THOUGHTS FROM THE PASTOR

Last week in the bulletin I wrote of the theology of marriage and then addressed a few questions that are sometimes asked about marriage, especially in regard to couples who are wanting to have a child but find that, with the best of intentions, they remain childless. Today I would like to continue this reflection with several more current questions with moral implications.

How does the use of donors and surrogates in trying to have a child raise a moral problem? Some approaches to infertility clearly violate the integrity of the marital relationship. These introduce third parties to fulfill essential aspects of parenthood by using eggs or sperm or even embryos from donors (who are often paid and therefore more accurately described as vendors), or even by making use of another woman’s womb to carry the couple’s child. The latter practice is sometimes known as surrogate motherhood, though this woman acts the way any mother would throughout pregnancy and then must relinquish the child to the couple who hired her. The child resulting from these arrangements is not the fruit of the spouses’ commitment to procreate only with and through one another. In an important sense, the spouses have decided not to be fully the mother and father of their child because they have delegated part of their role to others. The procreative aspect of their marital relationship is violated, just as its unitive aspect would be violated by sexual relations with a person outside the marriage.

These arrangements may harm people other than the married couple. Fertility clinics show disrespect for young men and women when they treat them as commodities, by offering large sums of money for sperm or egg donors with specific intellectual, physical, or personality traits. The cash incentives persuade these men and women to mistreat the gift of their own fertility and, for women, even to jeopardize their own health in the egg extraction process, in the effort to help others obtain a child outside the context of their own marital relationship.

What about reproductive technology that does not involve such third parties? Some methods that attempt to provide a couple with a child do not introduce donors or “surrogates” into the couple’s relationship. However, they still use artificial insemination, most often using sperm that is immorally obtained. In an attempt to conceive a child, the husband’s sperm is transferred with a syringe into the wife’s uterus. Substituting this technological procedure for the couple’s loving sexual union as a way of bringing a new human being into existence is immoral.

Often it is not the couple’s act at all but an impersonal act performed by a technician. This procedure can be performed even if the husband is no longer alive, using frozen and stored sperm. The husband and wife may love each other very much and look forward to having a child to love, but in artificial insemination the acts by which the child is brought into being do not reflect this reality. Children have a right to be conceived by the act that expresses and embodies their parents’ self-giving love. Morally responsible medicine can assist this act but should never substitute for it.

What is wrong with in vitro fertilization (IVF)? IVF is a reproductive technology in which a new human being is conceived by joining egg and sperm in a glass dish, not in the mother’s body. It further depersonalizes the act of generating a child, turning it into a technical process in a laboratory. This procedure is so far from a loving act of the spouses that it can even be used to conceive a child if neither of them is alive, for the body of neither one is involved in the act of generating this life once sperm and egg are obtained and stored. Because these embryos are deliberately created not in the nurturing environment of the mother’s body but in the poor substitute of a culture in a glass dish, the great majority of them die. Many couples have exhausted their savings and ultimately abandoned their efforts without ever having a live-born child from IVF.

Does IVF lead to further risks and abuses? Often this is the case. By “producing” new human beings in the laboratory, IVF divides the decision to welcome a new child into two separate decisions: whether to conceive this new human being and whether to transfer him or her to the mother’s womb. This has tempted fertility doctors and couples to exercise various forms of so-called “quality control” through genetic screening, so that only the embryos who seem most viable or have the most desired traits are given an opportunity to implant in their mother’s womb. The embryos not selected are destroyed. Occasionally couples have discovered that doctors transferred the “wrong” embryo, conceived by another couple, causing distress for two families.

The death rate of embryos conceived by IVF is so high that clinics routinely produce many of them and transfer several at once to a mother’s womb, hoping that one will survive. If more embryos than are wanted continue developing in the womb, many clinics offer “selective reduction” (targeted abortion) to eliminate unwanted “extra” children. This can exact a terrible psychological toll on the couple, whose desire for a child has led them to a gravely immoral decision about taking the life of one or more children in the mother’s womb.

Often embryos not used in a first attempt at pregnancy are frozen and stored for future attempts. This also poses a serious risk to their lives. When their parents have as many live-born children as they want, or abandon their efforts to have a child through IVF, the remaining embryos are considered “excess” or “spare.” Some are thrown away as laboratory waste, while others are abandoned indefinitely in a frozen state or slated for experimental purposes. The current debate about killing embryonic human beings on a large scale to “harvest” their embryonic stem cells arose partly because IVF clinics produced so many “spare” embryos, creating a terrible temptation for researchers to find a use for these human beings no longer wanted by their parents.

