Dossier

Recognizing the Gift of Life

The loss of a clear common understanding of human nature has led to a frightening new situation: medical practitioners are assuming the power to control life and death, without any meaningful moral guidelines.

There is no longer a common moral vision.

This was an incredible civilizing effect of the Gospel: something that simply wasn't there, even amidst the greatest achievements of classical culture.

The great recurring heresy is that which denigrates the body, and promotes the belief that human beings are something other than their bodies--that the body is merely an incidental tool, an instrument that can be used at will.

Someone once asked me whether I thought our society would go into a cultural decline. I replied: "... how much further could we decline?"

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Dr. John Haas: It is a very difficult time, because there is no longer a common vision of what constitutes the moral good. There was a time when we had common beliefs about what was good for human beings, and what constituted moral evil, and what were the kinds of actions that we should be promoting and fostering. Unfortunately we no longer have this common vision about the human person and his destiny, or about how we ought to act. There is no longer a common moral vision.

What's worse, there is no longer a common vision of man--of what the human person is. That really handicaps us.

Haas: The Pope John Center was set up 25 years ago, and I don't think there has been any time in that 25-year history when it hasn't been very busy. But in the course of that time we have been dealing with different kinds of issues.

It was roughly 25 years ago, for instance, that we were dealing with the onset of the whole abortion debate. Over the course of time the topics have shifted. When we were concerned about trying to stem the tide of abortion, and the call for legalized abortion, we were saying that this step would lead to euthanasia, to infanticide, and to other evils. In debate, our opponents were saying that this was a gross exaggeration--that they were only trying to provide solutions for a few women in very difficult circumstances, facing very difficult pregnancies. Of course, we now see very clearly that those dire predictions were right on target.

Today, in a sense we are fighting on many more fronts than we had been before. We are confronted with everything from the threats of cloning human beings, to doctors helping patients kill themselves, to the killing of newborns (which is what partial birth-abortion is all about). It is really quite frightening. In that sense, yes, we are much busier.

Haas: I think the other side is advancing. There has been a corrosion over the last 25 years of that common vision I mentioned earlier, with the growth of a more and more intense individualism, so that it has become commonplace to say no one can tell another human being what is morally right or morally wrong, what he can or cannot do.

For example, when the cloning issue broke--I was reading a magazine in Germany that listed some ten reproductive technologies, including in vitro fertilization, injection of the sperm directly into the egg, cryo-preservation of embryos (that is, freezing of embryos), and so on. All ten of these techniques were permitted in the United States. Six were permitted in Great Britain; three were explicitly outlawed. Only three were permitted in Germany and seven were outlawed. In the United States, anything goes. In Great Britain at this moment, if one does in vitro fertilization, a physician by law, may not implant more than three embryos or he will lose his license. In this country he can implant five, six--however many he thinks are necessary in order to increase the odds of successful pregnancy. Then, when more children are implanted than the woman wants, the same doctor may go through the horrific practice of fetal reduction--killing the babies they don't want. In this country there don't seem to be any norms at all anymore that can be applied to moral questions of this kind.

There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal on this question--the practice of fetal reduction--which really exposed the cold-blooded deliberation with which doctors would single out the children that they were going to eliminate. It is chilling:

That's something worthy of Auschwitz.

Haas: I remember the words of the Psalmist: "What is man, O Lord, that thou art mindful of him? Thou has created him a little lower than the angels, higher than the animals."

We seem to have lost sight of what man is, so we no longer stand in awe and reverence before the human person. We have dehumanized whole categories and classes of people: the dying, the unborn, the newly born. We've just removed them from the category of humanity.

Of course we have done this before. The ancients, before the light of the Christian Gospel, would refer to those who weren't of their tribe as "others." They would refer to themselves as "The People," and the others who were outside the realm of "The People" were not to be treated in the same kind of way. They could be killed; they could be tortured. One of the greatest achievements of Christianity was to universalize the sense of the respect that one owed to one's brother, one's family, one's kin, and one's tribe--bringing men to realize that we are all brothers and sisters under God the Father in Jesus Christ.

This was an incredible civilizing effect of the Gospel: something that simply wasn't there, even amidst the greatest achievements of classical culture. In ancient Rome, for example, the paterfamilias could exercise arbitrary authority governing the life or death of his own children; this was recognized by the early Christians as a horrible thing. Similarly, when the Spanish conquistadores arrived in the New World and encountered the practice of human sacrifice; their Christian consciences were dumbstruck--horrified at what they saw--and at great risk to themselves they smashed the pagan altars and the temples at which human beings were being sacrificed.

