The Weekend Post
26th March 2010
I've already looked at the central message of the Letter, the Pope's call for Irish Catholics to start out on a path of renewal and our need for a new vision of what it means to be a Catholic to enable us to find this new path. In this week's Weekend Post I want to look at the Dublin Archdiocese's Child Protection Service.
Pope Benedict thanks 'the many men and women throughout Ireland already working for the safety of children in church envrionments'
In his Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, Pope Benedict says, 'It is imperative that the child safety norms of the Church in Ireland be continually revised and updated and that they are applied fully and impartially' and he tells bishops and heads of religious congregations to cooperate with the civil authorities in doing this.
In the final paragraph, returning to this question of child protection, Benedict thanks 'the many men and women throughout Ireland already working for the safety of children in church environments' and adds 'while no effort should be spared in improving and updating existing procedures, I am encouraged by the fact that the current safeguarding practices adopted by local Churches are being seen, in some parts of the world, as a model for other institutions to follow.'
His use of the word 'safeguarding' seemed to echo the title of Safeguarding Children: Standards and Guidance Document for the Catholic Church in Ireland, the basic document that sets out the standards that must be followed from now on by all Catholic Church organisations to ensure that children are properly protected.
If we were following that document, I think, it would show that we were starting to 'get it' as the exasperated phrase we keep hearing puts it.
I live in Dublin, my bishop is Archbishop Diarmuid Martin so I decided to have a look at the website of the Dublin Archdiocese to see if it looks as if he ‘gets it’, as if the Dublin Archdiocese ‘gets it’.
Is there a professional approach to child protection?
Have they published standards and guidelines for parishes to follow?
Are they based on best practice?
Are they training people how to implement them?
Have they a Designated Person to whom complaints of abuse are to be made?
Is there an independent body tasked with monitoring what they are doing?
And is the process transparent? Can we see the documents they are working from?
The Dublin Archdiocese has a Child Protection Service
I started by googling ‘Irish Bishops’. Up came Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the official website of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference. The website is http://www.catholicbishops.ie/ It has a map of the 26 dioceses - http://www.catholicbishops.ie/archdioceses-and-dioceses/view-map Click on any diocese to access its website.
The website of the Dublin Archdiocese is http://www.dublindiocese.ie/ And on the home page there is a clearly marked link to the Dublin Diocesan Child Protection Service http://www.cps.dublindiocese.ie/
The role of the Child Protection Service is to help the Diocese implement its child protection policies and procedures, both in terms of prevention and in response to allegations, provides pastoral outreach and support for victims of child abuse and can provide advice, guidance and assistance for anyone working with children and young people.
Dublin Diocese's Child Protection Service is based on Children FirstBut what’s it based on, this Child Protection service? It’s based on two documents, the statutory good practice document for the Republic, Children First: National Guidelines for the Protection and Welfare of Children issued by the Department of Health and Children http://www.omc.gov.ie/documents/childcare/ChildrenFirst.pdf
(The statutory document setting out good practice for Northern Ireland is Cooperating to Safeguard Children http://www.dhsspsni.gov.uk/show_publications?txtid=14022 )
but also on the good practice document issued by a new independent body set up by the Church for this purpose, the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church.
The Church set up an independent body to formulate and monitor best practice - the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church
In December 2005 the Irish Bishops’ Conference together with the Conference of Religious of Ireland and the Irish Missionary Union, launched Our Children, Our Church: Child Protection Policies and Procedures in the Catholic Church in Ireland, and one of its stated objectives was to produce ‘a unified approach to child protection across the Catholic Church in Ireland.’ To move towards this goal they established the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church to assist those implementing safeguarding policy and procedures throughout the Church in Ireland to achieve a consistent and up-to-date standard of best practice.
The National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church issued a best practice document, Safeguarding Children: Standards and Guidance Document for the Catholic Church in Ireland
The National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church found in 2008 that in the preceding three years most diocese and religious orders produced and implemented their own policies and procedures largely in isolation from each other, resulting in ‘a multiplicity of guidance which contains different interpretations of what represents best practice for the Church.’ To address this variation the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church issued the 96-page Safeguarding Children: Standards and Guidance Document for the Catholic Church in Ireland (September 2008) (http://www.safeguarding.ie/downloads-1)
Dublin Diocese's Child Protection Service is also based on the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church's best practice document, Safeguarding Children: Standards and Guidance Document for the Catholic Church in Ireland
The very fact that all the foundational documents are posted for downloading is part of the commitment to openness. The different tasks are identified and the people responsible for each task are named and their contact details are given (http://www.cps.dublindiocese.ie/contactus.shtml)
The postal address is Child Protection Service, Holy Cross Diocesan Centre, Clonliffe College, Dublin 3. Ireland.
In line with good practice, the Dublin Child Protection Service has a clearly identified person that anyone who has a complaint about child protection may contact in the Dublin Archdiocese. This person is known as the Designated Person and Child Protection Officer and their contact details are given on the website.
There is a Victim Support Coordinator who provides support for someone making a complaint and for their family, and helps them present their concerns within the diocesan administration.
The Child Protection Service states clearly ‘It is Diocesan policy to report all allegations of child sexual abuse to the civil authorities.’
It also states ‘The Archbishop ensures that no priest is permitted to minister in the Diocese against whom an allegation has been made, who is considered by the Diocesan Child Protection Service, the Diocesan Advisory Panel, the Health Services Executive or the Gardaí to be a risk to children.
If an allegation is made against a priest, there is someone responsible for explaining this process to them as well.
‘Priests who are out of ministry as a result of child protection concerns are required to co-operate with a monitoring system operated by the Child Protection Service.’ And ‘The Gardai and the Health Services Executive are kept informed of the support systems put in place for priests who are out of ministry and are notified of any changes in their circumstances.’
There is someone responsible for the Training and Development of people and Child Protection Services, and their contact details are also given.
Numbers of people who have received Child Protection training
‘Every parish in the Archdiocese of Dublin has a trained child protection representative in place. 2,100 parish volunteers and Diocesan Organisation personnel and volunteers have participated in the Keeping Safe programme as licensed by the Volunteer Development Agency and used by the Health Services Executive.
They have a Garda Vetting Policy and 7,065 personnel have taken part in the Garda Vetting Process, including clergy, parish workers and volunteers, Diocesan agency workers and volunteers and ancillary staff in Catholic schools.
All Catholic schools in the Dublin Archdiocese, like every other school in the country, are required to implement Children First: National Guidelines for the Protection and Welfare of Children. The Teaching Council vets teachers.
The Dublin Diocesan Education Secretariat has also carried out training for Boards of Management in Dublin Catholic schools to ensure best practice in child protection, which is monitored on an ongoing basis.
The website provides links to non-Church agencies offering support services to abuse victims
The website also provides links to State agencies to whom one may report allegations or complaints of abuse, including links to lists of all Garda Stations and all Health Boards, and links to a range of non-Catholic-Church agencies providing support services both for adults children who may wish to discuss or seek help in relation to abuse, violence rape or related issues. This is sensible as people who have had a bad experience with the Church may only be able to open up to and trust non-Church agencies.
And there are links to the British and American Catholic child protection services.
‘The independence of the National Board for the Safeguarding of Children has been established, and it is from that point of independence I can now confirm that the capacity to protect children within the Catholic Church has radically improved over the past two years.’ Ian Elliott, Chief Executive Officer of the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church
In an article earlier this month in the Irish Catholic, Ian Elliott, Chief Executive Officer of the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church, says that two years ago ‘as became publicly evident, some bishops were less than committed to the work of the Board’, but that since then, ‘a shift in attitude and behaviour has happened.’
‘That change’, he notes, ‘should be acknowledged. The Catholic Church, the largest membership organisation on the island with more than four million members, had, bluntly, lost sight of the need to put the safety of children first. It was slow, disorganised and inconsistent in its addressing of the child abuse issue.’
‘It cannot change its past.’ he goes on, ‘However it can alter its present and its future by placing the focus on children’s safety, helped by the wisdom of those who have experienced harm within the Church.’
‘The independence of the National Board for the Safeguarding of Children has been established,’ Ian Elliott continues, ‘and it is from that point of independence I can now confirm that the capacity to protect children within the Catholic Church has radically improved over the past two years.’
He concludes on a note of hope and encouragement: ‘If all aspects of hierarchical commitment continue, the island of Ireland could within the foreseeable future, become a case study in excellence where the safeguarding of children is concerned.’
All that sounds and looks to me like what we want in place to protect our children. It looks like Dublin Archdiocese not only ‘gets it’ but is getting it right on Child Protection.
Appendix
If you want to see how other dioceses present their child protection provisions on their websites, here is an alphabetical list of them:
Achonry: http://www.achonrydiocese.org/
Ardagh and Clonmacnoise: http://www.ardaghdiocese.org/
Armagh: http://www.archdioceseofarmagh.org/
Cashel and Emly: http://www.cashel-emly.ie/
Clogher: http://www.clogherdiocese.ie/
Clonfert: http://www.clonfertdiocese.ie/
Cloyne: http://www.cloynediocese.ie/
Cork and Ross: http://www.corkandross.org/
Derry: http://www.derrydiocese.org/
Down and Connor: http://www.downandconnor.org/
Dromore: http://www.dromorediocese.org/
Dublin: http://www.dublindiocese.ie/
Elphin: http://www.elphindiocese.ie/
Ferns: http://www.ferns.ie/
Galway, Kilmacduagh and Kilfenora: http://www.galwaydiocese.ie/
Kerry: http://www.dioceseofkerry.ie/
Kildare and Leighlin: http://www.kandle.ie/
Killala: http://www.killaladiocese.org/
Killaloe: http://www.killaloediocese.ie/
Kilmore: http://www.kilmorediocese.ie/
Limerick: http://www.limerickdiocese.org/
Meath: http://www.dioceseofmeath.ie/
Ossory: http://www.ossory.ie/
Raphoe: http://www.raphoediocese.ie/
Tuam: http://tuamarchdiocese.org/
Waterford and Lismore: http://www.waterfordlismore.com/
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The significance of Benedict’s Letter for the Irish Church and for the Church worldwide – George Weigel’s analysis
‘The End of Euphemism: Benedict XVI and the corruptions of Ireland’, George Weigel's Analysis of the Pope's Letter
Pope Benedict XVI’s criticism of the Church in Ireland is unpalatable medicine. It’s tough to take and leaves a bad taste. Are we really that sick?
I wondered what an outsider would make of his Letter, one, moreover, whose Catholic-ness and loyalty to the Church are beyond question. George Weigel, author of the 900-page biography of Pope John Paul II, is a well-informed Vatican-watcher.
I would say his article on the Letter, ‘The End of Euphemism: Benedict XVI and the corruptions of Ireland’, is required reading. You can see it at
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MzY2MjI2ZDMwNjNkM2RkMmRiZDdiMmFmNjI3Mzg5NTg=
He notes that ‘its language is both unprecedented and unsparing’ and again, ‘sharp and almost startlingly blunt’ and he sees in its content a significant shift in Rome’s approach to abuse and its mismanagement worldwide.
The points the Pope makes, Weigel says, ‘indicate that the corporate mind of the Vatican is, at long last, beginning to come to grips with the full implications of the patters of clerical sexual predation and episcopal malfeasance’.
Pope Benedict acknowledges that two of the factors in the cover-up of sexual and physical abuse in Ireland were, in Weigel’s words, ‘an excessive deference to ecclesiastical authority and a misplaced concern for the Church’s public reputation; the safe care of Christ’s little ones, the Pope insists, must have absolute priority over worries about how revelations of the sinfulness of Church professionals will “look”, and must have absolute priority over the career prospects of men in ecclesiastical office.’
In other words, Weigel is finding in the Pope’s Letter to us important breakthroughs in its response to the issues which will have repercussions throughout the whole Church. This, he says, ‘The letter breaks ground for the Vatican by acknowledging, with admirable candour, that parents and entire families have “suffered grievously” because of the “abuse of their loved ones”, and that these families’ “trust has been betrayed” and their “dignity has been violated.” In the name of the Church, the Pope openly confesses to families “the shame and remorse we all feel”.’
‘It is also worth noting,’ Weigel continues, ‘that while the Vatican has accepted the Irish government’s Murphy Report on abuse, the Church, by the Pope’s explicit command, intends to go even farther in investigating these patters of gross misbehavior, in order to identify their causes and root them out.’
Weigel pulls no punches, describing Ireland as he sees it, stained and shamed ‘by terrible sins and crimes, but also by the distorted patters of clericalism and clerical ambition that facilitated these derelictions of duty.’
Weigel’s analysis of the Pope’s Letter confirms Benedict’s drastic diagnosis of the condition of the Church here, while at the same time, finding in it significant developments in the Vatican’s own understanding of all that is involved.
‘While the Irish crisis is unprecedented in its scope and in the depth of corruption it revealed, it is clear from his Letter that Benedict XVI is laying down markers for the Catholic Church throughout the world – further confirmation that this pope takes the moral crimes of sexual and physical abuse, and the failures in governance of the Church’s bishops in dealing with those moral crimes, with utter seriousness.’
Since I finished Weigel’s article, that phrase keeps replaying in my mind – 'the Irish crisis is unprecedented in its scope and in the depth of corruption it revealed'.
A bitter judgement.
Hard to take.
Bitter, but true.
Pope Benedict XVI’s criticism of the Church in Ireland is unpalatable medicine. It’s tough to take and leaves a bad taste. Are we really that sick?
I wondered what an outsider would make of his Letter, one, moreover, whose Catholic-ness and loyalty to the Church are beyond question. George Weigel, author of the 900-page biography of Pope John Paul II, is a well-informed Vatican-watcher.
I would say his article on the Letter, ‘The End of Euphemism: Benedict XVI and the corruptions of Ireland’, is required reading. You can see it at
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MzY2MjI2ZDMwNjNkM2RkMmRiZDdiMmFmNjI3Mzg5NTg=
He notes that ‘its language is both unprecedented and unsparing’ and again, ‘sharp and almost startlingly blunt’ and he sees in its content a significant shift in Rome’s approach to abuse and its mismanagement worldwide.
