Category: Moral Theology

A reader writes:

Jimmy,

I am wondering what your thoughts on the "morning after pill" are?

It’s evil.

First, it’s contraception, and contraception is evil.

Second, it frequently works (or is thought to work) by preventing the unborn baby from being able to implant in the mother’s womb, which makes it abortifacient.

Either way, it’s evil.

Which evil a person using it is guilty of depends on her knowledge of its effects and which effect is willed.

Objectively, though, it’s evil in that it’s contraception that also has a strong likelihood of causing abortion.

GET THE (JOYOUS!) STORY!

DUH.

A reader writes:

I recently found your site and have thoroghly enjoyed
reading it.  Your websites awsome!   I wanted to comment on
your article Cold and Flu People at Mass.  Thank you for pointing out
that sick people should be content with recieving Him under the
appearance of bread -rather then share their germs on the chalice.
Also, holding hands during the Our Father or shaking hands during the
kiss of peace should not be done if someone has a catching sickness.  Children, and as you pointed out adults, need to cover their
mouths when the cough and not coughing on someone else is always a good
thing.

 

One comment in your article concerned me however.  I
was surprised to read that having a contagious disease is a valid
excuse to miss Mass.  While in the case of small pox or something of
that sort I would agree, are you sure that a cold validly excuses a
person from their sunday obligation?  Worshiping at Mass is the  most
important thing any of us will ever do.  We do have an obligation not
to spread disease, but this can be done by following a few common sense
steps (which you mention in your article).  Also, if one is severely
ill and absolutly cannot make it to Mass they should have someone bring
them communion.

 

I only mention this because people can be inclined to
take the ‘easy way out’.  A mere case of the sniffles (or the
perception that they are going to get sick) will offer enough excuse to
stay in bed on a Sunday morning under the pretext that it is better to
miss Mass then spread their germs. 

 

Please don’t be angry with this note.  I respect that
you sacrifice your time to promote the Catholic Church in your website
and will keep your ministry in my prayers.  Like I said above, I’ve
thoroughly enjoyed what I have read on your site.

Several thoughts:

1. Don’t worry. I’m not a bit angry. I operate on the principle that not everybody has to agree with me.
2. Also, thank you for the kind words about my blog! I hope you’ll keep coming back and be a regular part of the group!
3. If anybody at Mass actually had small pox then he not only should be not be at Mass, he should be reported to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Small pox is considered to be a disease that is extinct in the wild, with only a few cold storage stocks of it kept on hand by governments. An actual case of small pox in the population would be a likely sign of a terrorist attack. That being said, I know you were just using small pox as a more serious disease and that I’m being overly literal. 🙂
4. I’m quite sure that people who have contagious diseases should stay home and not go to Mass.
5. First, it is not practically possible for a great mass of people to be together and have cold and flu sufferes without these diseases jumping from person to person. The stopgap measures I mentioned for preventing its spread are not infallible and will not be used by many people. People will forget and make slips. They will cough in their hands and then–even omitting shaking hands at the sign of peace–they will forget and put their hand on the seat or on the back of the pew in front of them and the cold virus will remain there and able to infect others for up to two weeks.
6. Colds and flu make people miserable and force them to take time off from work or to go to work and infect other people. If a person is elderly or in frail health (like many at Mass), a cold or flu can kill them. That’s why they try to get all the elderly to have flu shots every year. Influenza kills 20,000 people in the U.S. alone every year on average.
7. It is, in my opinion, an act objectively contrary to the virtue of charity to show up at Mass (or work) with a contagious case of cold or flu or any other similar illness (e.g., strep throat) unless there is a specific, counterbalancing factor of proportionate weight (like, "I’m supposed to get married at this Mass" or "I’ll get fired if I don’t clock in today").
8. Because it is objectively contrary to the virtue of charity if done without a proportionate reason, in my opinion showing up at Mass with a contagious disease of this nature is sinful, with the gravity of the sin being proportionate to the likelihood of communicating it to others and the likely health effects in the people who would catch it. (Thus it would be worse to show up with a contagious disease at a Mass held in an old folks home than in a college young adult center.)
9. We most certainly are not bound to show up at Mass with contagious diseases. While I people should not lightly excuse themselves from Mass, having a contagious disease is an instance in which they should. This applies even to the first phases of a the disease, when they may be most contagious.

Having said all that, I want to assure you that the attitude motivating your question is quite commendable, especially in a day when so many people fail to show up at Mass.

