The World will Regret Euthanasia based upon Secular Religion

The Catholic Register in Canada reports that Dr. Margaret Somerville, a world-renowned bio-ethicist warns that advanced Western nations have made a fatal mistake with the adoption of euthanasia.

Here are excerpts from the article by Glen Argan:

The onset of state-sanctioned euthanasia represents a “seismic shift” in values that the world will someday regret . . .

“I believe history will see the legalization of euthanasia as the most world-changing decision of the 21st century, and that they will view it with enormous regret,” said Margaret Somerville in a Nov. 26 lecture.

Among the moral values rejected by legalizing euthanasia are respect for authority, the common good and a sense of sanctity, she said.

“I believe we all need a sense of the sacred whether or not we are religious.”

. . . . In Edmonton, speaking at Providence Renewal Centre during an event sponsored by the centre and Newman Theological College, she said proponents of traditional values need to find ways to convince supporters of progressive values to reject practices such as euthanasia.

“We’re never going to coerce the progressive-values people to think differently, but we have a very good chance of persuading them,” she said.

One crucial step to that end is to be adamant about eliminating the pain and suffering of the dying without killing the person along with their pain, she said. Society has lost its ability to find meaning in suffering, something that used to happen in a religious context.

In their judgment in the Carter case which legalized euthanasia in Canada, the Supreme Court justices used the words “suffer” or “suffering” 212 times, she noted.

Somerville recalled that when she began speaking of “the secular sacred” about 10 years ago, “everybody got mad at me.” Religious people maintained she was denigrating the sacred, while secularists and atheists said she was trying to impose religion on them.

Yet perspectives such as atheism and environmentalism are secular religions, Somerville said. “It’s a lot better if people have secular religions than no religion at all.”

That sets the ground for dialogue in which those with traditional values can argue that secularists have much in common with them, she said. “That’s a very important move.”

For example, instead of speaking of the sanctity of life — a term secularists reject — one should emphasize “a deep respect for human life.”

. . . . Working with Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher, also an internationally known bioethicist, Somerville says, “We’re going to give them some high-powered bioethics . . . ”

ADVENT I

Litany in Procession and Sung Mass, 

ADVENT I, Sunday, Nov. 27 

12:30 noon 

 St Thomas More, 263 Roncesvalles, Toronto

RIP Leonard Cohen, one of our elder brothers in faith, as Pope St. John Paul II referred to the Jewish faithful.

Leonard Cohen had a profound respect for Jesus and for Christians.  Here is a thought he expressed about the Peace of Christ:

“As I understand it, into the heart of every Christian, Christ comes, and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the heart becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace. In the absence of this experience much activity arises, divisions of every sort. Outside of the organizational enterprise, which some applaud and some mistrust, stands the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.”

Trump and Clinton -- much of a muchness

Fr. Raymond de Souza, whom I had the pleasure to drive to the train after he addressed our Ordinariate Clergy and Clergy wives Assembly in Niagara last month, has some insights into the political situation south of the border.

The following is excerpted from an article of his published this week by the NATIONAL POST:

One hundred years ago this month, after nearly 68 years as emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph died, leaving the throne to his grandnephew Charles. The last ruler of the Hapsburg monarchy had a short reign, the liquidation of his empire and the abolition of his royal house being among the terms of peace that ended the First World War. Driven into exile, he died in Madeira before his 35th birthday.

Marriage in 1911 to Zita

Charles was a holy man who understood that he had a duty to serve his people and to work assiduously for peace. In 2004, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II. 

This election day in the U.S., the witness of Blessed Charles is a reminder that holiness and high office are not incompatible, and that great power can be a means of humble service. That he reigned a century ago is also a reminder that history is not a matter of progress, for the descent of man, and woman, from Blessed Charles to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, is steep and stomach-churning.

. . .  the service that Trump has rendered was to expose just how nasty the establishment culture of entitlement is in America, of which the Clintons are both exemplars and experts.

The Economist has spent the entirety of 2016 expressing the exasperation of the transatlantic establishment, which believes that Americans have been insufficiently appreciative of Clinton. After all, the “establishment politics that Mrs Clinton encapsulates almost to the point of parody” is what voices like The Economist think, on balance, is a good thing.