The points the Pope makes, Weigel says, ‘indicate that the corporate mind of the Vatican is, at long last, beginning to come to grips with the full implications of the patters of clerical sexual predation and episcopal malfeasance’.
Pope Benedict acknowledges that two of the factors in the cover-up of sexual and physical abuse in Ireland were, in Weigel’s words, ‘an excessive deference to ecclesiastical authority and a misplaced concern for the Church’s public reputation; the safe care of Christ’s little ones, the Pope insists, must have absolute priority over worries about how revelations of the sinfulness of Church professionals will “look”, and must have absolute priority over the career prospects of men in ecclesiastical office.’
In other words, Weigel is finding in the Pope’s Letter to us important breakthroughs in its response to the issues which will have repercussions throughout the whole Church. This, he says, ‘The letter breaks ground for the Vatican by acknowledging, with admirable candour, that parents and entire families have “suffered grievously” because of the “abuse of their loved ones”, and that these families’ “trust has been betrayed” and their “dignity has been violated.” In the name of the Church, the Pope openly confesses to families “the shame and remorse we all feel”.’
‘It is also worth noting,’ Weigel continues, ‘that while the Vatican has accepted the Irish government’s Murphy Report on abuse, the Church, by the Pope’s explicit command, intends to go even farther in investigating these patters of gross misbehavior, in order to identify their causes and root them out.’
Weigel pulls no punches, describing Ireland as he sees it, stained and shamed ‘by terrible sins and crimes, but also by the distorted patters of clericalism and clerical ambition that facilitated these derelictions of duty.’
Weigel’s analysis of the Pope’s Letter confirms Benedict’s drastic diagnosis of the condition of the Church here, while at the same time, finding in it significant developments in the Vatican’s own understanding of all that is involved.
‘While the Irish crisis is unprecedented in its scope and in the depth of corruption it revealed, it is clear from his Letter that Benedict XVI is laying down markers for the Catholic Church throughout the world – further confirmation that this pope takes the moral crimes of sexual and physical abuse, and the failures in governance of the Church’s bishops in dealing with those moral crimes, with utter seriousness.’
Since I finished Weigel’s article, that phrase keeps replaying in my mind – 'the Irish crisis is unprecedented in its scope and in the depth of corruption it revealed'.
A bitter judgement.
Hard to take.
Bitter, but true.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
A Radiant Letter
Pope Benedict's Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland
The key word in the Letter is ‘renewal’
I downloaded the Pope Benedict’s Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland from the website of the Dublin Diocese http://www.dublindiocese.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1836&Itemid=906 , printed it off and read it.
The key word in this Letter is ‘renewal’. It occurs over ten times, and at least ten other related words express the same idea.
‘A new vision is needed’
The message of the Letter, what Pope Benedict is saying to us, is that our response as individuals, as families, as communities, and as the Church in Ireland, has to go far beyond and beneath the presenting issues of individual and institutional abuse of children, and mismanagement of these by the Church authorities.
‘In confronting the present crisis, measures to deal justly with individual crimes are essential, yet on their own they are not enough: a new vision is needed, to inspire present and future generations to treasure the gift of our common faith.’
He warns us that we are in for a long haul: ‘No one imagines that this painful situation will be resolved swiftly.’
‘A path of healing, renewal and reparation’
What he calls ‘the crisis’ is a crisis for all of us. Not just the bishops. The rest of us too. And to lift us all up again, he says, we need a new vision of how to live our Christianity. What he proposes that we all need to undergo substantial renewal:
‘For my part, considering the gravity of these offences, and the often inadequate response to them on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities in your country, I have decided to write this Pastoral Letter to express my closeness to you and to propose a path of healing, renewal and reparation.’
‘Remember “the rock from which you were hewn”’
He asks us, quoting Isaiah, to remember “the rock from which you were hewn”’, to reflect on the generous and often heroic contributions made by Irish Christians in our past and to ‘let this provide the impetus for honest self-examination and a committed programme of ecclesial and individual renewal.’
What is shocking and surprising about all of this is that it is directed to all of not just to the bishops. He does not say, only some bishops messed up so only they need to change.
‘The need for unity, charity and mutual support in the long-term process of restoration and ecclesial renewal’
Just to make sure that’s what he is really saying, let’s consider another sentence where he makes it inescapably clear that it is all of us he is addressing and asking to walk the path of renewal:
‘With this Letter, I wish to exhort all of you as God’s people in Ireland, to reflect on the wounds inflicted on Christ’s body, the sometimes painful remedies needed to bind and heal them, and the need for unity, charity and mutual support in the long-term process of restoration and ecclesial renewal.’
‘All of you’ - we all have to change. Why all of us? Partly so that in the long run, we may become the kind of community that brings forth people of quality who will make it more likely that such abuses will not happen again in the future and that if they do they will be better dealt with by those responsible for overseeing things.
Underlying this is a profound but brutally realistic vision of the communal, social and political as well as ecclesial dimension of our lives. We are all ‘one body’, not only because as Christians we are drawn into Christ, but also because as human beings we are intertwined – the mystery of human solidarity and moral interconnectedness is part of the human condition.
We really are one moral body and soul as a Church, but also as a society, a people. Our leaders represenus, uncomfortable thought that reality may be for us to face. Society is the average Joe written large - I write this as a Joe. If many of us become a bit more sensible, restrained, responsible, then the tenor of society is leavened a bit in that direction. And the same applies in the other direction.
If we really are committed to a ‘never again’ then we need to be people of character. In order to be able to see what is right and do what is right we have to be right in mind and heart, and that’s where renewal comes in.
There has been a shortage of people sensible and mature enough to see what is fair and insist that it is done, strong enough in character to say the uncomfortable things, to take the lonely stand against the way things were always done, to go against the current, to speak the truth to power, to know and do what justice requires.
And brings us to the radiant centre of Pope Benedict’s Letter – what is it that brings about this change in us, and maintains and develops it?
‘Seek a personal relationship with him within the communion of his Church’
Speaking directly to the children and young people of Ireland he comes to the heart of the matter.
‘It is in the Church that you will find Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and forever. He loves you and he has offered himself on the cross for you. Seek a personal relationship with him within the communion of his Church, for he will never betray your trust! He alone can satisfy your deepest longings and give your lives their fullest meaning by directing them to the service of others. Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus and his goodness, and shelter the flame of faith in your heart.’
This is the radiant centre of the Letter – to seek and find a personal relationship with Jesus Christ – seen at first alive in the fellowship of people we come to see are authentic Christians, and then coming alive in us, as if by the jumping across of a spark.
‘A personal and life-giving encounter with Jesus Christ within a loving, nourishing community’
How on earth are we to live so that we have some chance of passing on this animating heart of our lives to our children and their children? Benedict’s answer is tough but as realistic as a rock. They have to see us living it.
‘A young person’s experience of the Church should always bear fruit in a personal and life-giving encounter with Jesus Christ within a loving, nourishing community.’
The young will know it is possible when they see it is real. That is what ‘experiencing the Church’ must become.
The aim for each of us has to be to become a one of a cluster of those in whom this relationship is alive so that others may behold and catch it there – living this way is the evangelical renewal that spark-leaps from generation to generation.
‘New ways to pass on to young people … friendship with Jesus Christ’
Benedict is aware that in today’s increasingly secularised society ‘even we Christians often find it difficult to speak of the transcendent dimension of our existence’ – we ourselves have become unable, sometimes to put into words what is the heart of our spiritual and communal experience and lives as Christians. The language that worked for previous generations may simply not speak to young people today.
So what are we to do? ‘We need to find new ways to pass on to young people the beauty and richness of friendship with Jesus Christ in the communion of his Church.’
With clinical bluntness, Benedict lays it on the line – ‘In confronting the present crisis, measures to deal justly with individual crimes are essential, yet on their own they are not enough: a new vision is needed, to inspire present and future generations the treasure the gift of our common faith.’
Either one of those tasks would be daunting, but our crisis consists in the necessity to address both of them at the same time.
Benedict has done us the inestimable service of reminding us that neither can be adequately addressed unless the both are.
The radiance at the centre of Benedict’s Letter
Pope Benedict’s Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland is a light in the long darkness we are working through.
There is a radiance at its centre, the friendship with Jesus Christ, the personal and life-giving encounter with him within a loving, nourishing community. This is the fulcrum that is going to move the Catholic Church in Ireland, to lift it up, and give it the push it needs to start upwards again on the long night’s journey into day that we know and feel in the heart of all our hearts it needs.
The key word in the Letter is ‘renewal’
I downloaded the Pope Benedict’s Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland from the website of the Dublin Diocese http://www.dublindiocese.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1836&Itemid=906 , printed it off and read it.
The key word in this Letter is ‘renewal’. It occurs over ten times, and at least ten other related words express the same idea.
‘A new vision is needed’
The message of the Letter, what Pope Benedict is saying to us, is that our response as individuals, as families, as communities, and as the Church in Ireland, has to go far beyond and beneath the presenting issues of individual and institutional abuse of children, and mismanagement of these by the Church authorities.
‘In confronting the present crisis, measures to deal justly with individual crimes are essential, yet on their own they are not enough: a new vision is needed, to inspire present and future generations to treasure the gift of our common faith.’
He warns us that we are in for a long haul: ‘No one imagines that this painful situation will be resolved swiftly.’
‘A path of healing, renewal and reparation’
What he calls ‘the crisis’ is a crisis for all of us. Not just the bishops. The rest of us too. And to lift us all up again, he says, we need a new vision of how to live our Christianity. What he proposes that we all need to undergo substantial renewal:
‘For my part, considering the gravity of these offences, and the often inadequate response to them on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities in your country, I have decided to write this Pastoral Letter to express my closeness to you and to propose a path of healing, renewal and reparation.’
‘Remember “the rock from which you were hewn”’
He asks us, quoting Isaiah, to remember “the rock from which you were hewn”’, to reflect on the generous and often heroic contributions made by Irish Christians in our past and to ‘let this provide the impetus for honest self-examination and a committed programme of ecclesial and individual renewal.’
What is shocking and surprising about all of this is that it is directed to all of not just to the bishops. He does not say, only some bishops messed up so only they need to change.
‘The need for unity, charity and mutual support in the long-term process of restoration and ecclesial renewal’
Just to make sure that’s what he is really saying, let’s consider another sentence where he makes it inescapably clear that it is all of us he is addressing and asking to walk the path of renewal:
‘With this Letter, I wish to exhort all of you as God’s people in Ireland, to reflect on the wounds inflicted on Christ’s body, the sometimes painful remedies needed to bind and heal them, and the need for unity, charity and mutual support in the long-term process of restoration and ecclesial renewal.’
‘All of you’ - we all have to change. Why all of us? Partly so that in the long run, we may become the kind of community that brings forth people of quality who will make it more likely that such abuses will not happen again in the future and that if they do they will be better dealt with by those responsible for overseeing things.
Underlying this is a profound but brutally realistic vision of the communal, social and political as well as ecclesial dimension of our lives. We are all ‘one body’, not only because as Christians we are drawn into Christ, but also because as human beings we are intertwined – the mystery of human solidarity and moral interconnectedness is part of the human condition.
We really are one moral body and soul as a Church, but also as a society, a people. Our leaders represenus, uncomfortable thought that reality may be for us to face. Society is the average Joe written large - I write this as a Joe. If many of us become a bit more sensible, restrained, responsible, then the tenor of society is leavened a bit in that direction. And the same applies in the other direction.
If we really are committed to a ‘never again’ then we need to be people of character. In order to be able to see what is right and do what is right we have to be right in mind and heart, and that’s where renewal comes in.
There has been a shortage of people sensible and mature enough to see what is fair and insist that it is done, strong enough in character to say the uncomfortable things, to take the lonely stand against the way things were always done, to go against the current, to speak the truth to power, to know and do what justice requires.
And brings us to the radiant centre of Pope Benedict’s Letter – what is it that brings about this change in us, and maintains and develops it?
‘Seek a personal relationship with him within the communion of his Church’
Speaking directly to the children and young people of Ireland he comes to the heart of the matter.
‘It is in the Church that you will find Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and forever. He loves you and he has offered himself on the cross for you. Seek a personal relationship with him within the communion of his Church, for he will never betray your trust! He alone can satisfy your deepest longings and give your lives their fullest meaning by directing them to the service of others. Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus and his goodness, and shelter the flame of faith in your heart.’
This is the radiant centre of the Letter – to seek and find a personal relationship with Jesus Christ – seen at first alive in the fellowship of people we come to see are authentic Christians, and then coming alive in us, as if by the jumping across of a spark.
‘A personal and life-giving encounter with Jesus Christ within a loving, nourishing community’
How on earth are we to live so that we have some chance of passing on this animating heart of our lives to our children and their children? Benedict’s answer is tough but as realistic as a rock. They have to see us living it.
‘A young person’s experience of the Church should always bear fruit in a personal and life-giving encounter with Jesus Christ within a loving, nourishing community.’
The young will know it is possible when they see it is real. That is what ‘experiencing the Church’ must become.
The aim for each of us has to be to become a one of a cluster of those in whom this relationship is alive so that others may behold and catch it there – living this way is the evangelical renewal that spark-leaps from generation to generation.
‘New ways to pass on to young people … friendship with Jesus Christ’
Benedict is aware that in today’s increasingly secularised society ‘even we Christians often find it difficult to speak of the transcendent dimension of our existence’ – we ourselves have become unable, sometimes to put into words what is the heart of our spiritual and communal experience and lives as Christians. The language that worked for previous generations may simply not speak to young people today.
So what are we to do? ‘We need to find new ways to pass on to young people the beauty and richness of friendship with Jesus Christ in the communion of his Church.’
With clinical bluntness, Benedict lays it on the line – ‘In confronting the present crisis, measures to deal justly with individual crimes are essential, yet on their own they are not enough: a new vision is needed, to inspire present and future generations the treasure the gift of our common faith.’
Either one of those tasks would be daunting, but our crisis consists in the necessity to address both of them at the same time.
