Trains, and using your energy wisely...

We got a great game a gift from my eldest sister, the Christmas before last at home. Called Ticket to Ride: Europe, it was kind of a hybrid between Risk and card games like Poker. The basic idea is that you’ve a map of Europe with train routes marked on it, and that you’ve to build tracks along routes, connecting cities and facilitating journeys as you go.

You keep a running score through the game, based on the tracks you’ve built between individual cities, but your running score may not reflect your eventual score in any meaningful way, as you gain bonus points for journeys you’ve facilitated across the map, and nobody else knows what journeys you’ve been tasked with fulfilling.

It might not sound like fun, but it really is; I can’t think of a game we’ve played as a family that we’ve all enjoyed quite so much. It can be instructive too.

It’s a bit like the cheese, but that’s another story...

The last game we played over the Christmas just gone had a very different pattern to previous ones. Hitherto, along with building tracks and trying to develop our own secret journeys, we also tried to work out what our opponents’ objectives were, and sought to frustrate them, to some degree anyway. But in our final game, we all took a fresh approach, not worrying about what everyone was doing and just concentrating on what our own special jobs were.

My younger sister won by a huge amount, comfortably getting the highest score we’d ever managed. I came second, some way behind her but still, I think, with the second-highest score we’d seen in our games. Those behind me had achieved what would have been winning scores in plenty of other games.

And it left me thinking, reminding me of other things, and the more it’s sat with me, the less inclined I’ve been to get involved with spats online or elsewhere. Why bother arguing with people when they’re wrong? People so rarely change their minds, after all; time and again I’ve argued with people on issues of politics or religion or whatever and produced solid facts that refuted what they were saying only to see them days or weeks later spilling out the same old nonsense. And, to be fair, I probably do the same myself.

Better, surely, at least with people who don’t engage honestly, and who aren’t willing to listen, just to shake the dust off your feet and do something more productive. To build your own train tracks, regardless of their nonsense. And sometimes, in building those train tracks, you’ll refute the nonsense anyway. It’s a matter of just sticking to your job, and not fretting about other people’s.

I’m getting better at this, but have a long way to go. I still cut in too often, and respond to readily, and the other night, cranky from tiredness and a lack of tea, I was pretty snide with someone when I started off; and, of course, predictably, when I cut in this way I change nobody’s mind. Better to listen, and to write my blogs, and to build my train tracks.

The Irish Times isn’t the only paper that doesn’t refuse ink

Sometimes, though, it’s hard. Last night, for instance, I saw an article by the Irish columnist Colette Browne that left me rolling my eyes back so far I almost sprained them. A litany of ill-informed clichés entitled ‘It’ll be a miracle if a new pope ushers in real change in a decaying Church,’ I sent links to a couple of friends, asking what they thought.

‘I’d love to know how many errors, misconceptions, and falsehoods you could count in Colette Browne’s piece today,’ I said to one.

‘I ran out of fingers,’ he replied a few minutes later. And he trained as an actuary.

The headline’s the first problem, of course, as the Church is far from decaying: numbers of Catholics of all sorts are growing globally, with numbers of priests and seminarians keeping pace. It’s only here, in the western bit of the Northern Hemisphere, among people who Jonathan Haidt calls WEIRD, that the Church is in decline. Still, Colette can hardly be blamed for the headline, although she does point to it when she talks of the “increasing marginalisation of religion in society” and speaks of the Church as “decaying institution”.

It’s true to say that religion is being increasingly marginalised here in the west, but it’s profoundly untrue to suggest that it’s being marginalised globally; that distinction really matters, unless by ‘society’ what Colette means is ‘the bit of the world that I think counts’.

Still, Colette raises an important when she describes as incomprehensible the behaviour of “à la carte Catholics determined to remain part of an organisation with core teachings many find offensive or, frankly, ridiculous.” She’s not alone in that view, though I think she misses how it’s long been a staple of sociology and anthropology that religion is less about what we believe that what we do, who we are, and how we see ourselves in our society. We rarely reject our families, for instance, even when we disagree with our parents. And often, as we grow up, we realise how often our parents were right.

It shouldn’t really be that surprising that the sceptical, the disaffected, and the apathetic nonetheless believe themselves to be, in some sense, Catholic, and will tell people they are such. Doubt and difficulty are a normal aspect of faith, in any case; the then Father Joseph Ratzinger said something rather memorable to that effect in his 1968 Introduction to Christianity, and Timothy Radcliffe had it spot on in last year’s Take the Plunge, writing:

“Christianity will flourish in the twenty-first century if we grasp that the Church is above all the community of the baptized... the baptized are members of the Church, even if they keep far away. Even if we are filled with doubts and hesitations, we share dimly in the faith of the Church so long as we do not explicitly reject it. The doubters, the questioners, even the lapsed, belong in the spacious household of faith.”

Trope Central

Onward Colette blunders, brandishing the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1986 letter On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons as evidence of the Church’s deep antipathy towards gay people, but without showing a shred of understanding of who the document was for – something utterly necessary even for beginning to understand it. Michael Merrick, a blogger rather more thoughtful than most, nailed the media’s perverse and clueless fascination with this letter in a post he wrote the other day:

“The comment of the Pope on an ‘intrinsic moral evil’ comes from a single letter, written in 1986, immediately after re-affirming that the inclination is not a sin. To be properly understood the terms used, ‘evil’ and ‘disorder’, must be grasped in their theological context, not accessed simply through colloquial understandings of those terms – as anybody who has ever tried to teach the privatio boni argument to children will understand.”

The letter, as Michael points out, was written for bishops in the language of bishops and presumed the advanced theological knowledge – and indeed the teleological worldview – that ought to be typical of the Church’s local leadership. Their job – and I'm not saying they did it well – would have been to apply and explain that letter in everyday pastoral language. It’s at best foolish and at worst downright disingenuous to quote from it as though its meaning is clear in an everyday context.

And, of course, not a word is said about how gay people must be accepted with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity”, just as must everyone else: we are all made in God’s image, after all, and called towards union with him. No, instead we get another quote out of context and then this bizarre pseudo-paraphrase, which Colette casts as a choice between abstinence and damnation: “In short, you can spend your life as a self-hating homosexual, tormented with the knowledge that God instilled in you such disgusting urges as a sort of bizarre penance, or you can simply ignore all of that guff and get on with your life.”

This is merely how Colette reads Church teaching; it bears no resemblance to what the Church teaches, not least because the Church does not teach that God installs homosexual passions in people. He may well play a part in this – most sensible people think sexuality is due to a combination of nature and nurture – but we just don’t know, and the Catechism is clear that “its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained”.

So we can forget the notion that same-sex attraction is installed in gay people as a “bizarre penance”, so, and about the Church wanting gay people to be “self-hating homosexuals”. Rot. If the Church says that gay people – like everyone else – are called to chastity, it does so not as an imposition, but as an invitation to choose for themselves how they want to live, and to what ends. Suffice to say that the motivation for this – at least nowadays, in the modern Church – s not fear or hatred or self-loathing; it’s love, hope, and faith, and the acceptance of such an invitation is made in a spirit of profound freedom. You won't find many adults nowadays who are forced to say they're Catholic. People don't have to believe unless they want to.

