The Catholic legacy & abortion:a debate
Burtchaell, James Tunstead & Editors, The & Maguire, Daniel C.
JAMES TUNSTEAD BURTCHAELL T he men and women who first tried to follow the risen Jesus were Jews. They were not entirely unprepared for the moral demands this would make on...
...There is a lot more sense in the Catholic tradition than there is in twentieth-century Vatican theology, which I find in many respects a caricature of a rich and variegated tradition...
...The difference between gluttony and a weight problem is something you can discern by seeing the moral difference between people who are afflicted by each...
...All other abortions, even the ones he doesn't know about, are done by murderous, exploiting, autistic, morally withered women who are "'at a loss to manage their own lives or intimacies'' but whom we must nobly try to love as we do "drug dealers, rapists, and pathological prison guards...
...He refers to theories of delayed animation and ensoulment, suggesting that they have a continuing philosophical import even if their earlier biological basis has been undermined...
...Its word for abortion, phthora, means, literally, "destruction," and the one destroyed is called "child," teknon, the same gentle word used in the final sentence to address the readers themselves...
...His pattern was the Lord Jesus who had loved to the death those who betrayed and denied and deserted and condemned and crucified him...
...There are tragic circumstances, however, when abortion is the only way a woman or a couple can avoid a disastrous outcome from the birth of a child...
...Thus the high tone was set...
...The fire of Pentecost rapidly enflamed the Christian community to a sense of what it was about...
...Burtchaell is more dogmatic than the tradition which recognized doubt and gave the woman the benefit thereof...
...With a wraith-like immunity to the.canons of scholarship, Burtchaell, in a great feat of exogesis, looks "into the eyes of Jesus crucified," repairs to disparate and scarce patristic references to abortion, and finds there, in zygote form, his own peculiar views on the subject...
...to yield any normative doctrine...
...Here I must say a word about the common claim that abortion would be morally acceptable when the mother is presented with only two alternatives: to save her own life at the cost of her child's survival, or to preserve her child but perish herself...
...It is because his position rests on a conviction very distant from those which thoughtful Christians might use to discuss the rightful application of our commitments to other humans...
...The editors may then ask, how are we to share in these moral insights, if we must sort out what is authentic and inspired from what was glib and shortsighted...
...Burtchaell does not employ here "Holocaust imagery," but he is apparently unpersuaded by the underlying complaint about such analogies, as evidenced by his comparison of aborted fetuses to the victims of apartheid...
...We should fight the injustices that are often conducive to the onset of such pregnancies...
...These were thunderclaps of moral exclamation that bound the small and scrappy new fellowship to make the purpose of their lives the liberation of those most at a loss...
...And is the meaning one puts on that testimony really going to emerge from the documents themselves or from a more general vision about Jesus' revelation, the character of the community of his disciples, and the nature of ethics...
...Can the morality of abortion, even the moral theology of abortion, be debated without reference to the philosophical arguments that have frequently played so large a part in both the church's and society's thinking on the subject...
...It is the prophet among us who is inspired to see through that and to shout out the truth...
...The United States, for instance, must never imagine that enmity between nations will be subdued if our neighbors are in bondage to us...
...Pope Innocent IV imposed it...
...These then are the questions remaining: 1. Who is right about the testimony of the early church...
...One is theological: How does a general moral repudiation of abortion convert into specific norms for conduct...
...If he were but to check his university library, he would find that I have written, among other things, a 477-page book, The Moral Choice, to offer a method for making "reliable moral decisions in the midst of ambiguity and complexity...
...We, possibly more than others, must immediately recognize that these various struggles are in alliance with each other...
...Prophecy" should be made of sterner stuff...
...We listen to their accounts of what it is they have done...
...And there was scant advantage from being a person of yourswom word if you were a chiseler whenever you were not under oath...
...Victims destroyed, destroying victims...
...That is a sweeping judgment of a huge part of humanity, the feminine part, and the implications of that judgment, as I have said, are sexist...
...Christian moral doctrine showed its direct descent from Jewish ethics...
...Maguire complains of the analogies ("noxious and insulting") that equate living individuals, "especially Jewish people and other victims...
...My opponent argues for abortion on demand...
...That was their test...
...At this latter "work, I must admit, he displays a special, if invidious, talent...
...As Burtchaell sees it, Maguire's concern with the older exceptions and the newer excesses of church teaching is merely a clearing of the ground for a position that is very distant from Christian thought...
...Burtchaell fails here...
...You cannot extract from words like teknon or trucidatur a revolution of consciousness on abortion...
...They witnessed to the Resurrection: Jesus, at whose, unjust execution they had been inert and disengaged, was risen to power as Messiah and Lord...
...you shall not covet your neighbor's goods . . . (Didache 2:2-3...
...Are the many women who have committed abortion evil?'' Professor Maguire asks...
...it has simply beheld that it is not the point...
...It was presented as the imperative agenda for the church, the test for all discipleship.' Believers were warned away from abortion as they were from adultery, murder, greed, and theft...
...Early in the second century the Christian movement had achieved momentum enough to arouse antagonism in Roman society...
...Burtchaell does not respond to this challenge...
...Now why has the Christian tradition not vouched for significant moral distinctions between abortion for convenience and, say, abortion to eliminate a handicapped offspring...
...Here too I would point out that insight into moral complexities comes from experience...
...Even the old Penitentials that dominated Catholic thought for centuries were more capable of making distinctions where there are differences...
...History reminds us that we are insensitive and prejudiced in our moral vision, often blinded by convention and prejudice...
...It is the mother who eliminates her son that Clement cares about, because she must destroy her philanthropia as well, her love for humankind, in order to do it...
...These Christians were in so many ways an observant Jewish movement: in their worship, their hopes, their moral way of life...
...to develop a sense of historical and contextual sensitivity...
...We would both like to see conditions which would make abortion less likely...
...Burtchaell, on the other hand, urged that "we have never had more reasons to reconsider," that is, reaffirm, what our "ancestors in the faith held to be essential," the obligation to protect the unborn from destruction...
...It could be a death far worse than death...
...If one is guided by procedural rules alone, such as that which Professor Maguire follows, there is probably enough dissent scattered on the pages of the past to neutralize any Christian tenet or commitment you might choose...
...The resident alien had to be guaranteed shelter, for he dwelt within the national enclosure of the land and trusted its people...
...They are owed nothing because they were never accepted...
...The disease of character that follows from 668: exploitation of others was seen, in Christian perspective, to be more hideously incapacitating than the worst that befell victims...
...The theological record does not support this simplistic contention...
...Yet it was precisely here that the young Christian community found a distinctive vigor and vision, and set forth from its mother's house on a moral journey of its own...
...Rome "braces its position with philosophical arguments with which we can agree or disagree according to our perceptions...
...desperate cases, but the real purpose is to secure freedom of abortion for anyone at any time...
...It is Maguire who introduces ensoulment, Probabilism, and the Catechism of the Council of Trent into the discussion, and quotes Thomas Aquinas in his rebuttal...
...It is a human being and one who will be a human being, for every fruit is there present in the seed (Apologeticum 9:8...
...If adultery was wrong, then so was lustful intent...
...Throughout, he seemed to proclaim that his gnostic reading of scattered patristic texts spared us all the fuss and bother of ambiguity and complexity...
...you shall not prey upon boys...
...We cannot just do ethics by amassing groupings of do's and don't's as Burtchaell is set on doing...
...Whatever your topic, you do have to cope with the moral differences that are uncovered in circumstantial analysis...
...Take the recognition of sainthood as an example...
...Refutation of All Heresies 9:12:25...
...Herein lies a philosophical revolution in the realm of epistemology...
...Contrary opinions, long considered solidly probable, could have value only until such time as' 'church authority should settle the issue...