Benedict has done us the inestimable service of reminding us that neither can be adequately addressed unless the both are.
The radiance at the centre of Benedict’s Letter
Pope Benedict’s Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland is a light in the long darkness we are working through.
There is a radiance at its centre, the friendship with Jesus Christ, the personal and life-giving encounter with him within a loving, nourishing community. This is the fulcrum that is going to move the Catholic Church in Ireland, to lift it up, and give it the push it needs to start upwards again on the long night’s journey into day that we know and feel in the heart of all our hearts it needs.
The Stone Throwing Business
The media coverage of the Pope's Letter doesn't seem much interested in what it actually says
I turned on the radio to get a sense of the responses to the Pope’s Letter.
As far as I could hear, the interviewers mostly forced the discussions back into their own narrative framework, uninterested in the vision that animates the Pope’s Letter.
Some of those responding to the Letter were survivors of abuse, bearing witness to what they have endured, reminding us of the need to get to know what to watch out for and what to do, and to acquire the character to do it, if we see abuse.
So what is the Pope saying in the Letter we should do, then?
Most of the other commentators didn't go into that. They were too busy pushing their own agendas of how they want the Church to change its doctrines. They didn't bother to go into the actual content of the Letter.
The emotional atmosphere of the discussions seemed to me too hot and hostile for any real listening to the Letter.
I had the impression that the media pundits and most of the invited speakers and commentators are so far out of the Church’s way of approaching things, that anything, other than their own language and proposals, is dismissed by them as a cop out or they glaze over when confronted with it. It's in another language than theirs. They are simply unable to connect with what the Pope is talking about in any real way.
They haven’t a bog’s notion what he is talking about and they are not going to even try to go there.
I, on the other hand, am an incorrigible bog-Catholic, and it's not often we get a Letter addressed just to us by the Pope, (has there ever been one before?) so I would like to know what the Pope is saying to me, even if it means I have to read the thing for myself!
Time and again, the media interviewers bark out hostile questions that seek to box the answerer into a position where they ‘have’ to call for another bishop to resign or else be made to feel they are part of, or approve of, a cover-up of child sexual abuse.
The Stone Throwing Business
Listening to them, I couldn’t help thinking of the brilliant homily Archbishop Diarmuid Martin gave on ‘the woman taken in adultery’ in the Pro-Cathedral at Mass on 20th March 2010, when the Pope’s Letter was first presented in the Dublin Archdiocese.
The homily is about the mercy of Jesus. It is well worth reading the whole thing. You can read it and download it at: http://www.dublindiocese.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1838&Itemid=907
But here’s the bit that struck me as catching the media's hectoring style to a T:
‘They want to trap him and put him in contradiction with their interpretation of the Law of God. … And as often with those who bear fundamentalist tendencies, they love to trap and compromise anyone who has even the slightest difference from their view of things. … Jesus says very little. He waits, he writes in the sand. Wisely he does not allow himself to be trapped into answering their loaded question. After a long silence he challenges them: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” … all of us are in need of God’s mercy. Jesus alone is the one who is without sin; and thankfully for us all, he is not in the stone throwing business.’
I was door-stepped on my way out of Mass myself this morning (21st March 2010) and had the same experience. The questions were loaded so as to try to push me into saying the Letter ‘had not gone far enough’. Would I not have to agree that another bishop should resign? I felt the questions were phrased so as to trap me and put me into contradiction with their narrative of what should happen next.
Stone throwing was very much the order of the day.
But, to get back to the Letter. What’s in it? There’s the question.
It’s a terrible conclusion to have to come to, but I’m afraid there’s only one way for me to find out for sure, and that’s to read it!
I turned on the radio to get a sense of the responses to the Pope’s Letter.
As far as I could hear, the interviewers mostly forced the discussions back into their own narrative framework, uninterested in the vision that animates the Pope’s Letter.
Some of those responding to the Letter were survivors of abuse, bearing witness to what they have endured, reminding us of the need to get to know what to watch out for and what to do, and to acquire the character to do it, if we see abuse.
So what is the Pope saying in the Letter we should do, then?
Most of the other commentators didn't go into that. They were too busy pushing their own agendas of how they want the Church to change its doctrines. They didn't bother to go into the actual content of the Letter.
The emotional atmosphere of the discussions seemed to me too hot and hostile for any real listening to the Letter.
I had the impression that the media pundits and most of the invited speakers and commentators are so far out of the Church’s way of approaching things, that anything, other than their own language and proposals, is dismissed by them as a cop out or they glaze over when confronted with it. It's in another language than theirs. They are simply unable to connect with what the Pope is talking about in any real way.
They haven’t a bog’s notion what he is talking about and they are not going to even try to go there.
I, on the other hand, am an incorrigible bog-Catholic, and it's not often we get a Letter addressed just to us by the Pope, (has there ever been one before?) so I would like to know what the Pope is saying to me, even if it means I have to read the thing for myself!
Time and again, the media interviewers bark out hostile questions that seek to box the answerer into a position where they ‘have’ to call for another bishop to resign or else be made to feel they are part of, or approve of, a cover-up of child sexual abuse.
The Stone Throwing Business
Listening to them, I couldn’t help thinking of the brilliant homily Archbishop Diarmuid Martin gave on ‘the woman taken in adultery’ in the Pro-Cathedral at Mass on 20th March 2010, when the Pope’s Letter was first presented in the Dublin Archdiocese.
The homily is about the mercy of Jesus. It is well worth reading the whole thing. You can read it and download it at: http://www.dublindiocese.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1838&Itemid=907
But here’s the bit that struck me as catching the media's hectoring style to a T:
‘They want to trap him and put him in contradiction with their interpretation of the Law of God. … And as often with those who bear fundamentalist tendencies, they love to trap and compromise anyone who has even the slightest difference from their view of things. … Jesus says very little. He waits, he writes in the sand. Wisely he does not allow himself to be trapped into answering their loaded question. After a long silence he challenges them: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” … all of us are in need of God’s mercy. Jesus alone is the one who is without sin; and thankfully for us all, he is not in the stone throwing business.’
I was door-stepped on my way out of Mass myself this morning (21st March 2010) and had the same experience. The questions were loaded so as to try to push me into saying the Letter ‘had not gone far enough’. Would I not have to agree that another bishop should resign? I felt the questions were phrased so as to trap me and put me into contradiction with their narrative of what should happen next.
Stone throwing was very much the order of the day.
But, to get back to the Letter. What’s in it? There’s the question.
It’s a terrible conclusion to have to come to, but I’m afraid there’s only one way for me to find out for sure, and that’s to read it!
Thursday, March 18, 2010
'The Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction 'produced no biological or scientific evidence to prove that implantation was the start of life', Dr James Clinch, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist
The Weekend Post
19th March 2010
The High Court Judgment in R v. R
Part 5: The Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction ‘produced no biological or scientific evidence to prove that implantation was the start of life’, Dr James Clinch, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist
At the end of his judgment, Mr Justice McGovern’s concluding position will be that human embryos in vitro are not protected as ‘unborn’ under Article 40.3.3. I am trying to follow his reasoning to see how he constructs the argument that allows him to arrive at that conclusion. Reading through the judgment right through, what happens is that he brings up a succession of topics, reflects on each one and moves discontinuously around among them.
The phrase ‘an unborn child’ in Section 58 of the Civil Liability Act, 1961
Mr Justice McGovern’s first set of reflections is on the use of the phrase ‘an unborn child’ in Section 58 of the Civil Liability Act, 1961 which states,
'For the avoidance of doubt it is hereby declared that the law relating to wrongs shall apply to an unborn child for his protection in like manner as if the child were born, provided the child is subsequently born alive.'
Mr Justice McGovern makes up an example of what this might mean - a child in the womb of a mother in a car accident sustains injuries through someone’s negligence is entitled to have proceedings brought on their behalf if they are born alive to recover damages for the injuries. He then comments, ‘It would seem on the face of it, that “unborn” in Section 58 of the Civil Liability Act, 1961 refers to a child in the womb.’
But there is an hiatus in reasoning here. The Section he quotes does not mention the word ‘womb’. He picks an example that refers to the womb and then says the word ‘unborn’ in the section ‘seems on the face of it’ to refer to a child in the womb. This is a non sequitur. His conclusion does not follow necessarily from the example he selected. Another example would widen out the range of meanings that the unborn child could have under the Section. For example, if a mother was pregnant with an embryo in her fallopian tube and an x-ray technician carelessly exposed her to radiation that harmed the embryo, then it would seem that the child, if born alive, would also be entitled to have proceedings brought on their behalf to recover damages for the injuries.
Indeed, Mr Justice McGovern in his very next sentence goes on to imagine a situation that widens out the range of application of the Section to include human embryos in vitro - an embryo could sustain injuries while in an IVF clinic through the negligence of a technician.
The obvious conclusion from this example is that since, today, it is common practice and common knowledge that human embryos are generated in clinics and laboratories and are dealt with, and at the mercy of, the personnel in these facilities, situations could arise in which the embryos would suffer injuries at the hands of these technicians or other operatives.
But having himself envisaged a situation where the phrase ‘unborn’ would refer to a human embryo in a clinic or laboratory, Mr Justice McGovern nonetheless holds back from moving to the relevant conclusion that human embryos in vitro would seem to qualify as ‘unborn children’ under Section 58 of the Civil Liability Act, 1961.
Of course, as he himself says, he is not considering a case about alleged harm to the three frozen embryos under this statute so he says, rightly that it is not for him to decide such issues in the judgment he is making.
But why then bring it up in the first place? I think it was because the phrase ‘an unborn child’ in the statute is obviously pertinent and he wanted to explore the logic of that statute and its possible relevance to the issue in R v. R.
More importantly, why does he not follow the logic of his own example and take it as the key instance for R v. R of the doctrine of prevailing ideas he has already adverted to, and conclude that the advance of science and technology in the area of IVF has brought about a situation in which unborn human lives outside their mother are capable of being harmed through human negligence?
Whyever, Mr Justice McGovern concludes, contrary to his own second imagined example, that ‘the word “unborn” as set out in the Civil Liability Act, 1961 does not offer much assistance to my determination of the issues in this case.’
If there is doubt, shouldn’t one come down on the side of life?
With no paragraph break, Mr Justice McGovern switches to a second set of reflections prompted by remarks given in testimony by Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist, Dr James Clinch:
'The Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction actually made a statement about life starting, but it produced no biological or scientific evidence to prove that implantation was the start of life. So while there is any doubt whatsoever, you come down on the side of life and since the embryo has all the genetic material it needs to turn into a human being, you would instinctively come down on the side of life.' (Transcript Day 6, Answer 31).
He appears at first to be weighing up an argument put forward by the mother’s legal team that ‘where there is uncertainty the Courts must favour life in interpreting the word “unborn”.’ But in fact, there is no discussion in his judgment of the principle that if a certain action might involve harm to a human life, this uncertainty or doubt is itself an ethical reason for withholding that action, nor does he discuss legal transpositions of that principle.
The uncertainty referred to is the uncertainty about when human life begins caused by differences among the experts called in the case by all sides.
The mother’s legal team argued that the three frozen embryos were living human beings whose right to life should be protected as ‘unborn’ under Article 40.3.3.
The father’s legal team and that of the Attorney General argued against this position, claiming either that the new living human individual only became one of ‘the unborn’ upon implantation in the mother, or that this happened at some other point, or that it was a question which it is impossible to answer satisfactorily.
The mother’s legal team countered this argument in two steps.
Firstly they pointed to the fact that ‘there is at least significant and weighty evidence that the frozen embryos at issue in this case could be human life’.
They then argued that for this very reason, because there was at least significant and weighty evidence, in other words, even where the evidence was not overwhelming and entirely compelling, even where there is doubt because other experts hold different positions about when human life begins, even then the Court should give the benefit of the doubt to the living human embryos who, on this argument, only ‘might be’ living human beings, and rule that such embryos are Constitutionally protected.
This is a fairly elementary principle in ethics – if a hunter hears a rustle in the bush and thinks it might be a bear but also that it might be another hunter, he is morally obliged not to shoot into the bush.
As you would expect, Dr Clinch sees the issue through the lens of his professional ethics as a medical practitioner, an obstetrician and gynaecologist. Primum non nocere is the first principle of medical ethics, First, don’t harm. In a situation where there is a doubt as to whether a human life is present or not, his acquired ethical sensitivity is to come down on the side of life.
Mr Justice McGovern’s response is different. He has already cited with approval the general legal principle that where experts differ, it is not appropriate for judges to come down on one side or the other.
But as we shall see, now, step by step, he is going to do just that. He is going to come down on the side of those who say human life should only begin to be protected under Article 40.3.3 from implantation onwards until birth.
This becomes clear when we follow how he responds to the Dr Clinch’s remarks. Dr Clinch made two points, firstly, that the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction failed to offer any scientific or biological evidence for their claim that human life begins at implantation, and secondly, that where there is doubt or uncertainty, then the appropriate ethical principle that should guide one in such a situation is to give the human life that might be there the benefit of the doubt by making no intervention that might harm that life, or legally, by prohibiting any intervention that might destroy it.
Dr Clinch’s claim about the lack of evidence should have been met by recourse to his previously enunciated principle that where experts differ it is not for judges to come down on one or other side. But what happens is that in the end he does come down on one side.
And indeed, this is what seems to command his attention in Dr Clinch’s remarks, the fact that the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction has come down on the side of the view that human life starts at implantation. He attached significant weight to the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction's opinion.
Only someone who was politically naive could be unaware that the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction was a creature more of politics than of science, and that its conclusions reflected a wishlist of interest groups rather than a dispassionate scientific opinion. Deferring to its conclusions as if they represented indisputable scientific fact looks like political naivety or choreography.
The Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction is a government-appointed body. The government picked the members of the Commission. The government selected them in such a way that an overwhelming majority of the members of the Commission were in favour of allowing embryo destruction. The members of the Commission recommended 24/1 that human embryos should be allowed to be destroyed with legal impunity.
This coincided with the interests of the IVF, embryo research and pharmaceutical testing industries. Work involving the deliberate destruction of human embryos could proceed apace without having to worry about legal challenges.
