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Dear Parishioners: During the summer months, we will print thought provoking articles to help prepare ourselves to give critical thought to issues of our daily lives. For the next five weeks, we will print sections of an article by Fr. Kenneth Overberg, S.J., A Consistent Ethic of Life. Part I: Everyone knows there is darkness in our lives, in our world. Violence of all kinds threatens life: in our homes, in our cities, in nations near and far. "Violence has many faces: oppression of the poor, deprivation of basic human rights, economic exploitation, sexual exploitation and pornography, neglect or abuse of the aged and the helpless, and innumerable other acts of inhumanity. Abortion in particular blunts a sense of the sacredness of human life." We see this passage from the U.S. Bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter on peace exemplified almost every day in the headlines. Many of us have directly encountered some form of violence in our own lives. Many more of us suffer with families and friends who have. How can we respond to this violence and death? A moral vision that holds together these many different issues and offers not only direction for action but also energy and hope is the consistent ethic of life. The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin articulated this perspective in the early 1980’s, and it has become a centerpiece of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ moral teaching. Pope John Paul II has affirmed similar themes in his 1995 encyclical The Gospel of Life. In this Catholic Update we will explore the richness of this teaching. A moral framework: What is the consistent ethic of life? It is a comprehensive ethical system that links together many different issues by focusing attention on the basic value of life. In his attempts to defend life, Cardinal Bernardin first joined the topics of abortion and nuclear war. He quickly expanded his understanding of a consistent ethic of life to include many issues from all of life. Already in the first of a series of talks, this one at Fordham University, Cardinal Bernardin stated: "The spectrum of life cuts across the issues of genetics, abortion, capital punishment, modern warfare and the care of the terminally ill." Cardinal Bernardin also acknowleged that issues are distinct and different. Capital punishment, for example, is not the same as abortion. Nevertheless, the issues are linked. The valuing and defense of life are at the center of both issues. Cardinal Bernardin told an audience in Portland, Oregon: "when human life is considered ‘cheap’ or easily exendable in one area, eventually nothing is held as sacred and all lives are in jeopardy." Along with his consistent linking of distinct life issues, Cardinal Bernardin acknowledged that no individual or group can pursue all issues. Still, while concentrating on one issue, he insisted in another address, the individual or group must not be seen "as insensitive to or even opposed to other moral claims on the overall spectrum of life." The consistent ethic of life rules out contradictory moral positions about the unique value of human life - and it would be contradictory, for example, to be against abortion but for capital punishment or to work against poverty but support euthanasia. This linkage of all life issues is, of course, the very heart of the consistent ethic of life. This linking challenges us to pull together things that we might have kept apart in the past. Often our convictions seem to cluster around ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ viewpoints - as in the above examples. But the consistent ethic of life cuts across such divisions, calling us to respect the life in the womb, the life of a criminal, the life on welfare, the life of the dying. Sincerely, |
