- Pope John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, no. 71. Translation that of Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
- On this see my “Free Choice, Baptism, and the Christian Moral Life,” in Camminare nella luce: Prospettive della Teologia Morale a 10 Anni da Veritatis Splendor, ed. Livio Melina (Rome: Pontificia Universitá Lateranense, 2004), 455–459.
- John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, no. 71; the internal citation, from St. Gregory of Nyssa, is from his De vita Moysis, 2,3.
- John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, no. 65, original emphasis.
- Ibid., no. 71, original emphasis.
- Ibid., no. 65.
- See, for example, the following: Joseph Fletcher, “Indicators of Humanhood: A Tentative Profile of Man,” Hastings Center Report 2.5 (November 1972): 1–4, in which he offered some twenty criteria for being counted as a human being, including a sense of time and of curiosity, and twenty criteria excluding human beings from being recognized as “persons,” among them Down syndrome. In December 1974, the Hastings Center Report published his essay, “Four Indicators of Humanhood—The Enquiry Matures” (4.6: 4–7). In this essay Fletcher declared that neocortical functioning is the sinequa non for being human as a person. Without this functioning the “person is non-existent no matter how much the individual’s brain stem or mid-brain may continue to provide feelings and regulate autonomic physical functions. To be truly Homo Sapiens, we must be sapient, however minimally.” See also Peter Singer’s Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). In that book he contrasts the “Old Commandments” with his “New Commandments.” He replaces what he calls “Old Commandment 5, “Treat all human life as always more precious than any non-human life” with his New Commandment 5: “Do not discriminate on the basis of species.”
- Patrick Lee, Abortion and Unborn Human Life (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 26–27, emphasis added.
- Mortimer Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 157 ff.
- Ibid., 202.
- John Macquarrie, Three Issues in Ethics (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 111.
- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” given at a conference on Catholic Conscience: Foundation and Formation (Proceedings of the Tenth Bishops’ Workshop 1991) and originally published as edited by Rev. Russell Smith by the Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Center, Braintree, MA (now the National Catholic Bioethics Center, Philadelphia, PA), and reprinted in On Conscience: Two Essays by Cardinal Ratzinger (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007). Ratzinger develops what he regards as the central anthropological and ontological meaning of conscience as anamnesis.
- Ibid., 32, emphasis added.
- Ibid., 36.
The Linacre Quarterly
Volume 77, 2010 - Issue 1