That is how things work in the world of realpolitik, the politics of power beyond principle. If you want a certain result you make sure that the membership of the committee set up to make recommendations on that result is overwhelmingly in favour of that result.
That is also how realpolitik works in the formation of government bodies – those with the power behind the scenes to bring about decisions, ensure that the membership of bodies is stacked so that they make the decisions that are wanted.
But Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist, Dr James Clinch, said, ‘The Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction actually made a statement about life starting, but it produced no biological or scientific evidence to prove that implantation was the start of life.'
Why did Mr Justice McGovern not join the dots? Earlier in the same paragraph he himself has envisaged a situation in which human embryos in vitro could be harmed by human negligence. Why does he balk at disagreeing with the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction?
What holds him back from accepting what Dr Clinch said and concluding that since the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction produced no scientific evidence that human life begins at implantation, their view is, at least, open to the suspicion that it is determined by their vested interest, that it serves their vested interest, that it is not a scientific view at all but an rationalization?
Why does he not have the confidence of his own example and draw the conclusion that is in line with the doctrine of prevailing ideas he previously accepted?
Why does he not conclude that, since modern science and technology have made it a frequent occurrence that human lives are started and maintained indefinitely in clinics and laboratories, it is now time to clarify that these living human embryos evidently and plainly are unborn human lives whose right to life should be and has to be acknowledged and protected as ‘the unborn’ under Article 40.3.3?
It is clearly in the interest of the IVF, embryo experimentation and pharmaceutical testing industries that human embryos be allowed to be manipulated, interfered with, experimented upon, taken apart so that elements wanted for research may be removed even though this brings about the death of their death, and deliberately destroyed without the individuals and companies doing these things incurring any legal penalty.
The nonsensical claim that human life begins at implantation serves that agenda.
The recommendation that human embryos prior to implantation should not be covered as 'unborn' under Article 40.3.3 serves the same agenda.
And, as the passage from Dr Clinch, which he selected for consideration, makes clear, the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction ‘produced no biological or scientific evidence to prove that implantation is the start of life.’
But Mr Justice McGovern does not go against the view set out by the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction that human life begins at implantation.
Further, as already noted, Mr Justice McGovern has previously laid down the principle that where scientific experts differ, then judges should not seek to decide the issue by coming down on one side or the other. Why does he now start to abandon that principle? Why does he begin to do what he himself has earlier said judges should not do, namely, side with those who make the claim that the life of a human embryo begins at implantation, and against those who say that living human embryos in clinics and laboratories are living human beings?
Whatever the thought process, having quoted Dr Clinch’s principle that where there is any doubt whatsoever, one should come down on the side of life, Mr Justice McGovern remains unmoved rationally by this principle and passes on with not a single word of comment on it.
Instead immediately after the Dr Clinch quote he has seven lines which make two points, ‘most people agree that embryos in vitro are deserving of special respect’ and ‘their very creation raises serious moral and ethical issues which in themselves impose restraints on what may or may not be done with them’.
These two points are the subject of next week’s Weekly Post.
Next Week
‘most people agree that embryos in vitro are deserving of special respect’
19th March 2010
Protecting Human Embryos in Clinics and Laboratories
The High Court Judgment in R v. R
Part 5: The Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction ‘produced no biological or scientific evidence to prove that implantation was the start of life’, Dr James Clinch, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist
At the end of his judgment, Mr Justice McGovern’s concluding position will be that human embryos in vitro are not protected as ‘unborn’ under Article 40.3.3. I am trying to follow his reasoning to see how he constructs the argument that allows him to arrive at that conclusion. Reading through the judgment right through, what happens is that he brings up a succession of topics, reflects on each one and moves discontinuously around among them.
The phrase ‘an unborn child’ in Section 58 of the Civil Liability Act, 1961
Mr Justice McGovern’s first set of reflections is on the use of the phrase ‘an unborn child’ in Section 58 of the Civil Liability Act, 1961 which states,
'For the avoidance of doubt it is hereby declared that the law relating to wrongs shall apply to an unborn child for his protection in like manner as if the child were born, provided the child is subsequently born alive.'
Mr Justice McGovern makes up an example of what this might mean - a child in the womb of a mother in a car accident sustains injuries through someone’s negligence is entitled to have proceedings brought on their behalf if they are born alive to recover damages for the injuries. He then comments, ‘It would seem on the face of it, that “unborn” in Section 58 of the Civil Liability Act, 1961 refers to a child in the womb.’
But there is an hiatus in reasoning here. The Section he quotes does not mention the word ‘womb’. He picks an example that refers to the womb and then says the word ‘unborn’ in the section ‘seems on the face of it’ to refer to a child in the womb. This is a non sequitur. His conclusion does not follow necessarily from the example he selected. Another example would widen out the range of meanings that the unborn child could have under the Section. For example, if a mother was pregnant with an embryo in her fallopian tube and an x-ray technician carelessly exposed her to radiation that harmed the embryo, then it would seem that the child, if born alive, would also be entitled to have proceedings brought on their behalf to recover damages for the injuries.
Indeed, Mr Justice McGovern in his very next sentence goes on to imagine a situation that widens out the range of application of the Section to include human embryos in vitro - an embryo could sustain injuries while in an IVF clinic through the negligence of a technician.
The obvious conclusion from this example is that since, today, it is common practice and common knowledge that human embryos are generated in clinics and laboratories and are dealt with, and at the mercy of, the personnel in these facilities, situations could arise in which the embryos would suffer injuries at the hands of these technicians or other operatives.
But having himself envisaged a situation where the phrase ‘unborn’ would refer to a human embryo in a clinic or laboratory, Mr Justice McGovern nonetheless holds back from moving to the relevant conclusion that human embryos in vitro would seem to qualify as ‘unborn children’ under Section 58 of the Civil Liability Act, 1961.
Of course, as he himself says, he is not considering a case about alleged harm to the three frozen embryos under this statute so he says, rightly that it is not for him to decide such issues in the judgment he is making.
But why then bring it up in the first place? I think it was because the phrase ‘an unborn child’ in the statute is obviously pertinent and he wanted to explore the logic of that statute and its possible relevance to the issue in R v. R.
More importantly, why does he not follow the logic of his own example and take it as the key instance for R v. R of the doctrine of prevailing ideas he has already adverted to, and conclude that the advance of science and technology in the area of IVF has brought about a situation in which unborn human lives outside their mother are capable of being harmed through human negligence?
Whyever, Mr Justice McGovern concludes, contrary to his own second imagined example, that ‘the word “unborn” as set out in the Civil Liability Act, 1961 does not offer much assistance to my determination of the issues in this case.’
If there is doubt, shouldn’t one come down on the side of life?
With no paragraph break, Mr Justice McGovern switches to a second set of reflections prompted by remarks given in testimony by Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist, Dr James Clinch:
'The Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction actually made a statement about life starting, but it produced no biological or scientific evidence to prove that implantation was the start of life. So while there is any doubt whatsoever, you come down on the side of life and since the embryo has all the genetic material it needs to turn into a human being, you would instinctively come down on the side of life.' (Transcript Day 6, Answer 31).
He appears at first to be weighing up an argument put forward by the mother’s legal team that ‘where there is uncertainty the Courts must favour life in interpreting the word “unborn”.’ But in fact, there is no discussion in his judgment of the principle that if a certain action might involve harm to a human life, this uncertainty or doubt is itself an ethical reason for withholding that action, nor does he discuss legal transpositions of that principle.
The uncertainty referred to is the uncertainty about when human life begins caused by differences among the experts called in the case by all sides.
The mother’s legal team argued that the three frozen embryos were living human beings whose right to life should be protected as ‘unborn’ under Article 40.3.3.
The father’s legal team and that of the Attorney General argued against this position, claiming either that the new living human individual only became one of ‘the unborn’ upon implantation in the mother, or that this happened at some other point, or that it was a question which it is impossible to answer satisfactorily.
The mother’s legal team countered this argument in two steps.
Firstly they pointed to the fact that ‘there is at least significant and weighty evidence that the frozen embryos at issue in this case could be human life’.
They then argued that for this very reason, because there was at least significant and weighty evidence, in other words, even where the evidence was not overwhelming and entirely compelling, even where there is doubt because other experts hold different positions about when human life begins, even then the Court should give the benefit of the doubt to the living human embryos who, on this argument, only ‘might be’ living human beings, and rule that such embryos are Constitutionally protected.
This is a fairly elementary principle in ethics – if a hunter hears a rustle in the bush and thinks it might be a bear but also that it might be another hunter, he is morally obliged not to shoot into the bush.
As you would expect, Dr Clinch sees the issue through the lens of his professional ethics as a medical practitioner, an obstetrician and gynaecologist. Primum non nocere is the first principle of medical ethics, First, don’t harm. In a situation where there is a doubt as to whether a human life is present or not, his acquired ethical sensitivity is to come down on the side of life.
Mr Justice McGovern’s response is different. He has already cited with approval the general legal principle that where experts differ, it is not appropriate for judges to come down on one side or the other.
But as we shall see, now, step by step, he is going to do just that. He is going to come down on the side of those who say human life should only begin to be protected under Article 40.3.3 from implantation onwards until birth.
This becomes clear when we follow how he responds to the Dr Clinch’s remarks. Dr Clinch made two points, firstly, that the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction failed to offer any scientific or biological evidence for their claim that human life begins at implantation, and secondly, that where there is doubt or uncertainty, then the appropriate ethical principle that should guide one in such a situation is to give the human life that might be there the benefit of the doubt by making no intervention that might harm that life, or legally, by prohibiting any intervention that might destroy it.
Dr Clinch’s claim about the lack of evidence should have been met by recourse to his previously enunciated principle that where experts differ it is not for judges to come down on one or other side. But what happens is that in the end he does come down on one side.
And indeed, this is what seems to command his attention in Dr Clinch’s remarks, the fact that the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction has come down on the side of the view that human life starts at implantation. He attached significant weight to the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction's opinion.
Only someone who was politically naive could be unaware that the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction was a creature more of politics than of science, and that its conclusions reflected a wishlist of interest groups rather than a dispassionate scientific opinion. Deferring to its conclusions as if they represented indisputable scientific fact looks like political naivety or choreography.
The Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction is a government-appointed body. The government picked the members of the Commission. The government selected them in such a way that an overwhelming majority of the members of the Commission were in favour of allowing embryo destruction. The members of the Commission recommended 24/1 that human embryos should be allowed to be destroyed with legal impunity.
This coincided with the interests of the IVF, embryo research and pharmaceutical testing industries. Work involving the deliberate destruction of human embryos could proceed apace without having to worry about legal challenges.
That is how things work in the world of realpolitik, the politics of power beyond principle. If you want a certain result you make sure that the membership of the committee set up to make recommendations on that result is overwhelmingly in favour of that result.
That is also how realpolitik works in the formation of government bodies – those with the power behind the scenes to bring about decisions, ensure that the membership of bodies is stacked so that they make the decisions that are wanted.
But Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist, Dr James Clinch, said, ‘The Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction actually made a statement about life starting, but it produced no biological or scientific evidence to prove that implantation was the start of life.'
Why did Mr Justice McGovern not join the dots? Earlier in the same paragraph he himself has envisaged a situation in which human embryos in vitro could be harmed by human negligence. Why does he balk at disagreeing with the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction?
What holds him back from accepting what Dr Clinch said and concluding that since the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction produced no scientific evidence that human life begins at implantation, their view is, at least, open to the suspicion that it is determined by their vested interest, that it serves their vested interest, that it is not a scientific view at all but an rationalization?
Why does he not have the confidence of his own example and draw the conclusion that is in line with the doctrine of prevailing ideas he previously accepted?
Why does he not conclude that, since modern science and technology have made it a frequent occurrence that human lives are started and maintained indefinitely in clinics and laboratories, it is now time to clarify that these living human embryos evidently and plainly are unborn human lives whose right to life should be and has to be acknowledged and protected as ‘the unborn’ under Article 40.3.3?
It is clearly in the interest of the IVF, embryo experimentation and pharmaceutical testing industries that human embryos be allowed to be manipulated, interfered with, experimented upon, taken apart so that elements wanted for research may be removed even though this brings about the death of their death, and deliberately destroyed without the individuals and companies doing these things incurring any legal penalty.
The nonsensical claim that human life begins at implantation serves that agenda.
The recommendation that human embryos prior to implantation should not be covered as 'unborn' under Article 40.3.3 serves the same agenda.
And, as the passage from Dr Clinch, which he selected for consideration, makes clear, the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction ‘produced no biological or scientific evidence to prove that implantation is the start of life.’
But Mr Justice McGovern does not go against the view set out by the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction that human life begins at implantation.
Further, as already noted, Mr Justice McGovern has previously laid down the principle that where scientific experts differ, then judges should not seek to decide the issue by coming down on one side or the other. Why does he now start to abandon that principle? Why does he begin to do what he himself has earlier said judges should not do, namely, side with those who make the claim that the life of a human embryo begins at implantation, and against those who say that living human embryos in clinics and laboratories are living human beings?
Whatever the thought process, having quoted Dr Clinch’s principle that where there is any doubt whatsoever, one should come down on the side of life, Mr Justice McGovern remains unmoved rationally by this principle and passes on with not a single word of comment on it.
Instead immediately after the Dr Clinch quote he has seven lines which make two points, ‘most people agree that embryos in vitro are deserving of special respect’ and ‘their very creation raises serious moral and ethical issues which in themselves impose restraints on what may or may not be done with them’.
These two points are the subject of next week’s Weekly Post.
