I think another important reason for the widespread acceptance of abortion needs to be emphasized as well as the false idea of freedom highlighted by Dr. Lamont in this article.

It is the false modern idea of justice, which equates this virtue with “equal” treatment for all. Instead of the classic principle of the ‘perennial philosophy’ that sums up justice as “suum cuique” – “his own to each”, i.e., awarding to each person what is due to him (and, therefore, “different strokes for different folks”) – justice is now popularly equated with “non-discrimination” – powerfully helped along by the US 14th Amendment and interpretations given to it by a secularized Supreme Court.

Thus, a very powerful ideological motivation behind the push for abortion – one pretty much independent of our innate aggressivity and violence lurking in our subconscious “id” – has been the ‘gut-level feeling’ among radical feminists and their fellow-travellers that justice for women demands that they have the same freedom over their bodies as men have. Men’s activities are not hampered by pregnancy, therefore women must be given “equal” opportunity with men to be ‘un-pregnant’. Paradoxically, “emancipation” for women is thus seen in terms of a new form of male domination: modelling female life-style ideals on a distinctively male paradigm.

The same distorted understanding of justice as “equal treatment” is seen right now in the assumption that any form of “profiling” is self-evidently unjust, and in the push for “gay marriage”. The most powerful propaganda tool in the militant homosexuals’ armory is not an attempt to defend the moral acceptability of sodomy as such, but rather, their constantly trumpeted demand for “marriage equality”, and its corollary – the claim that the traditional definition of marriage is “discriminatory”.

Paradoxically, this new, absolute and inviolable “11th Commandment” now getting carved in stone in courthouses by activist judges – “Thou shalt not discriminate!” – itself springs from moral relativism: if all substantive “values” and moral codes are just subjective opinions, then it seems that the only option remaining for public policy is to be ‘neutral’ toward all of them, without “imposing” any of them. So in practice “non-discrimination” itself becomes a new ethical absolute to “imposed” remorselessly on those who still hold to a traditional Aristotelian/Judae-Christian ethic.

Fr Brian Harrison OS
St Louis, Missouri, USA

Very interesting article. I’m inclined to think that our irresponsible desire for sexual freedom explains most of the support for abortion – except perhaps for a few radical feminists who may have darker motives – and the ease of its justification lies mostly in the widespread acceptance of consequentialism today, even (at least in the U.S.) by those who pride themselves on being orthodox Catholics, although in reality they are usually conservative Catholics. This point about consequentialism has been made by Daniel Nichols of the Caelum et Terra blog, and I think he is right. In the U.S. if you argue that the mass bombing of World War II was wrong, you will immediately find yourself confronted by consequentialist arguments, very similar to those which are used to justify killing children in the womb.

Thomas Storck
Westerville, Ohio, USA

A brilliant article — my deep gratitude to Dr. Lamont.

I have been showing my students for years now that the great poets of the Renaissance did not follow Ockham in this important regard. They did not define freedom as non-interference. They all affirm, and often in the most dramatic ways, that freedom without virtue is a contradiction in terms; that freedom always has a natural end, the goal that human beings as such are ordained to seek; that if you are talking about freedom but not talking about love, even the love made manifest in obedience, you are not talking about freedom at all but license. And license not only is not the same thing as liberty; license enslaves.

You can see this in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Milton, in Shakespeare, in Spenser, in Sidney, in Cervantes, in Tasso, in Petrarch, in Chaucer … In fact, if you cannot see the connection between freedom and charity, you simply will not understand what is going on in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, or The Tempest, or Measure for Measure, or Macbeth, or King Lear …

Anthony Esolen
Professor of English
Providence College
Providence, Rhode Island, USA

I enjoyed reading this article. For me, Latin was always as pronounced in church, which is the Italian way, and I never descended to ‘wayney, weedy, weeky’. There are still some clergy around who had the advantage of studying in Rome where they had to converse amongst themselves in Latin and their lectures at The Greg. were all in Latin. When I was at Seminary…(long ago and I did not complete it) most of my text books were in Latin and I got into the habit of skimming through each page and merely getting the drift of what was being said. Not the best foundation I must admit. I still have some of those books and, of course, I do have a Latin Vulgate, which I read more easily than my former text-books.

John Rayner

Speculation on the death of the Pope, when he is actually in very good health considering his age and the burdens imposed upon him by his ministry, strikes me as being unseemly if not tasteless. I am surprised that ‘Oriens’ has given further publicity to this article from ‘The Tablet’, especially in view of what this Pope has done for the cause that the Oriens Foundation promotes. Of course, everybody has to die sooner or later this side of the parousia, but my fervent hope is that Benedict XVI will do a ‘Leo XIII’ on us and be around for another ten years – at least.

Christopher Dowd OP
St Laurence’s Priory
134 Buxton Street
NORTH ADELAIDE
South Australia 5006
Australia