All Churches start their response to abortion from the same baseline - the Commandment "thou shalt not kill". Yet they do not all arrive at the same destination. Why is this?

The Catholic Church is the only one that teaches unequivocally that the destruction of an embryo from the moment of conception onwards should be made a criminal offence, and that Catholic legislators have an absolute obligation to do everything they can to bring this about.

President Joe Biden's failure to consent to this position has got him into trouble with US Church leaders and earned a public rebuke from the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Helen Watt, who has replied to my initial Tablet blog on Biden and abortion, makes a number of assumptions that may explain this discrepancy.

It is taken for granted in traditional Catholic ethics, for instance, that there is no such thing as the lesser of two evils.

Evils are bad and you cannot choose between them.

You must refuse to do either of them.

Nor can you justify a bad act with the excuse that good may come of it.

Some acts are absolutely evil, intrinsically so. Abortion is among them. So consequentialism, utilitarianism and relativism are all out.

Traditional Catholic ethics also take it for granted that human life starts at the moment of conception.

And because of the traditional nine ways one may share in the sin of another that I mentioned in my original article, legislators who decline to offer that newly conceived embryo statutory protection must share in the guilt of the sin.

But Catholic ethics can deploy the "doctrine of double effect" to explain why killing enemy soldiers in a war, say, could be morally justified.

Many people outside the Church see that as simple hypocrisy.

Indeed there must be very few outside the Catholic Church who hold all these premises at once, or even some of them, even if they are otherwise fine and decent people.

Recognition of that fact is the fundamental omission from Helen Watt's article, from which all else flows. She assumes that what is self-evident to her must be self-evident to everybody.

Yet it is not obvious to non-Catholics that human life begins at the moment of conception, and they are not bound to accept the verdict of Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae that it does.

They may not be persuaded by his arguments, and they are not under his authority.

They may say something like "human potential begins at the moment of conception" or "the process of becoming fully human is a gradual one".

That in fact is the implication of the present abortion law in Britain.

As in the United States, the crucial stage is viability, after which point the foetus could survive outside the womb. That is when legal protection starts.

Even among advocates of "a woman's right to choose", abortion after that stage of pregnancy presents a serious ethical dilemma.

Logically, a foetus that can survive outside the womb has to be treated as a separate individual with rights of its own, especially the right to life.

To kill it the moment it is born would be murder.

How can killing it five minutes earlier, when partially born, be anything else? Or a day earlier, before labour has started?

This is an argument that anti-abortionists could easily win, if they were less fixated on banning abortion at all stages.

I am not here arguing that the traditional Catholic ethical approach is right or wrong - for the purposes of this article I am remaining neutral - but pointing out simply that there is an alternative.

Catholics do tend to assume that there is only one way of arguing ethically, the Catholic method, and all other positions are wrong and involve a measure of bad faith or ignorance or both.

But a Catholic politician must know that many of those he represents will sincerely defend views opposed to his own.

And he knows that if they realised that he intended to try to impose his views on them, against their will, they would not vote for him. Continue reading

• Clifford Longley

May the Church appeal to secular leaders, including Catholics, to protect women and children from a practice increasingly funded and vigorously promoted both by governments and by non-governmental bodies?

In a letter on behalf of the US Bishops offering prayers for President Biden on his inauguration, Archbishop Jose Gomez reminds him that "our duty to love and our moral principles lead us to prudential judgments and positions that do not align neatly with the political categories of left or right… We are Catholics first, seeking only to follow Jesus Christ faithfully and to advance his vision for human fraternity and community."

After a generous reference to Biden's personal faith, Archbishop Gomez goes on to say that the bishops must proclaim the Gospel "in all its truth and power."

Abortion is "a direct attack on life that also wounds the woman and undermines the family".

It is not just a private matter, but "raises troubling and fundamental questions of fraternity, solidarity, and inclusion in the human community".