...But the reason was that they could not, for Burtchaell's train was made of shadows and my exercise in Catholic moral theology passed through it unengaged...
...Is the question possibly whether or not we twentieth-century Christians should find this extension of life-preservation in the "radical, prophetic imperatives" of Christian faith, regardless of what we can definitively prove about the understanding of the earliest "Jesus people...
...The primary font of moral wisdom in the Christian community is inspired insight into experience...
...They rushed to their task, for many others' lives depended on them: the lives of those so powerful they could crush others without noticing...
...Only after beholding them did we begin to reflect on what we saw and recognized...
...And they were to restrain themselves from all violence, whether drunkenness, gossip, or murder...
...Such unscholarly bombast does no justice to the position Burtchaell would defend...
...Having characterized'all differences between, say, an embryo and an adult taxpayer as a matter of "performance rating," Burtchaell asserts, "I see no grounds for denying that any live human being is a person...
...Burtchaell purveys a perceived ideal and then rushes to a conclusion that binds all kinds of people in all kinds of circumstances...
...But women who resort to some sort of deadly abortion drug slay not only the embryo but, along with it, all human love [philanthropia] (The Pedagogue 96...
...Women were not welcomed into full and equal status...
...The only person capable 663 of believing this is one capable of actually perpetrating it...
...A monetary indemnity was due to the father from anyone who caused his wife to abort...
...and (4) a movement to rescue the children from abortion, infanticide, infant mortality, and every sort of neglect and predatory danger...
...Maguire also wields the concept of "personhood," to which Burtchaell objects...
...The objection that Maguire raises to Burtchaell's "prophetic" standpoint is a well-established one, and one with considerable force...
...And the truest test of that faith is whether we have the gumption to share it with others, with those who are treating others unjustly, but especially with people who are victims...
...Moralists do define certain obvious classes of wrongful activity (such as nuclear war, rape, the torture of children) as "negative absolutes...
...No reviewer ever suggested that my ethical method was reducible to the avoidance of frivolousness...
...This is an impossible situation: not because it presents anguishing moral choices, but because it cannot occur...
...And Mr...
...If we truly follow him we are committed to doing the same...
...But their endless needs suggested another, even more vulnerable, group...
...That, of course, would include abortion...
...In actuality, our process is the reverse of that...
...Of course, if you accept Burtchaell's simplistic Christian moral creed, in which all matters are equally weighted (peace, liberation, reconciliation, and Burtchaell's view on abortion), all of this makes some sense...
...To prevent the birth of a child is simply a swifter way to murder...
...In truest Christian perspective, it is the oppressor who is destroyed...
...Practical moral principles store wisdom on what is generally good or bad, but it is of their nature to have limited applicability...
...Secondly, it does not substitute for the multiple chores of normative ethics...
...In a way that is close to Burtchaell, they wonder whether from the "radical, prophetic imperatives of Christian faith," or from the "more general vision about Jesus' revelation," or from "the character of the community of his disciples," comes our answer...
...5:2...
...With us, murder is forbidden once for all...
...4. Finally, is this a debate that can be pursued without considerably more attention to philosophical reflection on the moral status of the unborn human...
...The very core of Daniel Maguire's argument—"the heart of this debate," he calls it—is that, in fact, there has been "no 'clear and constant' teaching on abortion...
...Their own lives were at stake, for these Christians believed that they would perish in their persons if they proved nonchalant about the suffering of any of these most vulnerable brothers and sisters...
...6) acknowledging the moral import of circumstances and the limited applicability of moral principles...
...I appeal to the inspired sight of the first believers and to the matching insight it has aroused in the mind of the church in our day...
...Or between premeditated murder and reckless homicide...
...The tough part of ethics is the circumstantial analysis in which we confront these diversitates...
...Both synagogue and church taught that authentic religion meant coming to the aid of women and children deprived of breadwinners, and of the indigent and the refugee aliens...
...Maguire, in any case, does not expand on his rejection of Burtchaell's "proof-texting," and Burtchaell, in any case, does not reply...
...In two places, Commonweal seems to hanker for a Christian solution to abortion by the essentialist route of ethics by formula...
...Fourth, these writers knew well that any true protection of the helpless and exploited calls for a stable empowerment, so that those same people will not continue to be victimized...
...I embrace the strength and nuance and reject the weakness...
...The fact that' 'there has been a great glumbering and denial and turning of the back on these convictions" is not at all decisive...
...Pope Boniface VIII defined that all political power depends on the pope, and Pius XII called this an error conditioned by the times...
...Lastly, I must disallow my opponent's use of Probabilism...
...It little matters whether the advantage was seized purposefully or inherited unwittingly...
...And if there are indeed "conflict situations," doesn't it matter precisely what is the nature of the entities in conflict, and can we resolve that question on the basis (again) of texts...
...Women and men who are alienated, abused, poor, who are at a loss to manage their own lives or intimacies...
...Their arguments may have rationally analyzed the evil, but it was their direct insight that preceded and directed the course of their reasoning, just as our knowledge of drunkenness antedated the breathalyzer test...
...8) reliance on the "sense of the faithful" to discern truth in theological questions...
...It is tragic, they do admit, but not immoral, because no one should be obligated to care for someone he or she never accepted as a fellow human...
...That determination was* embodied in the entirely distinctive and innovative moral commitment to befriend the enemy, to embrother the slave, to raise up the wife, and to welcome the child...
...And after such outrageous activity they have the nerve to call themselves a Catholic church...
...The difference is that he finds in these texts what is not there...
...Burtchaell dismisses Probabilism which theologians use to justify some abortions...
...Neither tradition offered a protection for infants reliable enough to suit the first Christians, and they soon stated their own conviction which was to the point...
...In the trough of some of the most genocidal carnage and oppressive bondage and degradation of women and slaughter of innocent children, our era may be unusual in the readiness of some to listen to that bold and visionary Christian age whose teaching I have held up to your minds and memories...
...Roman law in the same era offered no protection against either abortion or infanticide, both of which were within the prerogatives of the male head-of-household...
...What of the later history...
...And who-, are aborting their daughters and sons today...
...It started one day when an honest but desperate worker got clubbed on a picket line, and felt all the vileness of it...
...2) conceding to the woman in these conflict situations the jus potius (a preferential right...
...Exactly...
...Why has the tradition of discriminating moral judgment yielded no allowance of abortion due to the imperfect status of the unborn...
...There were four radical, prophetic imperatives that the new Christian faith set before those who would live in the Spirit and fire of Christ: four disconcerting duties that would distance them from Jews and Romans alike...
...Burtchaell need not accept Maguire's, or anyone else's, specific criteria for "conflict situations" to tell us whether or not he sees some areas of indeterminacy in moving from his fundamental moral conviction to specific cases...
...The Greek is as straightforward as my translation, bluntly choosing words like "kill" (apokteinein) and "murder' '(phoneuein...
...Philosophy and theology are not adequately distinct, and thus I have already been speaking of the role of philosophy...
...We owe them every help...
...I have known them to have carried this sadness for weeks, months...
...What has experience been telling of those who reckon these unborn to be unhuman and impersonal...
...Christians consider, he wrote, that even standing by and tolerating murder was much the same as murder itself...
...An important issue is left unresolved...
...Pope Nicholas I condemned judicial torture...
...He was charged to cherish the distant enemy...
...Some of the most articulate writers of that age were apologists defending their fellow Christians against libel...
...He and his fellow rulers exercise their freedom of choice in good conscience...
...What is the background of parents who abuse and batter their children...
...These are statements Christian apologists were making to outsiders...
...Professor Maguire is appealing to a procedural rule of the scholastic period in Catholic moral theology, when it was held that a body of respectable dissent could cast into doubt certain moral obligations on which there had been a firm and settled consensus...
