of "personhood." The superior position,
surely, is that human beings possess equally an intrinsic dignity that is the
moral ground of the equal right to life of all. This is a right possessed by
every human being simply by virtue of his or her humanity. It does not
depend on an individual’s age, or size, or stage of development; nor can it be
erased by an individual’s physical or mental infirmity or condition of
dependency. It is what makes the life of even a severely retarded child equal
in fundamental worth to the life of a Nobel prize-winning scientist. It
explains why we may not licitly extract transplantable organs from such a
child even to save the life of a brilliant physicist who is afflicted with a life-
threatening heart, liver, or kidney ailment.
In any event, the position that all human beings equally possess
fundamental human rights, including the right to life, is the definitively
settled teaching of the Catholic Church. It is on this basis that the Church
proclaims that the taking of human life in abortion, infanticide, embryo-
destructive research, euthanasia, and terrorism are always and everywhere
gravely wrong.
And there is more. For the Church also teaches that it is the solemn
obligation of legislators and other public officials, as servants of the
common good, to honor and protect the rights of all. The principle of
equality demands as a matter of strict justice that protection against lethal
violence be extended by every political community to all who are within its
jurisdiction. Those to whom the care of the community is entrusted—above
all those who participate in making the community’s laws—have primary
responsibility for ensuring that the right to life is embodied in the laws and
effectively protected in practice. Notice, by the way, that the obligation of
the public official is not to "enforce the teaching of the Catholic Church," it
is, rather, to fulfill the demands of justice and the common good in light of
the principle of the inherent and equal dignity of every member of the
human family.
Yet, today many Catholic politicians are staunch supporters of what
they describe as a "woman’s right to abortion." Most of these politicians
also support the creation and government funding of an industry that would
produce tens of thousands of human embryos by cloning for use in
biomedical research in which these embryonic human beings would be
destroyed.
Catholic politicians in the United States and in other nations who
support abortion and embryo-destructive research typically claim to be
"personally opposed" to these practices but respectful of the rights of others
who disagree to act on their own judgments of conscience without legal
interference. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo famously
articulated and defended this view in a speech at the University of Notre
Dame in 1984. Recently, Cuomo revisited the issue, speaking in
Washington at a Forum on Politics and Faith in America. He offered an
argument which, if successful, not only justifies Catholic politicians in
supporting legal abortion and embryo-destructive research, but requires them
to respect a right of people to engage in these practices despite their admitted
moral wrongfulness.
Cuomo asserted that holders of public office—including Catholic
office-holders—have a responsibility "to create conditions under which all
citizens are reasonably free to act according to their own religious beliefs,
even when those acts conflict with Roman Catholic dogma regarding
divorce, birth control, abortion, stem cell research, and even the existence of
God." According to Cuomo, Catholics should support legalized abortion
and embryo-destructive research, as he himself does, because in
guaranteeing these rights to others, they guarantee their own right "to reject
abortions, and to refuse to participate in or contribute to removing stem cells
from embryos." But Cuomo’s idea that the right "to reject" abortion and
embryo-destructive experimentation entails a right of others, as a matter of
religious liberty, to engage in these practices is simply, if spectacularly,
fallacious. The fallacy comes into focus immediately if one considers
whether the right of a Catholic (or Baptist, or Jew, or member of any other
faith) to reject infanticide, slavery, and the exploitation of labor entails a
right of others who happen not to share these "religious" convictions to kill,
enslave, and exploit.
By the expedient of classifying pro-life convictions about abortion
and embryo-destructive experimentation as "Roman Catholic dogmas,"
Cuomo smuggles into the premises of his argument the controversial
conclusion he is trying to prove. If pro-life principles were indeed merely
dogmatic teachings—such as the teaching that Jesus of Nazareth is the only
begotten Son of God—then according to the Church herself (not to mention
American constitutional law and the law of many other republics) they could
not legitimately be enforced by the coercive power of the State. The trouble
for Cuomo is that pro-life principles are not mere matters of "dogma," nor
are they understood as such by the Catholic Church, whose beliefs Cuomo
claims to affirm, or by pro-life citizens, whether they happen to be Catholics,
Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, or atheists.
Rather, pro-life citizens understand these principles and propose them to
their fellow citizens as fundamental norms of justice and human rights that
can be understood and affirmed even apart from claims of revelation and
religious authority.
