Why not pray with John Paul II? HONDA
NOVEMBER General: That the Christians of the West may constantly increase their knowledge and appreciation of the spirituality and liturgical traditions of the Oriental Churches.
Brian Gardner’s
HONDA NORTH 432 Scarborough Beach Road Osborne Park 6017 Phone: 944 99 000 new@hondanorth.com.au www.hondanorth.com.au
Missionary: That the Church in America, celebrating the Second American Missionary Congress in Guatemala, may be inspired to more generous evangelising activity even beyond her own frontiers.
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WA’s only Catholic weekly newspaper Perth: 13 November 2003 Price: $1
When life
begins See inside PAGES 8 and 9 Archbishop reaffirms teaching on the beginning of life
A
rchbishop Barry Hickey has publicly reaffirmed the Church’s teaching that life begins at the moment of fertilisation.
Archbishop Hickey made his public statement last week after Anglican Archbishop Peter Carnley addressed the annual meeting of the Fertility Society of Australia and once again advanced his theory that conception can only be said to have occurred after the embryo has been alive and developing for 14 days. In a statement published the following day in The West Australian, Archbishop Hickey disputed Dr Carnley’s position. “We have debated his contention in the media before and nothing has happened in the last few years to change the standard scientific and moral belief that life begins at the moment of conception,” Archbishop Hickey said. “Long before the 14 days are up, scientists can tell whether the individual embryo is to grow into a boy or a girl and they can tell us a great deal about other characteristics, including the likely state of their health at birth. “Some people want to be allowed to screen embryos much earlier than 14 days in order to be able to decide which ones will be given the chance to proceed to full development and which will not. “In view of all this, it makes no sense to say that these recognisable individuals have not yet been conceived. “In the natural course of life, the living embryo may or may not implant in the womb and then proceed to full development and birth, but it is absolutely certain that if it has not already passed through the earliest stages
of human life it could never implant in the womb or do anything else.
The implications of Archbishop Carnley’s position were that IVF, abortion before 14 days, destruction of embryos and the morning-after pill would all be morally justified. “The possibility of twinning is not a problem. Twinning is a form of natural reproduction where a second life appears with the spontaneous division of the live embryo. “It would be entering the realms of the meaningless to say that because an embryo may divide and create a new human being it is somehow not human until the division takes place.” Archbishop Hickey said it was crucial to establish scientific certainty about the beginning of life. The implications of Archbishop Carnley’s position were that IVF, abortion before 14 days, destruction of embryos and the morning-after pill would all be morally justified. Catholic teaching is that the full dignity of the human person must be accorded to each person from the moment of conception to natural death. “Once we start to differentiate between people on whatever grounds – health, intelligence, usefulness, race, colour or creed – we deny the inherent dignity of the person,” he said. “This removes the principle of the equality of persons which is the foundation of a just human society. “Our laws already do this by permitting abortion and destructive research on embryos. “We should not compound the problem by arguing that these mistakes of law are somehow morally justifiable.”
The moment of fusion between sperm and egg.
Sex and the Holy City: BBC/ABC bias exposed COMMENT by Peter Rosengren
Bad journalism, bad science, and prejudice that do the ABC proud
I
n the end we could only laugh after watching ‘Sex and the Holy City’, courtesy of ABC TV’s Foreign Correspondent on Tuesday night. BBC journalist Steve Bradshaw’s charge: that after 25 years at the helm of the Church the Pope has caused mass death and misery throughout the Third World by relentlessly imposing his own personal belief in the wrongs of contraception on hapless under-educated, impoverished people throughout the world. Almost as bad, that John Paul II’s own naïve personal ideals of womanhood are forcing unwilling women everywhere into sacrificing their consciences to the Church’s cold and uncaring legalisms. The oversight in the very first sentences of the documentary set a theme of general error and thoughtlessness compounded by self-right-
eousness wedded to moral blindness. “Imagine a land,” Bradshaw’s voice intoned, “where ideal love is a reality, and ideal sex a reality, simultaneous climax a reality, and that in this land all couples are married: no barriers to perfect self giving, no barriers to childbirth, no condoms, IUDs or Pills. Abortion is illegal too.” However, he continues: “This land does not exist, but these ideals do, in the work and thought of Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II.” “This film,” he says as he ended his introduction on a more ominous note, “is about what happens when those ideals clash with reality.” The key charge in Bradshaw’s larger lunacy was that the Church is helping to spread AIDS throughout the world by teaching the myth that condoms don’t work because the pores in the rubber are hundreds of times larger than the virus itself. Bradshaw assumed science was on his side. Archbishop Rafael A’Nzeki of Nairobi was told by Mr Bradshaw: "You are peddling superstition and ignorance." The proof? The World Health Organisation says so – according to Mr Bradshaw, that is, although no actual evidence was produced to prove this. Neat. But go to the WHO’s Contraception WebPages (www.who.int/reproductive-health/index.htm). While there’s plenty of material regarding manuals Continued page 2