Americans have a tendency to take rules of this much more strictly than Rome intends, and they don’t realize how many exceptions Rome sees in the law. Thus they end up dragging themselves to Mass and infecting those around them, which is not Rome’s intention. Indeed, if you read older moralists, they name all kind of reasons as valid excuses for missing Mass that seem quite light to Americans–e.g., Alphonsus Ligouri considered it a valid excuse not to go if you would have to ride a donkey for more than fifteen minutes.

While worship is the most important thing we do in life, one can worship at home when one is sick. Indeed, if done for a motive of charity, staying home and not infecting others is itself an act of worship toward God. Thus, for God’s sake (in the literal sense), one should stay home.

Hope this helps, and God bless!

A reader writes:

I recently found your site and have thoroghly enjoyed

reading it.  Your websites awsome!   I wanted to comment on

your article Cold and Flu People at Mass.  Thank you for pointing out

that sick people should be content with recieving Him under the

appearance of bread -rather then share their germs on the chalice.

Also, holding hands during the Our Father or shaking hands during the

kiss of peace should not be done if someone has a catching sickness.  Children, and as you pointed out adults, need to cover their

mouths when the cough and not coughing on someone else is always a good

thing.

 

One comment in your article concerned me however.  I

was surprised to read that having a contagious disease is a valid

excuse to miss Mass.  While in the case of small pox or something of

that sort I would agree, are you sure that a cold validly excuses a

person from their sunday obligation?  Worshiping at Mass is the  most

important thing any of us will ever do.  We do have an obligation not

to spread disease, but this can be done by following a few common sense

steps (which you mention in your article).  Also, if one is severely

ill and absolutly cannot make it to Mass they should have someone bring

them communion.

 

I only mention this because people can be inclined to

take the ‘easy way out’.  A mere case of the sniffles (or the

perception that they are going to get sick) will offer enough excuse to

stay in bed on a Sunday morning under the pretext that it is better to

miss Mass then spread their germs. 

 

Please don’t be angry with this note.  I respect that

you sacrifice your time to promote the Catholic Church in your website

and will keep your ministry in my prayers.  Like I said above, I’ve

thoroughly enjoyed what I have read on your site.

Several thoughts:

1. Don’t worry. I’m not a bit angry. I operate on the principle that not everybody has to agree with me.
2. Also, thank you for the kind words about my blog! I hope you’ll keep coming back and be a regular part of the group!
3. If anybody at Mass actually had small pox then he not only should be not be at Mass, he should be reported to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Small pox is considered to be a disease that is extinct in the wild, with only a few cold storage stocks of it kept on hand by governments. An actual case of small pox in the population would be a likely sign of a terrorist attack. That being said, I know you were just using small pox as a more serious disease and that I’m being overly literal. 🙂
4. I’m quite sure that people who have contagious diseases should stay home and not go to Mass.
5. First, it is not practically possible for a great mass of people to be together and have cold and flu sufferes without these diseases jumping from person to person. The stopgap measures I mentioned for preventing its spread are not infallible and will not be used by many people. People will forget and make slips. They will cough in their hands and then–even omitting shaking hands at the sign of peace–they will forget and put their hand on the seat or on the back of the pew in front of them and the cold virus will remain there and able to infect others for up to two weeks.
6. Colds and flu make people miserable and force them to take time off from work or to go to work and infect other people. If a person is elderly or in frail health (like many at Mass), a cold or flu can kill them. That’s why they try to get all the elderly to have flu shots every year. Influenza kills 20,000 people in the U.S. alone every year on average.
7. It is, in my opinion, an act objectively contrary to the virtue of charity to show up at Mass (or work) with a contagious case of cold or flu or any other similar illness (e.g., strep throat) unless there is a specific, counterbalancing factor of proportionate weight (like, "I’m supposed to get married at this Mass" or "I’ll get fired if I don’t clock in today").
8. Because it is objectively contrary to the virtue of charity if done without a proportionate reason, in my opinion showing up at Mass with a contagious disease of this nature is sinful, with the gravity of the sin being proportionate to the likelihood of communicating it to others and the likely health effects in the people who would catch it. (Thus it would be worse to show up with a contagious disease at a Mass held in an old folks home than in a college young adult center.)
9. We most certainly are not bound to show up at Mass with contagious diseases. While I people should not lightly excuse themselves from Mass, having a contagious disease is an instance in which they should. This applies even to the first phases of a the disease, when they may be most contagious.

Having said all that, I want to assure you that the attitude motivating your question is quite commendable, especially in a day when so many people fail to show up at Mass.

