April 15, 1986

REFLECTIONS ON MORAL LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY

an address by
JOHN CARDINAL O'CONNOR

    Something over a year ago I walked among the starving and the dying in Ethiopia. As you, I had seen the pictures on television and had thought I was prepared. Not so, not at all. The experience of actually walking among those people is drastically different from the television experience that you can turn off at any time that it gets to be too much for you. To see them streaming out of the hills by the thousands, in the burning sun by day and the bitter winds by night, making their way, trudging, slipping, falling. Many dying en route across that parched earth. To see whole families literally dying before your eyes. To see little babies -- to hold little babies in your arms who are dying from malnutrition -- eyes virtually blinded because of the flies and diseases attendent to malnutrition. To see this and watch people mile after mile, searching for a feeding camp. This is something you can't turn off as you can turn off a television picture. It makes a tremendous impact. It shakes you very badly.

    The Ethiopian Foreign Minister asked to see me before I left. We talked at length. Apart from the political posturing and duty diatribes against the United States, he asked that I somehow convince our country to help, with help far beyond the tons and tons of foodstuffs we have been providing against the starvation. He was asking for long range help, developmental assistance to fight back against the encroaching desert, to restore the land, to build dams, to perform all the miracles modern engineering can make possible. I knew that he knew of the Hickenlooper Amendment, which in effect precludes such aid to countries that have confiscated American property. I faced that fact and I urged him to propose a formula of even minimal repayments, which could conceivably make aid legal. I returned to the United States and urged our own Government officials to do the same. To try to find some formula that would make it possible to give long term developmental assistance because God knows how many lives could be saved.

    Why do I speak of this? Simply because for me it's an example of the fact that public policy can not be truly sound -- can not be viable -- unless one includes in it a moral dimension. However reasonable, for example that Hickenlooper Amendment may be, and it is reasonable for many circumstances. It would surely be applied unreasonably if it precluded helping to keep millions of people from dying an unnecessary and terribly painful death, regardless of the politics or the sins of their masters. But here we are obviously introducing a moral imperative into law and into public policy without which, in my judgment, United States policy could indeed be accused of blind adherence to the letter of the law which kills, rather than to a spirit which gives life.

    Last year in the Archdiocese of New York, as an experiment, I authorized the expenditure of one million dollars to make it possible for low income families to obtain mortgages for relatively low-priced housing. This year I am authorizing an additional three million dollars, which will make possible the building of two thousand, so-called low cost single family homes. These homes cost approximately $62,000 to build. Federal, State and City Government payments and the use of City-owned land make the homes available to the purchasers for approximately $42,000. But if the law permitted us to build two and three family units, we could cut costs very significantly and provide far more housing, or cheaper housing for the homeless. The particular legislation which authorizes the program, however, precludes two and three family units. Yet in the State of New York an estimated 900,000 people are in "at-risk" housing, and thousands are sleeping in the streets, hostels, City leased hotel rooms, and so on. Surely there is a moral imperative here to which somehow, the law could, should, must make possible a common sense public policy.

    I use these two quite prosaic examples simply to introduce the notion of a law beyond law, a natural moral law that categorically must be respected in the formation of positive law, and surely in the formulation of public policy, if a rationally ordered society is to be achieved and maintained. You will recall that for the ancient Greeks, very possibly because of their belief in metempsychosis, a most terrifying penalty, because a most unnatural penalty, that is, a", penalty diametrically opposed to the natural order, was to prevent the burial of a dead body. The doomed wanderings of the ghost of Hamlet's father, for example, much later in Shakespeare's Hamlet, is reflective of this ancient Greek fear of an unburied body that would roam the world forever. We are indebted, however, to Sophocles, and his marvelous play, "Antigone", for explicating the notion that refusal to bury a dead body was a violation of natural moral law over which no positive law could prevail. You will recall that Antigone's brother, Polyneices, has conspired against the king, the so-called tyrant, Creon. Polyneices is killed in the ensuing battle and Creon orders that his body lie unburied. Antigone defies his edict out of respect for the higher law which makes it a moral duty to bury a dead body, a natural duty because, indeed, that moral law conveys on a dead body the natural right to be buried. Creon calls Antigone before him and asks if she knew of his edict and if so, had dared to transgress the law. Her answer is one of the earliest classical formulations of moral law.

"Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the Justice who dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that the decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of today or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth."

    It was for the Roman Cicero, however, to summarize centuries of natural
moral law tradition and its indispensability to positive law and public policy. A
tradition that could be found even in Homer, hundreds of years before Sophocles.  I
quote Cicero's classic text:

"There is in fact a true, law, namely right reason, which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men and is unchangeable and eternal. By its commands this law . summons men to the performance of their duties, by its prohibitions it restrains them from doing wrong. ... It will not lay down one rule in Rome and another in Athens. ... But there will be one law eternal and unchangeable, binding at all times upon all peoples. There will be, as it were, one common master and ruler of men, namely God, who is the author of this law, its interpreter and its sponsor. The man who will not obey it will abandon his better self."

You are too familiar with the use made of natural moral law by the Founding Fathers, formulators of the Declaration of Independence, framers of the Constitution, architects of so much of the public policy of their day, for me to bore you with a series of quotations from their texts. Their repeated references to the law of nature and of Nature's God, however, as entitling and empowering human beings above and beyond all other law, demonstrated highly sophisticated familiarity with some sixteen centuries of development in natural law tradition since the days of Cicero, while they retained very tenaciously his fundamental notions.

    What am I really speaking of but a moral orientation toward the formulation, the interpretation of all law and of all public policy, the exercise of some sense of moral "rightness"? Otherwise, it seems to me, we can readily become what Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned against here at Harvard on June 8, 1978, when he noted: "A society with no other scale but the legal one is...less than worthy of man."

I     am keenly aware that in advocating a sense of moral rightness, natural moral law, any other form of such moral orientation into the formulation and interpretation of law -- I'm keenly aware that in advocating this I fly in the face of Mr. Justice Holmes' clearly enunciated principle that the constitution was based on the acceptance of moral pluralism in society, and that, as George Parkin Grant notes, in his English-Speaking Justice, Justice Holmes considered such pluralism justified "because we must be properly agnostic about any claim to knowledge of moral good." With complete reverence for Mr. Justice Holmes, I fear that the extension of his principle has seriously, adversely influenced public policy on a number of crucial issues today and created impossible dilemmas. These dilemmas recurrently invade our national consciousness, no matter how we try to treat them as non-issues, and actually torture our national conscience. They simply refuse to go away and we find it impossible to be morally agnostic about them, even when we try -- for in the end, we are a country with a heart.

    You may be familiar with the marvelous Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust by Professor Yaffa Eliach of the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College.

"My Father suffered a mild heart attack in Israel. Some time later I was informed of his illness. By then, my father had recovered and was back home from the hospital. Angry that I had not been notified by telephone or cable, I demanded an explanation.

'It is very simple, my child,' my father said. 'The day that I had my heart attack was the happiest day of my life. As you so well know, I am a veteran of Hitler's ghettos, Stalin's camps, and Arab wars. I have witnessed so much death and suffering and survived it all. At times I wondered if I had a heart at all. This heart attack reassured me that I indeed have one. For how can a man without a heart have a heart attack?"

    There is a great deal of pain in what I might call the very heart of our country today, deep pain throughout the land in respect to a number of crucial problems. I believe that there is a profound and pervasive anxiety, rooted in the reality that as a people we do have a heart, an enormous heart, a warm and generous heart, a heart that is experiencing a gnawing pain, an enduring heartache, if not an outright spiritual and emotional heart attack, because in a least a vague and distant way, in my judgment, we suspect that too many laws are morally sterile, so that too many public policies simply don't work and can't be made to work for the common good.

    John Cogley puts it all this way in his "Natural Law and Modern Society."

"The basic problem, it would appear, is not that we often behave badly but that we may be losing our sense of ethics; the American consensus about what is good and bad, what is to be done and what avoided, may be breaking down. We often mean well enough but we do not quite know what we mean. We want to do the right thing but we do not know what is right. We muddle along, making uncertain choices, and finally when the uncertainty becomes pervasive, aimlessness sets in."

