In the “any stick will do category”, Tina Beattie at CruxNews gives us a total crap article which misrepresents the Church’s theology along with what Pope Benedict XVI previously said. Plus of course includes an appeal to surveys regarding Catholics as if they mattered beyond unfortunately illustrating the ignorance of many Catholics.
This only exposes the weakness in those who can’t grasp that you can’t do evil to do good. What she calls weakness is actually a consistent moral ethic.
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church
1750 The morality of human acts depends on:
- the object chosen;
- the end in view or the intention;
- the circumstances of the action.
The object, the intention, and the circumstances make up the “sources,” or constitutive elements, of the morality of human acts.
This is an example of the new eugenics where it is better to kill a person or prevent them from every becoming a person than to exist with illnesses and disabilities.
The Catholic tradition has always allowed for some flexibility in the interpretation of Church teaching in particular circumstances — a practice known as casuistry. When the denial of contraception exposes adults or the children they conceive to life-threatening illnesses and disabilities — and when the criminalization of abortion condemns women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or risk their lives through illegal abortions — we need to navigate a path of careful ethical reasoning through contested areas of human vulnerability, rights, and responsibilities.
Funny how abortion is a cure for “life-threatening illnesses and disabilities”. The new eugenics has been busy wiping out birth defects by eliminating the person who has them. They have done a bang up job with Down Syndrome with 90 percent being aborted and are looking for continued success in other areas.
She sees casuistry as loopholes to help ignore the morality of human acts.
From the Catholic Dictionary.
… casuistry is an integral part of the Church’s moral tradition. Its purpose is to adapt the unchangeable norms of Christian morality to the changing and variable circumstances of human life. (Etym. Latin casus, case, problem to be solved.)
It is not a term that describes changing unchangeable norms to adapt to the situation like she thinks.
As a partial remedy to this article is one surprisingly in the Washington Post “What this amazing mom of two girls with microcephaly has to say about Zika scare”.
“This is the baby I’m supposed to be a mom to,” she said. “I would be missing out on a gift that had been given to me.”
Note: Post title alludes to G.K. Chesterton’s comment in Orthodoxy.
“They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture.”
2 comments
The whole point of JPIIs Fides et Ratio was to put an end to contemporary forms of casuistry with regard to certain moral questions, abortion being the example par excellance. There are objective moral evils the evil of which no circumstance can diminish.
Sorry, that was Veritatis Splendor, not Fides et Ratio.