"Why do Catholics say Abortion is Wrong?"
Scrutátor asks, 'Why is abortion wrong?'
Catholic: Scrutátor, I will give my own view. It is a strong argument that "every child has a right to life", yet to me this is not the strongest. To me, the strongest reason is that every life belongs to God. So do our bodies. "Your body is not your own: you are bought and paid for", as S. Paul writes somewhere.
.
Jesus Christ did walk on this earth; He did die, and He did rise again. This fact is attested far more strongly than some other historical facts that we accept without any problem.
.
Scrutátor writes, "I am not here to judge, only to learn."
Catholic: Scrutátor, I'm nobody special. I am just a Catholic.
It often appears as if only a small proportion of the population are willing to learn. Especially anything difficult.
.
Might I recommend https://sites.google.com/site/catholictopics/
Scrutátor writes, << Catholic if we belong to God, then are we at liberty to make any decisions of our own? >>
Catholic: God has given us the Ten Commandments and the teaching of the Catholic Church – which He instituted precisely to preserve His teachings and Sacraments until the End of the World. These give us the limits within which we may use our discretion. I would add that the whole body of the Faith is a beautifully coherent thing. There is a discernible reason for everything we are taught. I believe it is a statistical fact that practising Catholics have a significantly lower rate of psychological problems than the population as a whole.
If a Catholic disobeys a clear commandment, even for a Good Cause,
we are effectively saying to God, "I have accepted that You have made
the world out of nothing, that You came down and died to give us
'The Way, the Truth and the Life' (Gospel of John somewhere) ... but
guess what, God! We've thought of a better Way!" In the language of
theology, he is rebelling against God's Providence.
==
Scrutátor, As an example of the way the Faith and Reason make a seamless unity in the Catholic Faith, here is a short extract
On the Nature of Law: Divine, Natural, Ecclesiastical, Civil, Positive
According to St Thomas Aquinas,
A Law is
•A precept of Right Reason
•For the Common Good
•Promulgated by the legitimate Authority.
Thus an attempt at enforcing a law that is either impossible, or unreasonable, or not directed to the Common Good, or not validly promulgated, is not a law at all but an abuse of authority which we are under a moral obligation to resist, otherwise we are participating in the sin by compliance with the offence against justice.
“The Law” subsists in several categories, the later ones "inside" the earlier.
•First is Divine Law which flows from the Nature of God Himself and the Nature of Reality.
Examples are: “Do good and avoid evil”. “Love the Lord thy God with thy whole Heart, mind and soul”.
•Within this is Natural Law which flows from the nature and structure of Creation, and within this the nature and structure of Man, body and soul.
Examples are: “You are never to commit murder” (the correct translation of the 5th Commandment); the absolute prohibition of abortion, homosexual acts, artificial contraception.
•Within this again is Ecclesiastical Law, which derives from Christ's establishment of His Church.
Examples are: The Commandments of the Church (see the Catechism).
(cont'd on the web page...)
See
https://sites.google.com/site/catholictopics/moral-theology-and-canon-law/on-the-nature-of-law
Scrutátor writes: <<Catholic, you highlight what religion is very good at: creating a moral code to live by....>>
Catholic: Scrutátor, living life by the Catholic way is perhaps surprisingly simple for the 'ordinary person' – there is nothing complicated about it. See e.g.
<https://sites.google.com/site/catholictopics/morality-and-catholic-living?pli=1>
Yet the actual ramifications of the Gospel of Christ have been mulled over by some of the greatest intellects, and the greatest saints, in history. Entire libraries of thought, meditation and prayer, not to mention the lives of the saints, are in existence.
Scrutátor writes: << ... Unfortunately what religion is bad at, I feel, is recognising that something that was written in a book by people living in a particular society hundreds of years ago, may not now reflect how society is today. >>
Catholic: In Catholic thought there is a word for what you are describing: it is 'casuistry' – relating the Eternal Principles of Faith and Morals to particular circumstances, even particular individuals. I will present the case that the dilemma you have mentioned is unresolved by Protestant Christianity, but does have a coherent solution in the Catholic Church. See later posting.