    We seem to know that we are doing so many things right as a nation, but we seem to know, too, or we feel a vague uneasiness and, at times, an acute anxiety, that we are doing some things wrong -- terribly wrong.

    We know there is something wrong as we pass the bag ladies, the bagmen in the streets. We know there is something wrong about gentrification that flushes lonely, elderly people out of homes and apartments with absolutely no place to go. We know there is something wrong when drugs control and destroy our neighborhoods, when we can't build prisons fast enough to meet the demand. We know there is something wrong when the most incredible pornography is defended as freedom of speech, when child abuse reaches horrifying proportions, when people are disenfranchised or exploited because of where they were born, or their sex, or the color of their skin. We know there is something wrong in the sexual exploitation and violence that various agencies deal with every day in virtually every city, and in the hopelessness of the burned-out buildings in cities all over the country. We know there is something wrong in Central America, in the Middle East, in the north of Ireland, in Cambodia and in Poland, in much of the vast continent of Africa, and elsewhere in the world. We know there is something wrong, something terrifyingly wrong, about the arms race, and about the horrifying potential of nuclear weapons.

    And all of this knowledge and more pains us, because we are basically a good people, a good and kind and merciful people. And the pain comes in knowing that we are doing some things terribly wrong and in either not truly wanting to right them, or in not seeming to know how to right them. Like the bag people. We didn't put them on the streets. We don't want them on the streets. We can't understand why they are on the streets, we disbelieve how many are on the streets, we wish they would go away, or someone would take them away. But in the meanwhile, particularly as we hustle to our own homes on bitter winter nights, we pass them by, and we know they are there, and the knowing pains us, because we know simultaneously that somehow, there has to be a better way.

    I live at a very fashionable address, 452 Madison Avenue. I look across the street at one of the most luxurious hotels in the nation and between my bedroom -and this really literally eats into my being -- 50 to 75 yards or less away, there are literally people sleeping in the streets. There's something wrong.

    This tragic dilemma, which not infrequently threatens to paralyze truly human development in our society, I sincerely believe derives in large measure from a strong tendency in some of our courts to reject our national tradition of natural moral law. We can not, can not grow as a people when the potential of individuals can not be actualized. It can be said that four major philosophies have shaped our nation over the course of two centuries -- natural moral law, pragmatism, utilitarianism and social Darwinism (a social "survival of the fittest"), but that our roots are clearly in natural moral law. The latter three of these philosophies, pragmatism, utilitarianism and social Darwinism, these three are relatively based -- they are relativistic philosophies. The very concept of natural moral law, however, requires the reality of an absolute: that there is, indeed, as Cicero avers, "a true law, namely right reason, which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men and is unchangeable and eternal."

    It is within this context, then, that I come now specifically to a topic that those who invited me here this evening explicitly urged me to address, a crucial issue of law and public policy, the question of the status of what h at least, believe to be children in their mothers' wombs, waiting to be born into the world. I locate this issue very explicitly within the context of natural moral law because I suspect that virtually anyone would agree that birth is a natural process, following natural law, and that any artificially induced interruption of the process can rightly be called unnatural, opposed to the natural. That the right to life can be viewed as a natural moral right was at least taken for granted, I should think, by the framers of the Declaration of Independence, who gifted us with the formulation that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, of which the right to life is first on their list. I doubt that we need argue that as a people we have traditionally considered it "morally wrong" to take innocent human life, whatever our particular religious persuasions. It certainly seems to be a deep rooted sense in our national psyche. I therefore, do not think I am being presumptive in locating the issue of abortion within the context of natural moral law.

    In my judgment, further, abortion is the pivotal legal and public policy issue of our day, because I sincerely believe that if the womb is no longer the safe refuge that surely nature and nature's God intended it to be, nothing, absolutely no thing and no person in our society can be assured a safe refuge until the tomb. Your own native son, Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr., and I saw him this morning at the funeral for Congressman Addabbo, in my view ratified this judgment when, in a speech in April of 1983, at Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Maryland, he quoted Senator Hubert Humphrey: "The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and handicapped."