Next Week
‘most people agree that embryos in vitro are deserving of special respect’
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Part 4: How Mr J McGovern approaches the construction of his argument that ‘the unborn’ does not include embryos in vitro
The Weekend Post
Friday 12th March 2010
Protecting Human Embryos in Clinics and Laboratories
The High Court Judgment in R v. R
Part 4: How Mr J McGovern approaches the construction of his argument that ‘the unborn’ does not include embryos in vitro
Mr Justice McGovern says the doctrine of prevailing ideas does not enable mean human embryos in vitro may be included among ‘the unborn’ whose right to life is acknowledged and protected under Article 40.3.3
Mr Justice McGovern, decides that the views of O’Higgins C.J. and Walsh J. he has cited, which ‘acknowledge that changing values in society may mean that rights which were not acknowledged in the past may now be accepted as firmly established under the Constitution’, 'are not, in my view, authority for the proposition that the word “unborn” in Article 40.3.3 should be given a different meaning to that which was understood by the people at the time when they approved the amendment, if it can be ascertained, from the historical context, what the word was understood to mean.'
In the argument that follows Mr Justice McGovern comes to a view about the meaning of the term ‘the unborn’ in the Constitution. And he does so on the basis of remarks and strands of reasoning drawn from Irish cases about aspects of the Irish law on abortion which were heard after the enactment of Amendment inserted as Article 40.3.3 in 1983, and a discussion of some of these remarks and strands of reasoning by a judge in a case in another jurisdiction.
The cases cited by Mr Justice McGovern in constructing his argument that ‘the unborn’ does not include embryos in vitro
Mr Justice McGovern cites the following cases in the course of building the argument on the basis of which he concludes that ‘the unborn’ in Article 40.3.3 does not include human embryos in vitro:
He first cites a piece of legislation from before the enactment of Article 40.3.3, the Civil Liability Act 1961, but he judges it to be of little help to him: ‘Suffice it to say that the word “unborn” as set out in the Civil Liability Act does not offer much assistance to my determination of the issues in this case.’
He next cites the Sixth Edition of the Medical Council’s Guide to Ethical Conduct published in 2004.
en he cites The Attorney General (S.P.U.C.) v. Open Door Counselling Limited [1988] which in turn refers back to remarks of Walsh J. in G v. An Bord Uchtála [1980]
And that brings him back to the case heard in England already discussed above, The Queen on the application of Smeaton v. Secretary of State for Health [2002] on which his argument and conclusion ultimately rest.
The judge in that English case, Munby J., case took issue with the reasoning of Hamilton P. in The Attorney General (S.P.U.C.) v. Open Door Counselling Limited [1988], and reasoning of Munby J. is the basis of Mr Justice McGovern’s conclusion that the term ‘the unborn’ does not include human embryos in vitro.
He goes on to cite The Attorney General v. X [1992] and Baby O. v. The Minister for Justice [2002]
After this, he quotes the recommendation of the Report of the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction published in 2005, that ‘the embryo formed by IVF should not attract legal protection until placed in the human body, at which stage it should attract the same level of protection as the embryo formed in vivo.’
What Mr Justice McGovern does with the citations from these cases is to argue that because they confirm the applicability of Article 40.3.3 to cases involving abortion it somehow follows that the right to life of the unborn can only legitimately be construed as applying to human embryos in vivo, and cannot legitimately be construed as applying to human embryos in vitro.
It is true that part of the intention of the people in voting in the amendment was to prevent abortion. But it does not follow from this that the people did not also intend more than that in voting in the amendment.
In the words of the Chief Justice, Mr Justice Murray, in his judgment in R v. R, ‘If the objective at the time had been to just address some perceived statutory frailties that could have been achieved more readily and easily by the adoption of legislation. But the public debate transcended that and the object was, as the result demonstrates, to place in the Constitution a protection for human life before birth.’ The Chief Justice continues, ‘ In any event the response to the wide ranging debate which took place at the time transcended legislative considerations and the issues were addressed at constitutional level.’
The debate is not one lost in the mists of time, but fairly recent, and what happened was that initial formulations of possible amendment wordings focused on articulating a right to life of the child before birth from the start of its life, and as the debate progressed, the proponents of such a wording had to accommodate legitimate concerns about safeguarding the right to life of the mother in a situation of difficult pregnancy and this was done by the balancing of the equal right to life of mother and child.
So the actual historical context was a demand for a constitutional recognition and protection of the right to life of the child before birth was the motivating and engendering concern and the balancing of this against the equal right to life of the mother was articulated not to deny the right to life of human embryos in vitro. Furthermore, the birth of Louise Brown, the first baby generated by IVF, was dramatic world news in July 1978, only a few years before the debate on the wording of the amendment.
The word ‘abortion’ does not appear in Article 40.3.3, so the argument seeking to restrict its remit to that of protecting the child in the mother against abortion is not only not compelling, it is not even persuasive. To a legal outsider like myself the argumentation feels intellectually tortuous, strained out of the natural shape of reason required by the issue at hand as if by a will not to allow the Article 40.3.3’s acknowledgement and protection of right to life of the unborn include human embryos in vitro.
The more general, not exclusively anti-abortion language of the Article 40.3.3 expresses the intent of the people that protection against more than abortion was envisaged. The use of the word ‘only’ in the following passage from the Supreme Court judgement of Mr Justice Fennelly in R v. R seems to support this interpretation:
'I do not think that the constitutional provision should be considered only as being intended to reinforce the effect of Section 58 of the Offences against the Person Act, 1861. The people, in adopting the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution employed distinct, new and independent language' (Par. 2)
Next Week
Part 6: How Mr Justice McGovern constructs his argument that human embryos in vitro are not ‘unborn’
Friday 12th March 2010
Protecting Human Embryos in Clinics and Laboratories
The High Court Judgment in R v. R
Part 4: How Mr J McGovern approaches the construction of his argument that ‘the unborn’ does not include embryos in vitro
Mr Justice McGovern says the doctrine of prevailing ideas does not enable mean human embryos in vitro may be included among ‘the unborn’ whose right to life is acknowledged and protected under Article 40.3.3
Mr Justice McGovern, decides that the views of O’Higgins C.J. and Walsh J. he has cited, which ‘acknowledge that changing values in society may mean that rights which were not acknowledged in the past may now be accepted as firmly established under the Constitution’, 'are not, in my view, authority for the proposition that the word “unborn” in Article 40.3.3 should be given a different meaning to that which was understood by the people at the time when they approved the amendment, if it can be ascertained, from the historical context, what the word was understood to mean.'
In the argument that follows Mr Justice McGovern comes to a view about the meaning of the term ‘the unborn’ in the Constitution. And he does so on the basis of remarks and strands of reasoning drawn from Irish cases about aspects of the Irish law on abortion which were heard after the enactment of Amendment inserted as Article 40.3.3 in 1983, and a discussion of some of these remarks and strands of reasoning by a judge in a case in another jurisdiction.
The cases cited by Mr Justice McGovern in constructing his argument that ‘the unborn’ does not include embryos in vitro
Mr Justice McGovern cites the following cases in the course of building the argument on the basis of which he concludes that ‘the unborn’ in Article 40.3.3 does not include human embryos in vitro:
He first cites a piece of legislation from before the enactment of Article 40.3.3, the Civil Liability Act 1961, but he judges it to be of little help to him: ‘Suffice it to say that the word “unborn” as set out in the Civil Liability Act does not offer much assistance to my determination of the issues in this case.’
He next cites the Sixth Edition of the Medical Council’s Guide to Ethical Conduct published in 2004.
en he cites The Attorney General (S.P.U.C.) v. Open Door Counselling Limited [1988] which in turn refers back to remarks of Walsh J. in G v. An Bord Uchtála [1980]
And that brings him back to the case heard in England already discussed above, The Queen on the application of Smeaton v. Secretary of State for Health [2002] on which his argument and conclusion ultimately rest.
The judge in that English case, Munby J., case took issue with the reasoning of Hamilton P. in The Attorney General (S.P.U.C.) v. Open Door Counselling Limited [1988], and reasoning of Munby J. is the basis of Mr Justice McGovern’s conclusion that the term ‘the unborn’ does not include human embryos in vitro.
He goes on to cite The Attorney General v. X [1992] and Baby O. v. The Minister for Justice [2002]
After this, he quotes the recommendation of the Report of the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction published in 2005, that ‘the embryo formed by IVF should not attract legal protection until placed in the human body, at which stage it should attract the same level of protection as the embryo formed in vivo.’
What Mr Justice McGovern does with the citations from these cases is to argue that because they confirm the applicability of Article 40.3.3 to cases involving abortion it somehow follows that the right to life of the unborn can only legitimately be construed as applying to human embryos in vivo, and cannot legitimately be construed as applying to human embryos in vitro.
It is true that part of the intention of the people in voting in the amendment was to prevent abortion. But it does not follow from this that the people did not also intend more than that in voting in the amendment.
In the words of the Chief Justice, Mr Justice Murray, in his judgment in R v. R, ‘If the objective at the time had been to just address some perceived statutory frailties that could have been achieved more readily and easily by the adoption of legislation. But the public debate transcended that and the object was, as the result demonstrates, to place in the Constitution a protection for human life before birth.’ The Chief Justice continues, ‘ In any event the response to the wide ranging debate which took place at the time transcended legislative considerations and the issues were addressed at constitutional level.’
The debate is not one lost in the mists of time, but fairly recent, and what happened was that initial formulations of possible amendment wordings focused on articulating a right to life of the child before birth from the start of its life, and as the debate progressed, the proponents of such a wording had to accommodate legitimate concerns about safeguarding the right to life of the mother in a situation of difficult pregnancy and this was done by the balancing of the equal right to life of mother and child.
So the actual historical context was a demand for a constitutional recognition and protection of the right to life of the child before birth was the motivating and engendering concern and the balancing of this against the equal right to life of the mother was articulated not to deny the right to life of human embryos in vitro. Furthermore, the birth of Louise Brown, the first baby generated by IVF, was dramatic world news in July 1978, only a few years before the debate on the wording of the amendment.
The word ‘abortion’ does not appear in Article 40.3.3, so the argument seeking to restrict its remit to that of protecting the child in the mother against abortion is not only not compelling, it is not even persuasive. To a legal outsider like myself the argumentation feels intellectually tortuous, strained out of the natural shape of reason required by the issue at hand as if by a will not to allow the Article 40.3.3’s acknowledgement and protection of right to life of the unborn include human embryos in vitro.
The more general, not exclusively anti-abortion language of the Article 40.3.3 expresses the intent of the people that protection against more than abortion was envisaged. The use of the word ‘only’ in the following passage from the Supreme Court judgement of Mr Justice Fennelly in R v. R seems to support this interpretation:
'I do not think that the constitutional provision should be considered only as being intended to reinforce the effect of Section 58 of the Offences against the Person Act, 1861. The people, in adopting the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution employed distinct, new and independent language' (Par. 2)
Next Week
Part 6: How Mr Justice McGovern constructs his argument that human embryos in vitro are not ‘unborn’
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Today’s Marie Stopes online poll is currently running at 89% of Irish people AGAINST abortion being legal here
What a difference a day makes!
Yesterday’s YouGov online poll for abortion–providers Marie Stopes found 78 - 87% of Irish people were FOR legal abortion.
Today’s Marie Stopes online poll is currently running at 89% of Irish people AGAINST abortion being legal here.
So what do you reckon happened?
A wave of mind changes swept the country?
Alas I don't think so.
They both can’t be right.
I guess it means Marie Stopes’ online polls aren’t worth a toss.
They’re junk science.
Have a look for yourself: http://www.reproductivechoices.ie/ShowContent.aspx?id=5942
Just shows you, a day is a long time in the politics of abortion-providers.
Yesterday’s YouGov online poll for abortion–providers Marie Stopes found 78 - 87% of Irish people were FOR legal abortion.
Today’s Marie Stopes online poll is currently running at 89% of Irish people AGAINST abortion being legal here.
So what do you reckon happened?
A wave of mind changes swept the country?
Alas I don't think so.
They both can’t be right.
I guess it means Marie Stopes’ online polls aren’t worth a toss.
They’re junk science.
Have a look for yourself: http://www.reproductivechoices.ie/ShowContent.aspx?id=5942
Just shows you, a day is a long time in the politics of abortion-providers.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Part 3: The Doctrine of Prevailing Ideas
The Weekend Post
Friday 5th March 2010
Protecting Human Embryos in Clinics and Laboratories
The High Court Judgment in R v. R
Part 3: The Doctrine of Prevailing Ideas
How Mr Justice McGovern approaches the question whether the frozen embryos are ‘unborn’ under Article 40.3.3
Mr Justice McGovern turns now to the main issue he has to address, ‘whether the three frozen embryos at issue in this case constitute the ‘unborn’ for the purposes of Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution.’
He notes that the Constitution does not define ‘the unborn’ and quotes the Report of the Constitution Review Group, issued in July 1996: 'Definition is needed as to when the ‘unborn' acquires the protection of the law. Philosophers and scientists may continue to debate when human life begins, but the law must define what it intends to protect.'
He says that he has to decide what ‘the unborn’ means in Article 40.3.3 and that, in the absence of a definition, ‘one can look at the history or background to the Amendment of the Constitution which resulted in Article 40.3.3 being adopted by the people.’
The Doctrine of Prevailing Ideas: with advances in knowledge, rights hitherto not acknowledged may now be accepted as firmly established under the Constitution
He then quotes remarks of O’Higgins C.J. in The State (Healy) v. Donoghue [1976] I.R. 325, at 347, that the preamble to the Irish Constitution
'Makes it clear that the rights given by the Constitution must be considered in accordance with concepts of prudence, justice and charity which may gradually change or develop as society changes and develops, and which fall to be interpreted from time to time in accordance with prevailing ideas. The preamble envisages a constitution which can absorb or be adapted to such change in other words the Constitution did not seek to impose for all time the ideas prevalent or accepted with regard to these virtues at the time of its enactment.'
Mr Justice McGovern notes that O’Higgins C.J. went on to quote Walsh J. in McGee v. The Attorney General [1974] I.R. 284 at 319:
'According to the preamble, the people gave themselves a Constitution to promote the common good with due observance of prudence, justice and charity so that the dignity and freedom of the individual might be assured. The judges must, therefore, as best they can from their training and their experience interpret these rights in accordance with their ideas of prudence, justice and charity. It is but natural that from time to time the prevailing ideas of these virtues may be conditioned by the passage of time; no interpretation of the Constitution is intended to be final for all time. It is given in the light of prevailing ideas and concepts.'