Scrutátor writes: <<I would love to be able to travel in time and talk to Jesus about his views on homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia and contraception.>>
Catholic: Well, IF Jesus Christ is True God and True Man, then He already knows... and He has made full preparation for this eventuality...
Scrutátor writes: <<I would love to be able to travel in time and talk to Jesus about his views on homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia and contraception.>>
Catholic: Well, IF Jesus Christ is True God and True Man, then He already knows... and He has made full preparation for this eventuality...
Catholic teaching, Scrutátor, is that God exists eternally. God the Son, "eternally begotten of the Father", was sent by Him to a predetermined place and time in our stream of history. The actual individuals who will be created, and given the gift of eternal life, were decided upon and chosen out of the infinite number of probabilities. The others will never be called into existence. For this alone we ought to thank God every day of our lives.
.
Why did God the Son come into the World? Well, all is not well with us. We do sense it. The rest of the animal world is innocent in a way that we are not. Yet even in the natural world there is great cruelty and ugliness among the beauty. And we can perceive and conceive things that are quite beyond the powers of even the most intelligent animal. The great Catholic writer G.K.Chesterton observed that "Original Sin is the only Christian doctrine that can really be proved." There is something 'wrong' about us. He notes that, if a man has drunk ten whiskies and is about to take the eleventh, we could slap him on the back and say, 'Be a man'. But if a crocodile has just eaten ten missionaries and is about to eat the eleventh, there is no point in slapping it on the back and saying 'Be a crocodile'.
God came down to save us from ourselves.
==
Scrutátor writes: <<I would love to be able to travel in time and talk to Jesus...>>
Catholic: One, but not the only reason, that God the Son came into the world was to tell us that God wishes us to have Eternal Life.
What is a human being? The Catholic answer is that he or she is an animal body with an immortal soul. At death, the soul leaves the body for a time, and presents before Christ to be judged. On the Last Day, the soul will be re-united to the body, and then will follow the public Judgment. Why two Judgments? Because God's Justice is infinite. At the Last Judgment, His Justice will be seen to have been done. Good deeds require not only reward but public recognition and praise. Evil deeds that were un-repented require not only punishment but public disgrace. So it will be.
.
And of what will this eternal life consist?
In Catholic teaching, Heaven is not just free sweeties: it is more as if our pet cat and dog were given the power to talk and join our human world. It would be beyond their nature; supernatural. In the same way, we have actually been promised that we will be lifted beyond our natural abilities and allowed to participate in the Life of the Holy Trinity: forever. That is the promise. But just as a cat cannot learn to talk by its own efforts, so we cannot make ourselves fit for Heaven by our own efforts alone.
We need the Gift of Supernatural Grace. This begins at baptism, and is renewed through our lives by prayer, good works offered to God, and especially the Sacraments of the Catholic Church.
Sacraments?
They are the 'interface' between the two worlds: The material and the spiritual. They are the normal and appropriate means by which our human nature receives spiritual nourishment. The Protestants made a huge mistake when they rejected the entire Sacramental system.
==
Scrutátor writes: <<... something that was written in a book by people living in a particular society hundreds of years ago, may not now reflect how society is today. >>
Catholic: The Catholic Church claims that God could have remained on the earth until the End of Time, to answer such questions. Or He could have appointed an Archangel to act as a kind of World President. But instead, He chose to remain in person, in a mysterious but completely real manner, in HIs Mystical Body. In a very real sense, a baptised Christian actually is a member of the Body of Christ: not as I am a member of a football club (or whatever) but as my hand is a member of my body. Christ is the Head, we are the members. [Once again, Protestants have reduced this doctrine to triviality.]
And He has left, not only His Mystical Body, but a Visible Head: His Vicar: one man who is given the supernatural gift of being guided by God the Holy Spirit so that, whenever he makes an official, binding pronouncement on a matter of Faith or Morals, he will be protected from error. He is not exempt from personal weakness and sin, and has no guarantee that he will save his own soul. When speaking on any matter outside a binding declaration of Faith and Morals, he speaks with only human authority, and is as liable to error as anybody else.