Broader abuse is in the realm of science fiction at this point, although many scientists say it is possible and even should be welcomed: a “brave new world” in which human beings are tailored for genetic perfection, developed outside their mothers’ bodies, and pre-selected for given roles in society. This would be the ultimate step toward a very efficient society in which the idea of human dignity may seem obsolete.

Each of these abuses is a natural outgrowth of the original decision to turn the begetting of a child into a manufacturing process. This threatens to turn what should be the unconditional love and acceptance of parents for their sons and daughters into something more tentative and conditional. In this situation, new life may be highly valued—as a way of meeting parents’ goals for family size, or of achieving other goals such as scientific knowledge, but this human life is not respected as human persons deserve to be respected.

--to be continued--

TWENTY THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Even if we had the wisdom of Solomon, we could not fully understand what God intends. If we cannot comprehend the things of earth, the things of heaven are beyond our grasp. Yet with God’s Spirit, the path to knowledge can be made straight as we learn to follow the Lord.
Jesus’ lessons on discipleship are not easy. One moment he teaches loving concern for others, and then he tells us to turn our backs on everyone else. Jesus’ instructions are not mutually exclusive. Being his disciples means that we are not attached to anything that stands in the way of following him. God’s reign must have first place in our hearts.

Following Jesus exacts a price. Paul learned to value those things that really mattered through suffering and hardship. As a prisoner for the Lord, he interceded for others who were in chains. Paul appealed on behalf of a runaway slave, asking his master to receive him back as a “beloved brother.” If we are daunted by the high demands of Jesus, we must remember that we are not left out on our own to fulfill them. Worldly wisdom may tell us otherwise, but we have the wisdom of the Spirit to guide us every step of the way.

For Reflection: What lesson have I learned today as a disciple of Christ? Do I teach this by the way I live my life?

LABOR DAY 2010

On Monday, September 6th, we celebrate the last holiday of summer, Labor Day. In years past, it not only signified the ending of summer but also the beginning of another school year. This latter event has changed significantly in many parts of the country with school now starting as early as mid-August. For all of us, however, Labor Day offers us a chance to reflect on the role of work in our lives and in our world, something that perhaps we do not often do in the midst of our busyness, but something that can prove helpful and beneficial to put things in perspective. I would like to summarize the 2010 Labor Day Statement of the American Bishops entitled A New “Social Contract” for Today’s “New Things” which was written by Bishop William F. Murphy, Bishop of Rockville Center, New York. He writes in part as follows:

This year has been difficult for many workers. Most heart-rending, of course, are those who lost their lives. The nation still mourns the twenty-nine West Virginia miners who died when the earth around them collapsed. We still grieve for the eleven riggers who died in the Gulf of Mexico when their oil derrick exploded. We are still saddened as the work life of the entire Gulf Coast is damaged or destroyed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. These are just the most visible examples of workers whose lives have been lost. But others suffer as well. Many millions are jobless or have a family member or friend who is among the fifteen million unemployed or the additional eleven million workers who only can find part-time work. Far too many have been unemployed for months, some even years. This is a pervasive failure of our economy today.

Despite many efforts, our country and our economy have not recovered from the financial and economic failures that overwhelmed us three years ago. Unemployment remains at 9.5 percent. There seems to be no quick fix or lasting remedy. Reports indicate an eight million job “deficit”—jobs that existed when the recession began but have since disappeared. And with employers adding only about 100,000 jobs per month, it could take nearly seven years just to get back to where we were. In other words, to bring down the unemployment rate, the economy would have to create another 100,000 jobs per month. Yet another 131,000 jobs were lost in July.

We cannot create many new jobs unless there are new investments, initiatives, and creativity in the economy. Previous decades saw the kind of growth in the economy that led to a 20 percent increase in jobs. That is not the case today. While our country has become increasingly a service-based economy, we have not succeeded in replacing whole areas of creative productivity that gave the U.S. economy the strength and stability it had in the past.

Today, as old assumptions collapse, many are calling for a new “social contract.” They suggest that this is a crucial moment in American history in which America is undergoing a rare economic transformation, shedding jobs and testing safety nets as the nation searches for new ways to govern and grow our economy. Workers need a new “social contract.” Currently, the rewards and “security” that employers and society offer workers in return for an honest day’s work do not reflect the global economy of the 21st century in which American workers are now trying to compete.

The Church faces the challenging task of bringing the light of the Gospel to these changing realities. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued what has become the Magna Carta of Catholic social teaching, Rerum Novarum, in which he dealt with the major shifts in production and new growth in productivity brought about by the Industrial Revolution that had seemingly moved the world into a new age.

Pope Leo addressed what he called the “new things” of that time. European society was in many ways split into two ideological camps, one socialist, demanding collectivist organization with much government control, and the other then called “liberal,” arguing that the entrepreneurs and those who owned the means of production should be free to develop markets with the most able, or ruthless, rising to prominence and wealth by whatever means they could find. Neither option seemed morally correct to the Pope.