...see also 37...
...Even slaves had to be dealt with as brothers and sisters in the Lord...
...I will tell you why...
...I have mentioned John Connery's fine historical study on abortion which shows Catholic theology approving of a number of direct abortions...
...Both good principles and good exceptions are grounded in "right reason...
...They too had been raised to unexpected power, and they stated with vehemence that they would no longer be passive before affliction...
...They are victims . . . even though they are victims who destroy others...
...The Catholic tradition on this issue has strengths, nuance, and weakness...
...The stable economy, the lovely countryside, the democratic government would all be devastated if the unwelcome and savage dark folk became part of the people...
...Have we actually viewed such a movie sequence...
...Cut, cut, cut—the background music swells and races...
...When the abolitionists rose up against slavery it was not a conclusion they arrived at by reading some book, and they certainly did not gain their conviction from an unbroken consensus of Christian theologians of the past...
...I add only that the most important philosophical point I have made is on the necessity of listening to women on abortion in a systematic way...
...Professor Maguire knows very well, for he is a well enough trained professor of ethics, that the tradition which developed the theology of Probabilism absolutely vetoed its use in any matter like abortion...
...First, the command to love their enemies struck down forever their exclusionary allegiance to a single race or nation...
...to use reason and to listen to the affective appreciation arising from unique and communal experience...
...The Christian road followed terrain already familiar to Jewish moral teaching...
...They did not set the slaves free...
...The tradition has not used moral finesse to ascertain when proper exceptions could be made in the prohibition of anti-Semitism...
...First to the deficiencies of Burtchaell's effort and then to the questions raised by Commonweal's commentary...
...The prophet and the church alternate, as soloist and chorus...
...We must prevail upon them to let us help them catch the impact of their distress in their own bodies, and in our own selves alongside theirs, without permitting the cycle of violence to carry on...
...It is by breaking the savage cycle of violence that victimization is laid to rest...
...Thomas Aquinas says that 'human actions are good or bad according to their circumstances...
...3. Does Burtchaell's approach, on the other hand, deserve Maguire's judgment that it "is not good ethics"—because it invokes large ideals without taking account of specific circumstances or "conflict situations...
...What the proposition assumes as fact, both debaters, although in different ways, reject...
...It is also relevant to the abortion debate that we have abandoned the truly ecclesial nature of Protestant Christians...
...And I say that their teaching has never rung more defiantly as the prophetic call of Christ...
...Not all of them, clearly,' since they contradict one another...
...you shall not practice sorcery...
...It was a particularly galling lie, precisely because protection of the young had become such a Christian priority...
...Victims exploiting victims...
...You have heard it expressed by P. W. Botha, president and prime minister of South Africa, who insists that white South Africans have a free choice not to accept black or mixed-race persons as their neighbors, or as their human peers...
...Let me pause a moment on this last point: Augustine and Thomas Aquinas taught that a Christian prince or legislator could permit prostitution to continue even while finding it personally offensive since greater evils would result from banning it...
...As the various stages of life pass, these powers develop, each in its own way, under the influence of circumstances, whether of education, environment, or of the supreme powers (DeAnima 38:1...
...We must take our creed through the intricate terrain of ethics to arrive at moral choice...
...Among themselves, abortion continued to be reviled as a procedure unthinkable for believers...
...Our accounts differ, obviously, in method...
...No matter which course be followed, the child is doomed by circumstance, not by human choice...
...The long Catholic tradition did not miss that, even in regards to abortion in a number of life situations...
...Come, come...
...Clement of Alexandria, perhaps the leading theologian of the second century, wrote: If we would only control our lusts at the start, and if we would refrain from killing off the human race born or developing according to the divine plan, then our entire lives would be lived in harmony with nature as well...
...That makes forty to fify million women butchers and murderesses every year...
...Burtchaell wants to call the church back to an original "vigor and vision," to a "point of radical conversion," a conviction that marked "those who were most electrified by the onset of Christian faith...
...Thus, direct abortions to save the woman when the fetus would die anyhow are morally fine...
...It was in the very center of the moral' life by which the church first defined itself before the Lord and before the world...
...slave and free could show forth as one, then it failed to be Christian...
...He offers no nuances, no distinctions, no principles for discriminating situations when children should be born from situations when they may be eliminated...
...By the time of Jesus some Jewish circles were ready to see the fully formed fetus as a protectable human being...
...The record of the church is no more honorable in its pursuit of that early commitment than it is in support of the early commitment to make slaves truly brothers and sisters...
...Do you think it possible to inflict fatal wounds on a baby so tender and tiny...
...Shortly before or after the turn of the second century, the Letter of Barnabas repeats the Didache's injunction against abortion and infanticide in virtually the same words, and laments that they destroy small images of God (Barnabas 19520:2...
...And, to be a peacemaker, you must be as ready to sustain as you are to restrain...
...No discerning method could be so confident in generalization or so replete with horror feminae...
...7) Probabilism with its reliance on the insight of prudent and learned experts, and not just on church officers...
...the end came when the Holy Office on July 24, 1895 spoke...
...672: BURTCHAELL For years, Professor Maguire has complained that his fellow Catholics would not give him a public hearing...
...He says (quoting from I know not where) that my position is to oppose only frivolous abortions...
...Maguire questions Burtchaell's history...
...They do not acknowledge their status as human peers, and so they believe themselves free to dispose of black and brown persons as they please...
...Commonweal is right again in raising questions about Burtchaell's use of philosophy, history, and the tools of moral theology to make his case...
...The same person cannot regard that which a woman carries in her womb as a living creature, and therefore as an object of value to God, and then slay the creature that has come forth to the light of day (Embassy for the Christians 35...
...We differ in our sense of the tragic possibility that those conditions are not always present...
...Biblical religion, first of all, does not contain the solution to the factual question of the time of ensoulment or personhood...
...And what of philosophy's role...
...Anyone who agrees to accept injustice without retaliating knows that she or he is not following a Utopian ethic...
...It was I who found myself trying to draw them away from the conviction that they must be evil, trying to draw them into a resolve that now they must turn and offer their lives to other helpless 671 people who needed them...
...I find company and comfort in the Catholic tradition on abortion...
...All of these characteristically Christian moral imperatives require a readiness to do the good and lifegiving thing because one is determined to do justice, not merely because one can count on receiving justice...
...Roma locuta est, but if we find deficiencies in what Rome says, causa nonfinita est...
...It is because those who look into the eyes of the aborters see that the status of the unborn has really made very little difference to them...
...It seems familiar enough...
...These were at great risk, as Were the four traditional proteges: the poor, the alien, the widow, the orphan...
...But the inspired insights of the past are reliably accessible only to those who are alive with the same Spirit as were the prophetic folk who came to the truth in the first place, and who take an active, not a passive, stance towards the past...
...Are the many men who bullied them into it evil...
...Now Notre Dame has listened attentively while he spoke his mind...
...Maguire's positive norm for evaluating abortion, as distinguished from his negative critique of church teaching, rests on an Enlightenment principle "that we have no obligations except by our own choice...
...And then the camera pulls way back to show the two trains speeding serenely past one another across two parallel bridges a half-mile apart...
...Moral meaning does not just come from ideals...
...And one is philosophical: What can reason tell us about the status of the unborn...
...In the former case, the child need not be aborted, but only delivered, to save the mother...
...Such a searching method could lead to positive or negative judgments on particular corporate mergers, medical experiments, killings in self-defense, and abortions...
...Beyond what I have already said, I would offer, summarily, two Judeo-Christian principles for the abortion debate...
...Would Burtchaell, for example, conclude that the Christian vision of a love encompassing enemies implies absolute pacifism...
...So many have done a lot of things...