A Battery of Balderdash

“The stark choice between abstinence and damnation is something of a recurring theme when it comes to much Church teaching,” Colette says, except it’s not, and is only ever believed to be by people who don’t understand what the Church teaches about salvation and damnation.

“Couples wishing to plan their families were told to roll the dice and rely on the rhythm method,” she says, talking about Humanae Vitae, except they’re told nothing of the sort.

The only softening on the Church’s line on contraception, Colette claims, was “an admission by Pope Benedict, two years ago, that the use of contraceptives was acceptable ‘in certain cases’, for example by gay prostitutes to reduce the risk of HIV.”

And this, as you’ll have guessed, wasn’t true either, as all he’d said – in a personal capacity – was that it was conceivable that there could be circumstances where the use of condoms might represent a step in the right direction for somebody. He never said they would be acceptable, or anything of the sort; just a possible indication of a moral awakening. It was never the big deal people made it out to be.

The statement that “it goes without saying that those unmarried people living in sin — with contraceptives or without — are hopeless cases whose eternal reward will likely be a fiery affair,” is yet another of those tropes typical among us generations of Irish Catholics who were deprived a proper religious education in our teenage years; when I was younger and thicker I too assumed this was the Church’s line. The reality is rather more nuanced, as you’d expect from a Church where a cardinal could not long ago have drily observed that we’re obliged to believe that Hell exists; we’re not obliged to believe there’s anybody there. All else aside, it takes real effort to sin mortally.

“The Church is happy to see women barefoot and pregnant” Colette goes on, which is an odd statement to make of an organisation that runs more than 135,000 schools around the world, thus almost certainly empowering more women than any organisation has ever done in history. They’re nearly all free, and they cater to the poorest of the poor all across the world.

People on the ground in places like Africa and south-east Asia will testify to how the Church is transforming women’s lives for the better across the world. It’s the second-largest relief agency and the second-largest development agency in the world, and helps improve women’s lives everywhere – and does it on their terms, operating in accord with local knowledge and local culture, rather than imposing things upon them with a “Europe knows best” attitude. But maybe they don't matter.

What did Bill Hicks say about women priests?

And then we have a wonderful section on women priests where Colette declares that in the eyes of the Church, “a penis is the most important qualification when becoming a priest”, before recognising, in however cock-eyed a way, that the reason the Church believes only men can be priests is a mystery rooted in Christ and his selection of the apostles.

So far so goodish, but then she goes on to say that in 2010 the Vatican decreed the ordination of women to be a crime on a par with child abuse, except – as you’ll by now expect – it didn’t really say that at all. For a more intelligent, more informed, and flat-out fairer take on this you might look at Andrew Brown’s observation in the Guardian that, although the new 2010 norms were a PR disaster, it’s easy to see why they were published as they were:

“Obviously, if what you are trying to do is to maintain a functioning priesthood, then ritual or sacramental crimes are just as capable of destroying it as moral ones. So from that perspective it is makes perfect sense to have a list which combines the two, and I don’t think (though I may be wrong) that any official Catholic would maintain that assisting at the ordination service of a woman is morally comparable to child abuse. It’s just that both are absolutely incompatible with the Catholic priesthood.”

A bit of a backtrack then to Christ only having appointed men as apostles, in order to issue this howler: “Strangely, the fact that there were no female apostles is reason enough to debar women from ever being ordained, but the fact that the same apostles were married is not seen as convincing evidence that priests should also be allowed to marry.”

Now, you’d think to write anything on the Church with any pretense at authority you’d want to be able to distinguish between doctrine and discipline, but evidently not. Here’s the thing: priests can marry. Or, rather, priests can be married, and the Church has always recognised this: that’s why Anglican priests can become Catholic ones, even if they’re married, and why Orthodox priests, even if married, are always recognised as full priests. And I think the priests of the Catholic churches of the east are often married too. That Latin rite priests can’t marry is a mere matter of discipline – discipline with serious scriptural and traditional foundations, but discipline for all that. The Church could allow all priests to marry tomorrow.

Experts found no evidence? Of course they didn’t, Colette, of course they didn't...

And then, as though it weren’t bad enough, Colette comes out with this:

“Meanwhile, a recent discovery by a Harvard professor, who has found a scrap of 4th-century papyrus that indicates early Christians believed that Jesus was married and his wife was an apostle, could prove most inconvenient for the Church.

While the scrap of papyrus is still undergoing tests to prove its authenticity, a number of preliminary examinations by experts have found no evidence of any forgery — a minor detail that has not stopped the Vatican from claiming that it is a dud in order to avoid any awkward questions.”

Now, as a certain former newspaperman used to say, “comment is free, but facts are sacred”. It really wouldn’t have been hard for Colette to have checked this. The so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife was one of those Dan Brown moments, where a Harvard scholar got excited by a papyrus of unknown provenance and arranged for her findings to be published in the January issue of the Harvard Theological Review, before the publication was shelved to allow for further study.

Several academics had taken issue with it – and the dubious manner of its being publicised – but the crucial factor in its shelved seems to have been its demolition by Durham’s Frances Watson, who showed that the so-called Gospel was stitched together from phrases in the extant Gospel of Thomas, with one word in particular showing a distinctive tell-tale line break. How on earth could Colette have missed this dismantling of the inconvenient text? It’s not as if it wasn’t reported in the mainstream media, after all.

And then, nicely, Colette wraps up by talking about the inexorable decline of the Church in the west; when it comes to admitting that that’s all you’ve been interested in, better late than never, I suppose.

Thing is, I could do this sort of thing dozens of times a day. Does it do any good? I doubt it. Better just to stick to find out the facts, be honest, and trust that the truth will out eventually.

Time to start building more train tracks.

On the Renunciation of the Petrine Ministry

This is a good, even a heroic decision by Pope Benedict. It is also one that makes perfect sense in hindsight, when we think of his visits to the tomb and relics of Pope St Celestine V, the thirteenth-century pope who abdicated, and Benedict's observation in 2010's Light of the World that, "if a pope clearly realises that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of an office, then he has a right, and under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign."

Although I'll be disappointed that we'll be deprived of Benedict's wisdom, I cannot but admire how he has been willing to break with centuries of practice in the face of reality: he is frail and the Church is a big ship that needs a healthy captain. In doing this, he has freed his successors from the need to shackle themselves to the mast, no matter how feeble they might be.

John Paul's determination to lead the Church right through his agony and to his death gave a powerful witness to the value of our lives and the missions we are given, but it can hardly be denied that in his final years the Church was somewhat rudderless. Benedict, I think, feels we do not need to relearn that lesson every decade or two, and recognises that modern medicine can keep him alive beyond a time when he can effectively lead.

His decision strikes me as a deeply humble one, too; always determined to be a teacher and an academic, he had leadership thrust upon him, and now he intends to leave the limelight altogether. I am fairly sure that once he enters Castel Gondolfo, and then a monastery in the Vatican, we'll hardly ever hear of him again. Unlike King Lear, or Mrs Thatcher, he won't hang around to undermine his successor. From being one of the most visible people in the world, he shall become one of the most invisible.

