From Mr G. Borg

What Fr Peter said on Georg Sapiano’s programme Doksa this week was nothing short of earth-shattering. He was, in simple and unambiguous terms, standing up to the Maltese bishops and the Roman Catholic Church on their official position on the beginning of the human life and implying it is ridiculous.

The debate centred on the use of stem cells: the ethical implications of using for medical reasons the lump of cells that forms after a sperm and egg are fused and before an embryo attaches itself to the womb. During those first 14 days after fertilisation, there are no diminutive humans living inside the mother. There is not even the primitive streak that would develop by the 14th day into the early antecedent of the eventual brain, spine and nervous system. During those first 14 days there would be nothing that is recognisably human.

Stem cells can be extracted and used in a laboratory to quite literally manufacture human organs that can save other human lives. But such an action would also stop the fertilised egg from eventually developing into a foetus and a human life.

A fertilised egg and the cells that emerge from that fusion are certainly living cells. In the way blood cells, say, are living. A human finger – as long as it is attached to its owner – is living, but is it, in and of itself, endowed with human rights? Clearly it is not. And the same should apply to the embryonic lump of cells that exists in the first 14 days after fertilisation.

Fr Peter dismissed the notion that cells in these first 14 days could be considered a “person”, in the way a foetus later is, with the clearest of justifications: “Personally, I am certain there is no person before 14 days pass from fertilisation because, by way of example, it is still possible for twins to emerge. It is difficult for me to see how one can claim there is a person when it is still possible for two persons to emerge. Clearly, you cannot have a person and another person eventually emerges from the first. Such a thing does not correspond with what in fact happens.”

This is where Fr Peter puts himself in a position that is diametrically opposed to the official position of his Church. The bishops repeated dogmatically on several occasions that at the moment of fertilisation human and personal life is complete and endowed with fundamental human rights in the way a foetus of any age, a child or an adult is.

Fr Peter did not stop there. Specifically on stem cells, he told Sapiano’s interviewer Alan Delia, “the issue is whether you can use something that belongs to the embryo in a way that would destroy the life of that embryo. It should be said these cells have the potential to develop into a human being but may be used to cure illnesses such as Parkinson’s by inserting them in a part of the body where the cell – instead of developing into a human being – develops into an organ belonging to a human being. Some say when you do this you are destroying what potentially could have been a human.

“What can also be argued is that in fact the human there exists merely in its potential and you are certainly not destroying the life of that cell. You are simply addressing it to develop into something else which is not a human being.

“Whether this should be excluded is very doubtful.”

At this point Fr Peter adopts the facial gestures of ironic wisdom. The translated and transcribed words he used cannot convey the real message he wanted to impart, but at least gives the idea: “The Church, as it is wont to do, says one must follow the safer principle and that therefore one should not do this, if it is true that there is the risk of impeding a human life and this amounts to the destruction of a person. I personally think in this case there are enormous advantages. You’re not doing this for the fun of it, as in the example that is often given of a man who shoots at where there may be a bird but may be shooting at a human by mistake. The enormous improvement in the quality of a person’s life justifies a measure of risk.”

Now Fr Peter is no average rebel. He is a respected philosopher within and outside the Church. He is credited as the brains behind the conservative agenda of the Fenech Adami era. Eddie Fenech Adami himself, on several occasions, acknowledged Peter Serracino Inglott as his mentor: the Merlin in his Arthurian reign.

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Fr Peter, by occupying for several years the seat of Rector of the University, is representative of the establishment and this breaking of ranks in the local Church has enormous implications not only in the religious, but also in the secular landscape.

Another of Georg Sapiano’s priestly guests – eminent moralist Fr Emanuel Agius – was explicit in his refusal of Fr Peter’s position. He clearly pronounced the opinions of his priestly and philosophical colleague as contrary to Church doctrine, effectively (though of course not in the canonical sense) excommunicating Fr Peter.

Fr Agius was speaking live in Sapiano’s studio and could react to Fr Serracino Inglott’s comments. Fr Peter’s interview was clearly pre-recorded and he could not have heard Fr Agius’s remarks.

But he sounded like he fully predicted what would be said of him by the official spokesmen of the Church when in a later part of the same programme, almost visibly mockingly, told his interviewer: “There are some people – I’m not precisely sure who they are – who continue to insist that human life begins at the moment of penetration. In my opinion, the respect of the opinions of these ‘some’ people, should not be enough to overrule the undoubted conviction and the almost universal agreement of scientists, denying therefore the opportunity of drastically improving the quality of life.”

There are several implications in what Fr Peter is saying here, though perhaps it would be unfair to make logical leaps on the basis of his premises. It is certainly true that the Church’s objection to stem cell research is grounded in the belief that human life begins the moment a human egg is fertilised. It is also certainly true that there are several other positions of the Catholic Church grounded in that belief, which Fr Peter so compellingly dismissed on local TV this week. Certainly the MPs backing the constitutional initiative to entrench in Malta’s Constitution the principle that human life begins at the moment of fertilisation (some of them heretofore disciples of the teachings of Fr Peter) will have some thinking to do after this programme.

Georg Sapiano’s show this week took the local debate on stem cell research to another level altogether. His guest, Peter Serracino Inglott, has provoked some cool and collected thinking that contrasts sharply with the Americanisation of the local debate that the so called ‘Gift of Life’ campaigners have introduced here.

George Borg