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To: kosta50
the Eastern Church never ... condoned abortion

Neither did the Western Church.

10 posted on 09/03/2008 3:24:25 PM PDT by ELS (Vivat Benedictus XVI!)
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To: ELS
You are wrong. The Church up to St. Augustine, starting with +Barnanbas and +Clement, all the way through the Council of Elvira, the Church held that nothing justified abortion.

St. Augustine (4th century), in his On Exodus (21, 80) changed all that (and then some). He embraced pagan Aristotelian theory known as "delayed ensoulment" which basically states that human soul cannot abide in an unformed body.

Thus a fetus destroyed before it begins to "look" human was not considered human because it didn't have human soul according to that theory, and therefore destroying a fetus before 40 days of gestation (90 days for females) was not considered murder.

That this is what the Church believed in the 5th century  is made crystal clear by St. Jerome says in his Epistle [121, 4]

"The seed gradually takes shape in the uterus, and it [i.e. abortion] does not count as killing until the individual elements have acquired their external appearance and their limbs

According to the early 8th century penitential of the Church in England, oral sex was punishable by  years to a lifetime of penance; aboriton only 120 days!

Obviously the Church did not consider abortion to be on the par with "alternative" sex practices.

At the end of the 9th century, Pope Stephen V in his letter to the Archbishop of Mainz sows that abortion was not equal to infanticide:

"If he who destroys what is conceived in the womb by abortion is a murderer, how much more is he unable to excuse himself of murder who kills a child even one day old."

Pope Innocent III (late 12th century, early 13th century) ruled that a Carthusian monk who arranged for his lover to have an abortion ruled that he wa snot guilty of murder if the fetus was not animated.

He taught that the fetus is animated when the woman begins to feel its movement (quickening). After that point abortion was equal to murder (homicide).

St. Thomas Aquinas, also 13th century, shared this view.

In the 15th century, Pope Sixtus V basically prohibited  abortion at any stage. This was revoked by Pope Gregory XIV (5th century)  who re-set the "timer" to 116 days (vs 40/90 of Augustinian time)

By the 17th century, with advancing medical knowledge, the Church developed what is known as the "simultaneous animation."  It was a Franciscan monk Hieronymus Florentinius who stated that all aborted fetuses must be baptized, but this was not the Church teaching.

It was not until Pope Pius IX that any definition of "animation" was dropped in 1869, but abortion per se was still not outlawed by the Church .

It was Pope Leo XIII who prohibited any form of abortion that caused death to the fetus. He did that in 1886.

Nevertheless, with Immaculate Conception as a dogma and the official teaching of the Church, there is no room for any Catholic to appeal to historical precedence, which was obviously based on the false (pagan) belief in various stages of animation.

11 posted on 09/03/2008 5:19:33 PM PDT by kosta50 (Eastern Orthodoxy is pure Christianity)
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