At an audience not long after he was elected in 2013, Pope Francis embraced an Italian man who was terribly disfigured by tumours growing all over his body.
It became an iconic image of his pontificate, a demonstration of the new pope’s commitment to human dignity and fraternal care.
He expressed his convictions in several important documents about bioethics, the philosophical discipline which deals with the human drama of health and illness.
Following news of the pope’s death, Dr Xavier Symons, a bioethicist and the director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics at Australian Catholic University, held a webinar to discuss Francis’s “broad, integrated vision of a joyful bioethics in the service of authentic human flourishing.”
The presenters on 6 May were Dr Michael Wee, of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre at Oxford, in the UK, Dr Bernadette Tobin, founding director of the Plunkett Centre and member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and Dr Natasha Michael, a senior palliative care consultant in Melbourne.
Although Francis was portrayed as a “progressive” by the media and conservatives, he resolutely held the line on key bioethical issues like abortion, IVF and assisted reproduction, surrogacy, assisted suicide, euthanasia, and gender ideology.
What the webinar speakers highlighted, however, was the late pope’s gift of infusing a deeply traditional Catholic approach to bioethical questions with compassionate pastoral care.
For Dr Wee, a “synthesis of moral teaching and Catholic social teaching was the hallmark of Pope Francis’s teachings on the moral life”. In his view, there is a “dangerous tendency” among some Catholics to demand clarity on moral issues, but to dismiss Catholic social doctrine as an optional extra.
“Pope Francis was certainly at his best in trying to synthesise these two traditions of the church’s teaching, the moral and the social, to try and go beyond that hostile inflexibility, that certitude of simply focusing on the law, on the written word and how and what that means for bioethics today,” he said.
For Pope Francis, Dr Wee contended, it was both/and rather than either/or—we need both clear principles and also concrete examples of how bioethics intersects with social teaching.
As an example of “this pivot towards the social and community dimension of the moral good”, Dr Wee recalled a moment in 2019 when he and his wife and their newborn child met Pope Francis at a conference on palliative care for infants. He was very impressed by the pope’s description of pregnancy as a kind of mystery, an awareness “of a presence growing within her, one that pervades her whole being”. The pope realised that mother and child constitute a “little community with its own common good, with its own conditions of flourishing”.
It was a new way of framing the bitterly contentious issue of abortion.
In her presentation, Dr Bernadette Tobin tackled the controversial encyclical Laudato Sí’ which Pope Francis published in 2015.
In it, the pope had found fault with consumerism, irresponsible economic development, environmental degradation and global warming. Unsurprisingly, it sparked a lot of controversy. Critics complained that he was channelling Greta Thunberg, not Catholic teaching.
This kind of reaction missed the point, Dr Tobin argued. The central theme of the encyclical was promoting an “authentic human ecology,” a society in which people can flourish. Environmentalism has a deeply moral dimension. As the pope said in Laudato Sí’, “The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast.”
The environment was also a concern for John Paul II and Benedict XVI. What Laudato Sí’ added to their critiques, said Dr Tobin, was “its tone, its pungency, its sweep, its apocalyptic flavour.”
But that didn’t mean that Catholics had to sign up to Greta Thunberg’s agenda. “On many of these concrete questions,” Dr Tobin said, “the church has no reason to offer a definitive opinion. She knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts while respecting divergent views.”
Dr Natasha Michael drew on her experience as a palliative care physician who has helped many people in their last days. She discussed the last major bioethics document of Francis’s pontificate, Dignitas Infinita, which was published last year. It was a deep analysis of what the often-misused word “dignity” really means,” she said.
“The dignity of others is to be respected in all circumstances, not because that dignity is something that we have invented or imagined, but because we as humans possess an intrinsic worth that is superior to that of material objects and contingent situations,” Dr Michael observed.
Dr Symons summed up the event for The Catholic Weekly: “Pope Francis was a very ambitious thinker, sometimes a little difficult to follow but always simultaneously original and steeped in tradition. We’re only now just beginning to appreciate some of the genius of his insights on bioethics. This seminar was a great opportunity to unpack some of these ideas”.
