Bioethical decisions must be grounded in truths of faith

At the end of the liturgical year in November, the Church invites us to reflect on the “four last things.” What can a reflection on such ultimate realities have to do with bioethics? Let’s start with two stories.

In 1831, deep in grief for his 20-year-old wife a year after her death, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then a junior pastor at Boston’s Second Church, decided to open her coffin. He was devastated. Two months later, Emerson quit his ministry, traveled to Europe and, through writing and lectures, helped to found a new quasi-religion known as Transcendentalism. Emerson’s visceral experience of death — one that few would dare to replicate — radically changed his beliefs and his life.

Yet roughly 300 years earlier in 1539, nobleman Francis Borgia (yes, related to those Borgias) visited the grave of his recently deceased friend, Queen Isabella of Spain. On this visit also, the coffin was opened. Borgia, like Emerson, was horrified to see the ravages of death on Isabella’s once-beautiful body. Unlike Emerson, however, Borgia did not lose faith. Rather, he resolved to dedicate his life to the service of God in a new and radical way. After his own wife died several years later, Borgia joined Ignatius of Loyola’s new order. Known later as the “second founder of the Society of Jesus,” Borgia was canonized in 1671.

For the last 50 years, bioethics experts have been debating issues surrounding life and death in a culture marked by encroaching secularism and declining respect for traditional moral standards. Perennial issues such as abortion and euthanasia, although condemned by the Church for centuries, still tempt far too many people. But the advance of technology keeps supplying new options — from assisted reproduction and human embryo research at the beginning of life, to experimenting upon “brain-dead” patients and profiting from the sale of human cadavers at the end of life, to attempts at sex reassignment. It can be hard to keep up with all issues and arguments. Too often secular bioethics has focused on abstract arguments and short-term answers, such as whether a decision is autonomous or legal. 

Catholics have many resources to draw upon but are called to do more than find the right answers. When facing perennial or emerging issues in bioethics, it is essential to ground not just one’s deliberations and decisions but also one’s very reactions to these challenges in the deepest truths of our faith. There is an old injunction among theologians: sentire cum Ecclesia — “feel and think with the Church.” Beyond accepting the Church’s teachings, we should align our attitudes and emotional reactions in ways that reflect our faith and support faithful action.

Understandably, one’s first reaction to a life-threatening diagnosis can be fear. The first tendency of a married couple, after experiencing infertility and learning what their health insurance covers for “fertility treatments,” may be to start calculating which technological options are most feasible. 

A firm grounding in the deepest truths of the Catholic faith can help one to approach challenging bioethical dilemmas in three ways. First, it can help one avoid or at least better handle fear, which can prevent careful deliberation and even cause a kind of paralysis. Second, “feeling with the Church” — about one’s life, body, and fertility — can help one avoid adopting worldly perspectives about these profound goods, which can only be properly appreciated within the orders of creation and redemption. Finally, being grounded can help one better endure uncertainty and the eventual realization that one’s own plans or goals for this life may not be realized. 

May our reflections on the most ultimate realities this November better prepare us to address whatever profound bioethical issues we may face.