Our People

Clones, Consciences and Campion

Annual Lecture to Campion College Australia

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
8/6/2007

I call heaven and earth as my witnesses this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live.

– Deut 30:19

1. To bravely go where few have gone before
In recent years our parliamentarians have been permitted a number of so-called ‘conscience votes’ on certain ‘moral’ matters unconstrained by their party machines or lines. During such votes they become, as it were, ‘independents for a day,’ or at least for a few minutes. One such vote was held on 7 June 2007, when 65 New South Wales MPs voted for, and 26 against, the Human Cloning and Other Prohibited Practices Amendment Bill 2007 introduced into the Parliament only a week before. The Bill redefines the human embryo so that it is no longer an embryo in NSW law during their first day or two after conception.   It would also legalise the following practices:

• some human embryo cloning – which makes a human embryo with only one genetic parent
• mixing the genetic material of more than two persons – which might make a human embryo with three or more genetic parents
• fertilizing immature eggs taken from aborted girls with adult male sperm – which might make a human embryo with an aborted baby girl as its genetic 'mother'
• creating human-animal hybrids as a test for sperm quality – which makes an embryo with a human genetic parent and an animal genetic parent.

All these practices are currently illegal in NSW. Under this Bill they will be permitted under licence provided that the embryos are killed within two days of their manufacture in some cases and within two weeks in others. It is forbidden to try to ‘save’ these embryos by placing them in the body of a woman.

In announcing the Bill Premier Morris Iemma, previously cautious about legalising ‘therapeutic cloning’,  now offered three reasons for recommending it to his fellow MPs:

• this is ‘vital’ medical research providing hope to thousands of people who are suffering diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and spinal injuries
• NSW must not risk losing its research scientists to other states such as Victoria or falling behind them in its research
• it will ensure national consistency in this area.

Just why national consistency is desirable in what is largely a state matter under the Constitution was not explained: certainly NSW is happy to go its own way on many other issues. As Cardinal Pell said in his statement on behalf of all the NSW Bishops on Monday last: "A matter of such dramatic ethical and social import should not be rushed through Parliament in a week… [Nor should] the NSW Parliament blindly follow the lead of other parliaments in passing such unethical legislation."

As a fop to the morally queasy Premier Iemma headed his News Release NSW Legislation to Maintain Ban on Human Cloning and declared that "The strict ban on human cloning will remain in place now and forever in NSW under a Labor Government."  That claim is either deliberately misleading or plain confused. The principal purpose of the Bill is in fact to allow some cloning while prohibiting other cloning. So no “strict ban on human cloning” is being effected; quite the opposite. Furthermore, in allowing amendments to the Bill and a conscience vote, the Premier is in no position to give such iron-clad guarantees even for this week, let alone into the indefinite future. And why would anyone believe that the last remaining prohibitions on some cloning “will remain in place now and forever in NSW” given that only four years ago Mr Iemma’s government banned with similarly solemn declarations what he now proposes to legalise?

The NSW Minister for Science and Medical Research – and also for Women – Verity Firth, who introduced the Bill to Parliament, declared that it would allow the production of patient-specific embryonic stem-cells, thereby minimising immuno-rejection.  The Minister for Health, Reba Meagher, spoke along similar lines to Ms Firth, and their opposition counterparts, Jillian Skinner and Pru Goward, did also. On this basis one can presume all four favour the massive egg harvesting from NSW women that will be necessary to allow embryos to be created in such numbers, with all its attendant invasiveness and risks for the women.  But no female MP addressed this problem.  Instead Minister Firth declared her Bill is “compassionate, forward-thinking and balanced” and would keep NSW “technically and economically” competitive.

Let us look at where such Star Trekish imperatives can take us in less than five light years. Until 2002 destructive embryo experimentation was illegal in many parts of Australia. From late 2002 destructive experimentation upon certain older stored and ‘surplus’ IVF embryos was permitted under licence throughout Australia, while newer embryos were protected and creating human embryos for such purposes by IVF or cloning was prohibited. In 2005 the protection of the newer IVF embryos was allowed to lapse under a sunset clause. Mr Justice Lockhart and a team of rather like-minded reviewers then proposed that most of the remaining protections be removed.  Passing resistance from the Prime Minister was followed by a quick Senate Inquiry into two bills  and the passage of the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Act 2006. The Act, which legalised most of the embryo industry’s then wish list, was passed by a smaller majority than many expected, but sadly even some professedly Catholic, Christian or pro-life MPs supported the new law. The two ‘Catholic’ state premiers, Steve Bracks and Morris Iemma led the charge to be the first states to mimic the Federal laws, largely deregulate the embryo industry, and so bravely go where few have gone before.