He leaves behind him a Church in far better shape than he found it, and in the fullness of time I'm certain his attempts to renew the liturgy and the episcopacy will be recognised, as will his strenuous efforts -- still unrecognised by so many -- to cleanse the Church after the abuse crises. A lot remains to be done on that, obviously, but Benedict’s work deserves credit.

His teaching, too, will I think be seen as a true gift to the world. For all his skill and erudition as a theologian, his writing has displayed a remarkably common touch; his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy is as notable for its clarity as its profundity and its engagement with current academic work, and his weekly audiences drew crowds far larger than those that attended the audiences of his perhaps more obviously charismatic predecessor.

He was tireless in his insistence that faith and reason worked in harmony, each depending upon the other, and on our need, as Catholics, to engage with the world in an honest and open way -- it's worth looking at his engagements with the Muslim world in the aftermath of the oft-misunderstood Regensburg lecture, and at his creation of the "Courtyard of the Gentiles" to engage with atheists and agnostics.

The media tended to get him wrong, I'm afraid, as indeed did many Catholics: Benedict is a thinker who needs to be engaged with, and for too many the instinctive response was automatic nodding or kneejerk rejection; he needed to be listened to carefully and to be pondered.

One of the most striking features about him was how he learned, and continued to learn, throughout his career whether as a young priest, a university professor, a bishop, or as Pope; a former doctoral student of his told me some months ago about how Benedict genuinely listens in a serious and profound way, and how he has always been notable for this.

That he seems to have been the member of the Curia who realised most quickly and took most seriously the abuse crisis is a prime example of this, such that it was no accident that in 2001 the whole area became his responsibility as head of the CDF -- before that he was theoretically responsible for overseeing how some cases were handled, but as Ireland's Dublin and Cloyne reports demonstrate, local bishops tended to be shy about telling Rome what was going on on the ground.* During his papacy we can think of how he's learned more and more about the need to engage with mainstream media and most recently social media online. He was correct when he described the internet as being less a tool that people use than an environment in which they live.

I think much will come from his encyclicals too, with Veritate in Caritas bound in time to be recognised as a profoundly important critique of modern capitalism. I think we can all agree that capitalism as we have it isn't quite working, and there aren't many coherent alternatives out there: Catholic Social Teaching may well point us in the right direction.

On possible successors, I'm always reluctant to speculate, given how Benedict himself was widely written-off entering into the last conclave; he had a lot of media attention through being one of the few cardinals known to the global press, but experienced Vatican-watchers felt that support for him in conclave was likely to stall at roughly half the number of votes he'd have needed to become Pope, and then fragment. With hindsight, of course, it all looks rather different.

That said, Irish bookmakers are offering odds on frontrunners, so I will say that while I like the look of Peter Turkson, Angelo Scola, and Christoph Schönborn, for me I really think Canada's Marc Ouellet is the one to watch.

Head of the Congregation for Bishops, he'll be the man best equipped to pick the Church's new leadership around the world, and is definitely in a Ratzingerian mould in terms of his views on culture, relativism, and the Church in Europe.

He really came onto my radar last year when he was the Pope's representative at the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, moving people with his homilies and his presence at the Congress's opening and closing masses. There were no shortage of journalists and observers there at the time who thought that not merely was he there to represent the Pope, but that he could make a fine pope himself. It's hardly insignificant that he's disavowed any interest in being Pope himself, saying that he'd regard it as a nightmare appointment: the fact that he doesn't want the job may make him all the more attractive as a candidate. All the more papabile, if you like.

--- Originally posted at The Huffington Post, 12 February 2013.



___________________________________________________________________
* As David Quinn tried to point out to Diarmaid Ferriter on Prime Time last night, of the 46 cases Judge Murphy detailed of alleged abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin, not even one was sent to Rome as a disciplinary measure, whereas in connection with her second report, considering how complaints about 18 priests -- and one bishop -- were dealt with by the diocese of Cloyne, none were sent to Rome prior to 2005. What evidence there is refutes claims that Rome knew what was going on in the ground. It really didn't.

The Fabulous Father Flannery

It’s depressing to see the Irish Times continuing to spin a line about the Redemptorist priest Tony Flannery that is less about simple facts than about perpetuating a narrative that the Catholic hierarchy, whether at home or in Rome, is out of step with Irish society and the modern world.

Today’s editorial, for instance, says that Tony Flannery and some of his colleagues are “under threat due to their insistence on the importance of personal conscience”. This could hardly be less true, not least because the Church is pretty big on conscience; Peter Kreeft puts it well, paraphrasing St Thomas Aquinas:

“if a Catholic comes to believe the Church is in error in some essential, officially defined doctrine, it is a mortal sin against conscience, a sin of hypocrisy, for him to remain in the Church and call himself a Catholic, but only a venial sin against knowledge for him to leave the Church in honest but partly culpable error.”

Tony Flannery can say what he likes; what he can’t do is say what he likes as a Catholic priest, giving the impression that it’s within the bounds of Catholicism. And as the head of Tony’s order stated today, Flannery’s comments involved “fundamental areas of Catholic doctrine, including the priesthood, the nature of the Church, and the Eucharist.”

How convenient...

Tony Flannery was one of a handful of priests who hit the headlines last year after being disciplined by Rome; Brian Darcy, whose ‘silencing’ was clearly nothing of the sort, was the most famous of this batch, but Tony Flannery, as one of the founders and leaders of the Association of Catholic Priests, may be even more important.

One of his brothers, Frank Flannery, is a close confidante and adviser of Enda Kenny; it’s been speculated that Enda’s line on Cloyne may have ultimately derived – perhaps by an indirect route – from Tony Flannery. Certainly, Tony Flannery welcomed the speech; I’m not quite sure why, given his own opposition to mandatory reporting of abuse allegations, which led Ian Elliott, the Irish Church’s chief child protection officer, to criticise him for what Elliott described as “an attempt at minimising the serious nature of clerical child abuse”.

This weekend, in the aftermath of the big Dublin pro-life vigil, the New York Times reported that Tony Flannery intended to break his silence about what he regards as an inquistition-style campaign against him by Rome because of his line on certain aspects of Church teaching.

The story seems to have broken at a rather inconvenient time for the Irish Church, just after having its new primate-to-be announced and fresh from helping rally 25,000 people onto the streets of Dublin in the biggest counter-government demonstration since Enda Kenny became Taoiseach. And isn’t that handy, given that Tony Flannery is brother to one of Enda Kenny’s right-hand men?

The dog that used to bark...

Anyway, the Irish Times ran a column similar to the New York Times one on their website on Sunday morning, it having come from the Press Association; shortly after running the piece, however, they redacted what was probably the most important part of it.

