Christopher Caruana (November 20) admirably paraphrased the underlying assumptions of Martin Scicluna’s article (November 18), namely that religion is by nature irrational, wholly a private matter, and therefore should be kept “out of society”.
So anything rooted in religious belief is anathema to parliamentary debate, whereas rational ideas deserve to be discussed in a parliamentary democracy, and sometimes enshrined in law.
Scicluna, as Caruana observes, astoundingly attempts to sweep away the contribution of Christianity to European culture, philosophy, art, architecture, and literature in the period 313-1700.
That would evidently include education: universities and organised schools were started precisely in that span of time. Secular thinkers always refer to Galileo’s case, conveniently forgetting that committed Christian scientists like Kepler, Albertus Magnus, Grosseteste, Steno, Pascal and Newton contributed greatly to the development of science. It is simply untrue that Christianity failed to contribute to ‘modern civilized society’ before the Enlightenment.
At Westminster in 2010, Pope Benedict certainly recalled, as Scicluna mentions, that “the Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation”.
Interestingly, that implies that objective moral norms can bediscovered and affirmed by reason, and so cannot be dismissed as irrational.
In that thought-provoking speech the Pope stressed that religion corrects and sheds light on the application of reason to the discovery of moral principles, adding: “I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue for the good of civilisation.”
In this dialogue, secular rationality will recognise the validity of elements that first originated in the religious domain, such as the commandments regarding respecting life, property and truth. Reconciliation and solidarity also blossomed in a religious context before becoming socio-politically relevant. Does that make them worthless?
At Westminster, Pope Benedict expressed concern at the increasing marginalisation of religion, “particularly of Christianity”, even in otherwise tolerant nations, adding that somewould like to see religion silenced or at least reduced to the private sphere.
Pope Benedict will be remembered as the intellectual who stressed the search for truth. He would be the first to want to establish the truth, from a rational and scientific point of view, on the issue of human embryo freezing.
Objective moral norms can be discovered and affirmed by reason, and so cannot be dismissed as irrational
Unlike Scicluna, he would certainly, like Christopher Caruana and myself, not simply “agree to disagree”.
Scicluna considers I “undermined” my case by devoting half my article (November 2) to “traditional religious beliefs”. On the contrary, I am comforted by Pope Benedict’s plea for dialogue between reason and faith. I showed, as I had stated, that faith and reason/science converge in concluding that it is morally wrong to discard or freeze the human embryo.
The position my article represented has been developed more extensively and more competently by the recently-published Church-commissioned report, framed in reason-based terminology and signed by twenty-one experts from different fields. It includes legal, medical and ethical considerations. It lists ‘matters of concern’ should adult interests supersede those of the human embryo, through a change in the Embryo Protection Act. It concludes that “the introduction of embryo freezing in connection with IVF procedures in Malta is both unnecessary and unreasonable”. Unreasonable, please note.
In the executive summary 6.2, one reads: “The right to life and to physical integrity of every human being from conception to natural death must be respected. The wilful and deliberate discarding or destruction of the human embryo, the freezing of supernumerary embryos, their use for basic scientific research, and their exposure to serious risk of death or physical harm are ethically unacceptable.”
That statement, in the best Catholic tradition mentioned above, involves “objective norms governing right action” that “are accessible to reason”.
These rational objective norms affirm the intrinsic value of life from its embryonic stage onwards. Life’s inherent value cannot be trumped either by the well-meaning desire to relieve suffering or by the hoped-for results of research. That is why it is rationally a sublime service to defend human life.
Fr Robert Soler is a member of the Society of Jesus.