2. Information underload
The truncated Lockhart Inquiry into the 2002/3 laws failed to canvass many issues it should have. At the time of the Inquiry there was plenty of hype about the embryonic stem-cell panacea and the supposed need for fresh IVF embryos, human clones and, of course, lots of government funding. But no-one guessed that as well as embracing these practices the embryo industry and the Lockhart Committee would press for the legalisation of human-animal hybrids, multi-parent embryos, aborted-mother embryos, redefining some embryos as non-embryos and limiting Parliamentary scrutiny in this area. Certainly there was no effort by the Lockhart Committee to test public reaction to such proposals at the hearings and ethical considerations were largely excluded.

We should not underestimate the level of ignorance amongst both the general public and our political leaders about what is really at stake here. Victorian Health Minister Bronwyn Pike, for instance, enthusiastically supported her Premier’s ‘trail-blazing’ in this area, explaining that: “We’re talking about experimentation on human eggs, and some people do have concerns, but I weighed it up on a personal level as did most other MPs, and I came to the conclusion that I think this is a good way forward.” Leaving aside for a moment how she did this weighing, what is depressing is that a state health minister – whose own brother runs one of this country’s finest bioethics institutes – could think that what was at issue was experimentation on human eggs. No-one, including the most enthusiastic embryo experimenter, thinks eggs are all that is at issue. It is, after all, human embryonic stem-cells they want.

Victorians are not uniquely confused on these matters. Consider the antics of our previous state Premier, Bob Carr. Casting aside his considerable critical intellect and customary humanist rhetoric, he became a head-over-heels enthusiast for the stem-cell panacea whatever the ethical and social cost.  Mr Iemma’s press statement this past week was almost as extravagant, though there were no photo shoots in hospitals with patients being promised a cure ‘any time now’. No honest worker in the embryo industry thought then or thinks now that we are on the verge of cures of people with major brain damage or degenerative nervous system disorders, yet both our Premiers have talked as if cures are on the near horizon. The same high-blown but cruelly misleading promises have too often been heard in our media.

Our leaders are not necessarily given much opportunity to become better informed. For all their supposed scientific credentials, the embryo industry and its industry-partners in certain disability groups cleverly avoided presenting much real science as they bombarded MPs with the testimony of pleading patients. The Lockhart and Senate Inquiries allowed very little time for public debate and submissions. The Bill was rushed through the New South Wales Legislative Assembly with unseemly haste, leaving parliamentarians little time for consultation. I suspect that only a tiny proportion of the general public knew then or know now what the bills are about. Few understand what cloning is, let alone all the code-words being used to cover it up.  Few guess the range of morally abhorrent practices being proposed.

3. Compassionate, forward-thinking and good science
The Church is not anti-science, anti-patients, anti-cures or even anti-stem-cells. We embrace any research with real prospects of serving humanity as long as it is conducted in ethical ways. Embryonic stem-cell researchers have no monopoly on being “compassionate and forward-thinking” whatever the spin-doctors say. Our best scientific advice is that non-embryonic stem-cells (derived from adults and cord blood) actually hold out far more promise therapeutically than the currently fashionable embryonic stem-cells; they certainly have more therapeutic runs of the board.  Such cells have now been found in almost every body tissue and have some of the same pluripotent capacity of embryonic stem-cells to transdifferentiate into many kinds of body tissues.  In groundbreaking Australian research — part-funded, I am proud to say, by the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney — nasal stem-cells have likewise been directed to grow into cardiac, liver, kidney, nerve and muscle tissue types.  These cells have “a developmental repertoire close to that of embryonic stem-cells” but less inclination to chaotic development as tumours.  Non-embryonic stem-cells have already been shown to be effective in tissue repair after stroke, spinal cord injury, diabetes, heart damage, Parkinson’s disease, and many cancers and autoimmune diseases.  Recently the Journal of Clinical Oncology reported that more than 45,000 people now receive adult stem-cell transplants each year and that within ten years most are as healthy as their peers.