The redacted paragraphs were substantively identical to these three from the New York Times piece:

“In the letter, the Vatican objected in particular to an article published in 2010 in Reality, an Irish religious magazine. In the article, Father Flannery, a Redemptorist priest, wrote that he no longer believed that ‘the priesthood as we currently have it in the church originated with Jesus’ or that he designated ‘a special group of his followers as priests.’

Instead, he wrote, ‘It is more likely that some time after Jesus, a select and privileged group within the community who had abrogated power and authority to themselves, interpreted the occasion of the Last Supper in a manner that suited their own agenda.’

Father Flannery said the Vatican wanted him specifically to recant the statement, and affirm that Christ instituted the church with a permanent hierarchical structure and that bishops are divinely established successors to the apostles.”

With these removed, the Irish Times gives the impression that Tony Flannery got into trouble because of his openness to women priests and married priests, and his line on homosexuality, contraception, and communion for married divorcees. The reaction to this narrative has been utterly predictable, given how, as the Irish Times says, in connection with lastyear’s misconceived ACP survey, “Fr Flannery is correct when he speaks of a disconnect between the Irish laity and Rome.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure Rome’s not happy about any of that either, not least because there’s a duty on priests to try to bridge such disconnects, but that’s not what's caused this.

The heart of the matter...

Rather, the main issue here is that Tony Flannery rejected the very idea of a sacramental priesthood as founded by Christ. Leaving aside how this would have put him in a position as paradoxical as it would be untenable, it was clearly something that Rome couldn’t let go.

Rome didn’t have much choice in this. Its hands were tied. Indeed, if Father Flannery’s in danger of excommunication – and seemingly, despite his claims, he was never threatened with this, which the Irish Times could surely have discovered if it had bothered – it’s because he pretty much put himself out of communion by denying the sacramental reality of Holy Orders. That’s the way excommunication works: in practice you excommunicate yourself, and the Church only tells you what you’ve done.

I’d even wonder whether by claiming that the Last Supper has historically been misrepresented by the Church he implicitly cast doubt on the sacramental reality of the Eucharist, and indeed almost all the sacraments and the basic authority of the Church. I think that may be what the head of the Irish Redemptorists meant when he spoke of Tony Flannery being ambiguous on this point.

The CDF’s dealings with Tony Flannery will have been designed to help him realise the seriousness and implications of what he’s said so he can figure out in conscience where he stands, ideally with a view to him coming afresh to an acceptance of Church teaching

Now that's not quite true, is it, Tony?

Monday morning’s paper saw the misleading effect that the redacted article conveyed being heavily pushed. Despite being about a central, fundamental, and essentially internal Catholic issue, the entire story was presented as yet another piece in the long-running Irish Times storyline I call ‘Catholic Hierarchy out of step with modern life’.

Tony Flannery sulks in Monday’s paper that the CDF has never approached him directly, describing how he’d been summoned to Rome to answer to the head of his order. He shouldn’t have seen anything sinister in that, the Church being best understood not as a neat pyramid but as a loose network of largely autonomous organisations; a Redemptorist priest who’d taken a vow of obedience, Tony Flannery is subject to a line management system, for want of a better phrase, which Rome was respecting.

On meeting the head of his order, he was faced with a choice he said he found impossible:

“Either I sign a statement, for publication, stating that I accepted teachings that I could not accept, or I would remain permanently banned from priestly ministry, and maybe face more serious sanctions. It is important to state clearly that these issues were not matters of fundamental teaching, but rather of church governance.”

Of course, this is rather at odds with today’s statement from the head of the Irish Redemptorists, and it’s telling that Tony Flannery glosses over how he denied the very basis of the priesthood; this cannot be dismissed as a mere matter of Church governance, being quite clearly a matter of fundamental teaching.

Feed my lambs... tend my sheep... feed my sheep...

Remember: Tony Flannery had denied the sacramental nature of the priesthood, saying that he no longer believed it had been instituted by Christ, and that it was, in effect, the creation of an elite who usurped power in the Church. I have no idea what he means when he says the Creed and says he believes in an ‘apostolic Church’.

It is quite possible to argue this, of course: it’s a commonplace of Protestant theology, for instance, with Protestants generally rejecting the notion of a sacramental priesthood instituted by Christ, and tending to believe only in the broader ‘priesthood of all believers’. But that’s the thing: that’s a Protestant view, and one completely incompatible with Catholicism.

“Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in 1908, “but they are the walls of a playground.” Shepherds are meant to protect their sheep, and it’s the job of the Church to step in when one of its priests teaches something that is utterly contrary to Catholic teaching. It’s not hasty about doing so, either: Tony Flannery’s spent years away from the Catholic mainstream, but in denying the sacramental basis of the priesthood he clearly went too far.

The Irish Times is putting forward a profoundly misleading narrative of what’s happened here, and sadly, where the Irish Times misleads, others tend to follow,. It may simply be that they think their readers wouldn’t care about issues of ecclesiology, but the fact remains that by stripping the story of its most important element they distort the story profoundly. So much for the ‘Story of Why?’.

Chesterton and Orwell: Reflections on 1984

“But among critics whose interest in Chesterton is extra-literary,” wrote Ian Boyd in John Sullivan’s 1974 work G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, “those who perhaps have done the most damage to his artistic reputation are a group who might be called the professional Catholics. For them, Chesterton is an institution to be defended rather than an author to be discussed.”

It’s an important point, and one I was reminded of yesterday when reading David Allen Green’s speculations that Orwell penned Nineteen Eighty-Four in response to Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I was tempted towards kneejerk reactions. They're rarely of use to anybody.

“Why did George Orwell call his last novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?” asks Green, “The usual explanation for the choice of title of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it was a play on the last two digits of 1948, the year the manuscript was finished. This has never convinced me. I think there may be a better explanation, which comes from George Orwell’s intellectual hostility to the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton.”

Afraid to come upon a blood red cup and the beating of the wings of an eagle...

Before observing that the action in Napoleon begins in 1984, Green concedes that the coincidence upon which his theory is based has been previously noticed, but says that he is unaware of any other attempt to assess the alternative explanation that he offers.

Green describes Napoleon as he understands it, and assembles an impressive litany of quotations from Orwell scornfully dismissing a host of Catholic writers for what he regarded as their intellectual dishonesty. Focusing on the preface to Napoleon, Green casts the book as a diatribe against progress and observes that:

“Taking the stories as a whole it is not too much of a strain to see Nineteen Eighty-Four as a riposte to The Napoleon of Notting Hill. There are many points of comparison. Both books show that a belief in revolution that appears to have gone wrong, and both focus on the frustrations of a sympathetic central character as he attempts to challenge the prevailing system. Both are utopian/dystopian visions, containing prophecies extrapolated from current trends.”

It’s an interesting thesis, but the more I look at it, the less I think it plausible, not least because it seems to me that although it's a commonplace among Chesterton fans that Orwell may have intended his title as a reference to Chesterton’s work, I think this unlikely; still less do I think Orwell's book a riposte to Chesterton's.

Wherever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow sunset, there my heart beats...
Even if we can dismiss as ahistorical the popular notion that Nineteen Eighty-Four was so named as a playful reference to 1948, the year in which Orwell finished writing it, we should at least recognise that there are other theories beyond the two Green cites.