...But the Christian was bidden go far beyond protecting the nearby alien...
...Second, this was not a program simply for the more strenuous...
...A childhood of violence, incest, contempt...
...see also 9:4-7...
...Third, though these exhortations show a sensitive and compassionate sympathy for the victims, their principal moral concern is for the oppressors...
...Those who have recounted their experiences to me deplore beyond anything else in their entire lives the destruction of their own children...
...Every man was to join in supporting the wives his fellow 662: believers had left behind as widows...
...Both alike must now be faithful throughout life, if they loved and married in the Lord...
...Citing Connery, Maguire denies that early texts reveal any "Christian revolution" in discontinuity with Jewish views nor any "revolution of consciousness" about abortion "in the very center of the moral life by which the church defined itself...
...you must not even hurl insults at him...
...Burtchaell equates the obligations Christians have toward the unborn at every stage with those we have, toward infants or adults...
...The legal dimension of the abortion issue was deliberately not addressed, and the philosophical dimension was touched upon but not emphasized...
...He has rummaged through history, cited miscellaneous exceptions to the continuing revulsion towards abortion, and concluded that the church's past doctrine is not unanimous or unqualified enough to impose itself on our consciences today...
...He speaks of "the resolution" of the debate on direct abortion and craniotomy...
...As his fellow Catholic, I cannot look into the eyes of Jesus crucified and see the empowerment Professor Maguire describes as what we are called to...
...Even the Vatican, which is not shy in these matters, has not tried to settle the ensoulment question...
...James Gustafson and others have long warned of this temptation to avoid homework by rushing from perceived ideals to simple conclusions...
...In other words, can we crack the kernel of early Christian idealism and community and find our formula for all or many classes of abortion...
...How, the editors then ask, convert this prophetic insight into workable instructions for behavior...
...Or will they take power like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela...
...As a community possessed of the Spirit who spoke through the prophets, we look at what they saw...
...It is also housed in principles and it is incarnate in the circumstances of flesh and life...
...I find in this approach the seeds of fanaticism...
...And so they refuse them all consanguinity or fraternal protection...
...Thomas Aquinas said that the more you take such principles into the particularities of life, the more do they experience defectus...
...This lurks behind the Catholic debate on abortion, making the debate more of an event in ecclesiology than in moral theology...
...I have presented the original texts and contexts of the Christian statements on abortion in the first two centuries...
...Burtchaell purveys a perceived ideal and then rushes to a conclusion that binds all kinds of people in all kinds of circumstances...
...The issue we dispute here is whether Christians owe others only such acknowledgment and care as it pleases them to give...
...That book offers not just "a principle" which Burtchaell thinks adequate 676 for doing ethics, but a full method for addressing complex and ambiguous moral questions...
...Even in the case of a child whose uterine position makes birth impossible, when Tertullian would accept dismemberment to save the mother's life, he bluntly says the child is being "butchered by unavoidable savagery" (De Anima 25:4...
...Now women could no longer be chosen and then discarded by their men...
...they turn their backs on the needy and take advantage of the afflicted...
...The ambiguity here is magnified when linked to the object of this reconsidering: "the virtually total Christian disapproval of abortion...
...Beyond the children orphaned by their parents' deaths were those still more helpless children whom their parents slew themselves...
...Believers were never to take crafty advantage of others, by perjury or sorcery or usury...
...He deplores their rigid refusal— simplistic, arrogant, fanatic, absolutist—to treat a complex issue with ethical nuance...
...The source of those ancient insights was experiential, and one way we verify which are of God and which are wayward is to compare them to our own experiences...
...Burtchaell also assumes, what the Christian tradition did not, that the human embryo is a child, a baby, a person...
...It was not enough to spare your neighbor's life...
...The doubt of fact on embryonic and fetal personhood has been treated as a doubt of law...
...Why will Professor Maguire never come out and say when abortion would be a Christian act...
...In a word, if we turn our backs on our offspring they do not exist, or they do not exist as our children...
...Abortion too is one of those acts which circumstances do little to defang...
...Catholic ecclesiology at its healthiest recognized that the Catholic search for truth rests on a tripod: the hierarchical pod, the sensus fidelium pod, and the pod of research theologians...
...Christians may make the difference...
...In any case, the debate between Daniel Maguire and James Burtchaell leaves us with the impression of having viewed it again...
...as long as sixty years...
...he refused to let the hatred go on ricocheting through humankind...
...The victims must accept suffering as well...
...the basic assumptions of Probabilism were used even before the theory was formulated...
...He apparently experienced no scholarly need even to know my work before debating me and caricaturing my method...
...Constitutional rights, fetal development, ensoulment, personhood: these are all brought up and discussed, but they count for next to nothing...
...The most ancient Christian document we possess, besides the New Testament, is called The Di~ dache, The Instruction of the Twelve Apostles...
...Burtchaell's uninformed characterization of my position is silly...
...Maguire protests that Burtchaell "assumes, what the Christian tradition did not, that the human embryo is a child, a baby, a person...
...And so they are unwanted, and have been refused peoplehood...
...How could Christians be accused of murder when they refused even to attend the circus events where humans perished as gladiators or as victims of wild beasts...
...to blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses...
...Empowerment cannot be grasped as the means to take revenge or, still worse, as the way to begin to be an exploiter oneself...
...Nor do I think that Jesus was asking people to be just only when the world settled down to being just in return...
...Second, no decision for abortion should be made that is not pro-life since our biblical tradition affirms the goodness of life and the sanctity of personal life...
...What of abortion because the unborn is so negligible, so undeveloped, so little advanced through life's course, so unpossessed of the powers and accomplishments of adults...
...His untrain is a curious figment...
...The difference runs much deeper, however...
...Those first disciples who reverenced every unwanted child, born or unborn, would have been stupefied by the sight of their own children in the faith gainsaying this or any of that fourfold commitment...
...It was ironic, then, that its great breakaway point of departure would be from one of the teachings Christians and Jews most closely shared...
...and the lives of their victims—unnoticed, undefended, even unnamed...
...BURTCHAELL Professor Maguire points out that he does not read the Christian record as a constant support for the moral imperative against abortion...
...Nor would we want to use the history of the church to vindicate its failure to pursue its early insights regarding even companionship between women and men...
...What Burtchaell does is not good ethics...
...He indicts me for offering no "refined principle to help us make reliable moral decisions in the midst of ambiguity and complexity...
...At times hierarchical figures have led, but at times they have failed us...
...Victims lashing out at victims...
...This is, of course, the moral view propounded by the Enlightenment: that we have no obligations except by our own choice...
...Such reliance can only be embarrassed by the data of history...
...Were you more dismayed about Bull Connor than about Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Undergirding this unique approach is a ridiculous host of false analogies and false characterizations along with a buoyant innocence of complexity and ignorance of the state of the question in moral theology...
...It is my claim that they embody an insight that is authentic and integral to their Christian commitment...
...He has reviewed the historical record of Catholic moral teaching through the centuries, and concluded that it speaks with too muddled a voice to yield any normative doctrine that could govern our behavior...
...One must be more than just to accept injustice, yet deal out justice...
...Early Jewish law seems to have regarded the unborn as paternal property...
...It came to them from experience, not analysis, that abortion was one of the more odious ways to take advantage of the unprotected...
...What is Maguire's norm, then, and what is its Christian derivation...
...Christians continued to relish and even to justify hatred against their enemies...
...The poor were always a special charge on the Christian's conscience...
...Look what abuse of duty this lawless man has encouraged, by inciting them both to adultery and to murder...
...They tried for some sense of differentiation in their analysis of reality...
...The Catechism of the Council of Trent denied the right to silence...
...Another Christian contribution will,be to tell all those who stand td lose power that it is in their highest interest to do so...