Yet while non-embryonic stem-cell research remains underfunded, embryonic stem-cell and cloning research are all the rage in Australia and have caught the imagination of many labs, corporations and governments. People might be surprised to learn, however, that:

• embryonic stem-cells have still not demonstrated any therapeutic benefit to anyone
• there are no current clinical treatments using such cells
• there have been few if any successes in animal models
• it is very difficult to obtain pure petri cultures of embryonic stem-cells or to establish and maintain embryonic stem-cell lines
• immuno-rejection of these cells can only be avoided by creating identical embryonic twins of each patient and deriving patient specific embryonic stem-cells
• this requires large numbers of human eggs derived invasively and at significant risk from women
• a large proportion of cloned embryos are genetic disasters anyway and thus unsuitable as sources of embryonic stem-cells for therapies and
• those embryonic stem-cell products which are not immunological or genetic calamities are very hard to control and may very well cause tumour formation and/or tissue destruction. 

So far, at least, the embryonic stem-cell panacea is not only an ethical nightmare but also the purest science fantasy.

A few brave researchers are now wondering publicly why we continue to pump so much of the limited medical research resources into cloning and embryonic stem-cells. Dr Peter Rathjen, head of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Adelaide, said: “It’s bloody nonsense that stem-cells might be able to cure Alzheimer’s. We don’t even know what causes it.” Dr Colin Masters, a neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne, agreed: “Stem-cell people might have an argument for replacing [dead cells] in traumas like strokes or spinal injuries, but in diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, it is beyond our imagination.”  But others keep up the pressure with their promises of miracle cures. The story is yet to be written on why so many researchers, funders, reporters and politicians were so smitten with the embryo industry and how non-embryonic stem-cell researchers were so effectively silenced while their projects were cash-starved and the glamour bucks went to the embryo people.

But here is a few pointers for those who might like to write that story… The embryo industry has saturated its mar¬ket. There are dozens of ‘providers’, often drawing upon the public purse. They are already giving some infertile couples dozens of IVF cycles, as well as some fertile ones. Extending artificial reproductive technologies to surrogates, singles, lesbians, widows, the ‘psychologically’ or ‘socially’ in¬fertile’ – as has recently been proposed in Victoria – as well as people who want babies designed for matched tis¬sue to use in other children or for preferred characteristics such as deafness – none of this will raise demand nearly enough to satisfy the industry. So major new reasons for embryo production must be found. Were medical science to go down the track of adult stem-cell therapy, taking and multiplying cells from the patients themselves, there will be no embryo new manufacturing, no patents of embryo products and no large-scale financial gains for the embryo industry or the pharmaceutical companies.

Another problem for the embryo industry is that women are often reluctant to donate their eggs for these programmes: as I have already noted, it burdensome and risky. Couples are often disinclined to hand over their embryos too. If that situation is to change we need to create a social expectation, indeed invent a new social duty, to give up your eggs and your embryos for others.

A third problem for the embryo industry has been its practice of excessive egg-collection, zygote-production and embryo-banking. There is more than a little unease about what are we to do with the ‘frozen generation’ of tens or hundreds of thousands of emnbryos now abandoned in freezers. If it is to keep the embryo market expanding despite this surplus, the industry needs to find new rationales for the creation, ex¬ploitation and destruction of embryos, and find them fast.

A fourth problem is that these frozen embryos are often damaged in the process of dehydrating, snap-freezing and thawing and so researchers want a constant supply of fresh ones.

A fifth problem for the industry is that its really big markets for embryos will probably not be in therapies but in drug testing and toxicology, abortifacients and lab training. But there is still public resistance to these uses of early human lives. So the strategy is to sell the general public on one permission after another, on the basis that they might yield therapies for some terrible diseases, use the patient groups for lobbying purposes and paint all opponents not just as enemies of progress but as lacking compassion for particular needy patients. Before long permission is granted and the current round of production and funding goals achieved. ‘Turn them into therapies,’ the industry whispers seductively, ‘and then you needn’t feel so bad about the frozen generation or the lab rat humans.’ Not that these embryos are going to be much use for therapies: for the reasons I have already suggested, embryonic stem-cells are not good science and are unlikely candidates for transfer to anyone.