It will not do to suggest, as Cuomo seems to suggest, that the sheer
fact that the Catholic Church (or some other religious body) has a teaching
against these practices, and that some or even many people reject this
teaching, means that laws prohibiting the killing of human beings in the
embryonic and fetal stages violate the right to freedom of religion of those
who do not accept the teaching. If that were anything other than a fallacy,
then laws against killing infants, owning slaves, exploiting workers, and
many other grave forms of injustice really would be violations of religious
freedom. Surely Cuomo would not wish to endorse that conclusion.
Yet he provides no reason to distinguish those acts and practices
putatively falling within the category of religious freedom from those falling
outside it. So we must ask: If abortion is immunized against legal
restriction on the ground that it is a matter of religious belief, how can it be
that slavery is not similarly immunized? If today abortion cannot be
prohibited without violating the right to religious freedom of people whose
religions do not object to abortion, how can Cuomo say that the prohibition
of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in
1866 did not violate the right to religious freedom of those in the nineteenth
century whose religions did not condemn slaveholding? Cuomo says that
the Catholic Church "understands that our public morality depends on a
consensus view of right and wrong," but it would be scandalous to argue that
Catholics should have opposed a constitutional amendment abolishing
slavery in the nineteenth century, or legislation protecting the civil rights of
the oppressed descendants of slaves in the mid-twentieth century, on the
ground that "prudence" or "realism" requires respect for "moral pluralism"
where there is no "consensus" on questions of right and wrong.
At one point at the forum on Politics and Faith, Cuomo suggested that
laws against abortion and embryo-destructive research would force people
who do not object to such things to practice the religion of people who do.
But this is another fallacy. No one imagines that the constitutional
prohibition of slavery forced those who believed in slaveholding to practice
the religion of those who did not. Would Cuomo have us suppose that laws
protecting workers against what he, in line with the solemn teaching of every
pope from Leo XIII to Benedict XVI, considers to be exploitation and abuse
have the effect of forcing non-Catholic factory owners to practice
Catholicism?
[At another point, in denying that there was any inconsistency
between his willingness as governor to act on his anti-death penalty
views but not on his antiabortion views, Cuomo denied ever having
spoken against the death penalty as "a moral issue." He claimed, in fact,
that he "seldom talk[s] in terms of moral issues" and that, when he
speaks of the death penalty, he never suggests that he considers it a
moral issue. Then, in the very next sentence, he condemned the death
penalty in the most explicitly, indeed flamboyantly, moralistic terms: "I
am against the death penalty because I think it is bad and unfair. It is
debasing. It is degenerate. It kills innocent people." He did not pause to
consider that these are precisely the claims made by pro-life citizens
against the policy of legal abortion and its public funding—a policy that
Cuomo defends in the name of religious liberty.]
The fact is that Catholics and others who oppose abortion and
embryo-destructive research oppose these practices for the same reason we
oppose postnatal homicide. Pro-life citizens of every faith oppose these
practices because they involve the deliberate killing of innocent human
beings. Our ground for supporting the legal prohibition of abortion and
embryo-destructive research is the same ground on which we support the
legal prohibition of infanticide, for example, or the principle of
noncombatant immunity even in justified wars. We subscribe to the
proposition that all human beings are equal in worth and dignity and cannot
be denied the right to protection against killing on the basis of age, size,
stage of development, or condition of dependency.
One cannot with moral integrity be "personally opposed" to abortion
or embryo-destructive research yet support the legal permission of these
practices and even, their public funding as so many Catholic politicians do,
including most Catholic Democrats and some Catholic Republicans in the
United States. For by supporting abortion and embryo-destructive research
they unavoidably implicate themselves in the grave injustice of these
practices.
Of course, it is possible for a person wielding public power to use that
power to establish or preserve a legal right to abortion, for example, while at
the same time hoping that no one will exercise the right. But this does not
get such a person off the moral hook. For someone who acts to protect legal
abortion necessarily wills that abortion’s unborn victims be denied the
elementary legal protections against deliberate homicide that one favors for
oneself and those whom one considers to be worthy of the law’s protection.
Thus one violates the most basic precept of normative social and political
theory, the Golden Rule. One divides humanity into two classes: those
whom one is willing to admit to the community of the commonly protected
and those whom one wills to be excluded from it. By exposing members of
the disfavored class to lethal violence, one deeply implicates oneself in the
injustice of killing them—even if one sincerely hopes that no woman will
act on her right to choose abortion. The goodness of what one hopes for does
not redeem the evil—the grave injustice—of what one wills. To suppose
otherwise is to commit yet another fallacy.