Christianity has always had that civilizing effect. It just seems that without benefit of the Gospel, as much as you might want to appeal to natural law and to the common sensibility of our common humanity, not all human beings are going to enjoy the same degree of respect.

Haas: Yes, and approaching every question with virtually with no sense of moral categories that should be brought to bear...

Haas: This is a big cultural question. I think several different things are going on. I think there is an elite in this country. Whether you speak of the academic elite or the media elite, you know that the members of this elite are not Christian, even on paper. We have evidence of that, too. Yet they are the ones who influence our culture to such a large extent, forming public policies that are guiding us in these activities, and even shaping the thinking of the common citizens.

As for those average citizens, we are indeed a Christian nation, but what kind of Christianity? The main influence is Protestantism, and Protestantism engendered the philosophical move toward individualism, in which one becomes one's own moral arbiter. That influence is probably contributing to our problems as well. Look at the number of Christian church bodies which are confused about the immorality of homosexual acts, or the immorality of abortion, at this point. Most of the mainline Protestant churches are suffering from that confusion

Finally, you have the great influence of the secular humanism within the established media, and I think a large segment even of the Christian community in the United States are very much influenced by moral relativitism and individualism.

Haas: Because we are Catholics, we do believe that there is such as thing as natural law and that even though people may be blinded to its precepts because of cultural influences or because the way that they're living their lives, that moral law can still be demonstrated to them by reasoned arguments. We do believe that there are ways in which we can address their reason and their good will in such a way that we might eventually bring them to see what the truly human, truly virtuous course of action would be.

Recently, when I testified before the US Senate subcommittee on health and public safety on the subject of cloning, I had to make all my arguments based on reason and on scientific evidence, rather than appealing to magisterial texts or even Scripture. This was entirely appropriate, because I was in a secular, public forum. I think the Catholic moral tradition is uniquely situated and suited for that kind of approach. So that's what we try to do.

The moral or religious disposition which you mention is an indispensable help in bringing people to see things clearly, and to know the right, decent, moral course of action. But even without that predisposition, people can still be brought to the same basic insights--although the process certainly is a little more difficult. We can appeal to the great pagan physician Hippocrates, author of the Hippocratic Oath, and his establishment of a universal moral code which has been good standing for centuries, with its clear rejection of euthanasia and abortion. It is interesting that Popes Pius XII and John Paul II each in recent years have appealed to the Hippocratic Oath, and cited the work of that pagan philosopher as reflecting essentially the same moral code which Christians would embrace.

That's what the Pope John Center has tried to do, when we venture out into public-policy debates: appeal to a common moral tradition. On the other hand, when we are asked to address various moral conundrums for a Catholic audience, obviously then we can appeal to magisterial teaching and the traditions of the Church as well, to help people see what the issues are and to clarify for them the proper course of action.

Haas: These days, in terms of the broad Catholic population, I would say that there seems to be just about the same amount of confusion. But that is because of a non-Catholic cultural influence. When you read most of the polls you will see that generally the divorce rate is the same among Catholics in America; the incidence of abortion, regrettably, is virtually the same. But if you look to Catholics who are going to Mass once a week--or even going to Mass once a month--or who have had a Catholic education, then the picture becomes quite different. With those people you can begin to appeal to tradition and magisterial teaching, and to their particular unique Catholic consciences.

Haas: Yes. I think the great recurring heresy is that which denigrates the body, and promotes the belief that human beings are something other than their bodies--that the body is merely an incidental tool, an instrument that can be used at will. This is the recurring heresy of Gnosticism.

In this kind of thinking, there is a sort of dualism---a divorce between what I may want to do with my body and what body is truly created to do. From this perspective, it is an entirely arbitrary matter how I choose to use my own body. Thus we hear talk about sexual preferences, as though the proper use of our sexual powers was nothing more than a matter of personal choice.

Similarly, from this perspective, there are no moral norms to guide the treatment of someone whose body can no longer fulfill what are seen as "higher spiritual functions." So we look upon someone who is in a comatose state as a "vegetable;" these people are no longer to be treated as human beings. By contrast, of course, the Christian tradition teaches that as long as there is a living human body, there is a human being here--body and soul--and we must treat them with the respect that is due a creature made by God in God's own image.

