Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s sermon on the feast of the visitation was no doubt designed to attract a bit more media interest than sermons, even archiepiscopal ones, normally do. He chose to move rapidly away from the remembrance of the joint rejoicing of the Blessed Virgin and Elizabeth, mother of St John the Baptist, whilst both were miraculously pregnant. Instead, his comments focused on the termination of other pregnancies, the practice of abortion.
It was not a great surprise to discover that he was opposed, for the standard Christian reason that life begins at conception, and so to abort a foetus in the womb is to deliberate kill a human being. The media response, however, focused not on whether this argument is cogent or not, but on his call for political action, backed by church discipline. Roman Catholic voters were urged not to back politicians who supported abortion, and Roman Catholic politicians were instructed that they could not expect to receive the sacrament of mass if they voted or spoke in favour of abortion.
It is this last point that has incurred the almost universal ire of media commentators. Religion, it would seem, has a place in British society, according to most who have pronounced on the issue, but that place does not include religious leaders instructing politicians how to vote, or making threats against politicians who vote in certain ways. His comments were castigated and repeatedly described as ‘medieval’. (Actually St Thomas Aquinas, the greatest mind of the medieval church, thought that the soul did not enter the body, and so the foetus become a human person, until quite late on into pregnancy. St Thomas was opposed to abortion, but for very different reasons to those offered by Cardinal O’Brien.) Was, then, the Cardinal wrong to say what he did?
Considering his pronouncement from the perspective of Roman Catholic ethics and canon law, I suppose that he was simply right: all members of the church are expected to refrain from sin, and should not approach the altar having committed mortal sin, without having made the sacrament of penance. Abortion, carried out knowingly and willingly, is without question a mortal sin within the Roman Catholic tradition. I presume that the encouragement and permission of abortion is also therefore a mortal, rather than venial, fault, and so a (virtually) insuperable bar to the reception of the Eucharist.
This, however, is not the point. I do not suppose people’s objections to the Cardinal’s views were based on disagreements over the technicalities of moral theology. He was offending against the mores of society, not the laws of the Church. But the nature of the offence is not clear, at least to me. The argument heard repeatedly in the last week, that, ‘I did not vote for a Catholic MP, but for a Labour one’, is simply fatuous. All MPs have various non-partisan interests. I discovered today that my local MP has a particular interest in Palestinian refugees, and holds an honourary role in a local university. So what? MPs and MSPs are supporters and often sponsors of all sorts of groups with defined ends: Amnesty International; the Countryside Alliance; British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV); Save British Science; Friends of the Earth; Make Poverty History; many trade unions; and a hundred others, no doubt (including the Pro-Choice Alliance…). In every case, it will be assumed by their constituents and colleagues that they will vote and speak in line with the stance of the organisation; if they do not, they might well expect to be asked to resign from it. None of this is perceived as a threat to the democratic process: why should it be when (a leader of) the Roman Catholic Church reminds its members that it has certain ethical views also?
Three possible reasons occur to me. First, the Church is not, fundamentally, an anti-abortion pressure group. It would make no sense to be a member of CND and to vote in favour the renewal of Trident, whereas one might be a convinced Catholic on theological grounds and yet happen not to agree with the Church on abortion. However, many, perhaps most, campaigning groups are not single issue, and there may well be many similar instances (a member of an environmental group who happened to be in favour of nuclear power, for example). How such a situation might be negotiated is an interesting political question, but hardly merits the level of opposition that O’Brien has received.
Second, I suspect that there is more concern when a church leader makes such comments, compared to the leader of a non-religious organisation. This is complex: in part it stems from prejudice against religion, in part from a fear, right or wrong, of too much religious influence in public life. More interestingly, there is a perception that a religious leader’s instruction carries more weight than that of a campaigning group: being asked to resign from the BUAV (say) is not trivial, but is probably less painful than being excluded from personally meaningful religious observance.
Third, I suspect that there was a perceived assumption on the cardinal’s part that he could instruct the consciences of his co-religionists. In fact, his language was more measured than many of the press reports suggested: he ‘urged’ politicians, and ‘asked’ and ‘reminded’ the faithful. He did say once ‘we must be unwilling’, but one suspects that our elected representatives have heard a little worse from their party whips before now, and nonetheless retained their own moral integrity.
What, however, if he had attempted to ‘instruct’ people what to do? The ‘argument from authority’ is a recognised form of logical and ethical debate; and so entirely proper to present in public. The argument would be of the form: X (say, the Roman Catholic Church) has a particular insight into the moral duties of humanity; X says Y (say, that abortion is always wrong); therefore Y. Each of us, even legislators, are then free to judge the value of the argument, largely on the status of the first premise. It is a premise I find fairly unconvincing (it happens that Roman Catholic moral theology is one of the very few places in Britain where an intellectually serious ethical discourse still exists, but it is a discourse based on certain premises I do not accept to be true, and so to my mind it is worthy of respect, but not of acquiescence).
Cardinal O’Brien’s church may happen to be wrong about the ethical status of abortion; that debate can be had—although ideally it would be had by people who have taken the trouble to understand the serious moral theory behind the Church’s position (an understanding of the difference between the personalist approach of Pope John Paul II and the earlier deontological approach, for instance, would seem a minimum requirement for intelligent comment). Right or wrong, though, the Cardinal has a religious duty, and a civil right, to speak about his Church’s beliefs, and to seek to influence policy makers on their basis. In civil terms, he has exactly the same right as the Pro-Choice Alliance, the right to freedom of speech. He should not be vilified for using it.
Dr. Stephen R. Holmes teaches in the areas of historical and systematic theology, St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews.
