From the Minister

Natural Law and Abortion

This is from Msgr. Jack Sweeley, Th.D., St. James Catholic Community Catholic Apostolic Church of Antioch - Malabar Rite.

There is a systemic flaw that is endemic to the way the Roman Catholic Church operates and it is predicated on what the Church calls "natural law." Natural law is presumed to be immutable God given "truths;" most notably those which address ethical, moral, and theological beliefs the Roman Catholic Church believes are obvious via reason to the human person. Moreover, once identified and articulated by the Church especially if codified as Church dogma or doctrine, such "truths" are not only immutable but any new understanding of what that "truth" speaks to predicated on new information or interpretation must conform to the already existing body of natural law.

For example, consider the Roman Catholic Church's position on abortion. In the primitive Christian Church there was no consensus on when human life or ensoulment occurred. Most often individual bishops made the decision for their diocese predicated on Plato's comment in the *Republic* which was at "quickening," or a live birth, or imposed their personal opinion. Three early Church Councils: Elvira (303-309), Ancyra (314), and Trullo (692) all in what is now Spain, reached different opinions but these opinions were not accepted by the universal Church. Pope Sixtus V in 1588 declared that both contraception and abortion resulted in excommunication. However, his successor Pope Gregory XII lifted the ban on contraception and made abortion after "quickening" a sin but not one of excommunication.

It is clear from the above that until 1588 the Roman Catholic Church had discerned no natural law regarding abortion. However, that was to change in 1854 when Pope Pius IX declared the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception is the belief that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was born without "the stain of Original Sin on her soul" so that she could give birth to Jesus as both fully human and fully divine. Thus according to the Dogma there could be no question of when the fetus that would become the person Mary was conceived, became human, or was ensouled.

St. Augustine, the author of the concept of Original Sin in the late fourth century, stated that Original Sin is passed to the next generation by sexual intercourse that results in conception. As Mary was born without Origin Sin, the Roman Catholic Church declared that ensoulment occurred at the "moment of conception." Thus with the "moment of conception" now defined as the beginning of human life, human person hood, and ensoulment, the Dogma codified these "truths" as natural law.

Consequently, from the declaration of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, abortion is defined by the Roman Catholic Church as any human intervention that occurs after the "moment of conception" that in any way leads to a negation of the live birth of the fetus. However, what must be understood is that this definition of abortion and its subsequent ban is not predicated on the principle of first cause which has been central to Roman Catholic theology since it was established by St. Thomas Aquinas in the middle of the thirteenth century. This is because in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, contrary to its mantra of "right-to-life" from conception to natural death, "life" is not the first cause that prohibits abortion. The first cause that prohibits abortion is ensoulment because it is the belief that Mary was born without the stain of Original Sin and the Church could not prove when the soul entered the body that it chose the ambiguous phrase, "moment of conception." Consequently, "human life" and "person hood" are secondary causes that flow from and require a first cause which is the theological, not the science of human developmental biology, belief that there is a "moment of conception."

Where this brings us is that the "moment of conception" is a theological construct predicted on the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. It is not predicated on the biology of conception.

While the Roman Catholic Church defines a "moment of conception" and bans abortion from this point on, developmental biologists reject the concept of a "moment of conception." This is because from the moment the sperm makes contact with the outer membrane of the ovum a complex transformational chemical process begins that takes at least 36-48 hours and up to 72 hours to complete. However even the completion of this window, not a moment, is rejected by most developmental biologists and ethicists including Roman Catholic ones as the beginning of human life and human person hood because there are other significant markers that they believe is the beginning of human life and person hood. These markers are too detailed to analyze here but include in addition to the genetic view cited above held by the Roman Catholic Church are the embryological view which requires the implantation of the zygote into the wall of the uterus which makes the splitting of the zygote into two or more individuals impossible that takes up to fifteen days from the completion of fertilization, the neurological view that cites the 25th week of pregnancy comprised of three distinct stages, and the ecological/technological view that states human life and human person hood do not begin until a fetus becomes a live birth and is a baby.

Why is it that when the "moment of conception" is a biological myth predicated on Church dogma and that most developmental biologists and ethicists use the neurological view as the beginning of human life, that the Roman Catholic Church does not revise its position on when human life and human person hood begins? The reason is that they cannot do so because the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception which in turn created a "natural law" regarding the "moment of conception" will not allow them to do so.

