Why Catholics Are Right by Michael Coren

Author:Michael Coren [Coren, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Political Science, Religion, Christianity, Catholic
ISBN: 9780771023231
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2011-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

CATHOLICS

AND LIFE

IT’S THE SUBJECT CATHOLICS talk about a great deal and the one that they are criticized for talking about a great deal. In fact, they are criticized for being obsessed with the life issue, of being monomaniacs and single-issue extremists. Actually, such criticisms are usually nothing more than digressions or attempts to avoid the subject and dismiss the people discussing it. We talk about issues of life and sexuality because they matter. In a better world, the subjects we’re about to discuss here would be embraced by everybody, but, the world being what it is, it’s left to Christians and to the Roman Catholic Church in particular to take a stand and to speak up for the most vulnerable of people – the unborn, the elderly, the ill and handicapped, the most marginalized of marginalized. Catholics believe that life begins at conception and ends at natural death, and we know that this belief runs directly and increasingly contrary to the drift of Western society. Roman Catholicism is also inherently connected to, and an exponent of, natural law in that nature is God-given, and the laws of nature are as immutable and real as are the laws of gravity. It is in no way surprising that the Church champions unborn children or those threatened by euthanasia because nature tells us when life begins and when it ends. There are also, however, Biblical references to the unborn – Psalm 139 has “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Job has “Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?” and Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

But the Catholic defence is as much a moral and logical one based on science and on human rights as it is a religious or scriptural argument. All rights are important but the most inalienable and the most fundamental is the right to life. In fact, no right has any meaning unless it is underpinned by the most natural and essential right and that is, of course, the right to be allowed to be born. The argument is also about love, the love that increasingly dare not speak its name, the love for the unborn.

Some basic science first. At the moment of conception, a male sperm unites with a female ovum to fertilize it, and the single-celled organism formed is called a zygote, an intricate and sophisticated repository of biological information of both parents.

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