If my analysis so far is correct, the question arises: What should the
leaders of the Church do about people like Cuomo and his successor as New
York’s Governor, Republican George Pataki who evidently takes the same
position? What should they do about those who claim to be in full
communion with the Church yet promote gravely unjust and scandalous
policies that expose the unborn to the violence and injustice of abortion?
In the run up to the last American presidential election, St. Louis
Archbishop Raymond Burke offered an answer. He declared that public
officials who support abortion and other unjust attacks against innocent
human life may not be admitted to Holy Communion, the preeminent
sacrament of unity.
Pro-life citizens of every religious persuasion applauded the
Archbishop’s stand. Critics, however, were quick to condemn Archbishop
Burke. They denounced him for "crossing the line" separating church and
state.
But this is silly. In acting on his authority as a bishop to discipline
members of his flock, who commit what the Church teaches are grave
injustices against innocent human beings, Archbishop Burke is exercising
his own constitutional right to the free exercise of religion; he is not
depriving others of their rights. Freedom is a two way street. No one is
compelled by law to accept ecclesiastical authority. But Archbishop
Burke—and anyone else in the United States of America or other freedom-
respecting nations—has every right to exercise spiritual authority over
anyone who chooses to accept it. There is a name for people who do accept
the authority of Catholic bishops. They are called "Catholics."
In many cases, the charge that Archbishop Burke and other bishops
who adopt the policy of excluding pro-abortion politicians from Communion
"are crossing the line separating church and state" is also hypocritical. A
good example of this hypocrisy comes from the Bergen Record, a prominent
newspaper in my home state of New Jersey. John Smith, the Bishop of
Trenton, did not go as far as Raymond Burke had gone in forbidding pro-
abortion Catholic politicians from receiving communion. Bishop Smith did,
however, in the words of the Bergen Record, "publicly lash" Governor
James McGreevey, a pro-abortion Catholic, for his support of abortion and
embryo-destructive research. For criticizing the Governor on these grounds,
the Record lashed the Bishop in an April 25th editorial. The paper accused
him of jeopardizing the delicate "balance" of our constitutional structure,
contrasting Bishop Smith’s position unfavorably with President John F.
Kennedy’s assurance to a group of Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960
that he, as a Catholic, would not govern the nation by appeal to his Catholic
religious beliefs. Since the Record had seen fit to take us back to 1960 for
guidance, I thought I would invite its editors to consider a case that had
arisen only a few years earlier than that. In a letter to the editor, I proposed a
question that would enable readers to determine immediately whether the
editors of the Bergen Record were persons of strict principle or mere
hypocrites.
I reminded readers that in the 1950s, in the midst of the political
conflict over segregation, Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans
publicly informed Catholics that support for racial segregation was
incompatible with Catholic teaching on the inherent dignity and equal rights
of all human beings. Archbishop Rummel said that "racial segregation is
morally wrong and sinful because it is a denial of the unity and solidarity of
the human race as conceived by God in the creation of Adam and Eve." He
warned Catholic public officials that support for segregation placed their
souls in peril. Indeed, Rummel took the step of publicly excommunicating
Leander Perez, one of the most powerful political bosses in Louisiana, and
two others who promoted legislation designed to impede desegregation of
diocesan schools. So I asked the editors of the Bergen Record: Was
Archbishop Rummel wrong? Or do Catholic bishops "cross the line" and
jeopardize the delicate constitutional balance, only when their rebukes to
politicians contradict the views of the editors of the Record? To their credit,
the editors published my letter—but I am still waiting for them to reply to
my question.
Now, some good and sincere people have expressed concern that
Archbishop Burke and bishops of similar mind are guilty of a double
standard when it comes to demanding of politicians fidelity to Catholic
teaching on justice and the common good. They point out that the bishops
who would deny communion to those who publicly support abortion and
embryo-destructive research do not take the same stand against politicians
who support the death penalty, which Pope John Paul II condemned in all
but the rarest of circumstances, and the U.S. invasions of Iraq, of which the
Pope and many other Vatican officials were sharply critical.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church indeed teaches that the death
penalty should not be used, except in circumstances so rare these days as to
be, in words of the late pope, "practically non-existent." However, two
points must be borne in mind in considering the obligations of Catholics and
the question whether Catholic politicians who support the death penalty have
in fact broken faith and communion with the Church. First, neither the Pope
nor the Catechism places the death penalty on a par with abortion and other
forms of direct killing of the innocent. (Indeed, the Church will probably
never equate the death penalty with these forms of homicide, even if it
eventually issues a definitive condemnation of the practice.) Second, the
status of the teaching differs from the status of the teaching on abortion. As
John Paul II made clear in the great encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the
teaching on abortion (as well as on euthanasia and all forms of direct killing
of the innocent) is infallibly proposed by the ordinary and universal
magisterium of the Church pursuant to the criteria of Lumen Gentium 25.
