"Catholic" Gary Wills Get Abortion All Wrong - Plus The Catholic Church and Abortion(Good Easy Reading Article)

There seems to have been quite an uproar over what Garry Wills about abortion in his book entitled, Head and Heart: American Christianities.

First let me recommend this very informative article that hits most the issues we hear about.

Mirror of Justice that is a site devoted to dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory has been all over this the last few days. Here is Will's take as present by MOJ.

If you have some time I would suggest reading the various post ath MOJ has put up in response to this. They are:
More on Wills on Abortion
Robby George on Garry Wills
Dellapenna on Wills on abortion

Let me say I find some of Wills thoughts on this odd. Wills is a Catholic and should know better. I am also wary of a book that examines American Christianity and has an chapter entitled "The Karl Rove Era". Pleaseeeeeee. I think this article pretty much has enough smoke signals to see where he is coming from. A few jewels from that piece:
The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.
Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.


and

The moral zealots will, I predict, give some cause for dismay even to nonfundamentalist Republicans. Jihads are scary things. It is not too early to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment.
Good Grief not this balderdash. I wish people that are especially Catholic would listen to us converts. Many of whom came from this tradition that Mr Wills is associating with Jihad. However I suspect he would not like what we have to say is the reality.

Anyway on to his thoughts on Abortion.

Wills, himself a Catholic, raises the temperature even higher: "Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of the well-formed fetus as a person—calling for baptism and Christian burial." But this was never the case. "And no wonder," says Wills. The subject of abortion is not scriptural, "it is not treated in the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, or anywhere in the Jewish Scripture, the New Testament or the creeds and the early ecumenical councils." Augustine? He could never find in Scripture "anything at all certain about the origins of the soul."

And the most notable Thomas Aquinas, "lacking scriptural guidance" and using Aristotelian distinctions, "denied that personhood arose at fertilization by the semen. God directly infuses the soul at the completion of human formation."Wills refutes arguments that abortion is a religious issue, and that anti-abortionists are acting out of religious conviction. No, it is not a theological matter at all: "There is no theological basis for either defending or condemning abortion." Even the popes say it is a "matter of natural law, to be decided by natural reason," and the pope is not an arbiter of natural law.

Informed conscience, said super-convert John Henry Newman, has to come first in matters of this sort.Wills concludes: When anti-abortionists claim to be "pro-life," they are inconsistent. Only people like Albert Schweitzer can be called consistently pro-life. "My hair is human life," yet the barber does not preserve it. What matters is not "human life" but "the human person." Sonograms of the fetus reacting do not show a human person: "All living cells have electric and automatic reactions." Don't get Wills wrong: "It is not enough to say that whatever the woman wants should go. She has a responsibility to consider..." But, he asks, do religious or political authorities have the right to take over that responsibility? Take it from there.

Where does one begin. First I am astonished at this line "The subject of abortion is not scriptural, "it is not treated in the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, or anywhere in the Jewish Scripture, the New Testament or the creeds and the early ecumenical councils" Well it seems that Catholic Mr Wills has become Mr Sola Scriptoria a very un Catholic position. How about:
"You shall not kill an unborn child or murder a newborn infant."
The Didache ("The Lord's Instruction to the Gentiles through the Twelve Apostles"). II, 2, translated by J.A. Kleist, S.J., Ancient Christian Writers, Volume 6. Westminster, 1948, page 16.


"You shall love your neighbor more than your own life. You shall not slay the child by abortion."
Barnabas (c. 70-138), Epistle, Volume II, page 19.

Again please go to ABORTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH which has a list of councils and Church Father ,Doctors, and Councils that just plain out refute the essence of what Willis is saying. The whole "ensoulment" part of his argument sounds like it came out of "Catholic For Free Choice" propaganda sheet. Again that is dealt with at the above link.