Chapter 1 of Austriaco's Biomedicine and Beatitude: Four Crucial Issues

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Notes

1 Father Austriaco was finishing his studies for the S.T.L. at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., when I was teaching a course on bioethics and the family to students enrolled in the Master of Theological Studies Program at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, then housed in the Dominican House of Studies. Several times Father Austriaco was a guest lecturer who explained clearly to my students and me the scientific, biological issues. His lectures were models of clarity—he is a superb teacher.

2 Pinckaers’s famous The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 1995) is divided into three major parts. The first (I) concerns “Ethics: Human and Christian” and focuses on the distinctive nature of Christian ethics; the second (II) is called “A Brief History of Moral Theology”; the third (III), called “Freedom and Natural Law” concludes with chapter 17, titled “Natural Inclinations at the Source of Freedom and Morality”; see my review of this work in “Recent Moral Theology: Servais Pinckaers and Benedict Ashley,” The Thomist 62.1 (1998): 117–131.

3 See Romanus Cessario (2001: 79–90) concentrates on the “natural inclinations” as manifestations of the natural law. He recognizes that there are “principles” or “precepts” of natural law and that St. Thomas taught this. But he insists the preferable way for a realist Thomist theologian to speak of natural law is to speak of natural law “inclinations” rather than natural law “precepts” or principles.

4 On this see Martin Rhonheimer (2000), especially pp. 61–64, “The Natural Law as the Work of Reason.” See also the observations of D. O'Donoghue: “there are two ways of understanding rational participation: We might see it as a receptive participation: created reason is receptive of Eternal Law just as irrational nature is…though in a higher way. Or we might see rational participation as legislative, as participation in the very act of legislating….That we must understand rational participation in the second sense, seeing human reason as regulative rather than regulated, is clear from the fact that St. Thomas identifies the Natural Law with the “propositions” or “precepts” of natural reason. The matter is put beyond doubt in q. 93, a. 6, where a sharp distinction is drawn between participation in the Eternal Law by way of inclinatio naturalis ad id quod est consonum legi aeternae and ipsa naturalis cognitio boni…. That which differentiates Natural Law from natural inclination, and makes it law in the proper sense, is the fact that it is the work of reason, expression rather than impression. It comes from God, as all human things…but the mind receives it, not as itself an object which is revealed by it but as becoming a source of light, discerning and declaring the truth for human activity.” “The Thomist Concept of the Natural Law,” Irish Theological Quarterly 22 (1955): 93–94.

5 On this see the helpful essay by Angel Rodriguez Luño, “La valutazione teologico-morale dell'aborto,” in Commento Interdisciplinare alla “Evangelium Vitae,” under the direction and coordination of Ramon Lucas Lucas, Italian edition by Elio Sgreccia and Ramon Lucas Lucas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), 419. As examples of older moral manuals defining abortion as the expelling of a living but not yet viable fetus from the mother's womb, Luño refers to those by D. M. Pruemmer and H. Noldin. In his Manuale Theologiae Morale (Friburgi Brisg./Rome: Herder, 1961), vol. 2, no. 137, Pruemmer defined abortion as eiectio immaturi foetus viventis ex utero matris (expelling of an immature living fetus from the mother's womb). In his Summa Theologiae Moralis (Oeniponte-Lipsiae: P. Rauch, 1941), vol. 2, no. 342, Noldin offered a similar definition, foetus abortus est eiectio immaturi ex utero matris (abortion is the expelling of an immature fetus from its mother's womb).