    I am convinced that, as a nation, somehow, we know that there has to be something wrong when human life at any stage of its existence is wantonly destroyed. We know, somehow, whatever our religious persuasion, that there is something wrong when one and a half million unborn human lives are taken every year in our beloved country. We know, again, that whatever the reason, there must be a better way. We know that this magnificent country, with its incredible resources, its ability to put man on the moon, the skill to transplant hearts, the heart to give our lives for the oppressed all over the world -- this marvelous country must surely have a better answer to the violence of poverty, than to inflict the violence of death on the innocent; it must surely have a better answer for the lonely, confused, frightened young woman, the teenager, the ten or eleven or twelve year old pregnant girl, than to destroy the new life within her. Our nation must surely have more to offer a bewildered family than the money to help pay for a daughter's abortion. Our society must, surely must, have more support for the woman torn with conflict over a pregnancy than to point her toward an abortion clinic.

    Is this simply a religious perspective? Is my own grave concern over abortion born merely of what I have been taught as a Catholic? I can't believe that. I know that millions of Jews, Protestants, Orthodox, Muslims, people of many other religious persuasions and people who profess no religious faith at all, grieve as I do over this destruction of life.

    Or, is abortion not the destruction of life? Are we, in fact, not putting babies to death?

    If we are not destroying human life, of course, then our concern, our anxiety, our pain over abortion virtually disappears. There is a dramatic difference between removing four thousand pieces of tissue each day from the bodies of four thousand women and taking the lives of four thousand babies. Obviously, therefore, this is a crucial question.

    What is abortion, then? Can we face that question honestly? Can we raise it without rancor, without accusation, without judgment or condemnation of any group? Surely it is a crucial question. Surely it deserves an answer, and it is difficult, I think, to find a better source for an answer than in the common sense experience of daily living and in the scientific evidence readily available, ~e same common sense experience and scientific evidence that we find in a Planned Parenthood publication in 1963, which warns teenagers: "An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun." That is quite plain, common sense language.

    I turn now to Doctor Bernard Nathanson, the well-known Jewish obstetrician-gynecologist who identifies himself as an atheist.

"Some time ago -- after a tenure of a year and a half -- I resigned as director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health. The Center had performed 60,000 abortions...I am deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.

There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists within the womb from the very onset of pregnancy.

Evidence of heart function has been established in embryos as early as six weeks. Recordings of human brain activity have been noted in embryos at eight weeks. Our capacity to measure signs of life is daily becoming more sophisticated, and as time goes by, we will doubtless be able to isolate life signs at earlier stages in fetal development."

    Doctor Nathanson now spends a large part of his life pleading against abortion, not because of a religious conversion, but because of the evidence yielded by ultrasound scanning, intra-uterine surgery, in vitro fertilization and other advances in science and technology. Doctor Nathanson previously used the impersonal term "alpha" to describe what he now calls "the person in the womb".

    Doctor Nathanson is far from alone. The American Medical Association itself urged strict laws against abortion more than a century ago, simply ~because the scientific evidence said that human life begins at conception. In 1871, the AMA told its members that a fetus becomes animated long before quickening. Quoting from Archibold's Criminal Practice and Pleadings, it said this: "No other doctrine appears to be consonant with reason or physiology but that which admits the embryo to possess vitality from the very moment of conception." No statement by the AMA in more recent times has contradicted the position it took in 1871.

    In our own day, miracles of modern science confirm what we have known all along -- that life exists in the womb. Reporting on an article called "Healing the Unborn", the 1963 Medical and Health Annual of the Encyclopedia Britannica says: "Prenatal medicine is now beginning to be able to intervene before birth, to alleviate, and even cure conditions that previously would have severely compromised the fetus. This promises survival for thousands of threatened lives ... The concept that the fetus is a patient, an individual whose disorders are a proper subject for medical therapy, has been established."