The same is plainly not true of the developing teaching on the death
penalty. Moreover, Cardinal Avery Dulles and others have interpreted the
teaching against the death penalty as essentially a prudential judgment about
its advisability, not a moral prohibition following from the application of a
strict principle. As it happens, I don't agree with their analysis, but no one
will be able to say with confidence from a Catholic point of view which side
in this debate is right until the magisterium clarifies the teaching. So, it
cannot be said that supporters of the death penalty are "obstinately persisting
in manifest grave sin," and may or should be denied Holy Communion
pursuant to Canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law. No one can legitimately
claim for opposition to the death penalty the status of a definitively settled
moral teaching of the Church. (Nor can one claim that the Church teaches or
will ever teach that the death penalty—except in cases where it is applied
unjustly—involves the grave intrinsic injustice attaching to any act involving
the direct killing of the innocent.)
Regarding the question of the U.S. invasions of Iraq, it is important to
understand the precise terms of Catholic teaching on just and unjust warfare.
These terms are set forth with clarity and precision in the Catechism. In line
with the Church’s historic teaching on the subject, neither Pope John Paul II
nor Pope Benedict XVI has asserted that opposition to the war is binding on
the consciences of Catholics. John Paul II’s statements opposing the use of
force in the run up to both invasions plainly questioned the prudential
judgments of political leaders who, in the end, had and have the right and
responsibility (according to the Catechism and the entire tradition of
Catholic teaching on war and peace) to make judgments as to whether force
is in fact necessary. That is why the Pope and the bishops have not said, and
will not say, that Catholic soldiers may not participate in the war. This
contrasts with their clear teaching that Catholics may not participate in
abortions or other forms of embryo-killing or support the use of taxpayer
monies for activities involving the deliberate killing of innocent human
beings.
I wish to close with a word to those in politics and the media—
Catholics and non-Catholics alike—who have expressed anger, even
outrage, at the world’s Catholic bishops for teaching that the faithful must
never implicate themselves in unjust killing by supporting legal abortion and
embryo-destructive research. In scolding the bishops, the editors of the New
York Times, for example, have insisted that "separation of church and state"
means that no religious leader may presume to tell public officials what their
positions may and may not be on matters of public policy. But if we shift
the focus from abortion to, say, genocide, slavery, the exploitation of labor,
or racial segregation we see how implausible such a view is. When
Archbishop Rummel excommunicated the segregationist politicians in the
1950s, far from condemning the Archbishop, the editors of the New York
Times praised him. They were right then; they are wrong now.
being—without regard to race, sex, or ethnicity, and equally without regard
to age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency—is entitled
to the full protection of the laws. The Church teaches that human beings at
every stage of development—including those at the embryonic and fetal
stages—and those in every condition—including those who are mentally
retarded or physically disabled, and those who are suffering from severe
dementias or other memory and mind-impairing afflictions—possess
fundamental human rights. Above all, each of us possesses the right to life.
Now this teaching is disputed by some. There are those, including
some Catholics, who deny that human embryos are human beings. They
assert that and human embryo is merely "potential" human life, not nascent
human life. The trouble with this position is not theological but scientific. It
flies in the face of the established facts of human embryology and
developmental biology. A human embryo is not something distinct in kind
from a human being—the way that, for example, a rock or potato or alligator
is something different from a human being. A human embryo is a human
being at a particular, very early, stage of development. A human embryo,
even prior to implantation, is a whole, distinct, living member of the species
Homo sapiens. The embryonic human being requires only what any human
being at any stage of development requires for his or her survival, namely,
adequate nutrition and an environment sufficiently hospitable to sustain life.
From the beginning, each human being possesses—actually and not
merely potentially—the genetic constitution and active disposition for self-
directed development from the embryonic into and through the fetal, infant,
child, and adolescent stages and into adulthood with his or her distinctness,
unity, determinateness, and identity intact. In this crucial respect, the
embryo is quite unlike the gametes—that is, the sperm and ovum—whose
union brought a new human being into existence. You and I were never
sperm or ova; those were genetically and functionally parts of other human
beings. But each of us was once an embryo, just as each of us was once an
adolescent, and before that a child, an infant, a fetus. Of course, in the
embryonic, fetal, and infant stages we were highly vulnerable and dependent
creatures, but we were nevertheless complete, distinct human beings. As the
leading textbooks in human embryology and developmental biology
unanimously attest, we were not mere "clumps of cells," like moles or
tumors. So the basic rights people possess simply by virtue of their
humanity—including above all the right to life—we possessed even then.