...Women with unwanted and problem pregnancies are not the beneficiaries of peace...
...Our forerunners in faith have not taught us to detect any significant ethical difference between genocide for convenience or genocide after provocation...
...4) experimenting with categories such as "materially unjust aggressor" to place the burden of proof on the fetus, rather than on the woman in a conflict situation...
...But Professor Maguire does not really care what they have said...
...Single gender epistemology, as Carol Gilligan has shown on precisely this issue, is partial...
...The moral decision is born at the interstices of all these sources of moral meaning...
...They could allege that adultery was more serious than abortion...
...Professor Maguire is a Christian man...
...In a later passage the instruction describes what it calls ' 'the way of death": It is the path of those who persecute the innocent, despise the truth, find their ease in lying . . . those who have no generosity for the poor, nor concern for the oppressed, nor any knowledge of who it was who made them...
...Certain moral "isms" are presented in purely negative terms: sexism, racism, militarism...
...If we interact dynamically and fasten our gaze intently and see what the ancients saw, then we do not merely report what they said...
...What of conflicts among the various moral imperatives, those inherited from Judaism as well as those extended by the early Christians' radical imperatives— conflicts between the life of the enemy and the life of the sheltered refugee, between the defenseless woman and the unborn child, between the survival of born children and the unborn...
...It is the only circumstance in which I can countenance abortion as compatible with the prophetic tradition of our people...
...We have beheld saints: we have seen them with our eyes and touched them with our hands and heard them with our ears and been awestruck at their luminous likeness to Jesus...
...Such unions, he observed, had only tended to encourage abortion...
...If we receive tradition passively, all we have is hearsay...
...When the community of the present is told by its ancestors that abortion is a merciless sin, we do not simply take it on their word...
...But I say that Christians will mean much to these movements of grace, and these movements must mean much to us...
...Fifth, we must note that this was a rigorous duty presented to our Christian ancestors...
...It was not I who was pointing the finger at them, but they who seemed to have sensed that people who do evil things to others wither...
...It is the husband that bullies his wife whose person dwindles even more sadly than hers...
...I have worked from primary sources...
...But a truly compassionate support could never invite them to assuage their own anger by exterminating those more helpless still...
...It is, to begin with, a very Catholic and very theological debate, befitting its venue and the professions of the participants...
...Only if you do believe that, can you say believably that you care for the mothers who destroy their unborn children, for they stand to lose even more than do their tragically destroyed offspring...
...Both were eliminating another human because 4ie or she was undesirable, or undesired...
...Infidelity was to be avoided in all its forms: adultery, incest, and idolatry...
...It is the same with sin...
...Granted that abortion is generally evil, under what specific conditions might it be tolerable...
...2) a movement forthe relief of bondage of every sort: freedom from slavery and from racial subjection, dignity for the worker, status for the migrant...
...674 THE EDITORS: SIFTING THE ARGUMENTS Imagine a movie which opens with a shot of a powerful railroad engine moving onto and across the screen from left to right...
...We go out ourselves and look in the eyes and consciences of those who have known abortion as the work of their own hands: both those who accept it and those who have deplored it...
...It stopped commending us to the' 'proven and reliable authors" and tried to end theology on abortion by proclaiming that all abortions are objectively immoral...
...Maguire states, "I would say that the embryo and fetus weigh more heavily and morally every day...
...The four Christian innovations were offered as the the classic new signs of authenticity...
...On the contrary, there has been a great slumbering, denial, turning of the back on these convictions...
...Botha is a Christian man, whose church has had no rigid dogmas to hold up as a rebuke to him on this subject...
...He wants to find an ideal in various disparate texts and leap from there to very practical conclusions in ethics that apply transculturally and transtemporally...
...He is not at all concerned with the later history of the church's moral casuistry that occupies Maguire...
...you shall not fornicate...
...you shall not commit adultery...
...Each approach has its own difficulties,, and each participant is better at raising them for the other's case than answering them for his own...
...But there are problems beyond Burtchaell's illiteracy in moral theology...
...I leave it to Father Connery to tell us whether his anthology has been used as a sourcebook or as a garage sale...
...With increasing rapidity, the film cuts from one looming, roaring, rushing engine to the other...
...It was evil in their eyes...
...For his part, Burtchaell raises a question about Maguire's resort to history: does Maguire, in truth, consider this history at all normative...
...Burtchaell finds his position on abortion' 'in the very center of the moral life by which the church defined itself...
...Two powerful minds have come charging toward one another from opposite directions—and then unexpectedly crossed paths without collision...
...Burtchaell chooses rather to^gree that one cannot "read the Christian record as a constant support for the moral imperative against abortion...
...It was wretched...
...It may take you some time and some care to portray her adequately: But your knowledge of what a saint is comes from your exposure to that person and to her intense dedication, not to theological treatises or sociological surveys...
...Are the many men who aborted them evil...
...In this one situation, when it is not human choice that imposes the death of the unborn, I would see abortion as a moral decision that is consistent with the call of Jesus and the moral survival of our consciences...
...That there could be anyone who would butcher a newborn babe, hardly yet a human being, who would shed and drain its blood...
...In this vein, a modern Catholic legislator who found all abortions wrong could supportRoe v. Wade because of the prudently predictable tragedies from illegal and unsupervised abortions...
...But abortion law was scanty and ambiguous...
...Later, he stresses that the Vatican covers its uncertainty about "the moment of personhood" by going on to do philosophy on the subject...
...When pressed hard to state when, if ever, he would disapprove of a woman's decision to abort, his response is that he opposes frivolous abortions...
...This is irrelevant to the case at hand...
...He knew it because of the knob on his head and the Spirit in his spirit...
...It was not inevitable that he arrive at moral insight...
...The price they must pay —if they are to be Christians—is that they must forgo resentment and hatred...
...This is a refined principie to help us make reliable moral decisions in the midst of ambiguity and complexity...
...If theirs, was not a community where Jew and Gentile, man and woman...
...He is correct...
...The word "reconsider," it turned out, could be taken in nearly opposing senses...
...Its flame can smolder down the centuries and then blaze out again...
...All those textbooks told us that you could not use Probabilism to shoot into the bush on the grounds that it is probably a turkey in there even though it might just as well be another hunter...
...The Christian tradition has not ignored or denied the issue...
...We must see and say how often it is that women who victimize their children are themselves handicapped by never having enjoyed control over their own lives...
...The second engine approaches from the other direction...
...He wants to find an ideal in various disparate texts and leap from there to very practical conclusions in ethics that apply transculturally and transtemporally...
...Professor Maguire is pleading for any parent's free choice to disinherit and destroy unwanted children— precisely because they are unwanted...
...Not all of it, but those surges of inspired revelation, those prophetic torches amid the fog and storm...
...Early on, Maguire emphasizes the difference between "aphilosophical plank" (his italics) and "a given of faith...
...Our differences are primarily methodological...
...He longs for an ethics by formula...
...The alien and the pauper, the widow and the orphan, classic beneficiaries of preferential sustenance since Sinai, were suggestive to the Jesus people of four other forlorn categories that they must safeguard: the enemy and the slave, the wife and the infant —unborn or newborn...
...equivalent of a doubt of law opening the way to probabilistic justifications of some abortions...
...The revolt against abortion was no primitive and narrow dogma that a more sophisticated church has now outgrown...
...To say this to them with any credibility, we must first be utterly persuaded that oppressors suffer an even more tragic injury than their victims...
...Burtchaell says no: it is only a matter of finding the historical record "too muddled...
...they are cozy with the affluent but ruthless judges of the poor: sinners to the core...
...It is the freedom to subjugate others at will, not the power to be free by commitment to the service of others according to their needs, rather than our preferences...
...We touch for it ourselves...