Mr Justice McGovern says that these views of O’Higgins C.J. and Walsh J. acknowledge that
'Changing values in society may mean that rights which were not acknowledged in the past may now be accepted as firmly established under the Constitution.'
The relevant new prevailing idea in R v R: human embryos in vitro are human beings at the embryonic stage of their lives
The advances that provide the foundation of such changes in interpretation of the Constitution are advances in knowledge and corresponding advances in the way the dignity and freedom of the human individual and a social order commensurate with that dignity and freedom have to be acknowledged and respected, and protected and vindicated in law.
After all, the two primary purposes of Ireland as a society, as set out in the Preamble to the Constitution, are ‘so that the dignity of the individual may be assured’ and ‘true social order attained’.
In the case of the three frozen human embryos at the centre of this case, they are clearly human, clearly alive, and clearly individual (referred to as three in number without equivocation throughout the High Court and Supreme Court decisions).
The advance in knowledge consists in the range of different manners in which new individual human lives may be generated apart from sexual union, and kept alive apart from the natural process of development within the mother.
Each of these embryos is alive, is human, is an individual, and so, to apply the two criteria set out in the Preamble, the new questions now arise:
The obvious application of this principle to R v. R would have been as follows:
And the obvious reasonable and responsible way to protect these vulnerable new human lives would have been to recognise that they too came under the protection of Article 40.3.3. They are human embryos just as those in a mother's womb are human embryos. In the case of IVF and similar techniques, the embryos that were in the clinic one week are in the mother's womb the following week. Or the IVF-generated embryos left in the clinic are the brothers and sisters of the IVF-generated embryos transferred into their mother And the IVF-generated embryos still left in the clinic are unborn, just as those transferred into the mother are.
But Mr J McGovern does not take that approach. Instead he sets about constructing an argument that because Article 40.3.3 says 'with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother', it somehow follows that the right to life of human embryos who are not in their mother but who are in clinics or laboratories are not included among 'the unborn' whose right to life is acknowledged by the State and to be defended and vindicated as far as practicable by the laws of the State.
Next Week
Part 4: How Mr J McGovern approaches the construction of his argument that ‘the unborn’ does not include human embryos in vitro
Friday 5th March 2010
Protecting Human Embryos in Clinics and Laboratories
The High Court Judgment in R v. R
Part 3: The Doctrine of Prevailing Ideas
How Mr Justice McGovern approaches the question whether the frozen embryos are ‘unborn’ under Article 40.3.3
Mr Justice McGovern turns now to the main issue he has to address, ‘whether the three frozen embryos at issue in this case constitute the ‘unborn’ for the purposes of Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution.’
He notes that the Constitution does not define ‘the unborn’ and quotes the Report of the Constitution Review Group, issued in July 1996: 'Definition is needed as to when the ‘unborn' acquires the protection of the law. Philosophers and scientists may continue to debate when human life begins, but the law must define what it intends to protect.'
He says that he has to decide what ‘the unborn’ means in Article 40.3.3 and that, in the absence of a definition, ‘one can look at the history or background to the Amendment of the Constitution which resulted in Article 40.3.3 being adopted by the people.’
The Doctrine of Prevailing Ideas: with advances in knowledge, rights hitherto not acknowledged may now be accepted as firmly established under the Constitution
He then quotes remarks of O’Higgins C.J. in The State (Healy) v. Donoghue [1976] I.R. 325, at 347, that the preamble to the Irish Constitution
'Makes it clear that the rights given by the Constitution must be considered in accordance with concepts of prudence, justice and charity which may gradually change or develop as society changes and develops, and which fall to be interpreted from time to time in accordance with prevailing ideas. The preamble envisages a constitution which can absorb or be adapted to such change in other words the Constitution did not seek to impose for all time the ideas prevalent or accepted with regard to these virtues at the time of its enactment.'
Mr Justice McGovern notes that O’Higgins C.J. went on to quote Walsh J. in McGee v. The Attorney General [1974] I.R. 284 at 319:
'According to the preamble, the people gave themselves a Constitution to promote the common good with due observance of prudence, justice and charity so that the dignity and freedom of the individual might be assured. The judges must, therefore, as best they can from their training and their experience interpret these rights in accordance with their ideas of prudence, justice and charity. It is but natural that from time to time the prevailing ideas of these virtues may be conditioned by the passage of time; no interpretation of the Constitution is intended to be final for all time. It is given in the light of prevailing ideas and concepts.'
Mr Justice McGovern says that these views of O’Higgins C.J. and Walsh J. acknowledge that
'Changing values in society may mean that rights which were not acknowledged in the past may now be accepted as firmly established under the Constitution.'
The relevant new prevailing idea in R v R: human embryos in vitro are human beings at the embryonic stage of their lives
The advances that provide the foundation of such changes in interpretation of the Constitution are advances in knowledge and corresponding advances in the way the dignity and freedom of the human individual and a social order commensurate with that dignity and freedom have to be acknowledged and respected, and protected and vindicated in law.
After all, the two primary purposes of Ireland as a society, as set out in the Preamble to the Constitution, are ‘so that the dignity of the individual may be assured’ and ‘true social order attained’.
In the case of the three frozen human embryos at the centre of this case, they are clearly human, clearly alive, and clearly individual (referred to as three in number without equivocation throughout the High Court and Supreme Court decisions).
- There would have been no case if they were not human, say for example, yak embryos.
- There would have been no case if they were dead. The defendants and the State agreed with the plaintiff that they were being kept alive though frozen by the clinic.
- There would have been no case if they were merely frozen spermatozoa or oocytes because everyone knows these are not human beings.
- There would have been no case if everyone had not understood and accepted that the plaintiff and the first named defendant are the mother and the father respectively of the three frozen embryos.
- If they were implanted in the mother while she was pregnant they would fall under the protection of Article 40.3.3 ‘the unborn’. They would still be the same three living human individuals.
The advance in knowledge consists in the range of different manners in which new individual human lives may be generated apart from sexual union, and kept alive apart from the natural process of development within the mother.
Each of these embryos is alive, is human, is an individual, and so, to apply the two criteria set out in the Preamble, the new questions now arise:
- How must society re-arrange itself and the laws so that the dignity and freedom of these new individuals is assured;
- How must social order be re-arranged so that true social order is attained;
- In other words, how must all the individuals directly and indirectly involved with the coming into existence and remaining in existence of these new human individuals re-arrange their social relations so that the dignity and freedom of these new individuals is assured;
- And how must the laws be altered to take account of these new relationships involving these utterly defenceless human lives and a range of adults at whose mercy is their very coming into existence and remaining in existence.
The obvious application of this principle to R v. R would have been as follows:
- That under Article 40.3.3, the State acknowledges a right to life of the unborn which it guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate;
- Once the unborn is in the mother, its right to life has to be considered together with the equal right to life of the mother;
- But new situations have been opened up by contemporary science and technology where the unborn may exist in vitro, not implanted in a woman, whether in the course of Assisted Human Reproduction procedures or research involving human embryos, or stored frozen, usually indefinitely;
- With these advances in knowledge, the right to life of these embryonic human beings living outside a woman’s body must acknowledged as firmly established under the Constitution;
- And so the State acknowledges the right to life of embryonic human lives living outside a woman’s body, whether involved in the course of Assisted Human Reproduction procedures or in research involving human embryos, or frozen in storage under whatever circumstances, and guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right, as no balancing with equal right to life of the mother is involved or called for.
And the obvious reasonable and responsible way to protect these vulnerable new human lives would have been to recognise that they too came under the protection of Article 40.3.3. They are human embryos just as those in a mother's womb are human embryos. In the case of IVF and similar techniques, the embryos that were in the clinic one week are in the mother's womb the following week. Or the IVF-generated embryos left in the clinic are the brothers and sisters of the IVF-generated embryos transferred into their mother And the IVF-generated embryos still left in the clinic are unborn, just as those transferred into the mother are.
But Mr J McGovern does not take that approach. Instead he sets about constructing an argument that because Article 40.3.3 says 'with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother', it somehow follows that the right to life of human embryos who are not in their mother but who are in clinics or laboratories are not included among 'the unborn' whose right to life is acknowledged by the State and to be defended and vindicated as far as practicable by the laws of the State.
Next Week
Part 4: How Mr J McGovern approaches the construction of his argument that ‘the unborn’ does not include human embryos in vitro
Monday, March 1, 2010
Avatar Is James Cameron's Avatar prolife?
Avatar
Is James Cameron’s Avatar prolife?
Some critics of James Cameron’s Avatar saw nothing more than a breakthrough special effects extravaganza and dismissed the plot and characterisation as trivial and meaningless. Others saw and rejected it as an expression of Western ‘white man’s guilt’ at economic mistreatment and exploitation of less developed peoples. Others felt that they were being preached at, that Avatar was a green eco-sermon.
The first thing I would have to say about it as a movie experience was that, for me at any rate, it was a landmark experience of wonder. What attracts me more than anything in an imaginative story is the creation of a new world, a world with its own internally coherent order and ethos and feel, what J. R. R. Tolkien in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ calls ‘the making or glimpsing of Other worlds’.
The world we enter in Avatar is such a world, a new world -- immense, overwhelming, breathtaking, astonishing, surprising. I smiled all the way through with delight and awe at the giant Home Tree and the action that takes place in it, running up and down the branches, falling and jumping off them, and even riding along them at marvellous speed; at the floating Hallelujah Mountains roped together with huge vines knotted around great rocks; the wonderful flying sequences with the dragons (I know, they are Banshees, but that’s a hard one to swallow for an Irishman, and the Na’vi call them Ikrans, but if I call them that you won’t know what I’m talking about, so for me they are dragons); and the Tree of Souls and the Tree of Voices with the threads of light hanging down from them. I didn’t really need any action beyond these images to mark it down as a movie I would have to go back and see again.
But listening to people who said they got little or nothing more than a Wow from the film over the past month or two has prompted me to take a look at this sudden surge in critical response. Maybe part of what they dislike in the midst of the glorious panorama of multicolour is its rather conventional black and white ethical view of things? So what exactly is the taken-for-granted sense of right and wrong in Avatar? After all, it is the highest-grossing box-office success of all time so it obviously has some deep resonance with the cinema-going masses.
What are the animating ethical senses that propel the action of the movie and carry us along with it, moving us to identify with one character and not with others? A fairly obvious handful, I’d suggest:
In Avatar Cameron has returned to the giant space corporation of Aliens ready to put lives at risk for commercial reasons. What drives the plot is a commercial operation to strip-mine a priceless mineral on an inhabited planet, a moon, actually, with an atmosphere, which has no industrial development.
In artistic works, names sometimes reveal the nature of characters. To me some of the names in Avatar suggest moral elements in the plot. The name of the moon-planet that they are here to exploit is Pandora, named after the first woman in Greek mythology. She was given a box by the gods but told never to open it. If it was opened, she was warned, all the troubles of mankind would escape and run wild all over the world. Opening Pandora’s box, thus, involved breaking a divine command.
The name of the mineral the corporation is stripmining for, Unobtainium, identifies the mining company’s irresponsibly unrestrained greed and aggression as their motive for breaking the divine command of restraint and respect. The mineral cannot be obtained without breaking the divine command not to wreck the planet’s ecology and the way of life of the people who live there, an archaic hunter-gatherer people, the Na’vi.
The back-story to the movie is that we have so over-exploited the Earth in the future that no nature at all is left and the spaceships in the opening sequence are part of an outreach from a now energy-exhausted Earth to sustain our lives. The mission is to bring back the mineral at any costs.
When the shuttle brings us for the first time from the mother ship down to the mining base on the planet and we swoop in over the lush green forest, we see the vast gaping wound in the hills that is the giant strip-mining operation with its outsized, frightening people-dwarfing vehicles, a scene of nature devastated that reminded me of a photograph of strip-mining I saw in National Geographic. The transgression of the limits of fair and responsible economic activity and the use of mercenaries to drive out the inhabitants of the planet brings about in those who command and carry it out, a radical deformation of their own humanity.
The sense of the loss of self that is associated with the operations mounted from this base is captured in its name, Hell’s Gate. Those who pass out through these gates on their mining and anti-aboriginal missions are going against the Light, descending into the Hell of self-harmed humanity.
The head of the commercial operation is Selfridge. His name intimates the freezing to death of his self by greed and the abdication of his conscience to the corporation he works for. Meeting company targets irrespective of the human cost has quenched in his heart the respect that should be there for the way of life and the rights of those who stand in the way of his gaining access to the minerals he wants, and the compassion that should prevent him from ordering the violence that will destroy their lives as well as their home and their habitat. His language expresses belittlement and contempt for the people of the planet and an angry impatience to push them out of their home in the great Hometree so he can get at the minerals in the mother lode under the tree.
His brutal orders are carried out by Col. Quaritch. He has wrecked his humanity even more thoroughly than Selfridge. He is bursting with violence and his language savagely depersonalises the inhabitants of the planet as ‘savages’. We sense his explosive eagerness to get the go-ahead to lead his helicopter gunships and bombers, and ground troops armed to the teeth with modern weaponry on a seek and destroy mission against the forest people who are armed only with bows and arrows. Justice and compassion have been extinguished from his heart by aggression beyond the bounds of reason and responsibility.
If courage is the defining virtue of a soldier, then he has lost his humanity. Col. Quaritch's name may still faintly sound like ‘courage’, but the self-restraint that defines the courage of the soldier has been replaced by debasement as a mercenary at the service of quarrying for riches. On December 13th 1862, General Robert E. Lee is said to have remarked to General James Longstreet on Telegraph Hill during the battle of Fredericksburg, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.’ No sense of this spiritual danger for the soldier of losing one’s humanity by giving oneself over unrestrainedly to killing remains in Col. Quaritch, he is no longer able to give quarter.
