On this “right to life” Sunday, I do not intend to go into the details of the Church’s teaching on abortion, stem-cell research, genocide, capital punishment, euthanasia and all the other scenarios related to the beginning or end of life. I am sure that you already know what the Church teaches on them.

I feel greater responsibility, however, to offer you two reflections related to what the late John Paul II called the Gospel of Life.

The first concerns some ambiguous language commonly used in relation to these same matters.

The second concerns the degree to which Catholics are obliged in conscience to hold, obey, defend and promote the Gospel of Life.

First, the language game! In the abortion debate, there are at least two terms which have been “hijacked” by pro-abortionists and which we must reclaim for the Gospel of Life.

The first is the term “pro-choice.” It should be obvious to anyone that every human being not only can, but must, be pro-choice! Pro-choice means pro-freedom and pro-freedom means pro-human. If someone were not able to choose, they would be either seriously mentally handicapped or dead.

So, it is to state the obvious to say that everyone’s right and freedom to choose must be respected. The question is not about being “pro-choice”, but about what one chooses.

Some choices do not involve good or evil, for example what brand of soap I buy. Other choices do involve good and evil, sometimes great good or great evil.

There are those who say that by the very fact I choose something it is good. That is what infants think: “I want it, so it must be good.” In other words, I decide, I create what is good.

On the contrary, there are those who first ask whether something truly is good or evil and then make their choice. This is the adult approach. Irrespective of likes or dislikes, or of what it costs, I choose what is truly good. I conform to the good, I do not create it. This is how Jesus chose, how the saints and martyrs chose.

Choice without first asking what is truly good or evil is not choice at all. It is impulse or personal convenience. A freedom which is not guided by a discerning judgment of conscience about good and evil is not freedom. Impulsive living is not free living, but slavery to impulse. Convenience living kills conscience and with it freedom.

The immature are more likely to choose evil, sometimes without realizing it, and effectively put their freedom to sleep and with it their own dignity. The mature will do the opposite.

Since we cannot compare either abortion or euthanasia to buying a bar of soap, we must admit that the choice involved is a moral choice, that is, it requires conscience first to ask whether it is right or wrong.

To use the term pro-choice, then, is to put the cart before the horse. Moral choice must follow the judgment about what is right and wrong, not precede it, otherwise it is not a question of “pro-choice” but of “no choice.”

The second term we hear is the “right to privacy.” The Church’s Code of Canon Law states that, “No one is permitted ... to injure the right of any person to protect his or her own privacy” (can. 220).

The right to privacy is an obvious implication of respect for human dignity. But, in the abortion debate, and in other such debates, the right to privacy is a code word for the right to abortion.

As with the term pro-choice, the right to privacy is not at issue: it is what one does in privacy that is the problem. I cannot murder someone in a locked room and then claim innocence because I did it in private.

It is misleading to focus the debate on privacy. The question is whether or not the act I perform in private is or is not a crime. We should not smoke-screen the real issue by talking about privacy.

The core question is whether or not, and at what point, an unborn child is to be considered a human person with all the rights that accrue to it. On the answer to this question rests the answer to all the other beginning of life questions.

The second reflection I said I would look at is: to what degree are Catholics obliged in conscience to hold, obey, defend and promote the Gospel of Life?

Many Catholics know what the Church teaches on the right to life questions but disagree with it, for all kinds of reasons. The real issue here is not the right to life or, in the case of euthanasia, the so-called “right to die.” It is the relationship between the individual Catholic and the teaching authority of the Church. It is a question of faith.

It is a crisis of authority, not from the Church authority’s point of view, but from that of the individual Catholic’s relationship to that authority. Since that teaching authority is none other than the authority of Christ himself which he has sovereignly and explicitly given to Peter and the Apostles, i.e. to the Pope and the Bishops, we are really talking about a crisis in the relationship between the individual Catholic and Christ. It is as simple and as fundamental as that.

A Catholic who disagrees with the Church on abortion is often heard to say, “my opinion differs from the Church’s opinion.” By reducing the Church’s teaching to mere opinion this kind of Catholic has deprived it of any authority to bind them in conscience. In doing so, they have effectively deprived Christ of that same authority.

You cannot reject the authority of the Church in matters of faith and morals and then claim that you are subject to that of Christ. This is a false alternative which betrays a serious and fundamental misunderstanding of the way Christ deals with us. It is erroneous or, if conscious, hypocritical to seek Christ’s grace through the sacraments he has entrusted to the Church and then reject the grace of his light and wisdom as it is given to us through the teaching of that same Church.

To reduce Church teaching to mere opinion is to reject Church authority on the very questionable basis of one’s own authority.

It is often done, of course, by appealing to conscience as the ultimate source of authority. But this is a false understanding of conscience.

