As conditions in Afghanistan become chaotic, and the likelihood increases that Western nations will be called on to accept an influx of Afghan refugees, more and more Catholics will turn their focus to the Church’s teaching on immigration. When it comes to this often politically fraught issue, Catholics can use the consistent life ethic to inform their thinking. This is an approach to human life and dignity that applies appropriate ethical principles to different areas as a basis for making sound practical judgments to protect and promote human life.
“Where life is involved, the service of charity must be profoundly consistent,” wrote John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae. “It cannot tolerate bias and discrimination, for human life is sacred and inviolable at every stage and in every situation; it is an indivisible good. We need then to ‘show care’ for all life and for the life of everyone. Indeed, at an even deeper level, we need to go to the very roots of life and love” (87).
Sometimes people distinguish between “life issues” and “justice issues”—between matters such as abortion, euthanasia, and other forms of unjustifiable killing on the one hand and matters such as homelessness, health care, human-trafficking, and racial discrimination on the other. The distinction can be helpful as far as it goes. But you’ll notice that some social issues (such as marriage and family life or environmental concerns) don’t easily fit into either category, whereas others (health care and criminal justice, for example) arguably belong in both. An over-reliance on this distinction, then, can leave out important social issues or overlook how life issues also involve matters of justice—rights—and how justice issues also depend on the right to life and flow from it. The right to life, though not the only right, is foundational for the exercise of all other rights. At the same time, the right to life—being a right and therefore involving justice—is a “justice issue.”
Pope Benedict XVI recalled how Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae “indicates the strong link between life ethics and social ethics” (Caritas in Veritate 15). Paul VI connected evangelization to human development: proclaiming Christ ought to lead society to improve the human situation. Christians are to be doers of the word and not just hearers (James 1:22). Conversion of individual people should help convert society—in its laws and civil institutions—to greater and more consistent respect for human life and dignity. Thus, putting one’s faith into responsible action is also part of the consistent life ethic—consistency here being between what we profess and how we live.
Although most of us likely agree, in principle, with the idea of a consistent life ethic—because we’d rather think of ourselves as consistent than inconsistent—we may still fail to practice it. Ideology can affect us here. Ideology—defined in a negative sense as a set of ideas given vastly more explanatory power than warranted and held far more firmly than justified—can impede us.
Ideologies abound. The Marxist ideologue reduces everything to economics and class struggle; the Freudian reduces psychology to sex. The racist makes everything about race, the extreme libertarian ideologue about freedom of choice and self-ownership, and the radical feminist about oppression and liberation of women. Our own ideas can become ideological, too, taking something true so far that it leads us to error. We can, as John Paul II once put it, treat a piece of the pie as if it were the whole pie. Ideology can blind us to the moral implications of Church teaching, and thus we can fail to apply it in our personal lives and in our social obligations.
Pope Francis warns against ideologies in his apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate. He sees a danger of ideology leading some people to separate the demands of the gospel from “their personal relationship with the Lord.” They come to treat Christianity as a political organization and ignore Christ. Social and political work, good as it can be, is no substitute for a relationship with Christ. Likewise, Pope Francis warns against a false prioritizing of social concerns, as if some human lives were inherently more important than others or as if, because we work to address a particular issue, it is the only important issue worth addressing.
He notes, for example, how some Catholics treat the plight of migrants as a “lesser issue” rather than a “grave issue” like abortion and other bioethical questions. Yet, he asks, can’t we realize that this attitude contradicts Jesus’ teaching “when he tells us that in welcoming the stranger, we welcome him”? (Gaudete et Exsultate 102).
Francis’s point is not that all social issues are equally grave, or that abortion and migration are morally equivalent. Rather, he stresses how the same human dignity at stake in bioethical issues, such as abortion, is involved in the lives of migrating people. Both the unborn child and the migrant are human beings with the right to life. We shouldn’t let a specific area of concern, whether it be abortion or migrant issues (or other topics), ideologically distort our valuing of human life in other areas.
The consistent life ethic can itself be misused as a kind of ideology. We can fall into the trap of thinking everyone committed to a consistent life ethic must agree with our particular approach to every issue concerned with the right to life and human dignity. For example, sometimes the consistent life ethic is described as a seamless garment—a metaphor drawn from the description of Jesus’ robe in John 19:23. As that robe was woven as one piece from top to bottom, it is said, so should our approach to the various issues of life and human dignity be “of a piece.” This makes sense from the perspective of a consistent ethic of life, but some people cite the seamless garment metaphor to claim that anyone who holds to that ethic must therefore endorse a lengthy and specific set of political positions. Yet this contradicts the teaching of the Church that Catholics with well formed consciences may at times disagree on political issues. As Vatican II teaches:
It is necessary for people to remember that no one is allowed . . . to appropriate the Church’s authority for his opinion. [People] should always try to enlighten one another through honest discussion, preserving mutual charity and caring above all for the common good (Gaudium et Spes 43).
Catholics must agree on Catholic social principles, since these are the teaching of the Church, but they don’t always have to agree about the best political applications of those principles in society.
Furthermore, equating a consistent life ethic with a “seamless garment” of particular political stances on all issues touching human life confuses the fundamental importance of all issues involving human dignity with the erroneous position that all moral issues touching on human life are of the same weight. As we have seen, something can be important, even gravely important, yet not of the same moral significance as something else.
Unfortunately, some people in politics employ this false notion of the seamless garment to depict themselves as good representatives of a consistent life ethic. They may wrongly equate the principle with their specific policy approach, and they may wrongly put all life issues on the same level of gravity.
The Church wants Catholics to avoid two false alternatives. We must neither relativize the absolute nor absolutize the relative. Fundamental principles regarding human dignity and human rights are absolutes: they may never be violated, and Catholics, whether as citizens or political authorities, must respect these principles. This is why they are sometimes spoken of as non-negotiable.
Catholics must also avoid absolutizing the relative—treating particular political approaches to issues as if they were themselves inviolable principles. The Church insists on “the legitimate freedom of Catholic citizens to choose among the various political opinions that are compatible with faith and the natural moral law, and to select, according to their own criteria, what best corresponds to the needs of the common good.”
This article is adapted from the booklet 20 Answers: Catholic Social Teaching, available at the Catholic Answers shop.