I have not written the above with the intent to change anyone's personal faith beliefs or personal belief regarding abortion. Rather, I wrote it to illustrate why the Roman Catholic Church once it takes a position on what it considers an ethical, moral, or theological issue predicated on natural law, finds it impossible to change that position even in the face of what any rational person using reason and logic considers irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

From this perspective I am reminded of the question raised when I was a seminarian at St. Mary's Roman Catholic seminary. The question was, "What does it take to be a "good Catholic?" In other words, what does it take to accept the teaching of the Magisterium in the face of reason and logic that debunks the validity of Catholic dogma and doctrine?

If we understand that faith, the faith that any religion or denomination requires is at its essence irrational and that human beings are rational beings, then for one to have faith they must deny logic, reason, and rationality. From this we may extrapolate that the person with the greatest faith, the one who accepts the most irrational dogma and doctrine as "truth," is the person who is most irrational in that they can suspend and deny reason and logic to a greater degree than can others.

In no religion more than Christianity and in no Christian denomination more than Roman Catholicism must one be irrational to accept the Church's dogma and doctrine as "truth." Why? Because it is not rational to belief that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. It is not rational to believe that there is such a thing as Original Sin that is transmitted via sexual intercourse from generation to generation to say nothing of the Church's claim that of all the human beings ever born Mary is the only one born without it. It is not rational to believe that a human being, the pope, has the ability to speak infallibly when he speaks in the name of all Christians on matters of faith and morals. It is not rational to believe that as the Church proclaims only it has the full means of salvation. It is not rational to believe that the bread and wine used at the Holy Eucharist is somehow transformed into the "Real Presence;" that is, Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ.

Yet, these and many other beliefs are required if one is to be a "good Catholic." From this perspective is easy to see how the Roman Catholic Church expects "good Catholics" to deny the facts of human developmental biology and instead believe there is a "moment of conception" predicated on the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Moreover, the Church believes that as "good Catholics" can deny logic and reason to accept other illogical and unreasonable dogmas and doctrines, they will accept the illogic and unreasonableness of the "moment of conception" and thus deny that abortion can ever be a licit medical procedure regardless of the damage to the fetus or danger to the woman's health or life.

Mercy, Mercy

This is by Michael Kessler, the Assistant Director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University.

It's been a big few weeks for mercy.

First, Paris Hilton was released from a Los Angeles jail, after being incarcerated for violating the terms of her probation on alcohol-related driving violations. While the LA sheriff was rebuked for his attempt to mercifully spare Hilton from weeks of incarceration, Hilton's divine guardian gave her a second chance at a life more worthwhile than "models and bottles."

When Barbara Walters interviewed Hilton from her jail cell, asking, "How are you different?" the young socialite waxed theological: "I'm not the same person I was," she said. "I used to act dumb. It was an act .... It is not who I am, nor do I want to be that person for the young girls who looked up to me. I know now that I can make a difference, that I have the power to do that. I have been thinking that I want to do different things when I am out of here. I have become much more spiritual. God has given me this new chance."

Then on July 2, President Bush commuted the prison sentence of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, convicted of perjuring himself to a federal grand jury during the investigation of the release of the classified CIA status of Valerie Plame. While defending the process that led to Libby's conviction, Bush considered the sentence of thirty months to be "excessive," and thus worthy of his (unusual) intervention.

Usually the president has argued for harsher punishments; the news analysis that has followed the commutation shows the inconsistency of Bush's treatment of "Scooter" with his handling of every other request for sovereign mercy that has come across his desk.

These two events have more in common than their timing. Both Bush's mercy toward Libby and Hilton's claim of a divinely awarded "second chance" operate on the principle that the individuals in question deserve special treatment from the sovereign.

In Hilton's case, her position as wealthy heiress and (may the gods save us!) role model for young girls everywhere means, in her mind, that God intends for her to put her life to better use, making a "difference" in others' lives. Presumably, she deserves this merciful second chance because of her prominent position and capacity to fund a life pursuing more worthwhile goals than constant partying. The jury is out on whether she'll put this opportunity to good use (perhaps she's another Darfur spokesperson in the making?).

But isn't there an arrogance in her declaration of special divine beneficence that runs counter to a long tradition in Western theology? The Western tradition is saturated with an Augustinian-inspired disdain for an individual's arrogant assumption that one is so important as to be essential to the unfolding of God's plan. Moreover, there is a deep biblical tradition that "God is no respecter of persons" (Acts 10:34). Unmoved by riches or earthly power, God is said to be interested only in our internal motivations: "For the Lord sees not as man sees; for man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). Perhaps Hilton's God reads People and sees an opportunity.

