Sixteen years ago, the University of Sydney applied to buy several hectares of land within the boundary of St. John’s College, intending to construct a new medical building there.
I was the Rector of the college at that time. I and the fellows were sympathetic to the request, for we had no use for the land, which lay between our oval and existing university property.
The proposed price ran to several million dollars, and, like all educational institutions, we could use the money.
But for us, as a Catholic college, there was one big ethical issue at stake: we determined that we could not sell the land unless the university gave us an undertaking that the new building would not be used for medical procedures that were connected in any way with the termination of human life, either of the very young or the very old.
The university authorities were, in the main, surprisingly acquiescent, even respectful of our ethical stance, but approval was by no means unanimous: the secular left (and that means most of the university’s staff and students) were outraged, and we got a drubbing from many in the media.
We had one quirky media success. I was booked for a radio interview with Derryn Hinch.
By sheer good fortune, I was allowed to overhear his very hostile introductory remarks before he switched me on.
Mr. Hinch is a man not noted for the warmth of his feelings towards Christianity, and he had much to say about how the Church should not meddle in matters that don’t concern it.
That gave me a few minutes to collect my thoughts and start off on the front foot.
He made an initial tirade against the Church’s ‘interference’ in political and social issues (“keep your rosaries off our ovaries,” he might have said). After he was done, I asked him if he disapproved of Bishop von Galen’s outspoken opposition to Hitler and what he thought about two archbishops (Luwum in Uganda and Romero in El Salvador) who were murdered for their resistance to cruel and tyrannical regimes.
There were so many more I could have mentioned as well if I had had time: martyrs like Edith Stein, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Maximilian Kolbe, abolitionists like William Wilberforce. And, of course, Martin Luther King.
Nothing New Under the Sun
A decade and a half later, the same battle lines are still in place, but the fight has grown fiercer.In Canberra, the ACT government has now “nationalised” Calvary Hospital, a Catholic foundation, ostensibly in the name of efficiency, but undoubtedly because it would not provide the sort of ‘health services’ that modern secular society demands of it.
Hospitals are among the greatest success stories of the Christian West.
There was almost no precedent for them in the ancient and pagan world in which unwanted children were aborted before birth or, once born, killed or exposed to death.
Slaves that were sick or who had outlived their usefulness were likewise killed or exiled to temple sanctuaries to expire from exposure or starvation. Old people generally, particularly if poor and resourceless, were deemed to have no intrinsic value at all.
Even if the medical facilities had been available, it would have made no sense to the ancient mind to preserve their lives, nor was palliative care generally available—except to those few who could afford it.
Christianity changed all that.
Tertullian (born 155 AD) insists that infanticide, whether of the born or the unborn, is morally indefensible. We know from written accounts and inscriptions that the early Christians cared for unwanted children and the sick and dying and that their compassion and mercy extended to all.
From this matrix of charity arose the first recognisable hospitals, a tradition continued for centuries by monks and nuns.
Where Does Sanctity of Life Go From Here
The advances of later times, of Edward Jenner, Joseph Lister, Florence Nightingale, and all their successors amount to a kind of tsunami of growing knowledge and ever-improving practice, a tidal wave that has still not peaked and perhaps (please God) never will.
But the enforced secularisation of hospitals to conform to the values of our present age means that they have been stripped of much of their original moral purpose.
We do well to remind ourselves constantly that Hitler rose to power in what was probably the most highly educated nation in the world.
We should be appalled by what some men and women in the medical profession were capable of doing once their moral compass and their commitment to science had been subverted by political fanaticism.
Interference with the natural course of human life was always an absolute ethical no-go area for hospitals—until modern times.
Likening the situation in Australia to Nazi Germany would be far-fetched and irresponsible. Absurd comparisons are like crying wolf—they trivialise reality. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is not a dictator from the 20th century.
But what we can acknowledge, if we’re honest, is that the absolute value of all human life is now seriously questioned by many in authority, that the centre is no longer holding (to borrow Yeats’s imagery), and that we could swing off-orbit.