Americans have a tendency to take rules of this much more strictly than Rome intends, and they don’t realize how many exceptions Rome sees in the law. Thus they end up dragging themselves to Mass and infecting those around them, which is not Rome’s intention. Indeed, if you read older moralists, they name all kind of reasons as valid excuses for missing Mass that seem quite light to Americans–e.g., Alphonsus Ligouri considered it a valid excuse not to go if you would have to ride a donkey for more than fifteen minutes.

While worship is the most important thing we do in life, one can worship at home when one is sick. Indeed, if done for a motive of charity, staying home and not infecting others is itself an act of worship toward God. Thus, for God’s sake (in the literal sense), one should stay home.

Hope this helps, and God bless!

You may have heard rumblings about new options in the stem cell debate that could get us around the current impasse.

SLATE RECENTLY RAN AN ARTICLE ON TWO SUCH PROPOSALS.

I’m not convinced that either proposal works.

I’ll talk about the first, and simpler, proposal today and the second later.

Here’s Slate’s description of the first:

The first, by Drs. Donald Landry and Howard Zucker of Columbia
University, proposes that we take stem cells from embryos at the same
point at which we take organs from children and adults: right after
they die. All we have to do is agree on the point at which an embryo is
dead. Landry suggests that this point is "the irreversible arrest of
cell division," which conveniently applies to huge numbers of embryos
frozen in IVF clinics. With further study, he argues, we can clarify
the signs of irreversible arrest, which will tell us when it’s kosher
to start yanking stem cells. He cites an experiment in which stem cells
from arrested frog embryos were injected into normal frog embryos.
Twenty-five percent of the cells began to divide again and were
absorbed into the new embryos.

The conservatives on the council
like the idea. They have two concerns. They want to make sure the signs
chosen to certify embryo death don’t exclude some living embryos.
They’re also wary of the Columbia team’s suggestion that stem cells
could be harvested from embryos "in extremis," i.e., near death. But
Landry and Zucker point out that these are the same issues ethicists
have worked out in the case of a dying child or adult. We just need to
iron out the details. That’s the beauty of the proposal: It’s
conventional.

The idea of harvesting stem cells from deceased embryos is something that occurred to me before. While it would get around the fact that embryonic stem cell research is otherwise murder, the mere fact that we’re not dealing with murder any more does not mean that it is problem-free. Here are several concerns:

1. The first and biggest problem is that we don’t know when an embryo is dead. In the absence of heart or brain (neither of which has developed at the time researchers want to harvest stem cells), conventional tests for life don’t apply. The "irreversible cessation of cell division" proposal is not unobjectionable.
   • First, what counts as "irreversible" may be a technical matter that is not intrinsic to the question of life. Just as we can often now re-start the hearts of people who previously had technologically irreversible cessation of heart activity (and thus now no longer use merely the absence of a heartbeat as a test for life), research may make it possible to reverse cessation of cell division in embryos.
   • Second, and related to the former, cessation of cell division (reversible or not) may be one stage of dying for embryos, but not death itself, just as cessation of heartbeat is one stage of dying for adults, but not death itself.
   • Third, the most obvious (to me) point at which we could say that an embryo is dead is when cellular metabolism has stopped. But if you wait that long, the stem cells may not be of any use.
2. Supposing that there is a point at which the embryo can be established as dead and at which the stem cells could be usefully harvested, there are still other concerns. One is what should be done with all the embryos languishing in cryonic suspension in IVF facilities. One possibility is that they ought to be implanted and allowed to develop (though is is controversial among conservative Catholic moral theologians). Unfortunately, the vast numbers of these children make this a practical impossibility.
3. Supposing, then, that these children are not to be allowed to develop, what should happen to them? Baptizing them, unfreezing them (and baptizing them will itself unfreeze them), allowing them to die  naturally, and then respectfully dealing with their remains would seem to be the preferred way of addressing the situation.
4. Rather than proceding immediately to burial or cremation, though, would it be possible for parents to fill out the equivalent of an organ donor card for these children (a stem cell donor card)? We let parents do that with children are born and then die in the natural way.
5. In principle, perhaps it could be done. But I feel a moral discomfort with the idea of letting parents artificially create large numbers of children that they can’t possibly raise and then, upon their expiry, hand them over to researchers for experimentation on their corpses.
6. The root problem, of course, is the artificial creation of the children in the first place. That was immoral and unethical and should not have happened. But accepting it as something that cannot be undone, should parents be allowed to donate their children’s stem cells to bring some good out of their cruelly and immorally short lives–perhaps doing so to stop the outright murder of other children?
7. All I can say is . . . maybe. While the Church recognizes the moral legitimacy of organ donation in principle, it is not at all clear that it would be proper to allow parents who have artificially created children for themselves to exercise this possibility on behalf of these children.