But the dualistic heresy looks on man as somehow separated, in his deepest reality--divorced from his body. In France, there is a popular expression that refers to abortuaries as "angel factories." The effect of that sort of thinking is to imply that we are not actually killing human beings, but rather we are really producing angels! But human beings never become angels. We are not purely spiritual beings. We profess our belief in the resurrection of the body. But if you believe that we are fundamentally spiritual beings, and that our physical being is a sort of accident, that attitude can lead to errors such as the one found in that French expression.

Or look at the Hemlock Society, and its attitude toward suicide and assisted suicide. Derek Humphreys calls his book Final Exit: as if when someone is killed, he "exits" his body. But that's not what happens when we perform euthanasia. It's not that someone "exits," or somehow departs from the body; it's that someone is killed.

This dualism has frightening consequences, whether we are talking about questions such as abortion, euthanasia, or reproductive technologies. If we merely manufacture these bodies through in vitro fertilization or some other process, and then we impart meaning upon these new lives--as though we had made ourselves the creator--then it follows that we will expect them to live up to our standards. If they do not pass our "quality control" standards, we simply destroy them, as though they were defective manufactured products.

That is the great danger I see in our day: this dehumanization of the person.

Haas: I don't know how it could be much worse than it is. I really don't.

Someone once asked me whether, if things continue as they have been going, I thought our society would go into a cultural decline. I replied: "Well, we're already killing newborns, and killing people who are dying; how much further could we decline?"

Well, in practice I suspect things will get worse. We are already getting a glimpse of our own future--in Holland, for instance, with the emergence of non-voluntary euthanasia. We are likly to continue broadening the categories of people whom we feel we can arbitrarily eliminate if we happen to possess the power.

This is exactly what John Paul II says in Donum Vitae. We are living in a day in which the mighty exercise arbitrary power over the weak. The Holy Father implies that this problem--the arbitrary exercise of power--also applies to liberal democracies, when people think they can determine what the moral course of action is simply by garnering enough votes; that process of collecting votes is just another means of getting enough power to impose one's will on others.

Killing a newborn, at the very moment when it is being born, is fundamentally no different from killing a 2-year-old child. Right now we may think there is a difference, but it is a completely arbitrary one, and that distinction is bound to disappear. The Rubicon was crossed long ago, with the acceptance of abortion.

Actually, you and I know that the problem goes further back, because there was a very fundamental shift in the public understanding of what constitutes the human person which came with the embrace of contraception. That step required the acceptance of a new philosophical anthropology: a new understanding of the human person. And it is that new understanding which has led to so many of the evils we see today.

Haas: The Pope John Center is, as far as I know, the only Catholic bioethics center in the United States which is formally and publicly committed to doing all of its work in conformity with the magisterial teachings of the Catholic Church. So that if anyone wants to have the assurance of knowing what the Catholic Church would be thinking, or if anyone wants guidance in facing questions-- in what can be some very difficult areas--I would hope that they would turn to the Pope John Center first.

We are heavily involved in research dealing with the new reproductive technologies which are being developed, and with many of the ethical questions surrounding end-of-life issues. Again, I hope that we could help people making practical choices about those sorts of decision in their lives. And although many of these issues are difficult, and debates can arise, I think we would be as current on the topics as anyone else, and able to explain the common opinions among orthodox Catholic moral theologians as well as the teachings of the Church.

Then, on a wider scale, we hope to be entering more vigorously and effectively into public-policy debates on these issues--the debates which are taking place in our country right now, regarding the end-of-life and beginning-of-life issues, which touch on the nature of the human person. I have recently testified myself before the US Senate and the Massachusetts legislature; we hope to do more of that work. We held a seminar in Portland, Oregon in September in anticipation of the vote there on physician-assisted suicide. Regrettably, that seminar apparently didn't have much of an effect on the final outcome of that vote. But we did have two federal judges on the Ninth Circuit Court in attendance, and 300 people participated in all.

Then, of course, we have another special clientele: bishops and physicians and hospital administrators who can turn to us for guidance in some of these areas as well--perhaps on a somewhat different level than people who are making those choices in their own lives. We recently moved our Center from a suburban location to the campus of a Catholic teaching hospital in Boston, in part as a signal of that commitment. We're now beginning to do a lot more seminars and workshops, trying in particular to make more information and training in these issues available for dioceses, for hospital systems, and for parish priests.

We have recently developed and improved our Web site (www.pjcenter.org), making it more sophisticated and accessible. People can now seek consultations through that Web site, or send questions by email. They can also visit the Web site to subscribe to our monthly commentaries, Ethics and Medicine, or to order some of our other publications. And we remain the largest publisher of Catholic medical-moral texts in this country, with some 30 titles in our collection.