The Holy Father insisted on the value and dignity of the worker as a human being endowed with rights and responsibilities. He commended free association or unions as legitimate, and he insisted on a family wage that corresponded to the needs of the worker and family. He opened the way to humanize the industrial revolution and to bring Catholic principles about the person in society to factories and farms, markets and economies of a changing world.

That encyclical provided moral, and even spiritual, guidance for many of the great social reforms of the last century, including advances in public health, the banking system, public education, living wages, unions, and income security through the creation of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and similar programs. Then, as today, the Church was concerned about the balance between capital and labor, between owners and workers, when new technologies—whether steam engines, electricity, computers, or modern communications, whatever it might be—disrupt the balance and put economic justice and the social contract up for re-negotiation.

Pope Benedict XVI confronts this same challenge directly and clearly in his most recent encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. More than 100 years of papal “social encyclicals” have given the Church a number of principles based on the Gospels and the lived experience of the Church. One of the principal “new things” addressed by Pope Benedict is globalization. Like Pope Paul VI before him, Pope Benedict uses the centrality of integral human development as one of the basic criteria to address the challenges of an interdependent world. Here the economic realities of one nation or one society are constantly being influenced by some or all of the economies and cultures of the rest of the world.

Pope Benedict reminds us that we as a nation and people do not live in isolation. We influence and are influenced by our brothers and sisters in all the nations, economies, and cultures that make up this globalized world. More than ever, the dignity of the worker is a foundation upon which we should measure much of what is good, and not so good, in the financial, industrial, and service sectors of our economy and our world.

Work is good for every person. Productive work receives its intrinsic value from the worker who gives of him or herself in the workplace. People without work retain their innate dignity as a human person. They lack, however, one of the major avenues for self-expression and self-fulfillment. Work is that aspect of life that allows us to care for ourselves and those we love and to contribute to the wider society.

While it is not the role of the Church to propose a concrete economic blueprint for the future, the words of Pope Benedict should remind us that a key, perhaps the key, to overcoming the current economic situation is to unleash the creative forces of men and women. People, not things, must be the center—and the ultimate measure—of new initiatives for our nation’s economy, as well as the economies in which we are in competition and cooperative relationships around the world.

For the worker without employment, a job is the major issue. But jobs are not individual “things” whose worth can be measured by numbers. Jobs are the result of initiatives creating markets that offer new opportunities in response to new challenges. These are not limited to our economy in isolation from others. Our economy should stimulate greater productivity, new jobs, and new wealth. Our economy, in tandem with others, should provide workers jobs, wages, and benefits to support themselves and their families through expanded productivity, wise policies, and healthier markets.

In too many places across America, workers are not being fully paid for their labor. National reports tell of factory workers whose time begins with the start of the conveyor belt but not their arrival, of retail workers who are “clocked out” and then required to restock or take inventory, and wait staff whose employers do not give them their tips. Some unscrupulous employers ignore weak and inadequate laws that forbid such unfair practices in order to increase the bottom line. Families struggling to make ends meet cannot have wage earners shortchanged on overtime or not be paid for all the hours they work. The dignity of the person is diminished when poor or middle-class people are denied their full wage or just compensation for their hard work. A good job at good wages for everyone who is willing and able to work should be our national goal and a moral priority.

In light of this and similar issues, perhaps the call for a new “social contract” should be cast in the context of a globalized economy and seek a renewed development of the relations among the three sectors of market, state, and civil society. This new social contract could emphasize the roles and responsibilities of civil society, which would include, among others, labor unions, business associations, universities, think tanks, other social, economic, and cultural groups, and all those who seek to add vision and hope to a national and global economic dialogue.

We find ourselves at a crucial moment in economic life. Millions lack work, and there is so much work to do. As Catholics, we look to Jesus Christ, who teaches us, “Apart from me, you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5) but then reassures us with “I am with you always” (Mt 28:20). Pope Benedict reminds us, “As we contemplate the vast amount of work to be done, we are sustained by our faith that God is present alongside those who come together in his name to work for justice.”

This Labor Day we must seek to protect the life and dignity of each worker in a renewed and robust economy. Workers need to have a real voice and effective protections in economic life. The market, the state, and civil society, unions and employers all have roles to play, and they must be exercised in creative and fruitful interrelationships. Private action and public policies that strengthen families and reduce poverty are needed. New jobs with just wages and benefits must be created so that all workers can express their dignity through the dignity of work and are able to fulfill God’s call to us to be co-creators. A new social contract, which begins by honoring work and workers, must be forged that ultimately focuses on the common good of the entire human family.

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