    Indeed, so clear is the evidence that the journal California Medicine found it necessary to publish an extraordinary article in 1970. Conceding that life is present before birth, it warns physicians that if they want people to think that abortion is morally acceptable, they'll have to come up with a brand new language. Semantic gymnastics, they call it.

    Addressing this very attitude and the concept of semantic gymnastics, Sir William Liley, of the faculty of the Postgraduate School of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the University of Auckland, listed a series of developments that gave us new insights into the miracle of life before birth, and then continued:

"For a generation which reputedly prefers scientific fact to barren philosophy, we might have thought this new information would engender a new respect for the welfare and appreciation of the importance of intra-uterine life. Instead, around the world we find a systematic campaign clamoring for the destruction of the embryo and fetus as a cure-all for every social and personal problem. I, for one, find it a bitter irony that just when the embryo and fetus arrive on the medical scene there should be such sustained pressure to make him, or her, a social nonentity."

Again, I must ask myself, isn't there something wrong with this, even from the perspective of national policy? Where does it all stop?

    I know there are those who sincerely believe that abortion is an evil, but that not to have an abortion might be even worse. I know it, and I suffer with them. I know there are women and parents and young girls who are frantic about pregnancies. They don't know which way to turn or what to do. They're under enormous pressure. Who can condemn them? Who can fail to understand all they're going through? Their abortions are still tragic; their babies are still put to death. But they think they're doing the right thing. I can understand that. Do I, personally, condemn them for feeling that way? Of course not. On the contrary, I would do anything I could to help them pick up the pieces of their lives after an abortion.

    The same is true of families, of parents who might abhor the idea of abortion, but when their own daughter is pregnant, believe that unless she has an abortion her life will be ruined. There can be no question of the grief they feel, the conflict that rips at their very hearts, the deep suffering they endure in coming to a decision that an abortion is the only way. But is it? Is it the only way? Is it the best answer we can come up with after these many centuries of civilization?

    Let me return now to the broad question of moral law and public policy, but with abortion used as the crucial case in point.

    Some of the finest legal scholars in the United States have argued that the Supreme Court Justice who dissented from the majority called the abortion decision an act of "raw, judicial power". In other words, some might say, the will of seven justices was imposed on an entire nation.

    Given this reality, when charges are loosely made that those who plead for a recovery of legal protection for the unborn are trying to impose their will on the majority, it may be forgotten that virtually every State in the Union had some kind of protective law which was swept away by the Supreme Court. If we are going to argue that law must reflect a consensus, we must admit that there was a strong, national consensus against abortion on demand before the Supreme Court issued its decree that the unborn is "not a person whose life state law could legally protect".

    There are those who argue that we cannot legislate morality, and that the answer to abortion does not lie in the law. The reality is that we do legislate behavior every day. Our entire society is structured by law. We legislate against going through red lights, selling heroin, committing murder, burning down peoples' houses, stealing, child abuse, slavery and a thousand other acts that would deprive other people of their rights. And this, I think, is precisely the key: law is intended to protect us from one another regardless of private and personal moral or religious beliefs. The law does not ask me if I personally believe stealing to be moral or immoral. The law does not ask me if my religion encourages me to burn down houses. As far as the law is concerned, the distinction between private and public morality is quite clear. Basically, when I violate other peoples' rights, I am involved in a matter of public morality, subject to penalty under law.

    It is obvious that law is not the entire answer to abortion. Nor is it the entire answer to theft, arson, child abuse, or shooting police officers. Everybody knows that. But who would suggest that we repeal the laws against such crimes because the laws are so often broken? As Professor, now Federal Judge, John Noonan reminds us, laws matter for the tone they set as well as for the immediate obstacles they throw up.

    Every American is brought up, ideally, to respect the law. We know that some individual laws are good, some bad, some just, some unjust, but it's the concept of law that we respect. We know laws are necessary because we are all weak human beings, and while we may chafe under laws that are personally inconvenient to us, we know we must have laws or have chaos. It is one of our proudest traditions that bad laws can be changed. There is no better example than the Slave Laws. And while many blacks still suffer in our country, and are still far from enjoying all the human and civil rights due them by both moral and civil law, the reality is that if the 1857 Supreme Court decision in the famous Dred Scott case had been allowed to stand, they would still be legally slaves, non-citizens, forever unable to become citizens. In 1857, it was not enough for people of good will to call slavery wrong; it was absolutely essential that they call the law wrong, and worked to change it.