...Professor Maguire's reading of Christian history does not reach out to meet and to respond to its prophetic conscience...
...it is an embryo or a fetus and we know its measurements, location, and often, its genetic condition...
...And then we can all turn in his direction and take a second look and perhaps see what the prophet was first to see...
...Now I found myself grouped with Mr...
...The first engine sweeps onto the single track of a bridge from one direction...
...He seems to feel that ethics is done by generic classification, by finding a rubric or principle that bans or approves whole classes of actions...
...I do not think it is our task to frame ethics for Utopia...
...To the point at hand, how decide between the Maguire and the Burtchaell reconstructions of the Catholic tradition...
...Botha's view...
...Yet even this prophetic summons to a righteousness higher than that of the scribes and Pharisees would have found strong endorse^ ment in many of the better synagogues around Judaea...
...When they found abortion sinful it was because they had looked in the eyes of men and women who had done it, and seen death there...
...Arguments are being presented on behalf of...
...He deadened it and refused to pass it on...
...Nothing could be more traditional for a Jew or more fundamental for a Christian than this ancient commitment to provide for the widow, the orphan, the pauper, the stranger...
...That was the first great matter...
...Probabilism says that where there is confusion—legitimate, objective confusion—among goodminded people without a conflict of interest about the requirements of a moral obligation, then you may follow a lenient course except when that more permissive choice might do harm to another, in which case you may not follow a probable opinion but must pursue the safer course...
...The second was like it...
...He calls on them to allow for legitimately exceptional cases when abortion might be a conscientious option...
...Indeed, when there is doubt, and when injury might follow, all benefit of doubt accrues to the potential victim...
...He assumes a traditional mind-set in the audience ("Catholics have special authority problems"), pitches his case against the assertions of bishops, and formulates arguments that would be telling in terms of the kinds of claims made by Catholic authorities before the Second Vatican Council no less than after it...
...A woman," she writes, "is not a mother until she accepts a pregnancy and/or gives birth...
...Like the moral difference between a joke and fraud...
...But there is a further sacrifice to be made...
...I, for one, am disappointed that he has, after all, so little to say...
...Before I got to Notre Dame, Burtchaell announced in a university press release that it was right that I should come there since Notre Dame had had George Wallace, when he was fighting civil rights, and William Schockley, when he was defending the genetic base for racism...
...this he would agree to...
...You may not go out and fire off your 30.06 rifle in the woods at every sound behind a bush...
...We all carry around the scars and handicaps and disablements of the advantage we have taken of others from time to time...
...3) treating the personhood (ensoulment) of the early fetus as a "doubt of law" with the benefit of doubt going to the woman...
...Says Connery: "What it was saying practically was that a medical abortion involved direct killing and therefore could not be justified any more than craniotomy or other procedures of this kind...
...This debate, we pointed out, was very Catholic and theological...
...you shall not murder a child by abortion, or kill a newborn...
...At times, I wished I could be entirely on his side...
...Then they started to put together arguments about why slaveholding was so wrong...
...For Burtchaell, those who oppose his pontifical position are moral kin to opponents of sanctuary for Central American refugees and to those who neglect the poor, ply apartheid, or expose their infants...
...Women who are desperate or autistic enough to destroy their children are among society's most abused victims...
...He does not explain the basis of this conclusion, nor how it is related to the sort of philosophical arguments Catholic moralists have customarily mounted...
...And now we face the third issue raised by the editors: the philosophical issue of the status of the unborn...
...to attend to principles, authorities, creative discovery, and religious traditions...
...We have established the principle that all the natural potentialities of the soul with regard to sensation and intelligence are inherent in its very substance, as a result of the intrinsic nature of the soul...
...But in two great matters they burst forth as men and women possessed by a new Spirit...
...We have not yet approached it, and some speak of having surpassed it...
...The antiphonal exchange between past and present resembles that between prophet and Community...
...Maguire proposed that the church reconsider, that is, reassess its anti-abortion stance...
...And one of the slanders that outraged them most was the rumor that Christians slew infants to obtain blood for their eucharistic rites...
...There is another characteristic Christian insight needed in the abortion struggle...
...The light was dazzling, and they often preferred to draw back into the cover of darkness...
...Such false analogies and non sequiturs are grist for any freshman logic course...
...it is making bold and positive ventures towards the reduction of enmity and distrust...
...There is a striking reversal of roles in this debate...
...A Christian must hold suspect any human right which must be guaranteed by another human's elimination...
...One might mistakenly suppose that the church has an analytic checklist of the qualifications required for sanctity, against which it examines the recorded lives of the candidates: certain virtues, a rigorous consistency of character, the potency of miracles, and the like...
...Vatican II praised it...
...Does Burtchaell classify all the church's efforts to balance these imperatives—from Paul's refusal to challenge the institution of slavery itself to Augustine's just war theory and on to later casuistry—as so much falling away from the original moral vision...
...In this debate we are asking whether recent developments 670: and reflection give us authentic reasons to reconsider what the Didache and Athenagoras and Tertullian and our other ancestors in faith held to be essential...
...Tertullian, perhaps the most eloquent of the second century apologists, repeatedly opposed the teaching of the Stoics that children are not yet alive in the womb, and that their soul is given them at birth...
...The victims must gaze directly upon those who have taken advantage of them, and recognize them as brothers and sisters who themselves may have been pressed by distress of one kind or another...
...Our paths part," adds Maguire, "when we come to...
...2. What are Maguire's positive norms for evaluating abortions, as distinguished from his critique of the "negative absolutists...
...This principle rejects a micro-vision of an abortion...
...The findings of many theologians have been catalogued: some famous, most of them obscure...
...We are not free to destroy anyone conceived in the womb, while the blood is still being absorbed to build up the human being...
...The same rumor was challenged by Athenagoras of Athens...
...Father Burtchaell, on the other hand, although he is supporting a position identified with the institutional church, states his case in terms that are apt these days to be called' 'prophetic," a word that recurs in his remarks...
...it is attentive to the macro-evils of social and distributive injustice some of which I listed above...
...the 1917 Code of Canon Law sanctioned it...
...We do not know that someone who lies is sinning because lying is listed authoritatively as a sin...
...What Burtchaell does is not good ethics...
...After recounting these debates, however, Connery shows how his ecclesiology stops the conversation...
...BURTCHAELL Commonweals editors discern three issues implicit in our debate that require more direct attention...
...That is why Christians have inveterately reverenced the archival record of past belief...
...The texts he cites, while clearly opposed to abortion, are not as clear on this equation between unborn and born...
...It could not lead to alaissezfaire ethics...
...Therefore the doctrine of Probabilism would say: until the question of personhood of the unborn at various stages is resolved, all benefit of doubt goes to the potential victim...
...Hate them—hate any victimizers—and you are simply cheering on the cycle of abuse and violence...
...This means that the Christian moral agenda demands a price...
...Professor Maguire also says that in Utopia abortion would be almost unnecessary...
...However, if Maguire's account of the tradition is seen as somehow normative and not just muddled, it consistently seems to reject abortion far more than does the contemporary pro-choice position...
...Burtchaell's knowledge of moral theology is arrested at the level of his old seminary textbooks...
...Do you mourn more for the two thousand or so abortionists in America than for the eighteen million or so infants they have efficiently butchered...
...Most of us are in fact likely to mistake the unconventional villain if his sin is common enough...
...The common good consideration was crucial in this 677 thinking...
...of their development] and that greater reasons would be needed to terminate them...
...Or when it would be immoral...
...Or between discipline and chihld abuse...
...The master or mistress who abuses the slave sustains an injury even greater than what the slave experiences...
...and there are women who swallow drugs to stifle in their womb the beginnings of a man on the way—committing infanticide even before they give birth to their infant (Octavius 30:1-2...
