Sir, – Patrick Hannon claims that I did not engage with his main point (Letters, November 17th), namely that "lawmakers have to take into account all the circumstances of time and place when exercising their judgment on how best the common good is served by the law now".
I did not engage directly with it, since it seemed to me that the classical teaching on law-making he outlined so succinctly simply does not apply to the "distinction" he made in his Rite & Reason article between private beliefs or convictions and public acts which contradicted the same (with reference to Mr Joe Biden) ("Why would voting Biden not fall in line with Catholic teaching?", October 27th).
In other words, circumstances of place and time cannot justify any legislation that, as St Thomas teaches, contradicts natural justice, namely the moral law written into our being, such as that which forbids the direct killing of the innocent.
Intrinsically evil acts are the outer parameters within which lawmakers make judgments about suitable laws for the common good, taking into account circumstances of time and place.
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To illustrate his main point, Prof Hannon claims, he drew attention to a passage in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical. But in that passage, John Paul II did not refer to “voting for measures that would permit abortion in some cases”, as Prof Hannon writes, but rather voting for measures that would limit abortion in some cases. This is not hair-splitting, since to interpret the passage otherwise would be in contradiction with the main teaching of Pope John Paul II, namely that “those who are directly involved in law-making bodies have a ‘grave and clear obligation to oppose’ any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith doctrinal note, November 27th, 2002).
It is, or course, theoretically possible that Mr Biden might act to limit abortion along the lines described by the encyclical, but his record doesn’t offer much hope. Not only has Mr Biden voted regularly to permit abortion, he advocates abortion not just in some cases but on demand. During the recently concluded presidential campaign, he promised that he would “protect a woman’s right to choose and fight to keep access to abortion legal” by passing “a federal law that protects a woman’s right (sic) to have an abortion”.
That is a far cry from a lawmaker taking into account “all the circumstances of time and place” in making “a judgment as how best to serve the common good”. It is rather, in the language of traditional moral theology, formal co-operation in evil, which is always forbidden. – Yours, etc,
D VINCENT
TWOMEY, SVD
(Professor Emeritus
of Moral Theology,
St Patrick’s College,
Maynooth),
Donamon, Co Roscommon.