    Deeply as we feel the pain of the individual, and aware as we are that many, many women have abortions because that seems to them their only choice, we cannot, we must not treat abortion as though it were a matter of concern only to an individual woman or man or family. We are already seeing cruel signs of what an abortion mentality can mean for all society.

    We must ask, for example, how safe will the retarded be, the handicapped, the aged, the wheelchaired, the incurably ill, when the so-called "quality of life" becomes the determinant of who is to live and who is to die? Who is to determine which life is "meaningful", which life is not? Who is to have a right to the world's resources, to food, to housing, to medical care? The prospects are frightening and far too realistic to be brushed aside as "scare tactics."

    Now, some public policies that have evolved on the basis of certain permissive laws border on the incredible -- I have to say this. Such are dramatically illustrated, I think, by a letter to the editor in the March 1986 edition of a magazine geared for youth and especially to those in the New York area, called "New Youth Connections".  The letter is signed by the coordinator of adolescent pregnancy and parenting services for New York City.

"The fact is, any teenager who is pregnant can get Medicaid coverage for an abortion regardless of her parents' income and without parental notification", she wrote. "The teenager simply has to tell the Medicaid/finance worker at the clinic that she is applying 'on behalf of the unborn'. After the abortion, the teenager must cancel the Medicaid coverage."

    Now to me this seems to be a bizarre example of Orwellian language. when we apply for funds on behalf of the unborn individual in order to destroy the same unborn individual. Further, what a strange anomaly is a public policy that provides public funding for the unborn in light of the 1973 Supreme Court decision which denied standing to the unborn. How is it that one can apply for Medicaid funding for the unborn? You can't apply for Medicaid funding for a dog, a rabbit.

    Now it must be said to his credit that when this letter from one of his own agencies was brought to his attention, our Mayor, Mayor Koch, that he took steps within his purview, though limited, to discount this clear advocacy approach. But compare this letter and the law it represents, which is the law in the State of New York, -- compare that to the mind set of our forebears. Recently I was doing some genealogical tracing and turned to a record of wills and administrations in Wight County, Virginia, from 1647 -1800. It was fascinating to find so many estates left

to explicitly an "unborn child", even including such words as "in the event the said child, the said unborn child, does not live" the land goes to so-and-so.

I must turn finally to a question that has been sharply debated in recent years. It is clear that moral law can not apply itself to public policy; it must be applied by human beings. In our country, our tradition, every citizen is invited -indeed, urged by the imperative of citizenship itself -- to join the debate in any crucial issue of public policy. Yet questions have been raised about the involvement of the bishops of the United States in the matters at hand, and there have been allegations of undue intervention in the political process, including even the charge that in a programmed and conspiratorial fashion, some bishops, at least, are trying to destroy the so-called wall between Church and State; that the bishops are "perilously close" to threatening the tax-exempt status of their churches, or even more crudely, that the bishops are simply lusting for power.

    What is the story as I see it? The bishops have been saying substantially the same thing about abortion for years. Likewise, for years the bishops have been challenging the state and joining the public policy debate on a broad spectrum of laws and policies, economic, racial, social, military. Most recently the challenge was addressed to issues of war and peace, with the widely publicized formulation of the pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response. While much was made in that letter of nuclear war, even more was made -- and has been little noted -- of the causes of war, injustice, oppression, economic and other forms of violence and exploitation and indignities against the human person. It was not by accident that the bishops included in that document on war and peace the following:

"No society can live in peace with itself or with the world without a full awareness of the worth and dignity of every human person, and of the sacredness of all human life. When we accept violence in any form as commonplace, our sensitivities become dulled ... Abortion in particular blunts a sense of the sacredness of human life. In a society where the innocent unborn are killed wantonly, how can we expect people to feel righteous revulsion at the act or threat of killing non-combatants in war? ..."