“Orwell’s title remains a mystery,” wrote Robert McCrum in the Observer in 2009. “Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London’s novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984) or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton’s stories, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which is set in 1984.”

Well, only the opening sequence of Napoleon is set in 1984, the bulk of the book being set a decade later and the finale being set a further twenty years after that, and it’s rather stretching things to call Chesterton Orwell’s favourite writer, but still, McCrum’s general approach is sound; he doesn’t think the supposedly popular 1948-Nineteen Eighty-Four theory worth even a mention, and notes that there are several theories as why Orwell bestowed that now notorious date on the book. He could also have mentioned, for instance, the possibility that Orwell had been influenced by his late wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s poem ‘End of the Century, 1984’.

It seems at least as likely that the quest for what lay behind Orwell’s setting of his story in 1984 is a fool’s errand. Peter Davison’s note on the text of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of the novel notes that Orwell “first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness) that was changed to 1982, and, later, to 1984.”

There may, in short, be no special significance to the date.

That which is large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for the poor to defend...

That said, there’s much of value in the piece, not least the litany of quotations from Orwell’s writings which go some way to substantiating Randal Marlin’s observation in Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion that,

“Orwell had his baggage of prejudices, against Roman Catholics (Irish in particular) and gays, for example. G.K. Chesterton, who was not Irish, excited his great antipathy, perhaps because Chesterton was so adept at using words in defence of causes Orwell opposed and in ways that Orwell objected to, as explained in his essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’”.

Green's collection of quotations suggest that Orwell was less bothered by religious dishonesty than by Catholics. One thing that’s clear from them is that Orwell never really understood Chesterton, a failing which Greene seems to share. Green argues that the possibility that the title of Nineteen Eighty-Four was drawn from Napoleon “allows us to explore an often overlooked part of Orwell’s political outlook: the deep hostility of a decent and progressive liberal to the intellectual and moral dishonesty of religious conservatives.”

We’re into ‘begging the question’ territory there, but still…

A madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man...

One of Orwell’s earliest published writings appeared in Chesterton’s G.K.’s Weekly. Entitled ‘A Farthing Newspaper’, it dealt with corporate influence on public opinion through the news media, a concern which Chesterton shared and which has, of course, hardly become less relevant with the passing decades. John Rodden observes in George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation that – far from harbouring a deep hostility to a man who’d helped launch his career – Orwell generally admired Chesterton, who he resembled in many ways, notably in his patriotism and his love for the commonplace and the common man.

If Orwell developed an antipathy towards Chesterton, it was because he felt that in his later work he had sacrificed his talent and his intellectual honesty to propagandising for the Catholic Church; regardless of the merits or otherwise or Orwell’s analysis, it’s important to recognise that Orwell believed that the dishonesty he perceived was a hallmark only of “the last twenty years or so” of Chesterton’s life.

Most critics of Chesterton's work perceive a difference between his writing before December 1914 and his writing after his recovery from a rarely-broken coma that lasted for several months – Dudley Barker, surveying Chesterton’s oeuvre in Sullivan’s G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, observes that “not much needs to be said, indeed, about most of what Chesterton wrote after 1914”, and it’s this latter writing that Orwell so disparaged.

Napoleon, it should be pointed out, was not one of Chesterton’s later books; indeed, it was one of his earliest, published in 1904. Far from being “written from the point of view of a Catholic populist,” as Green says, Napoleon was written when Chesterton was an Anglican; indeed, Chesterton wouldn’t be accepted into the Catholic Church until 1922, eighteen years after Napoleon’s publication. Indeed, Napoleon is curious, as Christopher Hollis comments in his 1970 book The Mind of Chesterton, for being “alone among Chesterton's books,” almost devoid of references to religion.

Every man is dangerous ...  who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.

In truth, I’m not convinced that Green really understands Napoleon at all, not compared to, say, Terry Pratchett, who showed a sure understanding of the book’s engine when he said of Chesterton that:

“It’s worth pointing out that in The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill he gave us two of the most emotionally charged plots in the twentieth century: one being that both sides are actually the same side; it doesn’t matter which side we’re talking about, both sides are the same. This has been the motor of half the spy novels of the century. The other plot can’t be summarised so succinctly, but the basic plot of The Napoleon of Notting Hill is that someone takes seriously an idea that wasn’t intended to be taken seriously and gives it some kind of nobility by so doing.”

Consider Green's claim that the hero of the book is “Auberon Quin, an eccentric who suddenly becomes king.” Is this really accurate? I would have thought that insofar as Napoleon has a hero at all, it’s the ‘Napoleon’ of the title, the Adam Wayne who becomes Provost of Notting Hill and conqueror of London.

Does the book really focus on the frustrations of a sympathetic central character as he attempts to challenge the prevailing system? Hardly: Quin changes the system with ease, for a joke, and Wayne embraces the new system with a violent passion.

Can Napoleon really be described as either a utopian or a dystopian vision, containing prophecies extrapolated from current trends? Not really – Chesterton opens with a spread of the sort of predictions so common in his only day only to discard them and say that none of these prophecies or trends mean anything. People, he believes, don’t really change.

The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. ..

I’m not even convinced by the idea that Napoleon is best known nowadays for “its preface, entitled Introductory Remarks on the Art of Prophecy,” and supposedly a few hundred words long. The opening chapter bears that title, and it clocks in at 1,700 or so words, but I’m far from sold on the idea that this is why the book’s best known now, and I’m certain this isn’t “Chesterton’s clearest and best known statement against ‘progress’”, not least because it's not about progress so much as it is about prophecy, about whether the future can be predicted.

Chesterton isn't really interested in the prophecies of his contemporaries, after all; he needs his book to be set in places that he knows and loves, but cannot set it in his own day so casts his tale into the future, and needs to justify why it's not that different from the present.

What's more, if you take a look at the selected Chesterton quotations of ‘progress’ at the American Chesterton Society, you’ll see that not one is from Napoleon.

In any case, contrary to Orwell’s claim, Chesterton didn’t fear progress; what he was sceptical of was the cult of progress that was rife throughout the Edwardian era, before it was laid low in the trenches of the Western Front. And if Chesterton ever penned a definitive statement on that, it was in the second chapter of Heretics, published the year after Napoleon, and addressing themes he would return to again in 1908’s Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday.

I should stop, as I feel I’ve fallen into the trap of treating Chesterton as an institution to be defended rather than an author to be discussed. Boyd is probably right when he says that Orwell’s take on the later Chesterton as a violent propagandist is merely a hostile version of the caricatured portrait of Chesterton as Catholic champion so held forth by his Catholic supporters.

If you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time...

And there is something to be said for considering the idea that at some level Orwell might have written his work in response to Chesterton. That's what Christopher Hollis thought, at any rate:

“Chesterton wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill in 1904, proclaiming that he was narrating events that were to happen in eighty years time -- that is to say, in 1984. There is no exact evidence that Orwell had this coincidence in mind when he chose the title of his own book.

