Archbishop of Sydney

His Eminence,
Cardinal George Pell
Cardinal Priest of the Title of S. Maria Domenica Mazzarello

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Home > Our Archbishop > Addresses, Statements & Media Releases > Article	Printable Version

The Challenge Thirty years on

Address to the 30 Year Anniversary Dinner of the Right to Life Association (NSW)
Sydney

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
13 September 2003

It is appropriate that the 30th anniversary of the Right to Life Association in NSW coincides with the 30th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade. As you know, this case commenced in Texas in 1969, and was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which found in 1973 that it was unconstitutional for any state to intrude “into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” There is no other way of describing the impact of this decision except as momentous. Certainly in the United States it has had a powerfully corrupting effect not only on the law but also on medicine – epitomised most terribly in the failure of attempts so far to ban partial-birth abortion, and the defence even of this procedure as a “right”.

It is not always remembered, however, that when it came to the legalisation of abortion Australian jurisdictions such as Victoria and New South Wales were ahead of the United States by several years. In Victoria, Justice Menhennitt ruled in 1969 that an abortion will be not be unlawful where a medical practitioner “honestly believed on reasonable grounds that the act done by him [in procuring the abortion] was necessary to preserve the woman from some serious danger.” Because a prosecutor would have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the physician did not honestly believe either that the procedure was necessary to preserve the woman from serious danger to her life or physical or mental health, or proportionate to that danger, the Menhennitt ruling effectively imposed a test that is, for practical purposes, impossible to meet.

Menhennitt’s test was adopted in New South Wales in 1971 and extended. Whereas in the Davidson case, Menhennitt construed the seriousness of the danger posed by the continuation of pregnancy as a medical matter (that is, as a medical danger to life or physical or mental health), Judge Levine in the Wald case applied the principle of necessity more broadly so that economic and social factors might also be taken into account in assessing what constitutes a “danger” to a woman’s physical and mental health in any given instance. This cemented the subjective nature of the test for when an abortion will be lawful and marked the end of any legal restraint on abortion in Australian jurisdictions. The law as set out in the Wald case was not disturbed by the Court of Appeal in New South Wales in the 1995 Superclinics case , and although the decision in Superclinics was appealed to the High Court, the matter was settled out of court. So unlike the situation in the United States, our highest court has not been given the opportunity to make a determination on abortion. Over the last thirty years this has made little practical difference, but we can only hope that one day it will be to the advantage of the pro-life cause.

Abortion, of course, is only one issue that those committed to life are concerned about. Those who warned thirty years ago about the way the legalisation of abortion would diminish respect for life generally, and especially for the lives of the most vulnerable and defenceless, have been proved right. The push for destructive embryonic research, cloning and euthanasia - even for depressed teenagers, according to Dr Nitschke – continues and remains strong. While we have not won every fight, there have been some significant victories, especially on euthanasia. On other issues we have managed to slow down the play – and we always need discretion as well as valour - while we hope for a favourable turn in the wind. It has been heroic work, and although we may not see it in our lifetimes I know the cause of life will win in the end. It is a great encouragement to me, as I am sure it must be to those who have been involved in Right to Life in New South Wales from the early days, to see a new generation step up to continue the work and to see it through to success.

The pro-life cause will succeed for the same reason that Christianity succeeded when it came to the ancient world: because in the face of suffering, hopelessness and selfishness only values which affirm human dignity and the goodness of life offer a way out of the darkness. I think it is useful to reflect on the early history of Christianity in the Roman world as a way of reflecting why this is so.

“Christianity served as a revitalization movement, [arising] in response to the misery, chaos, fear and brutality of life in the urban Greco-Roman world.” Consider the example of ancient Antioch. The character of everyday urban life for the ordinary people who lived in there, was much the same as for any other city in the Empire. The city walls contained an area of two square miles, in which lived 150,000 people at the end of the first century AD. This gave the city a population density of 117 inhabitants per acre, compared with 21 inhabitants to the acre in modern Chicago, or 37 inhabitants to the acre in New York City.

Keep in mind too that modern city-dwellers do not have to share their space with livestock. Most of the people lived in crowded tenements a few stories high, which often collapsed. The cubicles in which families lived were “smoky, dark, often damp and always dirty.” The streets were narrow, the main thoroughfare of the city being only thirty feet wide. For the masses, there was no sanitation, no soap, and limited water, frequently contaminated. It was not uncommon for corpses to be dragged out from the tenements and left in the street. Given these facts, and “the incredible density of both humans and animals, most people in Greco-Roman cities must have lived in filth beyond our imagining.”

Cities in Roman times were pestholes of infectious diseases, and as a consequence mortality rates were high and life expectancy at birth was less than thirty years. “At least half of the children died at birth or during infancy, and most of those who lived lost at least one parent before reaching maturity.” A constant and substantial influx of new-comers was required simply to maintain a city's population. At any given moment, a considerable proportion of the population consisted of recent arrivals. Like the Western world today. This meant that social attachments between people were weak and as a consequence, crime rates were very high. The constant large migrations of new comers undercut social integration of different ethnic groups, which is one of the reasons why the cities were so prone to riots.