But why does Hilton think herself privileged enough to get out of jail, reformed and tasked with a new mission, while her cellmates languish under the burdens of under-representation, poverty, disease, and despair? After all, the same lord who "gave" her the second chance implores us to remember that "the rich and poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of them all" (Proverbs 22:2). Is she really that special?

These questions are more easily answered in Libby's case. While Libby has been silent, it is clear that the reason Scooter got special treatment was precisely due to his position as trusted friend. Unlike Yahweh, Bush does respect persons -- in this case the close confidant and right hand of the vice president.

Perhaps this is how it should be with the leaders of earthly kingdoms? We are, after all, humans easily seduced by our own powers. Friends of the sovereign win special favor. And, legally, the commutational power exercised by the president is unambiguously granted by constitutional authority. As Carl Schmitt argued, sovereignty is most transparent not in the routine moments of its exercise, but in the exceptions to the general rules. In this special case, the sovereign Bush decided that the friend Libby deserved an exception to the harsh sentences consistently imposed elsewhere. And there's not one thing to be done about this except try to shame a sovereign who seems to have forgotten how to blush.

We should ponder this order of justice and mercy. You and I would not receive such mercy from the seat of earthly or heavenly power. Justice for us is meted out through rigid application of rules, unless we are the favored chief of staff (or party girl) seated at the right hand of the ruler.

Likewise, most of us do not have the financial safety cushion to turn the lemons of incarceration into the lemonade of a new social mission. In fact, such incarceration would leave us indelibly tarred as convicted felons, unable to access many social and economic opportunities needed to seize our second chance.
A Hiltonesque jailhouse conversion, whether sincere or not, would not save us from a difficult restoration of our dignity in the eyes of others. No committee of political operatives will fundraise for our defense, nor will the media powers broadcast our conversion testimony. You and I, poor schlubs in a merciless world, are on our own.

Heaven and Hell

Do you believe in heaven or hell? If not, why not? If so, who's going there and how do you know?

As I intimated in a recent sermon, I am not convinced that heaven or hell, in the traditional Western Christian sense, really exist. Nonetheless, I am intrigued with other people's opinions about the afterlife.

The questions above were posed by Sally Quinn and Jon Meachem, two reporters for the Washington Post to some rather well-known writers and theologians. A few responses are posted below and more can be found here

I encourage you to visit the site for more opinions.

Enough of Heaven and Hell

From Susan Jacoby, author and reporter.

Oh, for heaven's sake. This question irritates the...inferno out of me. Of all the pointless, utterly childish notions associated with traditional religion, belief in eternal bliss in heaven or eternal damnation in hell surely tops the list.

Religions that have allowed themselves to be modified by secular knowledge downplay orthodox ideas of heaven and hell for the very good reason that such beliefs have been used throughout history to justify the most evil earthly acts imaginable. Christians slaughtered Jews and Muslims during the Crusades precisely because they believed that they were earning themselves a place in an all-Christian heaven, hemmed in by restrictive covenants.

In recent years, radical Islamists have embarked on suicide murder missions with the absolute conviction that they will be rewarded with a place in a Muslim paradise. The 60 percent of Muslim Americans who, according to a recent Pew Poll, do not accept the fact that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were carried out by Muslim Arabs, are deluded. Like the Christian Crusades, Islamist terror attacks are deeply involved with a form of religion that forsees an eternal reward for dastardly crimes against humanity.

I know that indignant readers will claim that none of these crimes have anything to do with the "real" Christianity or the "real" Islam. They don't have anything to do with modern, moderate forms of Christianity or Islam, but they have everything to do with retrograde expressions of religions that preach, among other things, the doctrine of eternal damnation for unbelievers and infidels. And these retrograde religious forms are on the rise in the world. They are every bit as "real" as religion based on earthly, loving kindness--something that promoters of religion as an unqualified good never want to admit.

Fear of hell has also proved notably inefficacious as a deterrent to evil human impulses; that is why we have man-made laws. Fundamentalists who want to post the Ten Commandments in courthouses have everything backward: we need courthouses precisely because some people just won't obey moral commandments unless they are subjected to earthly punishment.

In our godly nation, the most recent Gallup Poll (released on June 13, 2007) found that while 81 per cent of Americans believe in heaven, only 69 percent believe in hell. Approximately 86 per cent of American adults believe in God, but only 70 percent believe in the devil. We Americans really do like to have our cake (whether angel or devil's food) and eat it too; we seem to prefer the pursuit of happiness to the right to go to hell in our own way.

