When Samuel Johnson sought to reject George Berkeley’s argument that our worldly experience consisted of mental abstractions, Johnson walked to a rock and kicked it, proclaiming, “I refute it thus” as a method of proving the purpose.
Such ad lapidem arguments often remain the Achilles heel of many pro-life arguments. What seems so patently clear to lots of us stays terribly obscure to others. The danger of not making our arguments clear is to have them obscured in such a way where priests, bishops, and even popes make mistakes.
One in all these mistakes was in Pope Francis’ recent interview with America Magazine, where the direct query was put to the Holy Father by Gloria Purvis. Should the appropriate to life take priority over the query of social justice?
Francis demurred on the precise query, remarking that the pastoral query of abortion referring to individuals should carry much more importance that the political query. Yet, in Francis’ answer, there was a troubling remark that would not be explained away as either a miscommunication or misunderstanding.
While defending the essential human right to exist in clear terms, Francis went out of his method to separate the concept of human being and human person, indicating that this query – long considered settled — was open as a matter for debate:
In any book of embryology it is claimed that shortly before one month after conception the organs and the DNA are already delineated within the tiny fetus, before the mother even becomes aware. Subsequently, there’s a living human being. I don’t say an individual, because that is debated, but a living human being.
This can’t be the case.
Human personhood is roughly defined by two qualities: existence and a rational soul. Pope Saint John Paul II offered his own definition of human personhood in Evangelium Vitae, specifically citing that human being and human person were synonymous terms from the very moment of creation. Quoting from documents on abortion and procreation from the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, John Paul II wrote:
It will never be made human if it weren’t human already. This has all the time been clear, and … modern genetic science offers clear confirmation. It has demonstrated that from the primary fast there’s established the programme of what this living being can be: an individual… (EV, 60)
Critics who argued that a reduced potentiality means a reduced personhood find themselves firmly rebuked by John Paul II, who confirms that an “individual person along with his characteristic elements already well determined” is indeed that human being. St. Thomas Aquinas argues that this ensoulment continues until the human person has exhaled his last breath, not when their potential for living is exhausted or diminished.
Francis’ answer is at odds with Evangelium Vitae in a most direct way. By putting distance between human being and human personhood, Francis intentionally or otherwise opens the door to a litany of horribles which have each moral and theological consequences too terrible to disregard.
The long history of human experience illustrates what happens when humanity is permitted to disclaim the personhood in others: slavery, the Jewish Holocaust, the Holodomor, the 70 million dead babies and moms victimized by the abortion industry, Canada’s experiment in euthanizing the poor. All give testimony to the cruelty of treating each other as mere beings relatively than full individuals.
After all, it’s much more likely that Francis has not considered the query deeply enough. Too many Catholics forget how utterly spoiled we were to have such tremendous intellects within the Chair of St. Peter. Francis’ remark rightly emphasizes the pastoral over the political, yet the dearth of theological precision in matters of life and death has dire and direct consequences in a world filled with wolves.
Which brings us to a word of caution. One must have little interest within the cottage industry of “Francis-bashing” which passes for adult conversation in too many quarters of the English-speaking Catholic world. The good enemy of affection, reminds John Paul II, continues to be utility and use.
When human individuals are reduced to things, that is where Soren Kierkegaard’s admonishment in The Present Age rings most true: we will do probably the most terrible things to at least one one other human person on principle. The bloody history of the trendy age pays credence to this sentiment; relatively than kicking a rock to prove the purpose, one need only ask St. Peter’s successor to be more mindful, even when we bask in slightly kick every now and then.
(Editor’s note: This essay has been edited for sake of clarity since being posted.)
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