. . . it is also true that, in Hillary Clinton’s 40 years in public life, she has mastered the art of prevarication. Her husband, possessing greater charm, preferred the brazen lie. Nevertheless, despite the cataract of untruths that cascaded from Trump, he did tell one truth over and over again: America’s political establishment could be bought and sold. He knew this because he had bought and sold it himself, while attending to his celebrity properties.

Trump ran for president having held no public office. A lacuna to be sure, but surely as troubling is the permanent political class, which does nothing but trade public offices. The Clinton family business of personal enrichment through public office is odious, but by no means unique. It has become something of a norm, but no one has done it better, or for as long. To hear Clinton and her ilk speak of public service is nauseating, unless it is to be understood as the public servicing her family.

Yet this is the way the permanent political class operates. They decide who is in and who is out, and whatever arrangements need to be made to protect each other. When Trump blasted the Clintons last summer for having a man as repellent at Anthony Weiner in their inner circle, it was one of many ways in which the privileges of the political class were finally being called into question.

. . .  It took a wealthy man entirely outside the normal partisan apparatus to say what no one in the imperial court is permitted to say — namely, that the system is corrupt, and that the Clintons, seeking the White House a quarter-century apart, are this generation’s most corrupt couple.

Hillary Clinton, with the connivance of the partisan and media establishment, the co-operation of a politicized justice system and resources accrued from rapacious influence-peddling, will have heaved herself over the finish line for the presidency as she always has: within the rule, but just so. Trump changed the rules in 2016 . . . 

Fr. Hunwicke on Relics with a Greek Lesson

Fr. Hunwicke offers an historical and contemporary reflection on holy relics as we continue this month to remember those who have gone before us in faith.

I rejoice in the facility of offering the Holy Sacrifice on an Altar sealed with Relics; it is a relief to be able to be ecumenical, to conform to the consensus of the Latin West and the Byzantine East, that one should sacrifice over, as it were, the tombs of the martyrs. If a custom was good enough for the shell-shocked Church which in the fourth century emerged, metaphorically, from the catacombs with an overwhelming sense of being surrounded and supported by a great crowd of witnesses, martyres, then that custom is good enough for me. Even if the post-conciliar Church has gone a bit soggy on relics. I commend to those whose breviaries contain the old Appendix pro aliquibus locis the fine collect and the superb reading from S John Damascene they will find on November 5.

Not that the veneration of relics is as late as the fourth century. The contemporary account of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, the disciple of St. John, embodied in the Encyclical which his Church at Smyrna sent to the  Catholic world in the middle of the second century, links the desire of the faithful for his relics with the doctrine of the Communio Sanctorum, the Communion of Saints: "they hoped to koinonesai* with his holy flesh". So, although the hatred of the local Jewish community drove the Romans to burn his body, his people gathered up even the ashes and placed them where they could meet for Mass annually on the genethlion* of his martyrion*, for a mneme* of those who had proathlekoton* and the askesis* and preparation of those who were going to bear witness.

Most immediately pre-conciliar local calendars made today, November 5, the Feast of the Holy Relics; according to Sarum it was on the Sunday after the Translation of St. Thomas, i.e. in July; at Exeter on the Monday after Ascension Day.

Greek key: *share fellowship with; *birthday; *act of witness=martyrdom; *monument; *previously competed as athletes [a regular term for martyrdom]; *training. [I cannot restrain myself from two catty comments: that the current post-conciliar Roman regulations do not permit the use within altars of such relics as the tiny fragments gathered up by those who loved S Polycarp; and that, for sola Scriptura people, Acts 19:12 appears to encourage the use of Secondary Relics; and II Kings 13:21 the use of Primary Relics.]

Dr. Edward Norman and the Crisis of Authority in the Anglican Communion

One of the great theologians of the Church of England wrote of the crisis in doctrinal authority which led to his reception into the Catholic Church several years ago.  Re-reading this piece may be of encouragement to others who are now on the ‘journey home.’

