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A Practicing Catholic Debates the Questionable Teachings of the Catholic Bishops Regarding Abortion (BOOK REVIEW)

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However, if people consider O'Brien's dispassionate critique of the Catholic bishops to be cogent, shouldn't they feel a spark of anger against the Catholic bishops for failing to articulate an intelligent, reasonable, responsible position regarding abortion in the first trimester? Or are we Americans to overlook the failures of the Catholic bishops and chalk up the shortcomings in their reasoning to their passion and zeal as imitators of the ancient Hebrew prophets such as Amos?

 

It seems to me that the Catholic bishops have been given a free pass by the NEW YORK TIMES, for example. In a recent editorial in the NYTIMES titled "A Matter of Life or Death" (December 23, 2010), the editorial writers refer to the teachings of the Catholic bishops regarding abortion as "religious doctrine." The word "doctrine" means teaching; the Catholic bishops are obviously "religious" authority figures; therefore, their teaching regarding abortion can be dubbed "religious doctrine." But by dubbing the ethical teachings of the Catholic bishops as "religious doctrine," the editorial writers give the Catholic bishops' ethical teachings regarding abortion a free pass, instead of subjecting those teachings to careful scrutiny.

 

Ethics has been a branch of Western philosophy at least since the time of Plato and Aristotle. Moreover, Aristotle taught that we should consider the character of persons who advance philosophic arguments. Therefore, I urge all Americans to consider the ethical character of the Catholic bishops who transferred priests accused of sex abuse from parish to parish and from country to country. The actions of Catholic bishops who transferred priests accused of sex abuse speak louder than their words do in the ethical teachings that they advance regarding abortion in the first trimester.

 

For a scholarly discussion of Aristotle's views concerning the character of people who advance philosophic arguments, the interested reader should see Mark D. Morelli's article "Reversing the Counter-Position: The "Argumentum ad Hominem' in Philosophic Dialogue" in the irregularly published periodical titled the LONERGAN WORKSHOP, volume 6 (1986): pages 195-230.

 

In his book RENDER UNTO DARWIN: PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT'S CRUSADE AGAINST SCIENCE (Open Court, 2007, pages 95-120), James H. Fetzer, my former colleague at the University of Minnesota Duluth, works with deontological ethical theory to work out dispassionately a position on abortion in the first trimester that I find acceptable.

 

Finally, I should mention Barbara Koziak's book RETRIEVING POLITICAL EMOTION: THUMOS, ARISTOTLE, AND GENDER (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). In the book's title Koziak refers to retrieving political emotion. However, she does not mean that emotion has been lost from our political debates and that we should therefore set about retrieving it, as we might retrieve a lost object. Instead of meaning that kind of retrieval, she means that we need to retrieve the role of political emotion in our theory about politics and political discourse. In short, in our theory about politics, political emotion has been "lost" or left out. But Aristotle did not leave political emotion out of his theory of political discourse.

 

In his famous treatise about civic debate known simply as the RHETORIC (aka THE ART OF RHETORIC), Aristotle identifies three sources of appealing to the audience that the public speaker uses in his or her civic discourses: (1) logos, (2) pathos, and (3) ethos.

 

I have already acknowledged that the Catholic bishops are authority figures in the Roman Catholic Church. This is their ethos, their claim to authority and credibility. Unfortunately, most of their critics, including O'Brien and me, cannot establish an ethos as easily as the Catholic bishops can. Therefore, their critics should use ad hominem arguments about their supposed credibility by reminding everybody of the dubious ethical behavior of Catholic bishops in transferring priests accused of sex abuse from parish to parish and even from country to country.

 

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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