But, whether intentional or not, Orwell’s book, in which the death of freedom brought with it the death of every decency even down to the proverbial honour among thieves, was certainly a protest against the irresponsibility of Chesterton's forgetfulness of the great lesson: he who draws the sword will perish by the sword, and violence, when once employed, cannot easily be quenched. It is hard, as one looks at the tale of current violence, not to sympathise with Orwell's impatience.”

Chesterton, of course, wrote before the Great War in which his brother died, and the Spanish Civil War where Orwell witnessed the horrors of violence begetting violence.

Anyway, I may think utter bunkum the idea that Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 as a riposte to an intellectually dishonest Chesterton, but I’m glad I’ve been given food for thought. That original post is well worth the pondering, not least because it shows how a "decent and progressive liberal" can have an almost obsessive -- even bigoted -- antipathy towards Catholics.

Legislating for X: An Unorthodox View

And so the Oireachtas is conducting its hearing on how best to legislate for the X judgement, the Government having said that after pondering the Expert Group's report, they're going to legislate and regulate in accordance with the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1992 X case.

Labour's high command are rejoicing, as they look set to manage the rare feat of achieving something in their manifesto. Fine Gael are in disarray, as they'd said they wouldn't legislate for abortion. Pro-choicers are crying 'victory!'. Pro-lifers are weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. The bishops have finally found some backbone and said what they think. People who think that religious citizens shouldn't have a say in how their country runs things are angry. It's all very loud. It's hard to hear oneself think.

Still. We should try. I happen to think it's possible to legislate for X while still keeping Ireland abortion-free. Or, if you like, for both Labour and Fine Gael to keep promises that helped get them elected. I might be wrong, but hear me out...

Crossing the Red C, with some difficulty...

A few weeks back a poll found that 63pc of people wanted a new referendum on limiting the constitution such that a threat of suicide would be excluded as grounds for abortion, and 82pc wanted a new referendum to extend the grounds for abortion to include threats to a mother's health, or in cases where a woman had been raped. Leaving aside moral issues, I’m not sure how that would logistically be possible, as it’d mean that a right to abortion would be dependent on other legal processes and verdicts of guilt, but still, it seemed that 45pc of people wanted both to tighten and loosen the constitutional limits. 

It is possible to make sense of this, but doing so requires some contortion.

The same poll also found that 36pc of Irish people want abortion on demand, which is a depressingly high figure, but does at least suggest that the likes of Ivana Bacik and Clare Daly are most definitely in a minority, with most people recognising that without a right to life all other rights are meaningless, and that basic 'golden rule' ethics mean that we shouldn't will that others should suffer a fate we'd not have wanted for ourselves.

85pc of people in that poll said that they would be happy for the government to legislate in accord with the X case. Some pro-choicers have decreed that this means there's massive support for their position.

They'd be wrong. I support legislation for the X principles, and I'd not be the only pro-lifer who does so. The question, of course, is 'what sort of legislation?' and 'would it be enforced?' Because if we're to legislate in line with what the Constitution actually says, this would entail very narrow legislation, and would probably require serious and careful monitoring.

My biggest concern is that I'm not sure our politicians have the political will to do this.

Enter the European Court of Human Rights...

Unfortunately, most people still don't seem to get what the Supreme Court said in the X case, or what our obligations are in connection with the ECHR. The European Court of Human Rights wants us to clarify things, as the X judgment has remained a theoretical thing for twenty years: the ECtHR wants us to make this practical. There are plenty who point out that we don't need to do what the ECtHR says, and they're right, up to a point, but I tend to think that disregarding our treaty obligations is something we shouldn't do.

The ECtHR, in considering the X case and its ramifications, says this:

"The Court does not consider that the constitutional courts are the appropriate fora for the primary determination as to whether a woman qualifies for an abortion which is lawfully available in a State. In particular, this process would amount to requiring the constitutional courts to set down on a case by case basis the legal criteria by which the relevant risk to a woman’s life would be measured and, further, to resolve through evidence, largely of a medical nature, whether a woman had established that qualifying risk. However, the constitutional courts themselves have underlined that this should not be their role."

Or, in other words, courts have legal proficiency, not medical proficiency. They are simply not qualified to make medical decisions or to rule on medical matters. They may lay down legal principles, but it is inappropriate for them to evaluate medical situations.

Keep this in mind, and then remember what the X decision did: it established a legal test, as a way of interpreting the Constitution, and it applied that test in a real-life medical situation. The ECtHR is of the view that the first thing the Supreme Court did was entirely valid, and that, as a general principle, the second thing was outside its sphere of competence. Yes, it was legal, but only because in the absence of a consistent and transparent medical process, we didn't have any choice. It wasn't a good idea. It wasn't, as the ECtHR says, 'appropriate'.

Revisiting the X Case...

The central point of the X case revolved around the issue of whether the threat to a mother's life that justified a termination of pregnancy, should such a termination be necessary, had to be certain or merely probable.  Chief Justice Finlay ruled that:

 "... the test proposed on behalf of the Attorney General that the life of the unborn could only be terminated if it were established that an inevitable or immediate risk to the life of the mother existed, for the avoidance of which a termination of the pregnancy was necessary, insufficiently vindicates the mother's right to life. 

I therefore conclude that the proper test to be applied is that if it is established as a matter of probability that there is a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of the mother, which can only be avoided by the termination of her pregnancy, such termination is permissible, having regard to the true interpretation of Article 40.3.3° of the Constitution."

It's this test in accordance with which the government is obliged to legislate, not the X application, and it is only in accordance with our ECHR obligations, rather than the Irish Constititution that legislation is needed – Chief Justice Finley pointed out during the 1992 X case that “This Court has on a number of occasions said that legislation to protect constitutional fights is not strictly necessary”. 

Now, as the expert group has recognised, this test has two conditions:

“The Supreme Court in the X case held that the correct test was that a termination of pregnancy was permissible if it was established as a matter of probability that:

1) there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother; and

2) this risk can only be averted by the termination of her pregnancy.”

Over the past twenty years we've tended to emphasise the first condition and basically ignore the second. The issue in the X case wasn't whether terminations of pregnancy might be allowed in Ireland, in certain circumstances. It was proximity and magnitude of risk.

What was not in dispute was that termination should be permissible when it was the only option, the only way of protecting the mother's life.

"As far as practicable..."

This shouldn't surprise us. Take a look at the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution:

"The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right."

The State guarantees as far as practicable to defend and vindicate the right to life of the unborn, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother. Or, if you like, the State is bound to protect the lives of the unborn, as much as it possibly can, save where doing so would endanger the lives of their mothers. That's what the Irish people voted for in 1983. 

The crucial issue here, on which the X case turned, was what was meant by the phrase "as far as practicable". During the hearings for X, Justice McCarthy asked Peter Shanley SC, acting for the government, if he accepted that the 1983 amendment envisaged a 'lawful abortion' in Ireland, and Shanley said that he did:

"Yes, I accept that. For example, a mother suffering from a cancerous condition which requires chemotherapy has the right to have her pregnancy terminated. The pregnancy may be terminated if, but only if, there is an inevitable danger to the right to life of the mother."

