On Sunday last the Irish Catholic bishops issued a statement on abortion which at least some of them must have known was disingenuous.
It started with the claim that the words of Elizabeth to Mary, mother of Jesus, "Blessed is the fruit of your womb" (Luke 1.42) amounted to a "revelation" by God and a "recognition" that human life is sacred, from the moment of conception to that of natural death. Even if it is accepted that this remark was ever made (and on balance this is very unlikely) how can it be assumed that it meant anything other than what Elizabeth almost certainly would have intended - that the infant in Mary's womb was someone special. To blow this up to a claim that it was a "recognition" that human life is sacred from conception to the grave is so far-fetched as to be ludicrous.
The bishops followed up this claim with the assertion: "The Christian principle of respect for human life at every stage of its existence is firm, clear and continuous." It is most certainly neither firm, nor clear nor continuous. The same Christian Church had hundreds of thousands massacred over the millennia, the same Christian Church justified wars of abomination, including the Crusades, the wars of religion and the wars inflicted on the natives of countries in the "new" world.
The bishops recalled the claims of their predecessors in 1975 in asserting the principle of the fifth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill", which they claimed forbids "unconditionally" the taking of all human life. But is this sustainable? Is the taking of innocent human life always wrong? For instance, would it have been wrong for the US air force to shoot down one or both of the planes being targeted at the Twin Towers on 9/11 to prevent the loss of far more human lives, even though doing so would have involved the deliberate taking of innocent human lives? But, of course, in answer to such claims the weasel doctrine of "double effect" gets cranked up. It's okay to kill innocent human beings even deliberately and calculatedly, if this is not the primary intention and the primary intention is okay.
There is then the reiteration of the principle that all human life is sacred. But do we hear that when the US bombs countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan to bits? Where is the concern for the sacredness of human life there? Is there any insistent voice proclaiming that letting millions die unnecessarily of hunger and disease is a denial of the sacredness of human life?
The bishops end with an approving quotation from a declaration by American Catholic bishops that said: "true commitment to women's rights puts us in solidarity with women and their unborn children. It does not pit one against the other but calls us to advocate on behalf of both."
This is an insidious piece of nonsense. True commitment to women's rights is unsustainable with an insistence that abortion is always wrong. For what this means is that the State is entitled to criminalise a woman who refuses to allow her body to be used for the propagation of another human being (accepting here that a foetus is a human being from the time of conception) whose presence in her womb has come about through no consent or act by her but as a result of a horrendous rape and for whom the continued presence of this other human being represents a re-enactment of that rape. It means that the State is entitled to decide for a woman how her body is to be used, irrespective of the consequences to the woman.
Some of us may have moral qualms (even abhorrence) at the spectre of women resorting to abortion for purposes we deem trivial and may regard as a denial of the respect due to the unborn human being. But who are we or, more particularly, the State to intervene and decide for the woman how and when her body may be used for purposes she does not want?
And there is a final piece of badness in the bishops' statement. It is: "with [ recent economic success] has come an increasing experience of secularisation and coinciding with this has come a decrease in the awareness of the importance of moral values." Maybe the bishops are right about a decrease of moral values coinciding with economic success. But the inference that secularisation is moral-free, that those who believe in a secular society are morally indifferent or that morality exists only in the context of religious belief, is an insult to all those who do not believe in any religion but who struggle, however inadequately, to live moral lives, lives that respect the equal rights, entitlements and convictions of others.
There is indeed an argument that there can be no morality with conventional religion that places morality not primarily (if at all) in the context of equal respect for one's fellow human beings but as a means of pleasing God and winning eternal salvation.
Pleasing God is a dangerous pastime for it leaves all too open conceptions of what pleases God (from this idea the justification for the most appalling crimes against humanity was drawn) and, anyway, the moral basis for right action is undermined by an expectation of reward.