Another school of thought concedes that human embryos are human
beings; however, it denies that all human beings are persons. There are,
according to this school of thought, pre-personal and post-personal human
beings, as well as severely retarded or damaged human beings who are not,
never will be, and never were, persons. Proponents of this view insist that
human beings in the embryonic and fetal stages are not yet persons. Indeed,
logically consistent and unsentimental proponents say that even human
infants are not yet persons, and therefore do not possess a right to life;
hence, the willingness of Peter Singer, Michael Tooley, and others to
countenance infanticide as well as abortion. Permanently comatose or
severely retarded or demented human beings are also denied the status of
persons. So euthanasia is said to be justified for human beings in these
conditions. Although some who think along these lines will allow that
human individuals whom they regard as "not yet persons" deserve a certain
limited respect by virtue of the purely biological fact that they are living
members of the human species, they nevertheless insist that "pre-personal"
humans do not possess a right to life that precludes them from being killed
to benefit others or to advance the interests of society at large. Only those
human beings who have achieved and retain what are regarded as the
defining attributes of personhood—whether those are considered to be
detectable brain function, self-awareness, or immediately exercisable
capacities for characteristically human mental functioning—possess a right
to life.
The trouble with this position is that it makes nonsense of our
political, philosophical, and, for many of us, theological commitment to the
principle that all human beings are equal in fundamental worth and dignity.
It generates puzzles that simply cannot be resolved, such as the puzzle as to
why this or that accidental quality which most human beings eventually
acquire in the course of normal development but others do not, and which
some retain and others lose, and which some have to a greater degree than
others, should count as the criterion of "personhood." The superior position,
surely, is that human beings possess equally an intrinsic dignity that is the
moral ground of the equal right to life of all. This is a right possessed by
every human being simply by virtue of his or her humanity. It does not
depend on an individual’s age, or size, or stage of development; nor can it be
erased by an individual’s physical or mental infirmity or condition of
dependency. It is what makes the life of even a severely retarded child equal
in fundamental worth to the life of a Nobel prize-winning scientist. It
explains why we may not licitly extract transplantable organs from such a
child even to save the life of a brilliant physicist who is afflicted with a life-
threatening heart, liver, or kidney ailment.
In any event, the position that all human beings equally possess
fundamental human rights, including the right to life, is the definitively
settled teaching of the Catholic Church. It is on this basis that the Church
proclaims that the taking of human life in abortion, infanticide, embryo-
destructive research, euthanasia, and terrorism are always and everywhere
gravely wrong.
And there is more. For the Church also teaches that it is the solemn
obligation of legislators and other public officials, as servants of the
common good, to honor and protect the rights of all. The principle of
equality demands as a matter of strict justice that protection against lethal
violence be extended by every political community to all who are within its
jurisdiction. Those to whom the care of the community is entrusted—above
all those who participate in making the community’s laws—have primary
responsibility for ensuring that the right to life is embodied in the laws and
effectively protected in practice. Notice, by the way, that the obligation of
the public official is not to "enforce the teaching of the Catholic Church," it
is, rather, to fulfill the demands of justice and the common good in light of
the principle of the inherent and equal dignity of every member of the
human family.
Yet, today many Catholic politicians are staunch supporters of what
they describe as a "woman’s right to abortion." Most of these politicians
also support the creation and government funding of an industry that would
produce tens of thousands of human embryos by cloning for use in
biomedical research in which these embryonic human beings would be
destroyed.
Catholic politicians in the United States and in other nations who
support abortion and embryo-destructive research typically claim to be
"personally opposed" to these practices but respectful of the rights of others
who disagree to act on their own judgments of conscience without legal
interference. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo famously
articulated and defended this view in a speech at the University of Notre
Dame in 1984. Recently, Cuomo revisited the issue, speaking in
Washington at a Forum on Politics and Faith in America. He offered an
argument which, if successful, not only justifies Catholic politicians in
supporting legal abortion and embryo-destructive research, but requires them
to respect a right of people to engage in these practices despite their admitted
moral wrongfulness.