The archbishop notes: "As Pope Francis teaches, we cannot stay silent when nearly a million unborn lives are being cast aside in our country year after year through abortion."

This heartfelt but gentle appeal to a new Catholic President met, however, with a disapproving response from Clifford Longley.

Although the focus of the archbishop's remarks was less the banning of abortion than its expansion and funding at home and abroad, Longley focuses on the issue of making abortion illegal, equating the proscription of homicide before birth with the proscription of lying or adultery.

And we might agree, these actions too are unjust but not all injustice should be illegal - let alone all other forms of wrongdoing. Sometimes (as with perjury or fraud) lies are illegal and rightly so, but more often, they are not. As Longley suggests, making all lies illegal would likely lead to bad results.

True enough - but should we also place homicide of the innocent in the category of evils a society may freely tolerate?

The right to life is a foundational right: if protecting the innocent from homicide is not part of the mission of government, it is hard to think of many stronger candidates.

The basic equality of human beings, their origin at conception, and the need to protect them from deliberate, unjust attack, are matters of public reason: these are not arcane issues that only Catholics, at best, can understand.

And in terms of bad results, what bad result could be worse than the calamitous current and future toll of abortion both in the US and abroad where the US "solution" will now be funded with aid money that should be supporting human lives?

We have in fact experience of countries greatly increasing protection of the unborn, rather than decreasing it, without the dire effects so often appealed to by advocates of liberal abortion laws. Poland and Chile both strengthened their abortion laws without such dire results.

Attention to women's health - their actual, literal health - by treating or preventing issues such as hemorrhage and infection brings down maternal deaths.

Such deaths can be reduced in developing countries the way they were reduced in Western countries in the course of the twentieth century when maternal deaths declined due to the introduction of (for example) antibiotics, whether abortion laws were changed or not.

Abortion harms women: the violent loss of a baby prenatally is itself a serious harm.

Often that harm is felt consciously, sometimes bitterly, by the woman, but even where it is not, a harm has occurred. T

he desolating, violent act of abortion cannot be a private matter best left to individuals, much less something the State should fund and promote.

Nor should we assume that most Americans or citizens of developing countries even want the US government to fund abortions.

Many indeed want nothing less. Continue reading

• Dr Helen Watt is Senior Research Fellow at the Anscombe Bioethics Centre and a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford.

The latest example is President Joe Biden, who has been reprimanded by the President of the United States Catholic Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, for including in his policy agenda "certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender", contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Opposition to abortion remains the Catholic bishops' highest priority, the archbishop said.

President Biden himself has said on more than one occasion that he personally opposes it, but he does not consider it right to impose his views on those who differ.

This is a bolt hole that many other Catholic politicians have used over the years.

They hardly needed to point out the obvious truth that to stand for election on a platform that promised to align the law of the land with strict Catholic teaching on all such issues would be to guarantee their non-election.

It is unlikely they would even be selected by their party as candidates.

These practical difficulties aside, there are good theological grounds for asserting that the "Biden bolt hole" - personally opposing abortion but not in favour of banning it - is sound.

In Herbert McCabe's book On Aquinas, (Continuum 2008) he discusses this very point.

"Aquinas asks whether the laws of a state ought to command every good action (in the sense of approving it) and he says ‘Yes'; civil law is about morality in that sense. He then asks whether civil law should forbid every bad action and he says ‘No'. Civil law is distinct from morality in this sense.

"Civil law is for the sake of the common good. It is quite often the case, he points out, that making a morally bad action illegal will do more harm to the common good than tolerating it... Toleration is not here a virtue but simply a concession to the necessary limitation of human law.

"Thus, for example, there is nothing logically odd about tolerating legal abortion and thinking it a great evil."

The contrary view - that a Catholic politician has a duty to stamp out all evils such as abortion - derives from something that used to be taught in Catholic schools, the "nine ways I may share in the guilt of another's sin".

