Posted on 11/24/2022 11:52:29 AM PST by ebb tide
He was the first to acknowledge that the thesis he supports goes so far as to “subvert the Church’s conception of abortion.” That is, the thesis that one is a “human person” only “after the fourth/fifth month” of pregnancy, and so before this stage abortion is no longer murder nor even a sin, if carried out for good reasons.
This thesis is supported by a well-known and esteemed bishop, Luigi Bettazzi (in the photo), 99 years old, the last Italian bishop still alive who took part in Vatican Council II, when he was auxiliary to Bologna cardinal archbishop Giacomo Lercaro, who played a leading role at that Council.
He has done so in a two-page article in the August 15 issue of “Rocca,” the magazine of the association “Pro Civitate Christiana” of Assisi, an historic voice of progressive and pacifist Catholicism. An article presented as “Reflections on abortion” and entitled “Posterius,” the Latin adverb meaning “later.”
The reception of this stance of his was initially tenuous. But in mid-November, again in “Rocca,” a moral theologian among the most widely read and studied, Giannino Piana, former professor of ethics at the universities of Turin and Urbino, took up and developed Bettazzi’s arguments, after first saying that he shared them. He too acknowledging that their thesis “contrasts with the traditional doctrine of the Church,” but adding right away that “the authentic Christian tradition cannot and must not be thought of as a monolithic block, to be transmitted in a mummified and repetitive manner.” Because on the contrary it is “an open and innovative tradition, constantly growing,” and “the courage to change, in full respect of the evangelical substance, is the way to go in order to make it credible and universalizable.”
This is enough to grasp the disruptive force of the thesis of Bettazzi and Piana. But no less revealing are the arguments with which they support it.
Bettazzi begins by distinguishing between “reason” and “intuition,” that is, between a form of knowledge of reality of an intellectualistic and calculating, Cartesian stamp, wholly centered on the “I,” and another instead – to be given greater value – more attentive to the Pascalian “esprit de finesse,” to the reasons of the heart, and more centered on the “we.”
He then quotes Genesis where it says that “God formed man with dust from the ground and blew into his nostrils a breath of life, and man became a living being,” to gather from this that the biblical narrative identifies in what is shaped with the dust of the ground “something preliminary that is not yet the individual human being,” which will become such only later, with the breath of life.
And he asks: “What would be the moment of the breath of life that makes what is preliminary a human person?”
“Reason,” replies Bettazzi, “tells us that this would be the moment in which the male sperm fertilizes the female egg.” But “intuition” is more uncertain and open to mystery. He hesitates to say that this new reality is already a person. Is it one, perhaps, after the fertilized egg is implanted in the mother’s uterus? Is it one at three months of pregnancy, when the various parts of the body are already configured?
No, replies the bishop. Much more convincing, he writes, is what “one modern scientist,” whose name he is silent on, has maintained, namely that “the human being becomes an autonomous individual, a person, only when he becomes capable, still in the maternal womb, of being able to to live as a human being and to breathe autonomously: so not before the fourth/fifth month, like John the Baptist who in the sixth month leapt in Elizabeth’s womb at the greeting of Mary.”
Speaking in his turn, the theologian Piana, a specialist in bioethics and former president of the Italian Association of Moral Theologians, in taking up Bettazzi’s thesis insists above all on the distinctive “feeling” of woman, “marked by a unique existential involvement” in knowing “the human process in which one becomes a person,” which “can in no case be enclosed within predefined models” and “presents itself as perennially open.”
What is certain, writes Piana, is that “the moment of the beginning of personal life must be moved well beyond the act of fertilization, and one cannot speak in the strict sense of abortion except at a considerable distance from that event.” Which entails that “the taking of life that occurs in the first months of pregnancy, as grave as it may be, cannot be qualified as murder.”
Rome has so far responded to this disruptive thesis with silence. Yet Francis is very drastic on this subject. He has said and written numerous times that carrying out an abortion is “eliminating a human life,” it is “hiring a hit man to solve a problem.” And he has always made it clear that for him and for the Church every new human life is a “person” starting from conception, not four or five months later.
But perhaps the pope does not know – or is feigning not to know – what one of his bishops has stated publicly, in a voice that is certainly not isolated.
.
Ping
How can something not be a sin, “if carried out for good reasons.”
They need to watch the much smaller fetus actively trying to avoid being aborted. That should change their minds. Unfortunately, too many actively avoid watching that particular video.
Back in church history the day of the Annunciation (March 25) was a bigger day than Christmas because it was considered the beginning of Christ’s time on earth. Everyone of us went through that stage where apparently it’s ok to terminate life.
Looks like he’s just choosing which sub-floor level to get settled in hell.
My name is Giannino, I’m full of Bologna, and I’m going to play you a little boogie woogie on this here Piana.
Apologies to Jerry Lee Lewis.
Nominalism on full display. The vatican 2 religion which took over the property of the Church.
What a crock. NO.
that’s above yer paygrade boi...
“and man became a living being.” This was His special creation of the first man, followed by His special creation of the first woman.
He created them to produce “after their kind,” i.e. living beings creating other living beings.
NOT living beings creating something that— for a time— is not alive (even while it is growing, evidencing biological life), then conveniently comes alive once past a woman’s ability to secretly extinguish it.
Gotta a lot on my own plate to explain to God but thank the Lord I don’t have his plate.
“... the human being becomes an autonomous individual, a person, only when he becomes capable ... of being able to live as a human being and to breathe autonomously ...”
So a person on a respirator is not an autonomous individual?
🤔 Gee, sounds like the strawman proposition, "They say..." and the proposer looks confused, when asked "Just, who are "they?".
So, "someone" says X, so it must be true!
For You formed my inward parts;
You covered me in my mother’s womb.
I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Marvelous are Your works,
And that my soul knows very well.
My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.
And in Your book they all were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none of them.—Psalm 139:13-16
Erring on the side of caution should be the rule when it comes to when a human life begins.
Who do these guys think they are?
according to the famous scholar Frank L Baum mankind did not become civilized until they clothed themselves.
Even the Genesis book verifies that.
Any being that is not clothed is basically just livestock.
this is why higher status women throughout history have immediately swaddled their children.
that is why Luke mentioned it in his book.
A Bishop in the Army of Satan
P4L
How can any sane person refuse to allow surgery to remove an ectopic pregnancy. The fetus can not be saved and it can often kill the mother. Do people understand this is a pregancy not in the uterus where it belongs, but in the tube where it will rupture, or elsewhere in the belly.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.