Once Christianity appeared, “its superior capacity for meeting these chronic problems soon became evident and played a major role in its triumph.” In the world of the Roman Empire, “the central doctrines of Christianity prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations.” The way these doctrines took flesh in individual behaviour and organizational actions allowed it to become one of the most “sweeping and successful revitalization movements in history.” For example, “the simple phrase ‘For God so loved the world . . . ’ would have puzzled an educated pagan. And the notion that the gods care how we treat one another would have been dismissed as patently absurd.” In a world where pity and mercy were considered defects of character “unworthy of the wise and excusable only in those who have not yet grown up,” Christianity taught that God was merciful and that his mercy to us requires mercy on our part to others. All of this was entirely new to the pagan world, and the example offered by its being put into practice by the Christian community in the miserable cities of the Empire, was nothing short of revolutionary.

Most importantly, Christianity prompted liberating social relations between the sexes and within the family, and moderated class differences. Amidst contemporary denunciations of Christianity as patriarchal and sexist the fact that Christianity was unusually appealing to women in Roman times is generally overlooked. Infanticide of girl infants - usually by exposure - was accepted across all classes in the Greco-Roman world and widely practised, leading to a disastrous imbalance in the sexes and a chronic decline in population which government sought to address as early as 59 BC. Abortion was also frequently practised, the literature detailing an amazingly large number of techniques. Abortion was a major cause of death for women in the Roman world, and a major cause of infertility for those few who survived procedures carried out with neither soap nor a knowledge of bacteria, to say nothing of antibiotics. Women underwent abortion, despite the fact that in most cases it was a death sentence, because Roman law accorded the male head of the family literal power of life and death over his household, (something else which the Christian concepts of marriage and family would gradually change). Both infanticide and abortion were proscribed by Christian teaching from the very first, and as these teachings spread and were accepted by more and more people over time, the effect for women can only be described as radically liberating.

Christianity also provided a new concept of sexuality by linking it to love between husband and wife, and through this love to fertility. Most modern people even today and especially women still retain some concept of sex being related to love. This was not typically the case for the Romans. The frescoes in the baths at Pompeii and the decorations on vases and urns and other artefacts that have come down to us make the polymorphous nature of sexual activity in Roman times abundantly clear. To the extent that these images convey an impression of an erotic Arcadia, however, they are deeply misleading. While there was nothing that might not be done - including paedophilia and the staging of bestial rape in the amphitheatres - important points of status adhered to each and every act, and these points all revolved around the humiliation of one’s sexual partners. “The openness of display of Roman sexuality [was] an openness of display of power, power founded on domination and slavery, displayed before the eyes of every age, sex and condition.”

In this context, women who were regularly subject to the humiliation of degrading sexual practices explicitly understood as such were among the main beneficiaries of the Christian revaluation of sexuality. Christianity condemned these practices precisely because they degraded and humiliated people, and offered instead a concept of sexual pleasure based on love, mutual respect and the intrinsic dignity of human beings. We take this so much for granted even today that it is difficult for us to appreciate the enormous shift in attitudes it entailed, and its liberating effects. Many of the sexual practices of the ancient Romans developed in part as forms of contraception. In rejecting these practices, Christianity also rejected the cultural patterns that were causing the Greco-Roman pagan population to decline. Restoring the link between sexuality and fertility meant that Christians generally had higher fertility rates than the surrounding pagan population. This was one reason for the growth of the early church. Another was the high proportion of woman attracted to Christianity by the protection it offered them, and the high rate of intermarriage with the pagan population which brought the “secondary conversions” of their husbands and men folk.

When we consider the welfare services and the sense of solidarity that it brought to the social realm of the Roman world, together with the freedom from domination and the new sense of dignity that it imparted to individuals in the personal realm, the reasons for Christianity's development as a mass movement become clear. For a mass movement is what it was. The conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the first half of the fourth century AD has been misleading in this regard, sometimes causing scholars to see Christianity as the creation of a small elite. But the evidence suggests that Constantine's conversion is better understood as a response to what had become by then a massive exponential growth in the size of the Church. The cause of this growth lay in what Christianity gave to its converts, which was nothing less than their very humanity. It is in defence of this humanity that the Church continues its work of service today.

What Christianity gave to its converts in the ancient world it still has in abundance to give to the world today. This history shows that the world can be changed, that in the course of two or three generations the foundations can be laid for a whole new understanding of life. We should reflect on this experience and draw inspiration from it. The message of dignity, respect and the inviolable value of each individual; the message, in short, of life and love, is a message our world is yearning to hear. It is this message which I know Right to Life in New South Wales will take to the highways and byways over the course of the next thirty years.