The moral tension in Avatar hinges on us identifying with both sides in the conflict at the same time. For this to work there has to be a person we easily identify with who is a member of the powerful group and then identifies with the vulnerable group, enabling us to see things from both sides. In Avatar that Everyman is Sully, a Marine who has lost the use of his legs and so is in a wheelchair. ‘I joined the Marines mainly for the hardship’, he says, ‘all I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for.’
Selfridge gives him the mission of going among the natives of Pandora to see if he can learn anything that would enable them to persuade the Na’vi people diplomatically to ‘relocate’ voluntarily away from their Hometree so the company can mine the minerals under it. Col. Quaritch gives him a more duplicitous mission, to find out anything that could be used to force them to move or help the mercenary force move them by force if, or as Quaritch cynically says, when, diplomacy fails.
We identify with Sully’s joy when he regains the ability to walk 'through' the genetically engineered human/Na’vi body he is steering mentally, and we share his astonishment and enchantment as he enters the amazing forest world around the Hometree. And we follow him as his allegiance gradually shifts from the world of economic exploitation and military deception to the more wholesome life of the Na’vi people at one with their world of nature. He brings us with him morally as he becomes increasingly sickened and frightened by the contempt for the forest people shown by the corporate functionary who has submerged his conscience and personal responsibility in the institution he chooses to belong to, and the mercenary whose ethical sense is overridden by the violence in him just waiting for a rationalisation to be unleashed, indulged and acted out. Through Sully's response we are increasingly alienated from them by their willingness to deceive and betray the forest people and Sully himself. ‘The strong prey on the weak and nobody does a thing,’ Sully says.
Crucially for the moral tension in the movie, as the movie shifts back and forwards from the Hometree and Hallelujah Mountains to Hell’s Gate, we grow increasingly uneasy, together with Sully, as he realises how he has sullied his conscience by his participation in the deceptive betrayal of trust inherent in the mission he took on, which is essentially setting the forest people up for destruction.
Since his first days in Hell’s Gate, he has witnessed at first hand another way of relating to the forest people, tin tha actions and attitudes of Dr Grace Augustine. She is a religiously sceptical scientist who treats the Na’vi with respect. She has set up a school for their children and works among them. Through her Cameron leads us to a way of interacting with the forest people that, because it is respectful of them, does not harm our humanity when we adopt and practise it
Her name intimates Augustine’s book, The City of God, which sets out the inescapable interaction in our lives between the attunement to the Everlasting and the struggle for everyday existence in nature and society.
Augustine’s insight is that the two dimensions should interpenetrate. Respect and compassion for one another, heightened and refined in the heart’s straining for attunement to the Everlasting, should flow into our relationships with one another as justice. ‘Without justice,’ Augustine says, in the most famous sentence in the book, ‘governments are nothing but bands of robbers’. We are in no doubt as we listen to Selfridge and Quaritch that Hell’s Gate is a staging post for the excursions of a band of robbers.
Cameron leads us into his attempt to evoke the forest people’s religious experience through Dr Augustine’s scepticism and scientistic approach to it. As a scientist she does not believe in fairy tales, so she approaches the flow of energy that unites all living things on the moon/planet of Pandora experimentally, collecting samples and trying to measure and understand the energy flow mathematically. It is, she says, something like a neural interconnectivity joining everything together. Cameron has several fine symbols of this interconnectivity.
My favourite is the laying on of hands that follows Sully’s acceptance as a full member of the Na’vi. The camera rises over the people and pans down on them from above and in an effective symbol of the unity among the people, the people around Sully lay their hands on him, then the circle around them lay their hands on the shoulders of those who have already laid their hands on Sully’s shoulders, and a moving Mexican circle of solidarity ripples out until they are all united in a visible sign of the bond of unity among them.
Other symbols seek more directly to suggest the connectivity of all the life in the forest with its Ground – the bioluminescence that awakens when they run along the giant tree branches, the delicate floating or dancing light-seeds symbolising divine choice or favour, and the threads of light that hang down from the Tree of Voices and the Tree of Souls symbolising lines of communication with the ultimate source. And Dr Augustine’s openness to, and being pulled towards, this ‘religious’ tension towards the ultimate source of life is hinted at in her first name, Grace.
As her name suggests, the ultimate source of life cannot be commanded or constrained. We may call out to it and open ourselves towards it, they we have to wait. In the movie, Grace Augustine is wounded and dies. But the life force does not prevent or reverse her death. Within the religious experience of the forest people as Cameron evokes it, our existence as creatures is limited, we are born and we have to die, but death is not an evil but a moment of our existence as creatures; we come from life and when we die we continue to participate in it in some new and mysterious manner.
But Cameron goes a significant step further. He unambiguously allows the religious dimension of the sustaining source of the life force to become articulate. Throughout the movie, the Na’vi speak of and to ‘Eywa’, the ‘All Mother’, as an unseen personal source at the heart of life in the visible world. Indeed, the very sound of the name ‘Eywa’ is similar to contemporary vocalisations of the Tetragrammaton, and clearly is a personal name for a personal divinity. Some have seen pantheism in this, though pantheism would not experience the ground of the world's existence or the divine as a person.
I think that is to misunderstand what Cameron is about. He is making a movie so he has to make connections with us, his audience. His hero is a white, Western, American, not because he is 'obsessing about' or ‘working through’ or ‘imposing’ white guilt about colonialism, but, in my opinion, more mundanely, because that is the initial mainstream audience he has to connect with to get box-office lift-off for the movie. In the same way, in the Secondary World Cameron has created, the Na’vi are an archaic people living in a forest world, so in order to keep to the 'historically' credible form of religious consciousness such a people are popularly understood to have had, he portrays their religious experience as similarly archaic.
Further, Cameron is aiming his movie at a mass Western audience, first and foremost; and for that audience, widespread cultural loss of religious consciousness may safely be presumed among a significant proportion of them. So he is trying to make an imaginative connection for the audience with the imagined religious consciousness of an archaic forest people. He does this though the death of the sceptical scientist, Dr Grace Augustine, whose final words are addressed to Sully, ‘I’m with Eywa, she’s real.’ Is Cameron, then, ‘promoting’ belief in the Earth Mother or Earth Goddess? Again, I don't think so. I think he’s just making a movie that involves a sustained evocation of reality as experienced and understood religiously by an archaic people, and at the same time has to connect with a Western audience for many or most of whom alienation from living religious experience is a taken-for-granted.
As an emphatically not-de-religionised person myself, I don’t find Cameron’s evocation of the religion of the Na’vi in the slightest bit religiously threatening or offensive. A bit hokey, perhaps, but not bad for an artist working out of, and speaking to, a religiously alienated, largely secularised mass culture. As moderns we are, like Dr Grace Augustine, secularised maybe a bit too much. We believe in matter, in data; forgetting, perhaps, that even the word ‘matter’ has an echo in it still of the Latin word, mater, meaning ‘mother’; and that to speak of ‘data’, the given, is to invite the question, ‘Given by whom?’
And in the Jewish and Christian traditions one of the principal symbols chosen to express the intensity, the particularity, the warmth, the care of the divine for each one of us is based on the experience of motherhood and the fierce yet tender unconditional love of a mother for her baby. In the words of John Paul II,
'The second word that serves to define mercy is rahamim … rahamim, in its very root, denotes the love of a mother (rehem = mother’s womb). From the deep and original bond – indeed the unity - that links a mother to her child there springs a particular relationship to the child, a particular love. Of this love one can say that it is completely gratuitous, not merited, and that in this aspect it constitutes an interior necessity, an exigency of the heart. … Against this psychological background, rahamim generates a whole range of feelings, including goodness and tenderness, patience and understanding, that is, readiness to forgive.' (Dives in Misericordia, 1980, note 52)
The Bible ‘attributes these motherly characteristics to God when it uses the term rahamim in speaking of Him.’ This love, ‘faithful and invincible thanks to the mysterious power of motherhood’ is expressed for example in Isaiah: ‘Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should have no compassion, rahamim, on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.’ (Is 49.15)
I think in the context of the imaginary world conjured up by Cameron in Avatar, the religious symbolism is part of what he puts before us as a counterweight to show us what he believes is missing from hearts of the Selfridge and Quaritch. Something is missing from them that should stop them from destroying the forest people and the world that is their home and habitat, to extract minerals from it. How do we describe that something that they have closed their hearts to?
In order to be able to live properly, we need our lives to be embedded in a wider network of life, families and neighbourhoods, communities and societies, founded on respect for the right to life of each one – where that respect translates into a self-restraint that prevents the strong from destroying the weak simply because their being there stands in the way of us having what we want.
Avatar is about people whose hearts are hardened against respect for the right to life of people far more vulnerable than they are. They are so bent on knocking down the forest to get at the minerals underneath it that they are willing to destroy the lives of the people who live there and disrupt their way of life with all its interconnectedness social and ecological. They don’t care what they have to do as long as they can get what they want. The movie invites us to feel and see that people who feel and act in that way are humanly deformed and dimished by the dominance of this willingness to harm and destroy others less powerful, less advanced and more vulnerable than them selves; and part of the way it does so is by offering us an attractive vision of an archaic unity of the forest people with nature and the divine.
Avatar is prolife, then in the sense that it is a joyous, entrancing celebration of the beauty of life in nature and among people united in trust. But it is prolife also in a deeper, more ethical way. It calls forth from us as we allow ourselves to be immersed in it, the sense that we are all equal, even when it costs us to live out that equality. It moves us to feel that we should have equal respect for those who are vulnerable to us.
It moves us to ethical revulsion at the hardness of heart of those who destroy the lives, home and habitat of those who are at their mercy, through no fault of their own, simply because they are in the way.
Avatar, finally, moves us to feel that where others stand in the way of us having what we want, and they are at our mercy, then, more than in any other situation, we should exercise responsible self-restraint and compassion for them.
When we are watching a movie we ‘suspend disbelief’. Afterwards, we see that the story was exaggerated, that the baddies were too bad to be true and the goodies too good to be true; but that doesn’t stop us also feeling that, nonetheless, there was still a lot of truth in the story.
The final romantic and unrealistic battle-victory in Avatar reminds us that after all the evils had been let out of Pandora’s box, the one thing still left in the box was Hope.
But as we leave the cinema and return to realife, we bring with us a greater hope than we had before we saw the movie. We have been confirmed and upbuilt in the ethical senses that ground acknowledgemnt of the equality between us and those who differ from us and respect for the vulnerable and the realisation that we need to be fair and self-restrained in how we are with those who are weaker than we are and are at our mercy.
We return to daily life strengthened by the last gift in Pandora's box, Hope. That Hope will help us build a culture of equal respect for all, especially the vulnerable. After all, Hope is realistic. It reminds us that unlike the simplifications of the movies, the real people we live among are neither all good nor all bad; that our society, too, is a muddle of good and bad; but that it is not so damaged or corrupt that we may not set in motion by what we do changes for the better.
Is James Cameron’s Avatar prolife?
Some critics of James Cameron’s Avatar saw nothing more than a breakthrough special effects extravaganza and dismissed the plot and characterisation as trivial and meaningless. Others saw and rejected it as an expression of Western ‘white man’s guilt’ at economic mistreatment and exploitation of less developed peoples. Others felt that they were being preached at, that Avatar was a green eco-sermon.
The first thing I would have to say about it as a movie experience was that, for me at any rate, it was a landmark experience of wonder. What attracts me more than anything in an imaginative story is the creation of a new world, a world with its own internally coherent order and ethos and feel, what J. R. R. Tolkien in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ calls ‘the making or glimpsing of Other worlds’.
The world we enter in Avatar is such a world, a new world -- immense, overwhelming, breathtaking, astonishing, surprising. I smiled all the way through with delight and awe at the giant Home Tree and the action that takes place in it, running up and down the branches, falling and jumping off them, and even riding along them at marvellous speed; at the floating Hallelujah Mountains roped together with huge vines knotted around great rocks; the wonderful flying sequences with the dragons (I know, they are Banshees, but that’s a hard one to swallow for an Irishman, and the Na’vi call them Ikrans, but if I call them that you won’t know what I’m talking about, so for me they are dragons); and the Tree of Souls and the Tree of Voices with the threads of light hanging down from them. I didn’t really need any action beyond these images to mark it down as a movie I would have to go back and see again.
But listening to people who said they got little or nothing more than a Wow from the film over the past month or two has prompted me to take a look at this sudden surge in critical response. Maybe part of what they dislike in the midst of the glorious panorama of multicolour is its rather conventional black and white ethical view of things? So what exactly is the taken-for-granted sense of right and wrong in Avatar? After all, it is the highest-grossing box-office success of all time so it obviously has some deep resonance with the cinema-going masses.
What are the animating ethical senses that propel the action of the movie and carry us along with it, moving us to identify with one character and not with others? A fairly obvious handful, I’d suggest:
- The sense of the wrongness, the injustice and moral ugliness of deliberately killing innocent people;
- The sense that we are all equal;
- The sense that we are all equal especially to those who differ from us in appearance and size, cultural background;
- The sense that we are all equal to those we are inclined to feel culturally superior to;
- And even more so, the sense that we are equal to those who are less powerful than we are, less well positioned to defend their right to life that we are through no fault of their own;
- Most of all, though, the sense that we are all equal when it costs us to live out that equality; that we are equal to those who are vulnerable to us, who are at our mercy, through no fault of their own, whose mere existence stands in our way, stands between us and the enjoyment of what we have, whose lives we could, by a choice, bring to an end, thereby ending by the same stroke the inconvenience, the call to self-restraint and responsibility compassion for our fellow beings, that their equal humanity represents;
- The sense of the danger that we will be drawn, perhaps unstoppably, to harm others because they stand in the way of us having something we want;
- The awareness that we cannot destroy others, or trample on their entitlements, without first depersonalising them in our minds and in the language we use about them; and
- The horrifying discovery we make, if we are lucky, that in destroying others, not only do we harm or destroy them, we also in and by the same actions, harm or destroy ourselves as human persons.
In Avatar Cameron has returned to the giant space corporation of Aliens ready to put lives at risk for commercial reasons. What drives the plot is a commercial operation to strip-mine a priceless mineral on an inhabited planet, a moon, actually, with an atmosphere, which has no industrial development.