It is not in the current Catholic Catechism and I do not know its present status, but it is still relevant to this discussion.

The nine ways are traditionally listed as: by counsel; command; consent; provocation; praise or flattery; concealment; being an active partner in the sin, silence and by defending the evil done.

At least three of these could be thrown at any Catholic politician who takes any other line than outright root and branch opposition to abortion. But it proves too much.

The implication is that every politician shares moral responsibility for every immoral act of whatever kind committed by anybody, that he or she has not actively campaigned to make illegal. Every act of adultery, for instance; even every lie. It seems Aquinas saw this reductio ad absurdum all too clearly.

There is a more serious difficulty in the interface of democracy and Catholic morality even than this one.

Pope John Paul II spent a lot of time thinking about this issue, and according to his biographer, George Weigel, became the greatest defender of democracy and human rights of his age.

But JPII insisted, again and again, that democracy had to be founded upon certain fundamental moral principles.

Otherwise, it simply became an expression of the will of the majority, which could of course sanction moral evil if it saw fit to do so. Continue reading

• Clifford Longley

Writing in The Tablet, former religious affairs correspondent for The Times Clifford Longley lamented the move.

"In the case of newspapers, they will continue to report on religion, though less of it," Longley wrote.

"In a subject of considerable complexity, rife with public misunderstanding, expertise is no longer, by and large, thought necessary," he continued.

"That is itself an insidious kind of secular judgement - that making a mess of the coverage of religion is now a risk the media is prepared to run because the subject doesn't matter anymore."

Continue reading

This interview is with journalist, author and broadcaster, Clifford Longley, who is one of the UK's leading lay Catholics. He was invited to Australia by the progressive Catholic organisation, Catalyst for Renewal, and he delivered a series of lectures in May this year on the legacy of Vatican II.

In the interview he focuses on the issues and challenges in developing a mature Catholic laity in the light of the teachings of the Council, and the video also features excerpts from the inaugural Rosemary Goldie Lecture he gave on this topic.

It's fitting that his talk was delivered in this context, as Rosemary Goldie was one of Australia's leading lay Catholics. She was a theologian and lay activist, and one of the first women to be named an official observer of Vatican II. She died in Sydney in 2010 at the age of 94.

After the Council for several years she was Under-Secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, one of the first women and lay people to serve as a bureaucrat in the Curia. In this capacity, in the 60s and 70s she helped organise a number of major international lay congresses in Rome.

After this she was appointed a Professor of Pastoral Theology at the Lateran University in Rome. While large in intellect and influence, she was tiny in physical stature, and Pope John XXIII referred to her affectionately as ‘la piccinina' which translates from the Italian as something like ‘a little slip of a thing.'

Clifford Longley was born in the UK in 1940, and has had a distinguished career mainly as a print journalist. He worked as a general reporter on a number of newspapers before specialising from 1972 onwards in the coverage of British and international religious affairs.

He wrote a weekly column on religion for The Times from 1972 till 1992, and from 1992 to 2000 for the Daily Telegraph. This made him the longest continuously appearing columnist in British national papers, and in 1986 he was honoured with an award for ‘Specialist Writer of the Year' in the British Press Awards.

During this time, as well as his work as a columnist, he was leader writer and religious affairs editor for these newspapers. Since 1994 he has been a columnist, contributing editor and leader writer for the prestigious weekly Catholic journal, The Tablet.

In more recent times he has also made regular appearances on radio. Since 2002 he's been a contributor to Thought for the Day, and since 2004 he's been a panelist on The Moral Maze, both on BBC Radio 4.

Longley has also been a consultant to the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, and has been on the advisory council of the Three Faiths Forum. In 1998 he was made an honorary fellow of St Mary's College at the University of Surrey.

As well as his prolific writing for newspapers and journals, his books include The Times Book of Clifford Longley, The Worlock Archive and Chosen People.

Sources

• Peter Kirkwood in Eureka Street
• Image: UCA News