    What would those who criticize the bishops speaking out during an election campaign have the bishops do? Were those holding or seeking public office expressing explicit support for racism, for drug abuse, for pornography, for rape, for nuclear war, would the bishops be expected to keep silent? Or would they be damned for doing so? Obviously, no one in or seeking office is calling for any of these. Are the bishops to be silent, then, on the question of abortion, if we are convinced that it is the taking of human life? Why would we be free to indict racism -- indeed, be generally applauded for doing so -- but damned for indicting abortion? Why would we not be "imposing our morality" on others when we oppose rape, but "imposing our morality" on others when we oppose abortion? What a strange democracy it would be that would encourage bishops to cry out their convictions as long as these were popular, but to remain mute when so ordered?

    I cite a letter from Governor Cuomo to the President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1983 in which he praises the bishops.

"It would have been easy to compromise your position so as to offend no one. You chose instead to tend to your duties as shepherds, to teach the moral law as best you can. You can do no more.

Our Church has sometimes been accused of not having spoken out when it might have. Now you, our bishops, show the courage and moral judgment to meet this issue of nuclear holocaust with a collective expression of where the Church in America stands."

    In his speech previously mentioned, Speaker O'Neill referred to the letter on national economic policy currently being drafted by the Catholic bishops of the United States, predicting that it will have "a dramatic impact on public debate in our country". He cited critics who "say the Church should stay out of economic issues ... argue that religious concerns have no place in the market place ... that the only thing that matters in the business world is personal drive and ambition; that the only thing that matters in the affairs of man is force of arms", and he, Speaker O'Neill, replied: "I believe that we who share Christian values have a responsibility to put those values into action -- whether those values are popular or not, whether they are fashionable or not, whether they are high in the polls or not."

    I will be finished in but a few moments but I do want you to please bear with me for just those few moments as I reflect for a moment, just once more, in regard to my central concern in the over all about moral law and public policy.

    Harold Lasswell was a Yale lawyer and extraordinarily distinguished political scientist who pointed out in his Politics: Who Gets What, When and How, that people fashion institutions to assume the preservation and ascendancy of the values they cherish. If they value money, they have a highly institutionalized banking system. If they prize learning, they have extensive educational institutions. If they value law, they have a carefully institutionalized legal system. Might I observe that it would well fit the Lasswell model to suggest that if a people value moral values, they will have, not merely religious institutions, but a highly institutionalized judicial and political system rooted in and faithful to that moral law which is, as Cicero says, "eternal and unchangeable", "binding at all times upon all peoples".

    We could engage in a great number of speculations along these lines. These, however, are merely the stuff of another address, whereas my task at the moment is obviously to bring this address to a very rapid conclusion, which I can do rather handily, I believe, because of my confidence that the lucidity of my presentation precludes the necessity of a summary.

    I cannot leave you without a story that might seem mightily out of context, but is replete in its own way, I believe, with everything I have been trying to say about moral law and public policy.

    Some of you might best know the famed scientist Dr. Jacob Bronkowski from his television series, The Ascent of Man. Jacob Bronkowski was considered a value-free scientist. The value-free school of science teaches essentially that it is for the scientist to research, hypothesize, theorize, discover principles, turn everything over to engineers and others to do with as they will. The value-free scientist, in other words, assumes no responsibility for the use to which his work is put.

    After the bombing of Nagasaki, Dr. Bronowski was asked by the U. S. Government to assess the damage. He entered the harbor and took a small boat to the fleet landing. On the landing was a group of American sailors singing the nonsense ditty of the day, "Is You Is, or Is You Ain't My Baby". It meant absolutely nothing to Dr. Bronkowski. He left the fleet landing, circled a grove of trees, looked down upon what had been the city of Nagasaki. He was utterly stunned. He could not believe the horror -- the devastation that lay before him. Then the words of the ditty took shape, pounded through his very being -- "Is You Is, or Is You Ain't My Baby", and then he had to ask himself: "Can I, can anyone call himself a value-free scientist, disclaim completely the work of his hands, his mind, his very being as I look at what this horror has wrought, "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?"