4. The case of the disappearing embryo
Assuming embryonic stem-cell research did offer the promise its advocates hold out, is it ethical. Despite the claims of South Coast MP Shelley Hancock that “ethical expertise was prevalent and the ethical issues were considered” by the Lockhart Committee, such expertise was almost entirely missing from the Committee and such issues were largely excluded by it. Following Lockhart’s lead the Bills introduced to the Commonwealth and State Parliaments effectively cast aside ethical considerations in pursuit of experimental goals, commercial opportunity, retention of researchers and seductive claims of treatment for almost everything.

The Church argues that cloning or hybridizing a human being and then killing it is morally abhorrent. As many of the religious leaders of Australia noted in a joint statement in 2001:

The supposed distinction between ‘therapeutic’ and ‘reproductive’ cloning must be exposed for the furphy it is: to produce an embryo is always ‘reproductive’; to destroy an embryo is never ‘therapeutic’.

Cloning and hybridizing human beings are failures of respect for the human being manufactured and a denial of universal human dignity. To create human beings by these methods in order to destroy them only compounds the evil, because it reduces human beings to lab animals and abandons the foundational principle of medical research ethics, primum non nocere, first do no harm. 

Never before have we given legislative fiat (and subsequent public funding) to the manufacture of human beings specifically for destruction.  As Cardinal Pell observed: “This Bill would result in there being two classes of human embryos: those created to live and those manufactured to be eliminated in research. To produce a human embryo with the express purpose of destroying it for research – as if it were a lab rat – is a perverse new direction for human experimentation.”  Or as Greg Smith (MP for Epping) told the Parliament:
It is extraordinary that public policy in this country and this state is being driven by scientific entrepreneurs who are promising cures that no snake oil salesman could hope to get away with, treating human life like cement or iron ore or other raw materials, and tragically raising the hopes of desperate patients or carers of patients with incurable disabilities. To paraphrase the hit song of the pop group the Electric Light Orchestra, “It’s a living thing, what a terrible thing to lose.” Human life deserves better.

Sadly some demonstrate little appreciation that there is more at issue than raw materials. The Premier, Mr Iemma, who told Parliament he was ‘from a Catholic background’, observed that “the key question in this debate is whether the proposals in the bill cross a fundamental ethical line, i.e. allowing the creation of embryos for research purposes or, in other words, the instrumental creation of human life in order to destroy it for a subsidiary purpose.” That, of course, is precisely the question. Then came his answer: “The bill allows no such thing, because in therapeutic cloning there is no human life created in the sense that we understand it, namely, the union of a female egg and male sperm, and thus there is no human life destroyed in the experimentation that follows.” That our state leader (mimicking his Victorian counterpart) could be so confused about embryology and ontology is very troubling. To say that human beings who come to be in unaccustomed ways are ‘not human life as we understand it’ is about as logical as saying Dolly the Sheep was no sheep because she happened in such a strange way. I am sure you would get a Fail if you argued with such logic in a first year essay at this College. It is also to sell the pass not just on embryos cloned for destructive research, but on all those who might be cloned or manufactured in other new ways for development well beyond two weeks and even up to birth.

The argument of Mr Iemma’s Opposition counterpart Barry O’Farrell, also from a Catholic background, was more nuanced, but he too asserted that “The embryo, or blastocyst as it is called at that point, is visible only under a microscope. It has no nervous system and it is best described as having only a highly theoretical potential for full development.” What precisely is meant by saying an embryo has only a highly theoretical potential was not explained, but presumably the same can be said for one month old embryos too, as well as infants and perhaps full-grown politicians. The Deputy Speaker, Mr Tony Stewart, also a Catholic,  told the Parliament that “The bill is simply about saving lives and about providing an opportunity for people with debilitating sicknesses… The bill does not provide for unethical practices, it provides for the use of modern technology.”

The Church, as I said, is not ‘anti-science’. But it does ask that science be carried out in ethical ways. Primum non nocere is a doctrine from the pre-Christian evolution of the medical profession. It has been a fundamental principle in every morally respectable culture ever since. It is the stuff of ‘Bioethics 101’ courses, as well as all serious health ethics codes, and there is nothing peculiarly Catholic about that.  The support Cardinal Pell received from the NSW Council of Churches head David Crawford, Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen and Baptist Union President John Taylor is proof of that.

