Introduction
An
‘Open Letter’ or petition has been publicised calling on the Catholic Bishops
of Poland to withdraw their support for a legislative initiative to criminalise
all abortion. The signatures are arranged in alphabetical order, but the second
name, Tina Beattie, Professor of Catholic Studies at Roehampton, is one of the
very few which will be widely recognised, and it will be convenient to refer to
the document as ‘the Beattie Petition’. The text, purporting to come from
signatories who ‘respect the Church’s moral stance against abortion’, is a
disgraceful, but wholly unsuccessful, attempt to justify a failure to protect
the unborn. It’s central contention, that abortion is not always an act of
injustice towards innocent life deserving of legal protection, cannot overcome,
and only ignore, Pope St John Paul II’s powerful declaration the Church’s
infallible teaching on abortion, in his 1995 Encyclical Evanglium vitae §57:
Therefore, by the authority which
Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the
Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing
of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. This doctrine, based upon
that unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart
(cf. Rom 2:14-15), is reaffirmed by Sacred Scripture, transmitted by the
Tradition of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.