To the modern mind, this sounds preposterous, but reflect for a moment. Put it like this. If God the Father really did send His Only Son into the world, to be subject to poverty and humiliation and finally a fantastically cruel death, so that He could teach us the way to eternal life with Him ... can we imagine for a moment that He would be so incompetent as to allow His message to be forgotten or perverted as soon as He went back into Heaven?
.
Naturally, all this falls to the ground if the Catholic claim is simply untrue. The claim is made on many levels. On the historical level, I submit that the claim is strong. Might I recommend, e.g. the webpage
https://sites.google.com/site/catholictopics/history
==
Catholic: We touched upon the discipline of 'Casuistry' – relating the Eternal Principles of Faith and Morals to particular circumstances, even particular individuals. I will present the case that the dilemma you have mentioned is unresolved by Protestant Christianity, but does have a coherent solution in the Catholic Church.
Here is my take on this. There were real abuses in the Catholic Church by the 16th century. Alas, the wonderful love and innocence of the 12th & 13th centuries had long gone, and the Popes were even more worldly than usual. Abuses included nepotism (giving cushy jobs to relatives), plural benefices (giving one man several positions in the church, such as the bishoprics of several dioceses to one man just so that he could have the revenue), a method of money raising that was not technically simony (the grave sin of selling holy things) but looked suspiciously like it to the common folk – the practice of having a monastery run by a layman at a huge profit, while the abbot was given only a modest stipend. The latter was a sad irony. Our Lord had said, "Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all these things will be GIVEN unto you". The monks had taken this literally, and had moved into empty wastelands – and by hard work and thrift – and prayer – had turned them into extremely prosperous parts of the world. Then once the prosperity was established..... guess what happened. finally, over the centuries many local customs had grown up, not all of which were conformable with the true Christian spirit. But these things had been allowed to develop unchecked, partly through the scandals of the Fourteenth century, when there was a rival to the Papal throne at Avignon...
.
By the 16th century, in the heated atmosphere of the Protestant Rebellion (sorry, Protestants, but it is begging the question to call it reform... c.f. the latest attempt to emasculate the National Curriculum here in Ireland was invariably described by the obedient Press as 'Reform') ... in this atmosphere, there was a superficial plausibility in the slogan "Sola Scriptura! The Bible Only! Show it me In There! If it's not in the Word of God, I won't believe it!" Now there are several important reasons why this can never work, but they are off the present topic. The historical fact is that Our Lord did not, in fact, set up His Church up based on 'Scripture Alone'
See e.g.
Catholic Teaching in Scripture and Tradition
& Let me recommend
http://www.scripturecatholic.com/index.html
... one of the most comprehensive Catholic apologetics websites on the internet.
To quote from the Home Page:
ScriptureCatholic.com provides over 2,000 Scripture citations from the Old and New Testament that explain and defend the teachings of the Catholic Church. This site also provides hundreds of excerpts from the writings of the early Church Fathers (1st through 8th centuries). These writings explain the Fathers' interpretation of Scripture and demonstrate that the early Church was unequivocally Catholic. Through the study of Scripture and the Church Fathers, we see that, not only is the Catholic faith biblical, Catholicism is Bible Christianity par excellence.
Because the Old and New Testament Scriptures are the divinely-revealed, written Word of God, Catholics venerate the Scriptures as they venerate the Lord's body. But Catholics do not believe that God has given us His divine Revelation in Christ exclusively through Scripture. Catholics also believe that God's Revelation comes to us through the Apostolic Tradition and teaching authority of the Church.
(cont'd on the web page)
=
Sola Scriptura - a Study of Alleged Proof Texts
The Failure of the Proof Text
Sola Scriptura – the Bible Alone – is the Rule of Faith for many Protestants. Any point of belief or practice which cannot find a clear reference in Holy Scripture is rejected. Very many key points of Catholic belief and practice do not, in fact, find an unambiguous exposition in the Bible. The Catholic Church insists that none of these points actually contradicts anything in Scripture, and that the Tradition of the Church, Guided by the Holy Spirit, had preserved many things in the Message and the Action of Christ in establishing His Church, which are not recorded explicitly in the Bible; in fact, that the Bible itself is part of Tradition.