In his public statement Cardinal Pell pointed out that “We were all embryos once. That is how we started and from there we developed. The human embryo cannot develop as anything other than a human being. Therefore, it has intrinsic human dignity and should be afforded that most basic of human rights – the right to live, to grow, to prosper.”  The Minister for Juvenile Justice, Barbara Perry, likewise observed that the legislative redefinition of embryos during the first one or two days as non-embryos was non-sensical: “For me life starts at conception—as opposed to 24 to 48 hours later.” This, she insisted, was not a view she held because of any hidden religious agenda but because of the very logic of life.  Yet many of her parliamentary colleagues adopted the chilling Lockhart Committee description of a cloned embryo as “a cellular extension of the original subject” rather than an ‘embryo’ in its own right, and accepted that its only moral significance was therefore its research potential.  The Government distributed the testimony of Lockhart Committee-member Pamela McCombe. She explains that she came to support the cloning and destruction of human embryos when she realised that lab embryos are different from other embryos.

As one commentator earlier observed, putting inverted commas around the embryo or relabelling it out of existence does not make the ethical issue go away.  How, we must ask, are lab embryos different? They are different, Professor McCombe explains, because they are not going to develop into foetuses and infants. Why not? Because they are not going to be allowed to! Admittedly she is a neurobiologist rather than a philosopher, but it does not take more than the most elementary metaphysics to know that an embryo is an embryo is an embryo, and that just because you deny it the environment it needs to grow, or otherwise interfere with it lethally, does not make it a non-embryo: it only makes it a dead embryo. Foetuses, infants, politicians and scientists all fail to develop to the next stage if they are killed first, but that does not make them non-foetuses or non-scientists!

Modern biology agrees with sound philosophy: human beings begin at fertilisation (or the equivalent point in cloning) and are no more or less members of the species just because they are very small, or don’t have nerves yet, or are living in a lab.   As the Minister for Ageing and for Disability Services, Kristina Keneally, put it “Our humanity is not determined by someone else’s will. Something about us and something inherent in us makes us human. Society would rightly judge it as wrong if people’s human dignity and rights were determined by whether their conception, development and birth were intended. But that is exactly what this legislation does.”

5. Duties of a Catholic politician
In his great encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI quoted St Augustine’s observation that a state which is not governed according to justice is just a bunch of thieves.  Recalling the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on the autonomy and interrelationship of Church and state, he observes that the Church, rather than trying to exercise power over the state or impose its ways of thinking and acting upon non-believers, assists the state by recalling it to the requirements of the natural law and practical reason, and by informing the consciences of citizens and leaders which so easily fall prey to “a certain ethical blindness caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interests.” That very blindness is all too apparent in some quarters at the moment. The Church, he points out, “cannot and must not remain on the sidelines” in such a situation. “She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper.”

Since the Second Vatican Council  Church documents have offered counsel to Christian politicians on the course reasonably to be taken with respect to the protection of human life. These have included declarations of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,  many speeches of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, interventions by the Holy See at UN meetings, statements by national bishops’ conferences, responses of individual bishops to Catholic politicians—and much else besides—all culminating in John Paul II’s great encyclical on bioethics Evangelium vitæ. A number of positions, not uncommon in contemporary discourse and practice, have also been authoritatively refuted. Rather than rehearse the substantial argumentation offered in those texts, or offered by theologians who support those teachings, it must suffice for tonight to summarize five positive conclusions regarding bio-politics.

1. Manufacturing embryonic human beings in order to kill them is a gravely evil act, since its goal is the deliberate killing of innocent human beings and no potential medical benefit or civil law can ever make this right.  This is also an attack family and community, faith and reason. 
2. It is the duty of politicians to ensure that civil law serves the common good, reflects fundamental human rights and moral norms, and protects from unjust attack the vulnerable (including human embryos, the unborn, the disabled, the frail elderly, the sick and the dying). 
3. It is likewise their duty to lead rather than merely follow public opinion in crucial matters, and to seek to ensure the widest possible consensus for the good.
4. The first goal of a democracy is not the imposition of the will of the majority  but the protection of the vulnerable.  Those whose religion part-motivates their political activity to protect the weak are thus not guilty of religious intolerance or imposition upon the consciences of others but merely assume their proper rôle in such a polity.
5. On the other hand, laws that deny protection to certain classes of human beings – such as human embryos or cloned embryos – undermine the common good and expose even the supposedly democratic state as tyrannical.  Such laws cannot be morally binding. 