 Dr Edward Norman was Canon Chancellor of York Minster and is an ecclesiastical historian. He is an emeritus Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge and now a member of the Catholic Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham  This article was first published in the Catholic Herald and is excerpted here. The bolding is mine.

It is not joining the Catholic Church which is intellectually or emotionally difficult: it is leaving the Church of England that is hard. This is not because the Anglican understanding of Christianity is particularly consistent or persuasive, very much not, but because over the years loyalties accumulate, friendships are established and styles of worship become fixed. How could it be otherwise?

. . . It was from books, and from a study of Christian thinkers and apologists, that my knowledge of the faith derive.

Among a fellowship of believers a sense of shared faith can also bring palpable blessings, but in the end these things (Church members being humans and not angels) are a fragile basis for a sustained adhesion to a religious life. What is needed, in some form of words or other, is a clear Doctrine of the Church, a sacramental view of the relationship between Christ and his followers on earth [what Newman called the dogmatic principle].

At its simplest (and therefore most useful) expression the Church is the body of Christ in the material world.

The unfolding truths were first delivered to fishermen of Galilee, and were to be received, as Our Lord himself declared, by such as little children. Christ did not entrust his message, and the gift of salvation, to a body of writings, or a philosophical formula, or a prescribed order of society: he entrusted himself to a people the People of God, the Church. By very definition, as a result, the Church must be universal, and there can be no such things as a National Church. The essentials of Faith cannot differ from place to place, or culture to culture, although particular rites or interpretations of practice may legitimately vary, not in essentials but in applications.

The problem for the theologians and theoreticians has always been to determine which things are essential and which are not. There is also, as the Catholic Church teaches, a hierarchy of truths, some of which are more applicable in some circumstances and times, than in others, but which are all nevertheless truths. And there are errors which, because of the ease with which humans allow their passions and enthusiasms to correspond too closely to their desires, are only too readily misunderstood as authentic developments of the exhortations of the Saviour.

Now the main difference between Catholic Christianity and Anglicanism is the nature of the Doctrine of the Church itself. It is not that Catholicism has one understanding and Anglicanism another; it is that Catholicism has such a doctrine and a very clear one and that Anglicanism does not really have one at all. 

Far too much was left unattended at the Reformation, when English Christianity was detached from the centre of unity and from the Magisterium of the universal Church, leaving the Church in England without a means of determining its own doctrines. No one could have foreseen at the time that the split with Rome was to prove permanent. And so for the next three and a half centuries doctrine in the Church of England was determined by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council [Today in many places in the Anglican Communion doctrine is determined by majority vote in synods by people.]

 . . . Anglicanism has no basis for its authority which links it to a universal body. The consequent effect has been that every section of it and, in these days of spiritual individualisation, every person in it feels free to make up faith for themselves and deem the result to be Christianity. How can the Church be the body of Christ in the world when its confession varies from place to place and person to person, not only in minor but in the most essential teachings about faith and morals? At the centre of Anglicanism is a great void.

Catholic readers will perhaps find this all very obvious. It is not. However, the way things are seen in the Church of England where there is actually very little consciousness of any need to think about the authority of Christian teaching at all. Moral issues are determined, where they are determined at all, on the basis of data furnished by media presentation or the findings of surveys of opinion. Doctrinal questions do not in reality get much airing, largely because there is so little common ground for precise formulations or any stomach for debating them and, anyway, there is no authority for determining the basis of authority, short, one supposes, of legislation in Parliament. As for Christian morality, there is a procession of tawdry public controversies. With every compromise the truths of which the Church of England purports to be the guardian mean less and less.

Seeking to join the Catholic Church, after the experiences of years of exposure to these ecclesiastical inconsequences in the Church of England, induces not only a feeling of coming home but a sensation of cleansing. Humanly speaking, nevertheless, gratitude to Anglicanism is still experienced, and a large degree of lasting affection. The Church of

England provides a master class in equivocation; it also, however, is the residence of very many good and faithful Christian people who deserve respect for their perseverance in so many incoherent spiritual adventures. To leave their company is a wrench; to adhere to the Catholic faith is to join the encompassing presence of a universal body of believers in whose guardianship are the materials of authentic spiritual understanding. After lengthy preparation I have immense gratitude.