Martin Scicluna (November 18) has done us the favour of reminding us of the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI on the Church’s proper role in matters of law and policy to do with morally challenging matters, such as IVF and embryo freezing.
His article argued that the members of the Pro-Life Network are a “ragbag” of individuals who are spouting “venom”, suffering from “hysteria” and “paranoia” because, according to him, they equate IVF with abortion.
Unfortunately, Scicluna quotes Benedict in a one-sided way, leaving out important parts of sentences. He presents the Pope as saying that the Church only has the role of telling Catholics what to do but has nothing to say about how society should be a just one.
Benedict did say that Church and State are two distinct spheres, however, he did not say that they are independent. “The two spheres are distinct,” (Scicluna quotes from Deus Caritas Est), “yet always interrelated” (which part Scicluna omits).
In his speech to the British Parliament in 2010, Benedict’s message is not that governments should go their own way, follow reason and ignore the Church’s teaching, but that the politicians’ use of reason should come to the same conclusions as the Church about right or wrong in society. Then he does add that it is the politicians’ and not the Church’s job to find practical ways of implementing them though law, policy and government.
As far as I know, the mentioned pro-life article writers are expressing their reason and not legislating or governing. So much so that Scicluna blames them for reasoning wrongly. To associate IVF with abortion is such a case of bad reasoning, he says, that it is nothing short of venom and paranoia.
Benedict told the British Parliament that the Christian faith does not replace reasoning but it purifies it from the bias of self-interest as well as false and shortsighted solutions. People tend to indulge in all sorts of shortsightedness and blindness, refusing to face reality, unable to act in line with what they see. What a pity that there continue to be people who deny global warming, for example, or the holocaust, or the bad social consequences of sexual licence or of all sorts of ‘cutting corners’.
Recently, I found a website that responded to a viewer’s simple question: “What happens to excess [or ‘unused’] embryos after IVF?” This website was thoroughly candid in stating the facts, yet ‘politically correct’ in the liberal sense of not wanting to sound judgmental. It admitted that couples who decide they now have enough babies usually are surprised to find that they have no plans for their unborn children, still waiting in a frozen state.
Faith can give us the courage to face reality and accept the evidence
Yet, keeping them in the freezer is expensive. This very often leads the parents to give an order for their destruction. Some parents accompany the act of destruction of the embryo with a religious ‘farewell’ service.
‘Destruction’ and ‘funeral’ are words that naturally come to mind and there has been talk in Malta of reserving such a ‘sentence’ to a magistrate - they are not the most politically-correct words in a one-sided world that promotes the ‘rights’ of those whose voice we can hear at the expense of those who are voiceless.
I do not think Christianity is a religion of threats and jihad.
Dismissing the social relevance of all religions because of the errors of religions, including Christianity, is like condemning all books and media because books and media have been used to spread Nazism and Islamist radicalisation. Larry Sidentrop, in Inventing the individual – the origins of western Liberalism argues that we owe Western political and thought freedom to the strong influence of Christianity in the West’s formative centuries.
Where Scicluna and I might agree is in that I expect the Catholic Church to complete its circle and one day accept the results of its own success and embrace a morality that is freer in certain aspects. But we need Christianity’s voice mostly because we are morally afraid to call a spade a spade.
IVF is objected to for three types of reasoning. The first is that it generates life in a way that misses the mutual self-giving of parents within an act of love and replaces it with actions that can look technological, unnatural, or worse. The second is the distress of children with an anonymous parent, strongly supported by research. The third is that ‘excess embryos’ inevitably, oh so inevitably, with very few exceptions, have one way to go: destruction.
I cannot see how a society that has the courage and honesty to call a spade a spade, be it Christian or secular or mixed, can deny the second reasoning, and how it can avoid acknowledging the dark horror of the third. I can see Maltese society accepting surrogate parenthood as an act of love entered into with full responsibility and without anonymity.
But if we take Scicluna’s advice, we should take heed of Benedict’s teaching. His message is that faith can give us the courage to face reality and accept the evidence. Genuine believers and genuine non-believers clearly see that the habit of freezing embryos very easily leads to widespread abortion.
Charles Pace is a specialist in social policy with interests in philosophy.