Conscience does not mean that I can decide what the truth is. Conscience is neither a truth-making process nor a decision-making process, but a judgment-making process. Conscience belongs, neither to the legislative branch of the human spirit nor to the executive branch, but to the judicial branch. Conscience is a judgment about how to execute God’s law or truth in a specific context, a judgment which is then actually executed by freedom.

Conscience should not invent or determine the truth, just as a judge should not invent laws. Conscience is a judgment urging us to put into practice in the here and now the truth received from God.

The conscience does not form truth. Truth forms the conscience and the conscience must urge one’s freedom to put that truth into practice.

For the Catholic, that Truth is the saving and eternal truth of Jesus Christ which he continues to teach through his Church. This Truth every Catholic is thus religiously obliged in conscience to hold, obey, defend and promote.

The Truth of Christ in his Church must form the Catholic’s conscience, therefore his judgment, therefore his decision and therefore his action, even, and especially, when it enters into conflict with personal preferences or man-made laws.

If a man-made law or personal preference contradicts the law of God, it cannot oblige in conscience.

When it comes to the Gospel of Life, the late Pope John Paul II made it abundantly clear that he was not just expressing a personal opinion, but was speaking to all Catholics with the full apostolic authority given to him by Christ.

With that authority he confirmed that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral (“Evangelium Vitae”, n.57). He repeats similar language when he explicitly condemns abortion, embryonic research which kills the embryos and euthanasia.

A Catholic who knows and understands this cannot in good conscience “disagree” with the Church, unless they want to invent a new Church and a new Gospel and a new Christ.

For a Catholic to disagree with the Church, then, on these most serious matters is to put themselves in a condition of “bad conscience”, that is, sin, a sin which must be confessed.

To be absolutely clear, it is not a bunch of celibate old men, be it Karol Wojtyla or Joseph Ratzinger or Theodore McCarrick, “imposing themselves” on a Catholic’s freedom of thought or opinion. It is the Truth of Christ which, through the Church, is demanding of the Catholic the coherence of faith, thought and action already implicit in the sacrament of baptism.

To be in error is not to be free: only the Truth sets us free. Deliberately to court error in the name of freedom is to call God a liar instead of admitting it of oneself.

Time forces me only to touch in conclusion on a few related points. The first is that neither science nor society has the means or the authority to decide when human life begins.

The human person and their spiritual soul are beyond the microscope and the MRI. Parliaments, Presidents and courts do not grant human personhood or dignity, but can and must recognize it and give it at all times the greatest benefit of the doubt.

Human reason itself leads to the somewhat obvious conclusion that life begins at the beginning, that a plant cannot grow if a seed is not there. When a seed is buried in the soil, we don’t take it out and throw it away because it is not the lovely plant we want to see above the soil.

Because we do not see the smiling face of a child before us does not mean the child does not exist. People are not inexistent because we don’t see them.

On the level of faith, the Scriptures are full of texts which validate the existence of life from conception and the Church makes it abundantly clear that, according to the mind of Christ, life begins at conception.

The Church does not in any way neglect the illness or distress which mothers may experience because of the child they carry. The Church has many centers throughout the world which care for pregnant women tempted to abort.

Nor does the Church fail to understand the very difficult and painful circumstances in which many pregnant women find themselves.

But the solution to these very real problems is not to kill the child. It is for society and the Church to step up with realistic policies which assist the pregnant with due respect for the law of God.

To legislate the killing of the child costs less money, but what is the real price? It is the moral fiber and survival of civilization itself. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta so strikingly put it, in terms similar to the following, when a civilization tolerates or commends the killing of an unborn child by its mother, it is destroying its own foundation. We have no need of outside forces to destroy it when we do it ourselves and call it “freedom” and “progress.”

God’s judgment will be severe when the time comes to take stock of this unspeakable moral chimera. And it will be severest, not on the poor woman who has often anguished in pain and isolation, but on the law-makers, the law-executors and the law-judges who, instead of coming to her aid and to the aid of her child with laws of solidarity and humanitarian assistance, as the Author of all authority would have had them do, have made laws of death and dressed them up with words like “choice”, “privacy” and “empowerment.”

The child in the womb is, in the end, the child of no human being, but of God. It is he alone who gives the gift of life and it is he alone who calls to a higher life when our earthly pilgrimage ends.

In the meantime, with great compassion, understanding and mercy for those who are in distress, but also with clarity of language and the fidelity of a true conscience, we must look confidently to our mother the Church when she proclaims for us Christ’s Gospel of Life and ourselves be courageous apostles of that Gospel.

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, October 2^nd, 2005

Annunciation, DC:  5:30pm  vigil & 7am