...For him, however, this does not resolve the matter...
...At least superficially, Professor Maguire, although questioning the current official position of the church, argues within a rather traditional framework...
...Burtchaell designates the Didache, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and others as his "Scripture" since Scripture does not support his position, the difference is not that he goes to these texts and those of us who differ with him do not...
...Children, may you be kept safe from it all...
...These responses resolved on the level of authentic teaching the controversies...
...Do these philosophical references function to ground a moral theological position or rather to suggest that the ground beneath any position is shaky...
...Suppress your rage well enough to look closely and humanely at drug dealers, at rapists, at pathological prison guards, and you may see it there too: the same pathetic look of the battered spirit, preying on others wantonly...
...They were, it turns out, operating on entirely different tracks...
...It makes no difference whether one destroys a soul already born or interferes with it on its way to birth...
...Jesus told him he must love his enemy even at the risk of receiving hatred from both his countrymen and his enemy...
...Our belief is in a Lord who was the innocent victim of injustice...
...This approach does free up Burtchaell to bypass ethics and devote himself wholeheartedly to the creation of false analogies...
...If any abortions are allowed beyond the whole class which he himself condones, "Christ would have died in vain...
...These forthright voices from the first and formative Christian years, all argued that the destruction of the child— unborn or newborn— is infamy for those who follow Christ...
...they are killers of children, destroyers of God's handiwork...
...Every person interested enough to follow this debate is aware that we live in an extraordinary age...
...Burtchaell would excommunicate such moderate views as beyond the pale within which "thoughtful Christians" dwell...
...I see this as methodologically misconceived...
...If the exploited do arise and claim their rightful places, will they take power like Spartacus or Robespierre or Pol Pot...
...I say to you we have never had more reasons to reconsider their teaching...
...669 For they have truly withered under the weight of their exploitative advantages...
...Who could collide with that...
...For those "in the Lord," no one was any longer to be demeaned as mere property of another...
...3) a movement for equality of women and a more integrated companionship with men, so that family and work can be humanized for each and for both together...
...Arguing from philosophical more than biological grounds, he insisted that the body and soul grow together from the beginning...
...It is not at peace with the moral imperatives of Christ...
...Four great movements have stirred us round the world: (1) a movement for: world peace that is more than a weariness of war...
...At several points, Maguire raises the question of the moral status of the embryo/fetus...
...He has been aggressive in condemning Catholics, both bishops and theologians, who simply reject abortion as immoral...
...and why they should be exceptions...
...Third, the command that husbands and wives were to pledge an equal fidelity was a first yet crucial rejection of the corruption of men and women by their respective domination and acquiescence...
...He was to set no more bounds to his bounty than the Father who lavished sunshine and rainfall on all fields alike...
...But now he was startled to be told that he no longer had a male's freedom of choice to dismiss his own wife...
...The Catholic social movement in support of the dignity and organization of labor did not arise from economic studies or applications of employment theory or deduction from the Gospel...
...Now I call your attention to five facts, five aspects of that early Christian conviction, which we should note and take to heart...
...Fifty-one percent of all abortions are done before the embryo has become a fetus...
...But if you 678 have seen a saint, and are a believer yourself, you should know her for a saint...
...It asked whether there were good reasons "to reconsider the virtually total Christian disapproval of abortion...
...Historically, each of these pods has erred and, at times, each has led in the discovery of moral and religious truth...
...This is a nuanced position...
...His church, however, cannot offer him the comfort that Mr...
...What they have helped us to see is that we have nothing better to do with our lives than to shelter those whom circumstance has placed at the mercy Of our hospitality...
...Burtchaell would put all abortions, except the ones he approves of, in the category of butchery and murder...
...Affirming life is not always simple...
...And parents continued to destroy their young...
...Minucius Felix, a Roman attorney of African origin, states the contrast angrily: There is a man I should now like to address, and that is the one who claims, or believes, that our initiations take place by means of the slaughter and blood of a baby...
...It is the gap between these two different approaches that leaves the impression of trains roaring by one another without real engagement...
...I should, it is true, rejoice that in this solitary sentence, Burtchaell evinces some recognition that abortion might involve "ambiguity and complexity...
...We came to debate whether Christians have Christian grounds to turn away from a moral conviction that was one of the most purposeful and conscious commitments by which the earliest church professed its priorities and identity...
...I think it is entirely specious and sentimental to say: "So many have done it...
...Likewise, the movement of enhancement for women must never be furthered by making their children expendable...
...He had heard it said that he must love his neighbor and hate his enemy...
...But does the potential abuse of the term "personhood" invalidate the concept itself...
...First, sow in justice to reap peace...
...Are the historical Catholic positions on abortion normative...
...There will be heavy and sometimes bitter things to accept if hatred is to be extinguished, and not merely aimed in a new direction...
...How often it is that some helpless group is savaged by aggressors who have themselves been victims...
...One is historical: How is one to adjudicate between two such divergent accounts of earlier Christian attitudes towards abortion...
...Botha, Bull Connor, Spartacus, Robespierre, and Pol Pot, not to mention the bombardiers in the Vietnamese war...
...He then continues: We call it murder and say it will be accountable to God if women use instruments to procure abortion: how shall we be called murderers ourselves...
...That is Mr...
...Maguire had no chance to reply to this charge...
...That reflection eventually led to the description which later authorities use to verify sanctity in others who will come along...
...The next shot shows a similarly powerful train engine charging onto the screen from right to left...
...We have achieved it in this debate...
...The church was also not faithful to its early commitment to a new kind of relationship between slaves and masters, men and women...
...Aquinas says that "human actions are good or bad according to their circumstances," and that moral life is marked by "quasi infinitae diversitates...
...Second, the command to acknowledge slaves and masters as brothers and sisters condemned slavery to a long and sullen retreat, and ultimately to extinction...
...The tough part of ethics is the circumstantial analysis...
...Our tradition is normative for us...
...Among the Catholic strengths that can be profitably mined: (1) the long tradition of delayed animation which gave different moral status to early or late abortions...
...In the very rare instance when a pregnancy does seem to be a threat to the mother's survival, the unborn is either developed to the point of being able to survive outside the womb, or it is too young to be viable...
...we sit beside them in their grief or we listen sharply 679 when they explain what it was their right to do...
...Were we to forswear the hated enemy, the enslaved laborer, the subjected woman, or the defenseless infant, and do that in his name, Christ would have died in vain...
...Enslavement and enmity must both vanish...
...Tension mounts as it seems the two trains are heading toward a collision...
...One day they looked up with clearer eyes than ever before, and they saw what kind of people slaveowners had become...
...But this is different from Burtchaell's empirically bereft analysis which achieves its two tidy groupings of good abortions and bad abortions by decontextualized exegetical wizardry...
...MAGUIRE Commonweal is right...
...Are you really ready to believe that the staff of Auschwitz perished in a worse tragedy than those they exterminated...
...I have seen it for myself as well, and I am joined by an impassioned company of the Christian church which mourns their young dead, and struggles to raise their slayers from a death of their own...
...My method presses us to ponder all the empirical variables including viable alternatives and foreseeable effects...
...If, however, you suspect that Burtchaell's view of abortion does not have the status of dogma, then his analogies are simply funny in an obnoxious sort of way...
...Our paths part when we come to the thorns of conflict situations where I find him guilty of oversimplification...
...This ethical standard rests as firmly on rabbinical teaching as on the New Testament, which shows what a direct lineage there is from Hellenistic Judaism to early Christianity...
...Are there limits to what the Christian must do for the poor or alien, and how does one balance obligations to them with obligations, say, to one's family...
...So there is no moral accomplishment possible unless reconciliation extends the hand of fellowship across the battleline of suffering...