Cuomo asserted that holders of public office—including Catholic
office-holders—have a responsibility "to create conditions under which all
citizens are reasonably free to act according to their own religious beliefs,
even when those acts conflict with Roman Catholic dogma regarding
divorce, birth control, abortion, stem cell research, and even the existence of
God." According to Cuomo, Catholics should support legalized abortion
and embryo-destructive research, as he himself does, because in
guaranteeing these rights to others, they guarantee their own right "to reject
abortions, and to refuse to participate in or contribute to removing stem cells
from embryos." But Cuomo’s idea that the right "to reject" abortion and
embryo-destructive experimentation entails a right of others, as a matter of
religious liberty, to engage in these practices is simply, if spectacularly,
fallacious. The fallacy comes into focus immediately if one considers
whether the right of a Catholic (or Baptist, or Jew, or member of any other
faith) to reject infanticide, slavery, and the exploitation of labor entails a
right of others who happen not to share these "religious" convictions to kill,
enslave, and exploit.
By the expedient of classifying pro-life convictions about abortion
and embryo-destructive experimentation as "Roman Catholic dogmas,"
Cuomo smuggles into the premises of his argument the controversial
conclusion he is trying to prove. If pro-life principles were indeed merely
dogmatic teachings—such as the teaching that Jesus of Nazareth is the only
begotten Son of God—then according to the Church herself (not to mention
American constitutional law and the law of many other republics) they could
not legitimately be enforced by the coercive power of the State. The trouble
for Cuomo is that pro-life principles are not mere matters of "dogma," nor
are they understood as such by the Catholic Church, whose beliefs Cuomo
claims to affirm, or by pro-life citizens, whether they happen to be Catholics,
Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, or atheists.
Rather, pro-life citizens understand these principles and propose them to
their fellow citizens as fundamental norms of justice and human rights that
can be understood and affirmed even apart from claims of revelation and
religious authority.
It will not do to suggest, as Cuomo seems to suggest, that the sheer
fact that the Catholic Church (or some other religious body) has a teaching
against these practices, and that some or even many people reject this
teaching, means that laws prohibiting the killing of human beings in the
embryonic and fetal stages violate the right to freedom of religion of those
who do not accept the teaching. If that were anything other than a fallacy,
then laws against killing infants, owning slaves, exploiting workers, and
many other grave forms of injustice really would be violations of religious
freedom. Surely Cuomo would not wish to endorse that conclusion.
Yet he provides no reason to distinguish those acts and practices
putatively falling within the category of religious freedom from those falling
outside it. So we must ask: If abortion is immunized against legal
restriction on the ground that it is a matter of religious belief, how can it be
that slavery is not similarly immunized? If today abortion cannot be
prohibited without violating the right to religious freedom of people whose
religions do not object to abortion, how can Cuomo say that the prohibition
of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in
1866 did not violate the right to religious freedom of those in the nineteenth
century whose religions did not condemn slaveholding? Cuomo says that
the Catholic Church "understands that our public morality depends on a
consensus view of right and wrong," but it would be scandalous to argue that
Catholics should have opposed a constitutional amendment abolishing
slavery in the nineteenth century, or legislation protecting the civil rights of
the oppressed descendants of slaves in the mid-twentieth century, on the
ground that "prudence" or "realism" requires respect for "moral pluralism"
where there is no "consensus" on questions of right and wrong.
At one point at the forum on Politics and Faith, Cuomo suggested that
laws against abortion and embryo-destructive research would force people
who do not object to such things to practice the religion of people who do.
But this is another fallacy. No one imagines that the constitutional
prohibition of slavery forced those who believed in slaveholding to practice
the religion of those who did not. Would Cuomo have us suppose that laws
protecting workers against what he, in line with the solemn teaching of every
pope from Leo XIII to Benedict XVI, considers to be exploitation and abuse
have the effect of forcing non-Catholic factory owners to practice
Catholicism?
[At another point, in denying that there was any inconsistency
between his willingness as governor to act on his anti-death penalty
views but not on his antiabortion views, Cuomo denied ever having
spoken against the death penalty as "a moral issue." He claimed, in fact,
that he "seldom talk[s] in terms of moral issues" and that, when he
speaks of the death penalty, he never suggests that he considers it a
moral issue. Then, in the very next sentence, he condemned the death
penalty in the most explicitly, indeed flamboyantly, moralistic terms: "I
am against the death penalty because I think it is bad and unfair. It is
debasing. It is degenerate. It kills innocent people." He did not pause to
consider that these are precisely the claims made by pro-life citizens
against the policy of legal abortion and its public funding—a policy that
Cuomo defends in the name of religious liberty.]