Because I am an atheist (and by the way, the percentage of Americans who believe in God has dropped by four percentage points--down from 90 percent to a minuscule 86 percent--during the past four years), I naturally do not believe in immortality in either heaven or hell. I say with Milton:

O Earth, how like to Heav'n, if not preferr'd
More justly, Seat worthier of Gods, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old:
For what God after better worse would build? (Paradise Lost, IX.100)

If I were a believer, though, I would definitely reserve my closest scrutiny for the devil's many earthly workshops, from the office of the current U.S. Vice President (described in such riveting infernal detail in the Post series on Dick Cheney this week) to the hellish refugee camps in Darfur.

There is a devil--not a supernatural being but the sum of the worst human impulses. The devil is in us. Or rather, the devil is us. And what so many people think of as a supernatural being called "God" can be understood in the natural realm as the human capacity for good.

I also reject the concept of limbo, and I send my kudos to the Vatican for finally changing its dogma that unbaptized infants can't go to heaven because someone didn't sprinkle water over their heads. This change truly epitomizes the Roman Catholic Church's commitment to dealing with humankind's most important problems. I am sure that every lunatic who actually believed in a deity cruel enough to deny his presence to sinless infants will be greatly relieved by the Church's change of heart.

But I certainly do believe in purgatory. Purgatory is wondering whether the human race in general, and my fellow Americans in particular, will ever grow up enough to realize that we ought to treat one another decently simply because of our common humanity--not because we are looking forward to being entertained by harpists among the clouds or are terrified of eternal flame.

Modern forms of religion tend to define heaven and hell in a somewhat abstract way--the former as perfect union with God, the latter as the absence of God. Whatever the concept of eternity, it is based on the demonstrably false idea that the hope of heaven and the fear of hell will prevent people from doing evil to one another here on earth.

Purgatory is the only state inhabited by reasonable grownups, never quite living up to our own moral expectations but always hoping to do better.

Neither is The Final Destination

From N. Thomas Wright, Anglican Bishop of Durham, England.

Heaven is important but it's not the end of the world: in the mainstream Christian tradition until the Platonists corrupted it, the ultimate destination is THE NEW HEAVENS AND THE NEW EARTH, which will involve an ultimate resurrection (bodily, of course) for God's people (in some versions, for all people).

The way the phrase 'heaven and hell' are used today implies you go straight to one or the other, ignoring the solid biblical testimony to an ultimate new creation in which heaven and earth are brought together in a great act of renewal (for those who want it, check out Ephesians 1.10, Revelation 21 and 22, Romans 8.18-27 and 1 Corinthians 15.20-28 -- though once you see this theme it's there everywhere). When Paul says 'my desire is to depart and be with Christ which is far better', and when Jesus says 'today you will be with me in Paradise', the wider context of both indicates that this will be a TEMPORARY state prior to the eventual resurrection into the new creation. This means (by the way) that the 'second coming' is NOT Jesus 'coming back to take us home', but Jesus coming -- or 'reappearing', as 1 John 3 and Colossians 3 put it -- to heal, judge and rescue this present creation and us with it.

(b) The word 'hell' is a shorthand for several biblical themes which converge at the point where (i) God has promised to put the entire world right at last, showing up evil as what it is, the corruption and destruction of what is good, and the distortion of the good humanness which God made and loves, and therefore judging it so that it no longer has the power to infect his good creation; (ii) God will finally say to those who have persisted in their deliberate collusion with the powers of corruption, destruction and dehumanization (i.e. 'sin') that there can be no place for them in the glorious new world that he is making, so that (iii) God's new world will not have in it 'a concentration camp in the midst of a beautiful landscape', as some earlier visions of 'hell' have supposed, but rather the celebration (1 Corinthians 20.28) that 'God will be all in all'.

(c) There is a constant danger for contemporary western Christians of making a similar mistake at this point to first-century Jews. It appears that many Jews of, say, Jesus' and Paul's day supposed that when God acted to put the world right it would be the Jewish people who would be automatically OK.

The great breakthrough in Paul's thinking is that no, the one God of Abraham wants to reach out and welcome ALL people on the basis of faith alone. Similarly today many Christians think God is only interested in rescuing them, as saved humans, FROM the world, whereas the Bible is full of hints that those who know God and receive his salvation here and now are to be his agents in bringing that salvation to the wider world. Note how, even when Revelation 21 and 22 speaks of those who are in the holy city, the new Jerusalem, and those who are excluded from it, it also speaks of the river of the water of life flowing out to the world around, and of the tree of life growing on the banks of the river, with 'the leaves of the tree being for the healing of the nations'. What does that mean?