In artistic works, names sometimes reveal the nature of characters. To me some of the names in Avatar suggest moral elements in the plot. The name of the moon-planet that they are here to exploit is Pandora, named after the first woman in Greek mythology. She was given a box by the gods but told never to open it. If it was opened, she was warned, all the troubles of mankind would escape and run wild all over the world. Opening Pandora’s box, thus, involved breaking a divine command.
The name of the mineral the corporation is stripmining for, Unobtainium, identifies the mining company’s irresponsibly unrestrained greed and aggression as their motive for breaking the divine command of restraint and respect. The mineral cannot be obtained without breaking the divine command not to wreck the planet’s ecology and the way of life of the people who live there, an archaic hunter-gatherer people, the Na’vi.
The back-story to the movie is that we have so over-exploited the Earth in the future that no nature at all is left and the spaceships in the opening sequence are part of an outreach from a now energy-exhausted Earth to sustain our lives. The mission is to bring back the mineral at any costs.
When the shuttle brings us for the first time from the mother ship down to the mining base on the planet and we swoop in over the lush green forest, we see the vast gaping wound in the hills that is the giant strip-mining operation with its outsized, frightening people-dwarfing vehicles, a scene of nature devastated that reminded me of a photograph of strip-mining I saw in National Geographic. The transgression of the limits of fair and responsible economic activity and the use of mercenaries to drive out the inhabitants of the planet brings about in those who command and carry it out, a radical deformation of their own humanity.
The sense of the loss of self that is associated with the operations mounted from this base is captured in its name, Hell’s Gate. Those who pass out through these gates on their mining and anti-aboriginal missions are going against the Light, descending into the Hell of self-harmed humanity.
The head of the commercial operation is Selfridge. His name intimates the freezing to death of his self by greed and the abdication of his conscience to the corporation he works for. Meeting company targets irrespective of the human cost has quenched in his heart the respect that should be there for the way of life and the rights of those who stand in the way of his gaining access to the minerals he wants, and the compassion that should prevent him from ordering the violence that will destroy their lives as well as their home and their habitat. His language expresses belittlement and contempt for the people of the planet and an angry impatience to push them out of their home in the great Hometree so he can get at the minerals in the mother lode under the tree.
His brutal orders are carried out by Col. Quaritch. He has wrecked his humanity even more thoroughly than Selfridge. He is bursting with violence and his language savagely depersonalises the inhabitants of the planet as ‘savages’. We sense his explosive eagerness to get the go-ahead to lead his helicopter gunships and bombers, and ground troops armed to the teeth with modern weaponry on a seek and destroy mission against the forest people who are armed only with bows and arrows. Justice and compassion have been extinguished from his heart by aggression beyond the bounds of reason and responsibility.
If courage is the defining virtue of a soldier, then he has lost his humanity. Col. Quaritch's name may still faintly sound like ‘courage’, but the self-restraint that defines the courage of the soldier has been replaced by debasement as a mercenary at the service of quarrying for riches. On December 13th 1862, General Robert E. Lee is said to have remarked to General James Longstreet on Telegraph Hill during the battle of Fredericksburg, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.’ No sense of this spiritual danger for the soldier of losing one’s humanity by giving oneself over unrestrainedly to killing remains in Col. Quaritch, he is no longer able to give quarter.
The moral tension in Avatar hinges on us identifying with both sides in the conflict at the same time. For this to work there has to be a person we easily identify with who is a member of the powerful group and then identifies with the vulnerable group, enabling us to see things from both sides. In Avatar that Everyman is Sully, a Marine who has lost the use of his legs and so is in a wheelchair. ‘I joined the Marines mainly for the hardship’, he says, ‘all I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for.’
Selfridge gives him the mission of going among the natives of Pandora to see if he can learn anything that would enable them to persuade the Na’vi people diplomatically to ‘relocate’ voluntarily away from their Hometree so the company can mine the minerals under it. Col. Quaritch gives him a more duplicitous mission, to find out anything that could be used to force them to move or help the mercenary force move them by force if, or as Quaritch cynically says, when, diplomacy fails.
We identify with Sully’s joy when he regains the ability to walk 'through' the genetically engineered human/Na’vi body he is steering mentally, and we share his astonishment and enchantment as he enters the amazing forest world around the Hometree. And we follow him as his allegiance gradually shifts from the world of economic exploitation and military deception to the more wholesome life of the Na’vi people at one with their world of nature. He brings us with him morally as he becomes increasingly sickened and frightened by the contempt for the forest people shown by the corporate functionary who has submerged his conscience and personal responsibility in the institution he chooses to belong to, and the mercenary whose ethical sense is overridden by the violence in him just waiting for a rationalisation to be unleashed, indulged and acted out. Through Sully's response we are increasingly alienated from them by their willingness to deceive and betray the forest people and Sully himself. ‘The strong prey on the weak and nobody does a thing,’ Sully says.
Crucially for the moral tension in the movie, as the movie shifts back and forwards from the Hometree and Hallelujah Mountains to Hell’s Gate, we grow increasingly uneasy, together with Sully, as he realises how he has sullied his conscience by his participation in the deceptive betrayal of trust inherent in the mission he took on, which is essentially setting the forest people up for destruction.
Since his first days in Hell’s Gate, he has witnessed at first hand another way of relating to the forest people, tin tha actions and attitudes of Dr Grace Augustine. She is a religiously sceptical scientist who treats the Na’vi with respect. She has set up a school for their children and works among them. Through her Cameron leads us to a way of interacting with the forest people that, because it is respectful of them, does not harm our humanity when we adopt and practise it
Her name intimates Augustine’s book, The City of God, which sets out the inescapable interaction in our lives between the attunement to the Everlasting and the struggle for everyday existence in nature and society.
Augustine’s insight is that the two dimensions should interpenetrate. Respect and compassion for one another, heightened and refined in the heart’s straining for attunement to the Everlasting, should flow into our relationships with one another as justice. ‘Without justice,’ Augustine says, in the most famous sentence in the book, ‘governments are nothing but bands of robbers’. We are in no doubt as we listen to Selfridge and Quaritch that Hell’s Gate is a staging post for the excursions of a band of robbers.
Cameron leads us into his attempt to evoke the forest people’s religious experience through Dr Augustine’s scepticism and scientistic approach to it. As a scientist she does not believe in fairy tales, so she approaches the flow of energy that unites all living things on the moon/planet of Pandora experimentally, collecting samples and trying to measure and understand the energy flow mathematically. It is, she says, something like a neural interconnectivity joining everything together. Cameron has several fine symbols of this interconnectivity.
My favourite is the laying on of hands that follows Sully’s acceptance as a full member of the Na’vi. The camera rises over the people and pans down on them from above and in an effective symbol of the unity among the people, the people around Sully lay their hands on him, then the circle around them lay their hands on the shoulders of those who have already laid their hands on Sully’s shoulders, and a moving Mexican circle of solidarity ripples out until they are all united in a visible sign of the bond of unity among them.
Other symbols seek more directly to suggest the connectivity of all the life in the forest with its Ground – the bioluminescence that awakens when they run along the giant tree branches, the delicate floating or dancing light-seeds symbolising divine choice or favour, and the threads of light that hang down from the Tree of Voices and the Tree of Souls symbolising lines of communication with the ultimate source. And Dr Augustine’s openness to, and being pulled towards, this ‘religious’ tension towards the ultimate source of life is hinted at in her first name, Grace.
As her name suggests, the ultimate source of life cannot be commanded or constrained. We may call out to it and open ourselves towards it, they we have to wait. In the movie, Grace Augustine is wounded and dies. But the life force does not prevent or reverse her death. Within the religious experience of the forest people as Cameron evokes it, our existence as creatures is limited, we are born and we have to die, but death is not an evil but a moment of our existence as creatures; we come from life and when we die we continue to participate in it in some new and mysterious manner.
But Cameron goes a significant step further. He unambiguously allows the religious dimension of the sustaining source of the life force to become articulate. Throughout the movie, the Na’vi speak of and to ‘Eywa’, the ‘All Mother’, as an unseen personal source at the heart of life in the visible world. Indeed, the very sound of the name ‘Eywa’ is similar to contemporary vocalisations of the Tetragrammaton, and clearly is a personal name for a personal divinity. Some have seen pantheism in this, though pantheism would not experience the ground of the world's existence or the divine as a person.
I think that is to misunderstand what Cameron is about. He is making a movie so he has to make connections with us, his audience. His hero is a white, Western, American, not because he is 'obsessing about' or ‘working through’ or ‘imposing’ white guilt about colonialism, but, in my opinion, more mundanely, because that is the initial mainstream audience he has to connect with to get box-office lift-off for the movie. In the same way, in the Secondary World Cameron has created, the Na’vi are an archaic people living in a forest world, so in order to keep to the 'historically' credible form of religious consciousness such a people are popularly understood to have had, he portrays their religious experience as similarly archaic.
Further, Cameron is aiming his movie at a mass Western audience, first and foremost; and for that audience, widespread cultural loss of religious consciousness may safely be presumed among a significant proportion of them. So he is trying to make an imaginative connection for the audience with the imagined religious consciousness of an archaic forest people. He does this though the death of the sceptical scientist, Dr Grace Augustine, whose final words are addressed to Sully, ‘I’m with Eywa, she’s real.’ Is Cameron, then, ‘promoting’ belief in the Earth Mother or Earth Goddess? Again, I don't think so. I think he’s just making a movie that involves a sustained evocation of reality as experienced and understood religiously by an archaic people, and at the same time has to connect with a Western audience for many or most of whom alienation from living religious experience is a taken-for-granted.
As an emphatically not-de-religionised person myself, I don’t find Cameron’s evocation of the religion of the Na’vi in the slightest bit religiously threatening or offensive. A bit hokey, perhaps, but not bad for an artist working out of, and speaking to, a religiously alienated, largely secularised mass culture. As moderns we are, like Dr Grace Augustine, secularised maybe a bit too much. We believe in matter, in data; forgetting, perhaps, that even the word ‘matter’ has an echo in it still of the Latin word, mater, meaning ‘mother’; and that to speak of ‘data’, the given, is to invite the question, ‘Given by whom?’
And in the Jewish and Christian traditions one of the principal symbols chosen to express the intensity, the particularity, the warmth, the care of the divine for each one of us is based on the experience of motherhood and the fierce yet tender unconditional love of a mother for her baby. In the words of John Paul II,
'The second word that serves to define mercy is rahamim … rahamim, in its very root, denotes the love of a mother (rehem = mother’s womb). From the deep and original bond – indeed the unity - that links a mother to her child there springs a particular relationship to the child, a particular love. Of this love one can say that it is completely gratuitous, not merited, and that in this aspect it constitutes an interior necessity, an exigency of the heart. … Against this psychological background, rahamim generates a whole range of feelings, including goodness and tenderness, patience and understanding, that is, readiness to forgive.' (Dives in Misericordia, 1980, note 52)
The Bible ‘attributes these motherly characteristics to God when it uses the term rahamim in speaking of Him.’ This love, ‘faithful and invincible thanks to the mysterious power of motherhood’ is expressed for example in Isaiah: ‘Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should have no compassion, rahamim, on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.’ (Is 49.15)
I think in the context of the imaginary world conjured up by Cameron in Avatar, the religious symbolism is part of what he puts before us as a counterweight to show us what he believes is missing from hearts of the Selfridge and Quaritch. Something is missing from them that should stop them from destroying the forest people and the world that is their home and habitat, to extract minerals from it. How do we describe that something that they have closed their hearts to?
In order to be able to live properly, we need our lives to be embedded in a wider network of life, families and neighbourhoods, communities and societies, founded on respect for the right to life of each one – where that respect translates into a self-restraint that prevents the strong from destroying the weak simply because their being there stands in the way of us having what we want.
Avatar is about people whose hearts are hardened against respect for the right to life of people far more vulnerable than they are. They are so bent on knocking down the forest to get at the minerals underneath it that they are willing to destroy the lives of the people who live there and disrupt their way of life with all its interconnectedness social and ecological. They don’t care what they have to do as long as they can get what they want. The movie invites us to feel and see that people who feel and act in that way are humanly deformed and dimished by the dominance of this willingness to harm and destroy others less powerful, less advanced and more vulnerable than them selves; and part of the way it does so is by offering us an attractive vision of an archaic unity of the forest people with nature and the divine.
Avatar is prolife, then in the sense that it is a joyous, entrancing celebration of the beauty of life in nature and among people united in trust. But it is prolife also in a deeper, more ethical way. It calls forth from us as we allow ourselves to be immersed in it, the sense that we are all equal, even when it costs us to live out that equality. It moves us to feel that we should have equal respect for those who are vulnerable to us.
It moves us to ethical revulsion at the hardness of heart of those who destroy the lives, home and habitat of those who are at their mercy, through no fault of their own, simply because they are in the way.
Avatar, finally, moves us to feel that where others stand in the way of us having what we want, and they are at our mercy, then, more than in any other situation, we should exercise responsible self-restraint and compassion for them.
When we are watching a movie we ‘suspend disbelief’. Afterwards, we see that the story was exaggerated, that the baddies were too bad to be true and the goodies too good to be true; but that doesn’t stop us also feeling that, nonetheless, there was still a lot of truth in the story.
The final romantic and unrealistic battle-victory in Avatar reminds us that after all the evils had been let out of Pandora’s box, the one thing still left in the box was Hope.
But as we leave the cinema and return to realife, we bring with us a greater hope than we had before we saw the movie. We have been confirmed and upbuilt in the ethical senses that ground acknowledgemnt of the equality between us and those who differ from us and respect for the vulnerable and the realisation that we need to be fair and self-restrained in how we are with those who are weaker than we are and are at our mercy.
We return to daily life strengthened by the last gift in Pandora's box, Hope. That Hope will help us build a culture of equal respect for all, especially the vulnerable. After all, Hope is realistic. It reminds us that unlike the simplifications of the movies, the real people we live among are neither all good nor all bad; that our society, too, is a muddle of good and bad; but that it is not so damaged or corrupt that we may not set in motion by what we do changes for the better.
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