The fact is that Catholics and others who oppose abortion and
embryo-destructive research oppose these practices for the same reason we
oppose postnatal homicide. Pro-life citizens of every faith oppose these
practices because they involve the deliberate killing of innocent human
beings. Our ground for supporting the legal prohibition of abortion and
embryo-destructive research is the same ground on which we support the
legal prohibition of infanticide, for example, or the principle of
noncombatant immunity even in justified wars. We subscribe to the
proposition that all human beings are equal in worth and dignity and cannot
be denied the right to protection against killing on the basis of age, size,
stage of development, or condition of dependency.
One cannot with moral integrity be "personally opposed" to abortion
or embryo-destructive research yet support the legal permission of these
practices and even, their public funding as so many Catholic politicians do,
including most Catholic Democrats and some Catholic Republicans in the
United States. For by supporting abortion and embryo-destructive research
they unavoidably implicate themselves in the grave injustice of these
practices.
Of course, it is possible for a person wielding public power to use that
power to establish or preserve a legal right to abortion, for example, while at
the same time hoping that no one will exercise the right. But this does not
get such a person off the moral hook. For someone who acts to protect legal
abortion necessarily wills that abortion’s unborn victims be denied the
elementary legal protections against deliberate homicide that one favors for
oneself and those whom one considers to be worthy of the law’s protection.
Thus one violates the most basic precept of normative social and political
theory, the Golden Rule. One divides humanity into two classes: those
whom one is willing to admit to the community of the commonly protected
and those whom one wills to be excluded from it. By exposing members of
the disfavored class to lethal violence, one deeply implicates oneself in the
injustice of killing them—even if one sincerely hopes that no woman will
act on her right to choose abortion. The goodness of what one hopes for does
not redeem the evil—the grave injustice—of what one wills. To suppose
otherwise is to commit yet another fallacy.
If my analysis so far is correct, the question arises: What should the
leaders of the Church do about people like Cuomo and his successor as New
York’s Governor, Republican George Pataki who evidently takes the same
position? What should they do about those who claim to be in full
communion with the Church yet promote gravely unjust and scandalous
policies that expose the unborn to the violence and injustice of abortion?
In the run up to the last American presidential election, St. Louis
Archbishop Raymond Burke offered an answer. He declared that public
officials who support abortion and other unjust attacks against innocent
human life may not be admitted to Holy Communion, the preeminent
sacrament of unity.
Pro-life citizens of every religious persuasion applauded the
Archbishop’s stand. Critics, however, were quick to condemn Archbishop
Burke. They denounced him for "crossing the line" separating church and
state.
But this is silly. In acting on his authority as a bishop to discipline
members of his flock, who commit what the Church teaches are grave
injustices against innocent human beings, Archbishop Burke is exercising
his own constitutional right to the free exercise of religion; he is not
depriving others of their rights. Freedom is a two way street. No one is
compelled by law to accept ecclesiastical authority. But Archbishop
Burke—and anyone else in the United States of America or other freedom-
respecting nations—has every right to exercise spiritual authority over
anyone who chooses to accept it. There is a name for people who do accept
the authority of Catholic bishops. They are called "Catholics."
In many cases, the charge that Archbishop Burke and other bishops
who adopt the policy of excluding pro-abortion politicians from Communion
"are crossing the line separating church and state" is also hypocritical. A
good example of this hypocrisy comes from the Bergen Record, a prominent
newspaper in my home state of New Jersey. John Smith, the Bishop of
Trenton, did not go as far as Raymond Burke had gone in forbidding pro-
abortion Catholic politicians from receiving communion. Bishop Smith did,
however, in the words of the Bergen Record, "publicly lash" Governor
James McGreevey, a pro-abortion Catholic, for his support of abortion and
embryo-destructive research. For criticizing the Governor on these grounds,
the Record lashed the Bishop in an April 25th editorial. The paper accused
him of jeopardizing the delicate "balance" of our constitutional structure,
contrasting Bishop Smith’s position unfavorably with President John F.
Kennedy’s assurance to a group of Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960
that he, as a Catholic, would not govern the nation by appeal to his Catholic
religious beliefs. Since the Record had seen fit to take us back to 1960 for
guidance, I thought I would invite its editors to consider a case that had
arisen only a few years earlier than that. In a letter to the editor, I proposed a
question that would enable readers to determine immediately whether the
editors of the Bergen Record were persons of strict principle or mere
hypocrites.