It thus strikes me that the situation is far too ambiguous, and ultimately we’ll need guidance from the CDF on this one (which won’t offer such guidance until Catholic moralists have chewed this one over for a while).

In any event, it seems to me that this proposal is very far from being a slam dunk.

Earlier I blogged about a new proposal to get around the impasse in the stem cell debate.

THIS PROPOSAL, AND ANOTHER, WAS DESCRIBED IN AN ARTICLE IN SLATE.

Now I want to talk about the second proposal. It is this: We create human shoggoths.

The idea is that you disable one of the genes that controls organic development so that what develops isn’t an embryo but something that, if left to its own devices, will become a tumorous mass with jumbled up body parts. You then turn the gene back on in time to let it generate stem cells for harvesting.

According to the author for Slate:

It sounds perfect, until you look up at the projection screen.
Hurlbut has modeled his recipe on "aberrant products of fertilization"
and teratomas, which, he explains, are "germ cell tumors that generate
all three primary embryonic germ layers as well as more advanced cells
and tissues, including partial limb and organ primordia." Limb and
organ primordia? Yep, that’s what’s on the screen: a ball of tissue,
grown inside some poor creature, full of bits and pieces of what would
have been a body. Another slide shows an X-ray image of somebody’s
back. To the left of the spine, you can see a cluster of white spots
that look like teeth. And that’s exactly what they are, all dressed up
and no place to chomp. You wanted disorganized development? You got it.

This does not sound perfect to me at all, and I don’t need to look at a screen to get creeped out by it. Several problems immediately occur to me:

• First there is the problem of when you disable the gene. If you disable it after the germ cells have come together and formed a zygote then the act would amount to an assault on a living human being that is intended to cause gross bodily deformities. To avoid assaulting a human being you would have to turn off the gene in one of the germ cells before they come together and form a human zygote (a one-celled human being).
• If you only deactivate a single gene, have you really kept something from being a person? If it has a full human genetic code (I’m not talking about something with only one or two chromosomes instead of the usual forty-six) and you’ve simply turned off a gene (many of our genes are already inactive) does that really deprive the creature of humanity?
• Assuming that you did deactivate the gene in one of the germ cells, it seems to me that one could argue that what you have done in this case is genetically engineered a child that has a grave medical condition that will result in his life being very short. True, he will not have the bodily shape of a normal child, but then having a particular body shape is not needed to be a child. People do have bodily deformities and yet remain human beings. A human can be even a single cell, as with a zygote. True also, the child will not live long, but having a long life also is not needed to count as a human. If the creature has an otherwise intact human genetic code, I am not comfortable saying that if you switch off a single gene that you have deprived the creature of humanity.
• Even assuming that shutting off the gene deprived the creature of
  humanity, if you then switch on the gene so that the creature can make
  suitable stem cells for you, have you–by restoring its genetic code to
  normal functioning–are you then creating in it the property of being human? It now has a fully functional human genetic code. You’ve just severely interfered with its development such that it has a mangled body and a short life.
• Having said that, let me offer a counter argument: Scientifically, a human being is a living human organism. If something isn’t an organism then, even if it is made of human cells, it isn’t a human being (as is the case when someone has an organ removed; the organ isn’t a human being). If, therefore, you really can do something to the germ cells that prevents the development of an organism then what you are dealing with is not a human being and could be harvested without it being murder.
• The question is thus: If you create a zygote that cannot develop normally, have you created an organism with a grave genetic defect (in which case it’s a human with a grave genetic defect) or have you created something that’s not an organism (and thus not a human)?
• The problem is figuring out whether something constitutes an organism or not. In some cases (as with a normal embryo) it clearly is. In other cases (like a single ovum) it is clearly not. But when you start to get outside the clear categories that God set up, things get very blurry very fast. Body shape and length of life are not necessary conditions for something being an organism and we must at least proceed with caution here.
• In the absence of body shape and length of life being necessary conditions for the presence of humanity, we must assume that humanity remains present as a failsafe against taking innocent human life. This failsafe mentality in favor of life is mandatory. You have to be able to prove that humanity is not present. "Human until proven otherwise" is the rule when you’re monkeying in these waters.

It therefore seems to me that we have to proceed with caution and can’t go rushing off willy-nilly to create human shoggoths.