With the Holy Father’s visit, one cannot help linking the field of bioethics to this personality, not only because his thoughts represent that of the Catholic Church, but also because, as a famous theologian, he mentions bioethical issues in most of his books. Indeed the problems we face today with advancing medical technology reveal themselves in issues which challenge the dignity of man. During his visit he repeatedly shed light on the issue of abortion, the indissolubility of marriage and indeed our current problem with receiving immigrants from our southern neighbours. But equally significant is the number of times he concluded his talk with “He is risen, Alleluia!” It is this seemingly insignificant part of his speech which sheds light on where he comes from in ethics.

In the Dialectics of Secularisation he asserted that “the understanding of tolerance in pluralistic societies with a liberal constitution demands that in their dealings with unbelievers and those of different faiths, believers should grasp that they must reasonably expect that the dissent they encounter will go on existing”, and “at the same time however a liberal political culture expects that unbelievers, too, will grasp the same point in their dealing with believers”. In Truth and Tolerance, he acknowledges (p.222) that progress has a price and that this dialectic is “dreadfully cruel” and that reconciliation is sometimes only apparent. Man has to experience the wrath of war in order to try to avoid it.

We have a European Union only because of the devastation caused by World War II, which was brought about by the same economic situation that existed (if not worse) after the war. What was done after the war could just as easily have been done before. But we had to experience the “price of progress”. Likewise we cannot make use of technological progress whilst we present to people a pre-technological world (p.76). Technology changes peoples’ standards and their attitudes and behaviours and “the religious cosmos inevitably starts to shift on account of technology”. We cannot on the other hand leave religions in a sort of heritage park. In his dialogue with Ratzinger, Habermas, a great secularist, acknowledges that we cannot ignore religious tradition and the rich philosophy and morality it has brought about.

Ratzinger mentioned relativism a number of times in Malta. He acknowledges however that relativism is not pluralism and that the latter can exist because in reality it is not simply being tolerant of different positions, but seeks a common understanding rooted in common moral behaviour. Pluralism seeks a unity. If Habermas acknowledges that philosophy must recognise, to a certain extent, what religions have to say, and combine it to Ratzinger’s assertions that “If we cannot know the truth about God, then the truth about what is good and what is bad remains equally inaccessible” is true in our search for ethical truth. Otherwise, “there is no good and evil; only the reckoning up of consequences remains: Ethics is replaced by calculation.” (p. 230). His derivation from Pascal in Christianity and the crisis of culture, becomes a just recommendation for unbelievers – that if the enlightenment, which gave us so much, as he himself acknowledges, tried to find an ethics without the invocation of God (as if God did not exist), then, given the failure of the enlightenment to tell us on its own what is good and what is bad, perhaps we should think of our ethics “as if God existed”. This is a valuable proposal for everyone concerned. The discoveries of religious experience then become important for we will relive an ethics, based upon an assumption that God indeed exists, and together understand why we chose the indissolubility of marriage and the ethics of life etc.

But to form an ethics “as if God exists”, means that we need to acknowledge Truth – that there is a Good and a Bad. In On Conscience (p. 260) he says that, “A man of conscience is one who never acquires tolerance, well-being, success, public standing, and approval of the part of prevailing opinion at the expense of truth”. Such a binding statement makes us understand how it is impossible for the Church to budge from certain realities, as is abortion and divorce, when we tend to look at these problems pragmatically and only on their consequential level.

In his enthusiastic cry “He is risen; alleluia”, he points man into the direction of acknowledging not merely God, but the paradox of the trinity. In this I see him offering now the solution to me as a Christian. In Christianity and the Crises of Culture he asserts that “Our greatest need in the present historical moment is people who make God credible in this world by means of the enlightened faith they live. The negative testimony of Christians who spoke of God but lived in a manner contrary to him has obscured the image of God and has opened the doors to disbelief” (p. 52). On examining my conscience I realise how true it is that we often face the issues of abortion, euthanasia, divorce etc, yes through charity for the truth, but hardly through charity for the person suffering the situation. Not that we should acknowledge the act, but blocking a person’s way into an abortion clinic, as they do in America, and threatening politicians as we do in Malta, may not be a charitable way to convert hearts and minds of people.

Ratzinger calls us therefore, in my humble reading of him, to live in this Trinitarian spirit, even with whom I am encountering in the debate on abortion and euthanasia etc. I must empty myself and make myself one with the other. This kenosis, and perichoresis, as the technical words go, are what make agape (unity) a ‘lived’ experience. The doctor facing the woman asking for an abortion cannot stop at thinking solely about the act of the abortion itself and that he (or she) has a right to an objection of conscience. That is what we call doctor-centred thinking. Rather, being patient-centred, is seeing the cross that this patient is carrying and helping her to carry this cross. Seeing the patient as person does not mean I will concede to the abortion. But neither does it stop short of thinking solely about my rights. I am still obliged to understand where this person is coming from and to understand what has brought this person to carry such a morally burdensome decision. Only then can we perhaps help that woman come freely to see her pregnancy for what it is.

The key the Pope gives us to the solution of abortion (and divorce and the illegal immigrants) is this call. At Rabat he said it the first time: “He is risen, he has truly risen. Alleluia!” I have no right to shout this call or even to understand it unless I truly make this emptiness from my burdensome thoughts, which can only be limited, and making myself one with the other in their suffering. The same holds for us politicians in our quest to face these questions. His testament was Ut Omnes umun sint – that they may all be one. It takes energy and seems contradictory not to judge. Although we say we judge the act and not the person, in reality we do not really make this distinction for we acknowledge that by that act the person sins. In the Introduction to Christianity (pp.98-99) Ratzinger states that every man holds his faith only symbolically (a symbolon), “a broken, incomplete piece that can only attain unity and completeness when it is laid together with the others. Only in the symballein, in fitting together with them, can the symaballien, the fitting together with God, take place. Faith demands unity and call for the fellow believer”.

To keep our respect for life and marriage, Ratzinger again points to God who “is so humane that he himself became man, a suffering man, who by suffering together with us gives dignity and hope to pain” (Europe today and tomorrow p. 34). Although we continue not to legislate in favour of abortion or divorce, we cannot leave it at that. If God gives us dignity in these pains, then I perhaps have to seek him in the pain of the separate person or the person seeking a termination of pregnancy. I can only do my small part and it would be presumptuous to think that He will not do the rest. Acting an ethic “as if God existed” therefore acknowledges a truth that there is a kind of human existence which God intended which we refer to as the “nature” of man (Truth and Tolerance, p. 254). Our ethical responsibility would be to act out in response to that truth. Furthermore if our conviction takes to proclaim that He is Risen, then our responsibility is to act out a nature capable of choosing between closing ourselves to our beliefs without further reason, or embracing that “there will always be ups and down in history… the actual moral nature of man… does not run a straight line; rather it repeats itself. It is our task always to struggle for the relatively best possible framework of human coexistence in our present day and, in doing so, to preserve anything good that has already been achieved, to overcome anything bad that exists at the time, and to guard against the outbreak of destructive forces.” (p. 257) Freedom does not remain a ‘loosening of norms’, but an acknowledgement that if man has no truth, no nature, then he is not truly free. The law of the jungle takes away our freedom.

Pierre Mallia is Associate Professor in Family Medicine, Patients’ Rights and Bioethics at the University of Malta; he is also Ethics Advisor to the Medical Council of Malta. He is also former president of the Malta College of Family Doctors.