Consistent life ethic
The consistent life ethic, also known as the consistent ethic of life or whole life ethic, is an ideology that opposes abortion, capital punishment, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. Adherents oppose war, or at the very least unjust war; some adherents go as far as full pacifism and so oppose all war.[1] Many authors have understood the ethic to be relevant to a broad variety of areas of public policy as well as social justice issues.[2] The term was popularized in 1983 by the Catholic prelate Joseph Bernardin in the United States to express an ideology based on the premise that all human life is sacred and should be protected by law.[3]
Criticisms[edit]
One criticism made of the consistent life ethic position is that it inadvertently helped provide "cover" or support for politicians who supported legalized abortion or wanted to minimize this issue, a circumstance that Bernardin himself both recognized and deplored.[57][4] A critic of Joseph Bernardin, George Weigel rejected the claims that the consistent life ethic had been created to cover up for abortion rights, saying that Bernardin was "a committed pro-lifer". He still criticizes the concept as a legacy of what he considers as Bernardin's "culturally accommodating Catholicism".[58]
The concept of a consistent life ethic is often rejected in the United States and abroad by those who prefer to use the concept of a culture of life as was promoted by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI in their encyclicals. Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles dismissed the "seamless garment" approach in 2016 because in his view it results in "a mistaken idea that all issues are morally equivalent".[59] The "seamless garment" approach was also criticized by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger while he was serving as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In a July 2004 letter written to now former-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and to the United States Bishops as a whole, Cardinal Ratzinger makes it clear that the church does not treat capital punishment with the same moral weight that it does abortion and euthanasia: "Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father [the Pope] on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion...There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia."[60]
Jesuit magazine America stated in an article published on 6 December 2023 that the consistent life ethic, generally speaking, has been a failure, writing: "Depressingly, 40 years since Cardinal Bernardin first proposed the consistent ethic of life, the ethic remains mired in the same senseless, polarized partisanship that Bernardin proposed the ethic to overcome."[61]