Catholic Sensibility

“The great temptation of the moment was to transform Christianity into moralism and moralism into politics, that is, to substitute believing with doing. Because what does it mean to believe? Someone might say: we have to do something right now. By substituting faith with moralism, believing with doing, though, we retreat into particularism. Above all, we lose the criteria for judging and the guideposts that orient us in the right direction. The final result, instead of constructive growth, is division.” -- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Funeral Homily for Msgr. Luigi Giussani, Feb. 24, 2005 What might this mean for discussion of our thorniest public issue - abortion? It is always best to look at concrete cases. And, in the April 2005 issue of Studies in Christian Ethics, the Duke theologian Amy Laura Hall looks at the Anglican priest Joanna Jepson. Rev. Jepson was born with a facial disfigurement, afterwards surgically corrected. Years later, as a Cambridge divinity student, she realized that, because of a 1990 amendment to the law that allowed third trimester abortions if the child were otherwise likely to suffer “from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped,” abortions were performed after diagnoses of cleft palate. Arguing that a cleft palate was not even remotely a “serious handicap,” Jepson tried to get the relevant police to investigate and then the High Court in London. Now, we have gotten pretty good at arguing against positive eugenics – bioengineering for the sake of enhancement. The political theorist Michael Sandel has told us that positive eugenics would make it difficult for us to “view our talents as gifts for which we are indebted,” instead making it likely that we would simply see them as possessions. This would, needless to say, negatively impact our capacity for humility, responsibility, and solidarity. The enviromentalist Bill McKibben has suggested that the quest for engineered perfection would alienate us from the “deeper world” of nature and our own earlier history. The President’s Council of Bioethics’ “Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness” has criticized the construction of “better” children in a romantic defense of childhood as “that stage of life justly celebrated as most innocent, open, fresh, playful, wondering.” All well and good. But it is much harder to argue against negative eugenics. For instance, in their coverage of Rev. Jepson’s witness for the value of the lives of those with facial birth defects, the British media constantly focused on her good looks (the result of surgical correction). As a writer for the Times, after breathlessly mentioning her appearance - “long blonde locks, slim with perfectly manicured nails” - put it: “For all her sharply expressed arguments, her every sentence seems to cry out: Would it have been right to abort me? And the answer, even to those wary of Christian anti-abortionists, is no.” As Amy Laura Hall summarizes, “By this version, Jepson’s past is redeemed by her observably beautiful present. The outrageous cruelty she endured before her surgery is rendered meaningful by the perceptible results of the surgery itself.” But this could only be ironic. Rev. Jepson wanted to suggest that the value of those with birth defects had absolutely nothing to do with “long blonde locks” or “manicured nails.” She instead claimed, “There needs to be maturity in accepting that there will be suffering in this life,” and that her own suffering had “made me who I am, aware of other people.” The Times writer, robbed of his story of cygnet redeemed by becoming swan, could only dismissively respond, “Now she is giving me a sermon.” Regarding Alistair, her brother with Down’s Syndrome, Rev. Jepson said, “My brother is amazing. He loves taking photos. He takes these fantastic pictures of people that everyone else ignores – like the dustbin men, the postman, or the workmen in the street. Somehow, these people are important to Alistair, and I would never have seen that unless he had given me his take on the world.” Those who are handicapped, Joanna Jepson tells us, have a capacity for sustained attention – a “take on the world” that the rest of us desperately need. But the British press could not grasp the possibility of this “take on the world,” seeing the presence of handicapped life only as a threat to “what a woman wants” or as a disruption to “a person in the midst of life, with goals, relationships and responsibilities,” who would be terribly inconvenienced by having such a child. What was missing from the editorials was a sense of the grace present in the difficult lives of the handicapped – the sense that, as one mother of a cleft palate son asserted, “There is nothing that cannot be sorted and nothing will put his life in danger and stop him from leading a normal life.” As Amy Laura Hall puts it, when followed to its conclusions, this becomes a theological sense, the hard-won awareness that all “has been created by grace ex nihilo.” And so, “Christians may need to speak explicitly in the public sphere about the gratuitous nature of every life, held as each is by the extravagant providence of God.” To be sure, we must be ecumenical, and we must cooperate with those who share the belief, even unconsciously, that “What is good and just is rooted in eternal truth, in the nature of God, who is what he is quite independently of what the world is and what the world thinks” (Rowan Williams, Al-Azhar, Cairo), so that the worth of human beings is ineradicable. But we will only be able to communicate the real depth of our views if we do not focus on changing laws or external things, but try to get others to gaze upon Christ. As Pope Benedict said, “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event.” And in the light of this event, we can become aware of the true significance of the especially attentive “take on the world” of those who are handicapped, the beautiful grace discernible through the “there is nothing that cannot be sorted” that is manifested in their lives. As Rev. Jepson said in a remarkable sermon: “God decided to come upon his people not as a conquering King but as a poor, weak, defenceless, dispossessed child. So remarkable and unsettling was this choice, that I think we still find it difficult to absorb. We drown out the true Christmas message in self-indulgence and self-congratulation, as a distraction from a truly important message. God's Word was made into tiny, weak, vulnerable flesh. What are we to make of this? How are we to understand a God who so clearly turns his back on all-consuming glory and chooses instead the most abject humility? “The answer is that God was sending us a message of love and urging upon us a lesson of responsibility. He was telling us that his heart is always on the side of the marginalised, the disregarded and unloved. I believe that he particularly cherishes those babies who are terminated in the womb for the cruellest of reasons: namely, that they do not match the physical perfectionism of our times.” How do we make this present? Not through moralism, that’s for sure.