(It's worth noting, of course, that Shanley wasn’t a doctor either, and that it's not a given that cancer treatment necessitates termination of pregnancy, as Frederic Amant, for instance, points out.)

Justice Hederman spelled out what the Eighth Amendment meant in this regard, saying:

"The death of a foetus may be the indirect but foreseeable result of an operation undertaken for other reasons. Indeed it is difficult to see how any operation, the sole purpose of which is to save the life of the mother, could be regarded as a direct killing of the foetus, if the unavoidable and inevitable consequences of the efforts to save the mother's life leads to the death of the foetus. But like all examples of self-defence, of which this would be one, the means employed to achieve the self-protection must not go beyond what is strictly necessary."

Hederman thus distinguished between the direct killing of a foetus and the death of a foetus as an ancillary consequence of another procedure, the intended aim of which is the preservation of life. 

Catholic moral teaching would use the terms 'direct abortion' and 'indirect abortion', based on a distinction between direct and indirect effect, an ethical principle which informs general medical treatment in Ireland, as 2000's Oireachtas Committee on Abortion recognised, noting that "It forms a crucial element in the Medical Council ethical guidelines in this area."

We needn't get hung up on McCarthy's phrase 'legal abortion'; contrary to the claims of some pro-choicers, this isn't a matter of wordgames, not least as the term 'abortion' has a fair few meanings, some of which seem to be incompatible. As William Binchy put it to the Oireachtas Committee on Abortion in 2000:

"… it’s not so much the language that counts here, it’s the activities that are done and the context in which they are done that’s important – the principles that underlie the activities in question."

Is abortion medically necessary?

What's the point of this issue of necessity? Well, the expert group says that one of the key principles underlying any method of giving concrete effect to the X decision is that:

"The constitutional obligation on the State is by its laws to respect, and as far as practicable, defend and vindicate the right to life of the unborn."

Any legislation that doesn't meet that obligation would be unconstitutional; any legislation that goes beyond facilitating termination of pregnancy save when it's utterly unavoidable if it's to remove a danger to a mother's life would simply be in breach of the Constitution. 

Finley's little word 'only' is probably the key to this whole thing.

Abortions clearly take place to save the lives of mothers. They’re rare, but they happen. In England and Wales, for instance, 46 of the 189,931 abortions performed in 2011 – that’s 0.02pc of the total – were carried out in order to protect the life of the mother, one being an emergency abortion, and all others being ‘Ground A’ abortions, justified on the basis that:

“the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman greater than if the pregnancy were terminated”

Abortions under Ground F to save a mother’s life in an emergency situation are incredibly rare in England and Wales. There was, as noted, only one such in all of 2011, and seemingly not one Irish resident has undergone a ground F abortion there since the X case in 1992.

Given that roughly 4,000 of Britain’s roughly 190,000 annual abortions are performed at the behest of Irish women, it seems that approximately one in 47 abortions in the UK is an ‘exported’ Irish abortion. And, as we’ve seen, it looks as though 46 British abortions a year might pass the X test. Leaving aside margins of error, and bearing in mind the fact that the figures tend to be roughly the same each year, the statistics suggest that in any given year, one of these 46 will probably be performed for an Irish mother. One. 

The thing is, though, that this one might not meet the X criteria. Even if it meets the first criterion, there being a real and substantial risk to a mother’s life, would it meet the second?

What these rarities don’t establish is whether these abortions were the only way of saving those women’s lives. That’s the key question: is it ever the case that the only way to save a mother's life is to perform a direct abortion?

Pro-lifers will invariably say ‘no’, and that there are always other ways of protecting women, including interventions -- indirect abortions, if you will -- which inadvertently result in the deaths of unborn babies*. They tend to have the medical profession on their side on that one. 

It’s important to understand in this context that Britain’s 1967 abortion law doesn’t make abortion legal, but instead gives doctors a number of defences for situations where they believe it’s necessary to perform abortions. Treatment for ectopic pregnancies and so forth were never deemed offences under under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, so the 1967 act didn’t give doctors defences for dealing with such terrible situations; treatment for ectopic pregnancy isn’t classed as abortion in UK law and are counted separately from abortions.

Those who disagree will generally change the subject when asked to give examples of instances where abortion -- understood as direct targetting of unborn human beings -- is the only possible way of saving a woman's life.

Often they'll move the conversation to the issue of suicide. If, as in X, a mother threatens her own life, then it can be directly necessary to save her life. Leaving aside the fact that in X abortion manifestly wasn't necessary to protect X, such that it didn't pass its own test**, let's think about this.

Abortion and the risk of suicide

The Samaritans and the Irish Association of Suicidology advise that “suicide is never the result of a single factor or event”, and that “The reasons an individual takes their own life are manifold, and suicide should not be portrayed as the inevitable outcome of serious personal problems.”

These same guidelines recognise that "not all people who die by suicide have mental health problems at the time of death", but point out that the majority of those who kill themselves do, and Britain's Centre for Maternal and Child Enquiries said in its 2011 report that while suicide when pregnant is a relatively rare phenomenon, suicide in pregnancy or post-delivery tends to be linked to mental illness.

The evidence is pretty clear that there's no medical basis for presenting abortion as a medical solution to any mental health problem; it may not make things worse for women, but it is unlikely to make things better. Even Fintan O'Toole conceded this recently when he said::

"Last year, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges in the UK commissioned a systematic study of global scientific evidence on this question. It found: 'The rates of mental health problems for women with an unwanted pregnancy were the same whether they had an abortion or gave birth.'"

It's not just Fintan who recognises that abortion doesn't help women's mental health. In 2011 the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists issued the latest revision of their evidence-based guidelines on the care of women seeking induced abortions, stating that:

“Women with an unintended pregnancy should be informed that the evidence suggests that they are no more or less likely to suffer adverse psychological sequelae whether they have an abortion or continue with the pregnancy and have the baby... Women with an unintended pregnancy and a past history of mental health problems should be advised that they may experience further problems whether they choose to have an abortion or to continue with the pregnancy.” 

Given this it is, of course, rather surprising that the vast majority of abortions in Britain are on mental health grounds. 185,973 -- 98pc -- of Britain's abortions in 2011 were 'Ground C' abortions, that is, they were permitted because "the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman". It would seem that almost all of these were on mental health grounds, to judge by the previous year when 185,291 abortions -- again 98pc -- were Ground C abortions, with 99.96% of these reported as being performed because of a risk to the woman’s mental health.

With UK law saying that abortion on mental health grounds is permissible only when the risk of injury to mental health would be lower if an abortion were performed than otherwise, and with the medical evidence now recognised as showing that mental health problems are not reduced by abortion, it seems that such abortions in Britain are almost invariably performed in defiance of UK law.

Setting aside the Supreme Court’s application...

The expert group, listening to the ECtHR and looking at the X decision, made some interesting decisions. They seem, effectively, to have disregarded the X application, and paid heed only to the X test.

