The Church’s Constant Teaching
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Faith on Thursday, September 25, 2008 6:02 AM
You probably caught the recent incident where Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a self-professed Catholic, told an interviewer she can’t say for sure when life begins, and also mentioned that the Catholic Church does not have a historically consistent teaching on the topic.
If you missed the incident, you can catch fellow Faith & Family Live! blogger Rebecca Teti’s coverage here and here.
Needless to say, Nancy Pelosi was wrong about the Church’s teaching, and a number of excellent bishops mentioned the fact publicly. That was good. However, I was happy to see that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops took the thing one step further with the release of a document that showed up in my parish’s bulletin this past Sunday.
It wasn’t so long ago that I was a theology student - a dedicated, practicing, staunchly pro-life Catholic - asking one of my professors about St. Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on abortion. I was confused, because I’d heard that he thought it was okay in the earlier parts of the pregnancy. Thankfully, my professor helped me understand St. Thomas’s real teaching.
But because I was once in the position of not knowing better, I can see how people - even devout Catholics - could be confused by the quotations from St. Augustine and St. Thomas that the politicians have been throwing around recently. That’s why I was so happy to see this new document from the bishops.
It’s called Respect for Unborn Human Life: The Church’s Constant Teaching, and it’s available on their website.
The whole document is worth reading in detail, but I think it’s especially important because it points out a distinction that no one in the mainstream media, let alone Pelosi and her cronies, seems to be aware of: when St. Augustine and St. Thomas debated when life begins, they were not debating whether abortion was wrong. As with its teachings on contraception, the Church has always taught that abortion at any stage is a rejection of God’s creative powers and therefore a grave sin.
The debate among the great theologians was simply the degree of sin constituted by abortion. Because of their inadequate knowledge of biology, they thought that early abortion might be a sin more like contraception than like homicide. We now have enough science to show that abortion is, in fact, the latter from the moment of conception. I think the bishops’ text makes clear that St. Augustine and St. Thomas, were they alive today, would agree.
Read the whole document here, and you’ll be better prepared to be a witness to the constancy and beauty of our Church’s teaching on this important topic.
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