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Address by Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP: Launch of Catholic Bioethics for a New Millennium, University of Notre Dame Australia Sydney, Tuesday 31 January 2012

Your Eminence, fellow clergy and religious, academic leaders and scholars, healthcare leaders and practitioners, and friends all:

May I begin by thanking His Eminence Cardinal Pell for his gracious words tonight and for doing me the great honour of launching this book. He is my brother bishop from the Eastern part of Parramatta (also known as Sydney). More importantly, he is my metropolitan and dear friend. For years he has encouraged my ecclesiastical and scholarly pursuits, even if he has tried to make me too busy with the first to much pursue the second. After having me organise a little youth festival he was gracious enough to allow me the sabbatical in Oxford which Christopher and Paula Flynn helped finance and which meant I had the leisure and research tools to complete this book.

Tonight I also thank all at Cambridge University Press, including Melissa Zarafa who is with us, for taking on this project and tonight making the first copies available in Australia.

I record my gratitude to the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Governors, staff and students of the University of Notre Dame Australia for hosting us tonight. Trish Egan and Amy Higgins have worked especially hard to make this happen. Late last year I had the privilege of attending the university’s first graduation of medical students, including Trish’s son, Tom, along with law, theology and philosophy students, and as my work has been at the intersection of these four disciplines I was delighted to graduate with them.

Deputy Vice Chancellor Prof Hayden Ramsay has, like Cardinal Pell, been a huge support and encouragement to me. I have come to hold his university in great affection and very much enjoy my own occasional teaching here. I am also pleased that my little book will add to their research points for 2012!

I wrote my first book while I was an undergraduate at the University of Sydney, an institution now best known for being near the University of Notre Dame. I was very involved in the pro-life movement at that time.

The book was on Abortion in Australia and I have been somewhat type-cast ever since: most of my publications have ended up being in the area of bioethics. I never dreamed where such pursuits might take me! Since then the questions in health ethics have only multiplied, such as:

• When do people begin and how would we know?
• What’s all the fuss about stem-cells and are there more and less ethical ways to achieve therapies?
•  Is abortion a new form of eugenics? Who should live and who should die on the basis on their genes or wantedness, who decides and in whose interests?
• Are organ transplants a good thing or do they kill the donors? How should we think of the relationship between donor, recipient, families and community?
• Do unresponsive patients still matter and should we keep feeding them, even artificially?
• Why are Christians so hung up about killing patients, even those who are already at a very low ebb or who want to die?
• What is the role of a Catholic healthcare institution in today’s world and how can it protect its Catholic identity and ethical integrity in the face of all the pressures?
• How about the healthcare professional? What is their vocation and when may they cooperate in the morally dubious choices of an institution or other professionals?
• What sorts of laws and policies should we make in this area and are pro-life politicians able to vote for ‘bad but better’ laws?

In the face of such questions and many more I now write not just as an enthusiastic pro-lifer or as an academic but also, as the Cardinal pointed out, as a bishop. Many of you will know that I took as my episcopal motto ‘Speaking the truth in love’ – St Paul’s shorthand description, in the fourth chapter of his Letter to the Ephesians, of the tasks of Christian leaders and disciples.

Here he described the lived words, even more than the preached ones, of those who attain ‘the unity of the Faith and the knowledge of the Son of God’ and so mature as fully as possible, both as human beings and as children of God. That we might be assisted in this, he said, God graces ‘some to be apostles, prophets or evangelists, some to be pastors or teachers’.

Without reliable teachers, Paul continues, people can be carried about by the latest fashions, and become dim of wit, hard of heart or deaf to God. So I write in the hope that my words help. Of course the Church, as Pope Benedict XVI so often says, and Blessed John Paul II said before him, proposes rather than imposes her ideas: people are free in practice to accept or reject them. Christians hope to be given a fair hearing even by non-believers and judged on the basis of their arguments; but the Church is not merely a competitor in some war of ideas: what she believes to be the truth the Church proposes as a lover to the beloved.

One of my hopes, therefore, is that this book will serve as a catalyst for public discussion on some of the most important and pressing ethical issues surrounding human life. This is because, as the Holy Father recently said to the US Bishops, “The Church’s witness is of its nature public: she seeks to convince by proposing rational arguments in the public square.”

