Rite and Reason: The Catholic Church's pre-1869 position on the beginnings of human life is arguably more compatible with science than its current stance, writes Patsy McGarry
It was January 16th, 1999, the last year of the millennium, and my uncle Seán wasn't feeling well.
He rang to say he had a locum doctor call and she had told him he had cold on his kidneys, but he wasn't sure. Although 81, he was and had been in good health, apart from a hip-replacement operation some years before. I went across the city (Dublin) to see him.
He was writhing in agony. I insisted an ambulance be called to take him to hospital but he wouldn't hear of it unless he was guaranteed a bed. During the hip-replacement saga he had spent too many hours on too many hospital trolleys. He made me ring Beaumont to extract a promise of a bed. It couldn't, but I told him otherwise. I had to.
I rang an ambulance and we were waiting in Beaumont A&E, but not for long. Staff recognised how ill he was. They told me he was bleeding internally and had to go to theatre immediately. He had a 3 per cent chance of survival, they said.
Seán had a great fear of death so I could not tell him the truth. I said they were taking him to investigate his abdomen. He was happy with that - our last words and my second half-truth within the space of an hour. He was in many ways my spiritual father and our relationship was as frank as it was affectionate.
The surgical team worked on Seán for seven hours and he survived. I went home and was just about in bed when they called me to return. By the time I got to Beaumont he was in intensive care again. He had had a massive heart attack during a second operation and died. He was kept alive artificially until I arrived - a wonderful gesture by those marvellous people.
They switched off the life support as I sat by his bed, a kind priest whispered words of hope and consolation which simply could not reach me in the far depths below. Seán had gone and there was nothing else for it. He was brain dead and that was an incontrovertible fact.
It would appear to be accepted almost as an absolute today that when the brain dies, so too does the person. There is therefore little dispute over when human life ends. Where differences arise is over when human life begins.
In this column last week, Fr Kevin Doran took issue with me for, as he said, finding it "odd that the Catholic Church's teaching on the origins of life should take account of developments in the natural sciences". I never said such a thing.
Indeed my view would be that, in changing its position on the matter, science was not a major consideration for the church.
Fr Doran was referring to an article I wrote last month which pointed out that the Catholic Church's current teaching on human life - that it begins at conception - was just 137 years old and was contrary to what it had taught for most of the past 2000 years. That, and as espoused by some of its greatest thinkers, held that the developing foetus became human at "quickening" - at about the 16th week of pregnancy, when the mother began to feel the foetus moving. You might say this could be taken as the first signs of brain activity in the foetus.
It would appear that what dictated the church's current stance - as enunciated in 1869 by Pope Pius IX who decreed the penalty of excommunication for abortion at any stage of pregnancy - had more to do with church teaching on Mary and original sin at the time, than science.
In 1701 Pope Clement XI declared the Immaculate Conception (that Mary was born without original sin) a feast of universal obligation.
He settled the feast date at December 8th, exactly nine months before the feast of Mary's birth on September 8th. The thinking theologically was that Mary had to be sin-free from conception, as the future mother of the Son of God who could not be tainted by sin in any way.
Meanwhile, the ovum was not discovered until 1827 and it was the 1820s-30s before fertilisation was understood.
It could be argued that current scientific thinking on the beginnings of human life would be far more at ease with the original stance of the church, as enunciated for instance by St Thomas Aquinas.
He held that "the vegetative soul, which comes first, when the embryo lives the life of a plant, is corrupted and is succeeded by a more perfect soul, which is both nutritive and sensitive, and then the embryo lives an animal life and, when this is corrupted, it is succeeded by the rational soul introduced from without [ie by God]."
You might equate the latter stage with brain activity.
Surely if the death of the brain is the accepted terminus of human life, it should simply be logical to agree that detection of brain activity in the foetus could be accepted as the beginning of human life.
• Patsy McGarry is Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times