.
I respectfully suggest that the criterion of Sola Scriptura probably had some initial plausibility in the heady atmosphere of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, when various abuses, which had been allowed to develop within the Catholic Church for many generations, were being exposed.
.
In fact, there was a comprehensive reform of the Church in the later Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries – the Catholic Counter-Reformation – but by then, contrary attitudes had become well entrenched.
.
Once the principle of Sola Scriptura had become entrenched, however, two problems emerged. Both hinged around the question of Authority. The Catholic Church claimed that Her authority derived from an unbroken succession from the Apostles – the Apostolic Succession. Many Protestants claimed the written word of Scripture to be their final authority. By now, however, this principle was firmly wedded to a rejection of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and with it, the Catholic understanding of the Sacraments, which were intimately associated with the priesthood. This, once the heat of battle had abated, left two intractable problems. One was the problem of the actual contents of the Bible. There is no evidence that the so-called "Canon of Scripture" was decided before the late Fourth Century at the earliest. [Some Protestant Sects teach that there was always 'a Remnant' who kept the pure Biblical Religion – meaning that practised by modern day Biblical Protestants – and even that they were persecuted by the Catholic Church in the earliest centuries. There is not a scrap of evidence to back this suggestion. The second problem can be put like this: if it is really true that the whole Christian Faith is to be found in the Bible, then obviously this article of Faith must itself be found in the Bible.
==
(cont'd on the page)
==
& also
(...) Suppose that the claims of the Sola Scriptura adherents are true: that there was no hierarchical priesthood, no Sacraments as the Catholic church understands them; no Catholic church: and that the entire Christian Faith was contained in the written word of Scripture. Let us explore the implications and consequences of this premiss.
=
[1] In the first place, every copy of the Bible would have to contain, as part of the actual text, a list of the Canonical books.
[2] The text of the Bible would have had to contain a declaration that this compilation contained 'The Faith, the whole Faith, and Nothing but the Faith': again as part of the guaranteed text.
[3] The original copies of each book would have been guarded as the most precious relic in the world. The original copy of each would be signed by the Author, preferably Christ Himself (who could certainly read and therefore write).
(Cont'd on the page...)
Now! the upshot of all this is that the Bible-only Protestants have locked themselves into a system where they always have to 'look up the answer at the back of the book' whereas the Catholic Church has a wonderful system of philosophy and theology whereby new situations that arise can be dealt with by application of Principles already established.
So for example, I have been told on a Catholic-Protestant Discussion forum that abortion & contraception are permissible because there is nothing in the Bible against them...
...
And the Lutheran and Anglican denominations – not to mention the Greek Orthodox ... are in almost a worse state because they do accept some aspects of Tradition, but do not have a coherent explanation for the principles behind their choice. That is why eminent Anglicans like Cdl Newman, after their study, converted to Rome. Newman wrote, 'To study history is to cease to be Protestant'.
...
On the other hand, I will repeat G.K.Chestertons's comment... 'The Catholic Church is the only religion in the world that has an actual working mechanism for resolving disputes'.
=
I respectfully submit that this is the answer to Scrutátor's comment that he has problems with documents written thousands of years ago, and that he would like to know that Our Lord would think of the modern world. IF the Catholic Faith is true, then 'Vox Ecclésiae Vox Dei' - 'The Voice of the Church is the Voice of God'.
.
So abortion is wrong because every human life belongs to God; He has promised never to give us burdens without giving us the Grace to bear them; at conception an immortal soul is infused into the human cell, and thence begins an eternal life that God has chosen since before the Beginning of the World.
.
When Job rebuked, despaired, and questioned God, He did not at all come down and explain everything for Job's benefit. He delivered this stinging rebuke:
"Where wast THOU when I laid the foundations of the Word: what time all the Morning Stars sang together, and the Angels of God shouted for joy?"