The academy set up to promote Catholic doctrine on human life and personal dignity has lost its way entirely, writes Hugh Somerville Knapman OSB
There are two ways to demolish a building. If you’re in a hurry and don’t mind attracting attention, you can either blow it up or employ a wrecking ball. If you have more time and don’t want people to notice, you can discreetly chip away at its foundations. A critical mind might look at recent developments at the Pontifical Academy for Life and wonder if an attempt at the second has strayed rather too close to the first.
In recent weeks there has been significant concern at the appointment to the Academy of Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College, London, who is a professed atheist and a public supporter of “reproductive rights”. Another recent appointee is Sheila Dinotshe Tlou, a former health minister in Botswana and a fervent advocate of artificial contraception. When the Catholic News Agency asked for her views on abortion, given her ambiguous attitude towards it on social media, she declined to comment.
In October another new member of the Academy, Robert Dell’Oro, a professor of moral theology at the Jesuit-run Loyola Marymount University in the United States, criticised the American Supreme Court for overturning Roe v Wade. He called it a violation of “personal liberty” that verged on “totalitarian”. At a speech in Los Angeles he also publicly supported abortion up to 16 weeks, or the point at which an embryo can feel pain.
The president of the Academy, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, defended the appointment of Professor Mazzucato, saying that social-media posts such as hers which claim that “abortion is health care” do not enable judgment of a person’s “deepest convictions”. He also claimed, to the Catholic News Service, that while her Twitter posts may have been pro-choice, they were not pro-abortion. With all due respect to Archbishop Paglia, that is a distinction devoid of substance.
Paglia also asserted of October’s tranche of Academy appointees that “they are not all Catholics and do not profess all the tenets of the Catholic faith. And we know there are differences on the level of ethics, but they defend life in its entirety.” Meanwhile the Academy’s spokesman, Fabrizio Mastrofini, observed that the Academy is “a study and research body” that allows “debate and dialogue… between people of different backgrounds.”
Some context may be helpful here. The Pontifical Academy for Life was founded in 1994 to engage in the fields of biomedicine and law as they pertain to “the promotion and defence of life, above all in the direct relation that they have with Christian morality and the directives of the Church’s Magisterium.” In 2016 it received new statutes, which introduced the possibility of appointing members without regard to their religion.
Instead, members may now be chosen on the basis of their “academic qualifications, proven professional integrity, professional expertise and faithful service in the defence and promotion of the right to life of every human person.” The new statutes also dropped the requirement for members to make a signed statement of commitment to defend life in accordance with the teachings of the Church; instead they are now required to “promote and defend the principles regarding the value of life and the dignity of the human person interpreted in conformity with the Magisterium of the Church.”
If there are non-Catholics who share the Catholic commitment to the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, then it is sensibly pragmatic to engage with them in the promotion of life. However, Mazzucato is an atheist who supports abortion, Dell’Oro is a Catholic who supports abortion, and Tlou is a Catholic who supports artificial contraception while ominously refusing to reveal her views on abortion. Somehow we are meant to see these appointments as conforming with even the less rigorous 2016 statutes.
Those statues are the seedbed for a change of direction for the Academy that Paglia announced in his introduction to an Academy publication last June, which also included challenges to the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception. The move reflects Pope Francis’s advocacy of “a radical paradigm shift, or rather – dare I say – ‘a bold cultural revolution’” in the 2021 apostolic constitution Veritatis Gaudium on ecclesiastical universities and faculties.
In terms of the Church’s doctrine on human life, and the Pontifical Academy for Life in particular, this “paradigm shift” can be seen in two areas. First, in the Academy’s personnel. One of the laws of policy process proposed by Morton Blackwell is that “personnel is policy”. Appointments to the Academy therefore both indicate and facilitate the direction of its work, and these three recent appointees manifestly do not accept Catholic teaching on critical aspects of human life.
Secondly, the Academy’s reformed statutes allow members to evade committing themselves to defend human life in accordance with the teachings of the Church. The turn to affirming mere principles on the value of human life and the dignity of the human person clearly represents a significant change of emphasis from the previous requirement for absolute commitment to magisterial teachings on human life from conception to natural death.
The Academy’s “paradigm shift”, then, is to accommodate non-Catholic views that chip away at the magisterial authority of the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception. The appointment to the Academy of members who hold that the dignity of the human person can be served by allowing a woman to exercise her supposed “reproductive rights”, represents a policy shift that blasts more than chips away at the Church’s clear teachings on the human personhood of the unborn.
It is reasonable that the Academy, which is called to seek the best ways to promote effectively to a hostile world Catholic doctrine on human life and personal dignity, might seek to understand this hostility by engaging constructively with those who know it from within. However, it is quite another matter to admit those who promote views clearly contrary to the Church’s teaching as full members of such a body. The Pontifical Academy for Life now seems but one of a myriad of think tanks, and is no longer an agent for evangelisation.
Dom Hugh Somerville Knapman is a monk of Douai Abbey
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