...They were not entirely unprepared for the moral demands this would make on them...
...It formed part of an obligation by all believers to protect the four categories of people whom they now saw as peculiarly exposed to the whim and will of their fellow humans: the slave, the enemy, the wife, the infant — unborn or newborn...
...Prime Minister Botha, I assume, is against frivolous bondage...
...This fourfold phalanx of conscience on the march is only partly Christian in origin...
...Does his position differ from Burtchaell's closing characterization of it...
...There is suffering to be accepted by those in power if the disadvantaged and helpless are to be afforded true protection...
...Yet he caught the impact of that injustice in his own body, his own self...
...In a prospective abortion, we know exactly what is in the womb...
...Such reasons, however, could be present even to the very end of the pregnancy...
...My opponent says he does not welcome abortion...
...Botha has received...
...These apologists did not conceal their contempt for the surrounding pagan society which was willing to destroy its young by choice...
...675 It would seem then that Maguire, more than Burtchaell, looks to philosophical reasoning to provide an essential substratum for theological exploration of the obligations Christians owe unborn human beings...
...What counts is power: ruthless, arbitrary power—the power to choose who shall live—the power to exact from others whatever one needs to avoid catastrophe...
...Prophetic insight can spread through the believing community like a forest fire...
...We have seen what lying does to people, and thus we know that it is deadly...
...Many Catholics suffer from a fundamentalism of office just as many Protestants suffer from a fundamentalism of the book...
...But why, do you suppose, has he been so inexplicit and vague about what those exceptions might be...
...In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus invites his followers to go even further along this Way...
...Each of these movements is bent on empowerment...
...My position on abortion is my method, applied case by case, making distinctions where there are differences...
...Commonweal asks me about the normative value of the Catholic tradition, about the Christian assumptions in this debate, and about the role of philosophy in discussing abortion...
...Probability, however, is based on insight, not on permission...
...like Jesus...
...They and we have sinned against that light...
...Pius IX and Gregory XVI condemned religious liberty...
...Burtchaell stands outside contemporary or historical moral theology...
...Yet again it is not clear whether Maguire himself holds that any of these philosophical arguments are compelling, or especially compelling for Christians...
...A complex issue like abortion will not be solved by a bounding leap from creed to conclusion...
...My opponent has thumbed through and excerpted the historical survey published by John Connery...
...The editors have depicted my presentation of the ancient horror and repudiation of abortion by the first Christians as "prophetic...
...This kind of text-proofing and ignoring of the Sitz im Leben would not be tolerated in biblical exegesis...
...And, in fact, it is a practice of yours, I observe, to expose your own children to birds and wild beasts, or at times to smother and strangle them—a pitiful way to die...
...None can be pitted against another...
...The life that is good bears the mark of the tragic and the affirmation of life may entail negation...
...Oppressors must give up their advantage...
...Life is a web of interconnecting values and the negation which is abortion is justified only when it promotes life in its complex reality and balance...
...Catholic fundamentalism had undue reliance on the hierarchical pod...
...And I know many who are against frivolous wars and frivolous chauvinism...
...And this fourfold obligation was preached across the full expanse of the church: from Carthage to Egypt and up into Syria, then across Greece and in Rome...
...In an example that should be obvious, the poor woman who chooses abortion because she cannot feed adequately the children she already has is making a pro-life decision...
...conflict situations...
...MAGUIRE John Courtney Murray used to say that disagreement is a rare achievement...
...9) and finally in this incomplete listing, a sound distinction between political and personal ethics...
...What is in doubt is its personhood and even before the terminology was developed in the history of Probabilism, Catholic theologians treated this as the...
...In his opening statement, Burtchaell said many beautiful things beautifully...
...In the latter case the pregnancy is a threat, not to the life of the mother, but to the lives of both mother and child together, since if the former perishes the latter cannot survive...
...This is no bizarre doctrine...
...The problem may have been rooted in the proposition Maguire and Burtchaell were debating, a proposition loaded with ambiguities...
...Professor Maguire's wife, Majorie Reiley Maguire, who has been his closest colleague in the pro-choice effort, has expressed more candidly than he the doctrine that motivates their mutual endeavor...
...5) stressing the role of reason and the affective and experiential in moral discernment...
...His pietistic intuitionism needs no theological method, no textual criticism, no sense of historical conditioning, no ecumenism, no fellowship with philosophers or Christian or Jewish theologians...
...He knew where sin lay, and where justice lay...
...Women who pass for believers began to resort to drugs to induce sterility, and to bind their abdomens tightly so as to abort the conceptus, because they did not want to have a child by a slave or lower-class type, for the sake of their family pride and their excessive wealth...
...And there was a fourth point of radical conversion, for there was a fourth group of victims they had to embrace...
...Because those who knew and cared for men and women who had performed both kinds of abortion observed there was precious little difference in ruthlessness, little variation in its destruction of character, between the two...
...Their witness cannot be ignored on the abortion issue or on anything else...
...They are survivors of outrage, and they now seek to relieve their stress and suffering by turning on others who are weaker still...
...Burtchaell would spare us this by claiming to find an ideal that solves all (or almost all) abortion cases for all time...
...Indeed, he practices this himself...
...Our trains did not collide...
...MAGUIRE We should not conclude without recognizing that Catholics have special authority problems...
...But is history really the point at all...
...Jesus' rejection of divorce affected men and women differently, since only husbands had previously been free to reject their partners...
...On the one hand, he does not seem to deny daunting cases, where heroism is required, but what of conflict situations where not even heroism can forestall terrible consequences, spiritual as well as psychological and material...
...Starting in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Vatican came out with a negative absolute position on abortion...
...First, the repudiation of abortion was not an isolated or esoteric doctrine...
...Not having excused myself from his other writings, I already knew he compared his adversaries on abortion to the Nazi criminals of the Holocaust and to slavers...
...Even when they enter the contemporary dispute over the ensoulment of the unborn, these writers dismiss it as a quibble when it comes to abortion: it is the same ruthless willingness to eliminate unwelcome others that shows itself in the slaying of the unborn, the newborn, or the parent...
...In America today abortion is said to resolve a conflict of rights, a conflict of interests between women and their children...
...Burtchaell, interestingly enough, does not directly challenge Maguire's claim on this point, although one senses that he is not endorsing Maguire's historical account either...
...The status of the victim — the only status that counts — is not that they are impersonal but that they are unwanted...
...They are non-persons...
...Abortion, he said, was not only homicide, it was parricide: the slaying of one's own flesh and blood...
...It was not, however, very philosophical...
...But, ah, the analogies that awaited me...
...you shall not deal in magic...
...When you grasp the uplifted hand to prevent one injured person from striking out at another, you must do so in love, not in anger, for you are asking that person to absorb suffering rather than pass it on to another...
...Must we not turn to philosophical reflection...
...But they had smelt the evil before they framed those arguments...
...In conclusion, I return to my keynote position that neither of us is pro-abortion...
...It would indeed motivate us to work to spare women the pain of unwanted pregnancy and abortion, but the tradition cannot be forcibly transformed into a denial of the morality of abortions that are commended by reason...
...Already in this first-century catechism, the obligation to protect the unborn, and the infant was included within the roster of essential moral duties: You shall not commit murder...
...Early in the next century Hippolytus of Rome condemned bishop Callistus for his readiness to encourage marriage, legal or otherwise, between affluent women and lower class or slave-class men...
...Add to this kind of Catholic thinking Probabilism's principle that "where there is freedom," and you can argue that when an issue is respectably debated (defended by reputable authorities and sound reasons) a negative law will not graft onto the body politic and will do more harm than good...
...There was an abundance of prophetic insight in the founding Christian communities...
Vol. 114 • November 1987 • No. 20