Voting in the face of bad bills or laws occasions questions about co-operation in another’s evil and the amelioration of ‘imperfect’ laws about which I have written at length elsewhere.  Suffice it here to say that a ‘conscience vote’ is no excuse for unethical cooperation in the evil of making bad laws or for failing to do anything to try to improve a bad bill or law: quite the opposite. Commenting upon the legislation presently before the NSW Parliament, Bishop Kevin Manning noted that if MPs have been given ‘a conscience vote’ this only serves to emphasize their constant duty to inform themselves well and act upon a well-formed conscience. He observes that “no one is free in good conscience to do evil that good may come of it. Destroying a human embryo, a human being, cannot be justified by appeal to conscience. Politicians who vote in favour of killing an embryonic human being, no matter what good they think may come of it, place themselves in opposition to God and the natural law.”  To legalise killing some people in order to cure others, or to maximise research investment in one’s state, suggests a pragmatism in some ways more chilling than legalising killing for some ideology.

6. A legislative low point
To say, as some advocates of the new laws have done, that when there is a difference of moral position you must always opt for the permissive position in law  is, I think, disingenuous. People at one time disagreed about slavery. People today disagree about state execution, torture of terrorist suspects, and discrimination against certain minorities. To say that these are moral matters about which the state cannot adjudicate and which should therefore be permitted is absurd. Yet I suspect that that is precisely what so-called ‘conscience votes’ are fast becoming: a public statement that some issue is too ‘hot’ or ‘personal’ or ‘moral’ or ‘divisive’ for a government or a political party to take a position; and in our post-modern culture that almost inevitably means an issue too hot, personal, moral or divisive for our lawmakers to dare prohibit.

In 2002/3 our federal and state MPs voted against all human cloning and indeed against any method of creating human beings for any purpose other than implantation in a mother. In 2005 the United Nations adopted the UN Declaration on Human Cloning, which calls upon Member States to adopt all measures necessary to prohibit all forms of human cloning, whether nice or nasty, ‘therapeutic’ or ‘reproductive’, destined for destruction in the lab or intended for life beyond the womb. Australia voted in favour of this Declaration. No new facts or new arguments, no seismic shift in moral philosophy or community attitudes has emerged since then. Yet the moral disgust expressed by our political leaders to the manufacture of human embryos by cloning or other means for experimental purposes has turned to admiration in less than four short years. In the face of such strategic incrementalism – ‘the salami technique’ of lawmaking and social change slice by slice – would anyone imagine that today’s proposed shift in the dividing line between scientific curiosity and ethical standards is the last? As Cardinal Pell observed, “If this bill is passed, the enemies of human life will soon be back with further proposals, disguised with sweet words and promises of cures, to roll back the few remaining barriers to the regular destruction of early human life.”  It is hard to imagine how much lower our law-making can sink.

7. St Edmund Campion and the Catholic conscience
This week past the bishops of New South Wales called upon our parliamentarians to exercise their conscience – and this rare ‘conscience vote’ – in favour of life. In this they joined the ancient prayer of Jews and Christians that all might “choose life, not death” (Deut 30:19). “No Catholic politician,” Cardinal Pell observed, “indeed, no Christian or person with respect for human life – who has properly informed his conscience about the facts and ethics in this area – should vote in favour of this immoral legislation.”

Sadly, in recent years appeals to conscience have become appeals to a kind of “get out of morals free” card, allowing the individual an exception to the moral law  – what Allan Bloom called “the all-purpose ungrounded ground of moral determination, sufficient at its slightest rumbling to discredit all other obligations or loyalties”.  Appeal to conscience nowadays forecloses all further discussion and claims immunity to reasoned argument, the moral law or the teachings of the Church. ‘Follow your conscience’ has become code for pursuing personal preferences or reasonings over and against the teachings of Christ and the Church or the natural moral law. In his great encyclical Veritatis Splendor Pope John Paul II critiqued the idea of the infallible conscience in which “the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and ‘being at peace with oneself’”.  As he explained, this is not the Christian conception of conscience at all. It is, rather, as his collaborator and eventual successor, Benedict XVI, observed, “a cloak thrown over human subjectivity, allowing man to elude the clutches of reality and to hide from it.”  For a ‘conscience vote’ to be worth anything, it must be an opportunity for members of parliament, unfettered by party allegiances, to dedicate their lobbying, rhetoric and votes to achieving moral truth in action.