Though the Church may sometimes be contra mundum in the sense of offering a different wisdom, it is always for the world, in the sense of offering her message freely and lovingly in the hope that there will one day be not Cowboys and Indians, affirmative and negative debating teams, but one human family under God.

Those outside the Church who would seek to silence her on the great issues of the day, those inside who would prefer to repair to some haven of the like-minded, and those inside or out who want the Church to follow the latest opinion poll, all misread that legitimate separation of Church and State that Christianity first offered the world.

Though the Church may not dictate to the state, including those making laws with respect to human life, or to the professions, including those in the healthcare professions, she must always be a voice for the voiceless, including the voiceless unborn, sick and dying, and propose a wisdom she believes she has received from God and which drives her faithful who are themselves leaders and voters, doctors and patients.

Because of the public nature of the many issues in bioethics, much of this book utilises the language of the age, of philosophy and healthcare, of ideals common to people of all religions and none. But the Church also speaks with the authority of her Master, and so readers of this book will from time to time encounter a more distinctively Christian argumentation, including appeal to the Sacred Scriptures and Tradition.

There is much about contemporary healthcare and bioresearch worthy of celebration. Lives are saved. People are cured of debilitating diseases or prevented ever from suffering them. Others have the advance of sickness limited or symptoms relieved. Many more are well cared for while they are sick, recovering or dying. People, in the more developed economies at least, can now expect to live to ‘a ripe old age’.

Of course there are limits to the technology and art of healthcare – the limits of the possible and also of the moral. In medicine today ethics often bumps up against the technological imperative – the idea that if a thing can be done it should be (or inevitably will be) done; or the rescue imperative – the natural desire to save those at risk of damage or death no matter what; or a pragmatism that masquerades as efficiency but results in abandonment of the weak or the compromise of the ethic internal to healthcare.

In response to such pressures it is important that, when we talk of the ‘right’ to life, the ‘dignity’ of the human person, being pro-life in our healthcare institutions or life-affirming in our practices, we are clear that we are not fighting for some abstraction. Dignity and life are dimensions of real, flesh-and-blood human beings who matter, indeed matter very much. That’s what bioethics is about. To propose as our starting point that every human being should be reverenced, protected and assisted to flourish is not some rigid moral absolutism or abstract ancient formula but about love for humanity under grace.

Many people have affected my thinking in these chapters or helped me shape them. My family, of course, taught me first about the preciousness of human life and health, of truth and love, and I am pleased that my father Colin is with me tonight and my mother Gloria, recently the recipient of a new knee, is watching from her hospital room through the kind assistance of Xt3’s live-streaming. Margaret Fisher is commonly accused of being my sister but I am connected with her in other happy ways such as through this university.

My Dominican brothers saw to my education in moral theology and bioethics and supported me while I undertook much of this research: many of them attended the Melbourne launch of this book last week and I am grateful to have Fr John and Fr Paul here tonight.

Then there are those fellow scholars and clergy with whom I share my teaching mission and from many of whom I have gained my confidence that the Hippocratic and Judeo-Christian traditions can be synthesised with contemporary thought about practical reason, virtue and community to provide real answers to the dilemmas of healthcare today.

Present tonight are several who helped in one way or another with the detail of this text, including Susan Holmes, Brett Doyle, Ben Lucas, Helen Howard and Lisa Garland. Many other colleagues from the Diocese of Parramatta, including the Vicars-General Monsignor Robert McGuckin and Fr Peter Williams, from the Archdiocese of Sydney, from Catholic healthcare, education and welfare, and from the Order of Malta are here tonight and I thank them for their constant support. In the introduction to the book I thank many others who have affected my thinking.

For the reasons I outline in my book I think this is a particularly promising time to be involved in Catholic bioethics. Healthcare continues to do so much that is so good and has the potential to do more in the future. It is great that with us tonight are leaders or staff of several Catholic and secular hospitals, aged care facilities and healthcare groups, as well as practitioners from all branches of the healthcare and allied professions, who are the frontline of the healthcare mission.

They know better than any of us the potential and the challenges, including moral puzzles, not just for our institutions but for practitioners, funders, patients and our whole community. I offer them, and the young people preparing to follow them through their studies in this university, this book and my prayers. Thank you all for your support.