Defining Life

Let’s abandon economics, that dismal science, for a day and contemplate something simpler, like the nature of life.

Sarah Palin was challenged the other day on a strictly logical basis ( a refreshing change of pace) by an editorial writer who wondered why her Down syndrome baby Trig’s life was considered too precious to be aborted while, at the same time, Mrs. Palin supports capital punishment. How does she reconcile the two views as a Christian?

Good question. This has come to be called “the seamless garment” argument, recalling the seamless cloak Jesus wore and which the soldiers gambled for as capital punishment was being administered to Him.

Flipping through Bible pages back to the original Torah, the five books of Moses, we find the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 1- 13), the literal translation of one of them being “Do not commit murder.” When King James the First’s scholars were translating Exodus, no doubt cribbing from Tyndale, they rendered it in the now obsolescent second person as “Thou shalt not kill.”

For me, “kill” and “murder” are absolutely interchangeable so far as connotation is concerned. Both verbs refer to an unjust ending of a human life, such as a slaying for profit or out of anger. Elsewhere in the Torah, as crimes against God and man are enumerated by the Lord and the punishments prescribed, we find the death penalty. The point of noticing that is not because I propose that we “shall not suffer a witch to live,” but to demonstrate that the taking of life is permitted in a judicial setting. A crime is committed, a guilty party is named and suffers the penalty prescribed by the Law.

Here then is the difference between Trig Palin and, say, man on Alaska’s death row for murdering a convenience store clerk. Trig is innocent. Baby Palin was accused of no crime other than having a disability his family will find inconvenient. Death Row guy, on the other hand, took a human life for profit. He is actually guilty of something for which death is an appropriate punishment. Thus, Sarah Palin –and the rest of us morally opposed to abortion but favoring capital punishment-- wears a seamless garment, if the criterion for preserving life it its innocence.

As an unobservant Catholic I suppose I should be the last person in the world to stick up for the Magisterium, the teaching authority, of the Church. But the last two elections have been made interesting by candidates who seek to substitute their wisdom for the theology the Church has been struggling to evolve over the past 2,000 years.

We’ve had, in the most recent cycle, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Senator Joe Biden weighing in –as Catholics— on when they think that a fetus becomes a human being. The two of them got bogged down in Augustinian and Thomist arguments as to when the soul first inhabits the body –while ignoring the teaching of the Church that abortion is illicit at any time during a pregnancy –the status of the soul notwithstanding. They both got sharp raps on the knuckles from the Catholic bishops for that.

Most pro-choice Catholic politicians subscribe to the Mario Cuomo doctrine, which he enunciated at a speech at Notre Dame University some years ago. Briefly, Cuomo said that although on a personal level he accepts the Church’s teaching on abortion, as a public servant he cannot impose that personal, religious viewpoint on the general public, which may not share his faith.

It makes you wonder what he believes. If he believes –as a Catholic-- that abortion is the non-judicial taking of a life (remember “Do not commit murder?”), which is what the Church teaches, then as a pro-choice politician, he believes that a species of murder is allowable.

So how does a Catholic politician resolve this conflict? The answer is that he doesn’t.

Catholicism is not a buffet from which we might sample some dishes and leave others alone. It is in his acceptance of the Church’s teachings by which a Catholic is defined. If, especially in matters of life and death, a politician cannot accept church teachings, he or she should not identify himself as a “Catholic.” This leaves the Catholic politician with the stark choices of getting out of politics or changing one’s views at the risk of alienating the voting public.

There is the argument is that the Church has no business imposing its morality on the secular state. My answer is that it has already. What we consider to be right and wrong traces back, inevitably, to religious beliefs, be they pagan or Judaeo-Christian.

Certain acts, by their intrinsic injustice, were set apart as crimes by the earliest human societies. Not even a cannibal in a lost valley in New Guinea is free to steal what he wants or to kill without paying some form of compensation. Even in the most remote reaches of the Amazon, honesty is honored and liars execrated. From this most basic, instinctual understanding of justice have come our laws, sometimes defined in religious terms along the way, but always recognizably founded on an instinctual, visceral notion of what is right.

When we begin to redefine justice to suit our convenience or to evade responsibility, we open a Pandora’s box of troubles.