The “get out of morals free card” approach to conscience was especially evident this week as passions raged about Cardinal Pell’s intervention in the cloning debate. The media, dazzled by dubious promises of cures, were bored with talk of ethics and embryos, and so decided to make the issue ‘excommunication’ which has a much more dramatic ring to it. They demanded to know: Would the Cardinal be excommunicating Catholic politicians who voted for cloning and the rest? He’d never suggested any such thing, he said. But would he refuse them Holy Communion at the Cathedral? He didn’t think so, he said; we don’t go in for excommunicating people much here in Australia. Of course, it is common knowledge that anyone who destroys early human life or assists that to happen is, under Catholic Church law, automatically excommunicated if they understand the gravity of what they are doing and the canonical penalty attached.  But the Cardinal kept trying to draw the reporters’ attention back to point that killing some people in the vain pursuit of curing others is unethical. Catholic and other pro-life politicians, if they had a well-formed and informed conscience, could never countenance the production and destruction of human beings as if they were lab rats, he said. To do that would surely loosen their bonds with Christ and his Church, and any Catholics doing that should ask themselves whether they should be approaching Holy Communion.

Well, the radio shock jocks, the Sydney Morning Herald editorialist, the ABC Religion Report and some politicians immediately feigned outrage, and set about pillorying the Cardinal with titles such as a ‘bully’, ‘world class hypocrite’, ‘emotional blackmailer’, ‘attempted hijacker’ and comparable to ‘serial boofhead Sheik Al Hilali’.  What might the patron of this institution, Saint Edmund Campion, have made of all this?

Campion didn’t know much about cloning, of course, but he certainly knew about conscience and about communion. He lived for and died for conscience and communion. Nearby the house where I lived as a student in Oxford, there is a grand monument to three Anglican divines, martyred for their faith under Queen Mary. But there is still no monument for more than seventy Catholic martyrs associated with Oxford, such as St Edmund Campion, who died for their faith under Henry, Edward, Elizabeth or thereafter. Their consciences would not allow them to compromise their principles, not for the sake of being “compassionate, forward-looking and balanced”, not even for the sake of “national consistency” or “local investment”. They would, I think, have been astonished that anyone would suggest that after giving legal approval to some early homicide a parliamentarian might then think he had ‘a right to Holy Communion’. They knew that we have to be in communion with Christ and his Church if receiving the Sacrament of that Communion is to make any sense at all.

The Leader of the NSW National Party, Andrew Stoner, made this very moving declaration during the Parliamentary debate:

My mother, June, was the victim of an incurable fatal illness, motor neurone disease. She contracted this insidious, merciless killer disease in the late 1970s and began a progressive downward spiral in her physical function and her quality of life. She was in the prime of her life… looking forward to her days in the sun with my father, travelling, gardening and enjoying her grandchildren. That was snatched away by motor neurone disease. Over more than a decade her health irreversibly declined to the point where she was placed in a nursing home, requiring almost constant care. My mother passed away in her early sixties. My children never experienced their grandmother’s love.
I am passionate about finding a cure for motor neurone disease and some hope is offered by stem-cell research. However, in all conscience I cannot support this bill… I know my mother would have chosen a path that did not disregard the sanctity of life, that did not distinguish between two kinds of embryo — one born to live and the other created to die — and that did not make women the servants of biotechnology. I am, therefore, strongly opposed to this bill.

At some point in their lives every scientist, politician or churchman must decide what things they will not do, no matter what is proffered them or their kingdom by way of preferment, cures or kudos, in return for compromising fundamental principles. All the more reason, then, for supporting an institution such as Campion College as a place for educating future leaders. And all the more reason to pray for our present leaders and their electors. St Edmund Campion, pray for us.