The preface gives a clue to why they did this, saying:

“The members of the group who are not doctors are not settling legal issues, the lawyers are not deciding medical controversies and the administrators are not adjudicating on the medical or legal questions.”

In this they recognised areas of competence, noting that medical matters are beyond the competence of legal professionals; this was in line with the ECtHR’s recognition that courts – even the Irish Supreme Court – are inappropriate fora for deciding medical controversies.

The group was adamant that abortion – in the context deemed permissible by the Supreme Court – should be considered a medical procedure, noting:

“Given the circumstances in which a right to a lawful termination of pregnancy would arise, i.e. when there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the woman which can only be averted by the termination of her pregnancy, this procedure would necessarily fall under the category of medical treatment.”

As such it envisaged any decisions that abortions should be necessary as having, by definition, to be made by medical professionals. The Supreme Court, in the X case, had received no medical evidence, relying instead on the evidence and opinions of a psychologist; from the point of view of the expert group, that’s not good enough.

The expert group, then, have recommended to the government that in a situation where a suicidal woman might seek an abortion, the decision as to whether or not it should be granted should be an exclusively medical one. Doctors, probably including at least one psychiatrist, would have to be able to swear that an abortion was granted because there was no other way of saving that woman’s life.

Enforcing the ‘Only’

As we’ve seen, abortion almost certainly wouldn’t help alleviate any suicidal ideation or other mental problems said woman might be suffering, such that granting it would probably be illegal even in Britain.

In Ireland, however, the bar would have to be set much higher; if the Constitution is to be respected, doctors would be barred from granting abortions when they see them as the best, or the most convenient, or the most humane solution. They’d only be allowed to grant them when they see them as the only solution.

As the expert group says:

“The State is entitled and, indeed, obliged to regulate and monitor the exercise of [the limited constitutional right to abortion] so as to ensure that the general constitutional prohibition on abortion is maintained.”

 As such, the expert group seems to envisage monitoring rather beyond what happens in Britain, saying:

“Any proposed system should be duly monitored. There is a need to keep records on the number of women who seek and who are given terminations and the medical reasons that gave rise to the treatment for clinical purposes. Statistics are also required to inform policy, as well as to ensure that the principles and requirements of the system are being upheld. The Review Panel system and its effectiveness should also be monitored. Finally, it is important to protect and suitably anonymise all records, to safeguard the privacy and identity of both patients and doctors.”

This, of course, is where it gets interesting. Monitoring in Britain is minimal, with doctors having to submit the most scanty of forms to explain why they believed abortions justified, their discretion being trusted. HSA4 forms, from which Britain’s abortion statistics are compiled, are sent to the Chief Medical Officer, are not required to give detailed justifications, instead merely requiring two doctors – except in emergencies – to certify their good faith opinion that the termination meets at least one and the same ground set out in the Act, given the information that they have about the woman’s circumstances. 

If there is evidence that a certifying doctor has not formed an opinion in good faith, then those performing the termination are not protected by the Act and may have potentially committed a criminal offence by terminating the pregnancy. The doctors involved may also be acting contrary to their professional duties.

HSA2 forms, which are required for Ground F and G abortions, requires doctors to certify that they were “of the opinion formed in good faith that it is/was necessary immediately to terminate the pregnancy”

The expert group, however, seem to think Irish doctors should be obliged to set forth the medical reasons that necessitated the treatment; what this might mean is not clear, but what is clear is that a mere box-ticking exercise would run contrary to the Constitution. 

This wouldn’t be unnecessary fussiness or prurience. It would simply be a case of the State acting in accord with its duty to vindicate and protect the rights of the unborn, as far as practicable. And what happens when the monitoring panel looks at a case where an abortion took place which the panel deems to be anything other than strictly necessary?

Well, as things stand, and as in Britain, abortion is a felony under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, for which a sentence of penal servitude for life can be imposed. Doctors can still be charged under this. The guidelines for filling out the HSA1 and HSA2 forms say:

“If there is evidence that a certifying doctor has not formed an opinion in good faith, then those performing the termination are not protected by the Act and may have potentially committed a criminal offence by terminating the pregnancy. The doctors involved may also be acting contrary to their professional duties.”

It seems to me that even with amendments, this principle could be upheld.

I think this would work. We legislate for X, but demand that decisions to abort be made by doctors, and doctors only, and with every single abortion – direct or indirect – to be scrutinised after the fact by a monitoring panel of medical practitioners. This wouldn’t happen so often that the medical profession in Ireland would be overwhelmed; if the British figures give us a real guideline on this, there’d only be one case a year where doctors would even have to consider whether a mother was in such danger of death that an abortion – as understood in the colloquial rather than strictly medical sense – would be the only possible way of saving the mother’s life. 

Doctors performing or authorising abortions should have to justify to the panel not merely what the risk was to the mother, but also why there was no other way of saving her life other than killing her child. 

And if the Constitution is to be taken seriously, the monitoring panel would be obliged, in cases where they believed doctors had performed abortions which were not clearly necessary, to have said doctors struck off and reported to the Director of Public Prosecutions. And as we’ve seen, it’s very hard to think of a situation where abortion would be necessary. It wasn’t necessary in the X case.

Would this guarantee that there’d never be abortions in Ireland? No, but just as abortion isn’t a magic wand, neither is the law magic. It would, however, guarantee that direct abortion would remain illegal.

_____________________________________________________________________________

* Yes, babies. Because that’s what the Medical Council guidelines say. As indeed the NHS in Britain tends to. Just like most expectant mothers, and other normal human beings.

** Finlay deemed the test to be passed in X because, 

"In my view, it is common sense that a threat of self-destruction such as is outlined in the evidence in this case, which the psychologist clearly believes to be a very real threat, cannot be monitored [in the sense in which a physical threat can] and that it is almost impossible to prevent self-destruction in a young girl in the situation in which this defendant is if she were to decide to carry out her threat of suicide."

 Justice Hederman, dissenting, thought this was nonsense. 

"If this young person without being pregnant had suicidal tendencies due to some other cause then nobody would doubt that the proper course would be to put her in such care and under such supervision as would counteract such tendency and do everything possible to prevent suicide. [...] This young girl clearly requires loving and sympathetic care and professional counselling and all the protection which the State agencies can provide or furnish."

The evidence considered by the Court showed Hederman to be right, and Finlay to be wrong, as it records the psychologist who dealt with X as saying under cross-examination that:

 "My recommendation would be she was not safe unless under supervision. I would have thought, given the state which I found her in, in-patent treatment would be essential. I don't think the parents can offer 24-hour supervision."

My italics, obviously. It 's worth noting that this evidence was never contested in the Supreme Court.

X would not be safe without in-patient treatment, said the only person who gave direct testimony as to her mental state; even though X's parents couldn't protect her, she would be safe under professional supervision. The psychologist's judgement on this was not contested. The court was aware that abortion was clearly not the only way of resolving this. There was another option.

It's just as well that the ECtHR reckons it inappropriate for constitutional courts to make medical decisions, given that Finlay's decision didn't comply with the test that he lay down. The Oireachtas has the job now of legislating to comply with that test. It should try to avoid Finlay's mistake.