I reminded readers that in the 1950s, in the midst of the political
conflict over segregation, Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans
publicly informed Catholics that support for racial segregation was
incompatible with Catholic teaching on the inherent dignity and equal rights
of all human beings. Archbishop Rummel said that "racial segregation is
morally wrong and sinful because it is a denial of the unity and solidarity of
the human race as conceived by God in the creation of Adam and Eve." He
warned Catholic public officials that support for segregation placed their
souls in peril. Indeed, Rummel took the step of publicly excommunicating
Leander Perez, one of the most powerful political bosses in Louisiana, and
two others who promoted legislation designed to impede desegregation of
diocesan schools. So I asked the editors of the Bergen Record: Was
Archbishop Rummel wrong? Or do Catholic bishops "cross the line" and
jeopardize the delicate constitutional balance, only when their rebukes to
politicians contradict the views of the editors of the Record? To their credit,
the editors published my letter—but I am still waiting for them to reply to
my question.
Now, some good and sincere people have expressed concern that
Archbishop Burke and bishops of similar mind are guilty of a double
standard when it comes to demanding of politicians fidelity to Catholic
teaching on justice and the common good. They point out that the bishops
who would deny communion to those who publicly support abortion and
embryo-destructive research do not take the same stand against politicians
who support the death penalty, which Pope John Paul II condemned in all
but the rarest of circumstances, and the U.S. invasions of Iraq, of which the
Pope and many other Vatican officials were sharply critical.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church indeed teaches that the death
penalty should not be used, except in circumstances so rare these days as to
be, in words of the late pope, "practically non-existent." However, two
points must be borne in mind in considering the obligations of Catholics and
the question whether Catholic politicians who support the death penalty have
in fact broken faith and communion with the Church. First, neither the Pope
nor the Catechism places the death penalty on a par with abortion and other
forms of direct killing of the innocent. (Indeed, the Church will probably
never equate the death penalty with these forms of homicide, even if it
eventually issues a definitive condemnation of the practice.) Second, the
status of the teaching differs from the status of the teaching on abortion. As
John Paul II made clear in the great encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the
teaching on abortion (as well as on euthanasia and all forms of direct killing
of the innocent) is infallibly proposed by the ordinary and universal
magisterium of the Church pursuant to the criteria of Lumen Gentium 25.
The same is plainly not true of the developing teaching on the death
penalty. Moreover, Cardinal Avery Dulles and others have interpreted the
teaching against the death penalty as essentially a prudential judgment about
its advisability, not a moral prohibition following from the application of a
strict principle. As it happens, I don't agree with their analysis, but no one
will be able to say with confidence from a Catholic point of view which side
in this debate is right until the magisterium clarifies the teaching. So, it
cannot be said that supporters of the death penalty are "obstinately persisting
in manifest grave sin," and may or should be denied Holy Communion
pursuant to Canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law. No one can legitimately
claim for opposition to the death penalty the status of a definitively settled
moral teaching of the Church. (Nor can one claim that the Church teaches or
will ever teach that the death penalty—except in cases where it is applied
unjustly—involves the grave intrinsic injustice attaching to any act involving
the direct killing of the innocent.)
Regarding the question of the U.S. invasions of Iraq, it is important to
understand the precise terms of Catholic teaching on just and unjust warfare.
These terms are set forth with clarity and precision in the Catechism. In line
with the Church’s historic teaching on the subject, neither Pope John Paul II
nor Pope Benedict XVI has asserted that opposition to the war is binding on
the consciences of Catholics. John Paul II’s statements opposing the use of
force in the run up to both invasions plainly questioned the prudential
judgments of political leaders who, in the end, had and have the right and
responsibility (according to the Catechism and the entire tradition of
Catholic teaching on war and peace) to make judgments as to whether force
is in fact necessary. That is why the Pope and the bishops have not said, and
will not say, that Catholic soldiers may not participate in the war. This
contrasts with their clear teaching that Catholics may not participate in
abortions or other forms of embryo-killing or support the use of taxpayer
monies for activities involving the deliberate killing of innocent human
beings.
I wish to close with a word to those in politics and the media—
Catholics and non-Catholics alike—who have expressed anger, even
outrage, at the world’s Catholic bishops for teaching that the faithful must
never implicate themselves in unjust killing by supporting legal abortion and
embryo-destructive research. In scolding the bishops, the editors of the New
York Times, for example, have insisted that "separation of church and state"
means that no religious leader may presume to tell public officials what their
positions may and may not be on matters of public policy. But if we shift
the focus from abortion to, say, genocide, slavery, the exploitation of labor,
or racial segregation we see how implausible such a view is. When
Archbishop Rummel excommunicated the segregationist politicians in the
1950s, far from condemning the Archbishop, the editors of the New York
Times praised him. They were right then; they are wrong now.
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