In an article in the inaugural issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Romanus Cessario, O.P., asserted: “This short essay on method in Catholic bioethics assumes that the development of Catholic bioethics must proceed from the principles embodied in Veritatis Splendor”(2001, pp. 53-54). Cessario’s own essay focused on the encyclical’s emphasis on the complementarity between divine law and human freedom, contrasting this with the understanding of freedom found in proportionalist writers. It did not, however, seek to show how the teaching of this encyclical can and should inwardly shape “Catholic” bioethics.

John Keown, currently Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Professor at the Kennedy Institute of Bioethics at Georgetown University, offers a compelling, comprehensive, and clearly written argument against the legalization of euthanasia. The work includes an Introduction , six Parts subdivided into 21 Chapters, an important Afterword, bibliography, and index. In Part I Keown gives reasons for rejecting definitions of euthanasia advocated by its champions. One limits euthanasia to the active intentional termination of life when death is judged beneficial, ignoring euthanasia by intentionally killing people by acts of omission; another conflates and regards as morally equivalent treatment omissions intended to bring death about and treatment omissions foreseen but not intended to be lifeshortening . Keown properly defines euthanasia as the intentional ternUnation of life by act or omission (a definition in harmony with the Vatican Declaration on Euthanasia). Keown devotes one chapter of Part I to a defense, philosophical and jurisprudential , of the crucial moral difference between intending evil and merely foreseeing evil, a distinction crucial to the principle of double effect. In Part II Keown first takes up three arguments for VAE and PAS and three counter-arguments. The arguments in favor are: (I) that life is not always a benefit and that it is thus justifiable to kill a patient at hi s request when he would be better off dead; (2) that respect for patient autonomy requires VAE and PAS; (3) that present law is hypocritical in allowing passive VAE and PAS while prohibiting active VAE and PAS. Keown challenges these arguments by pointing out that the first is not only inconsistent with the principle of the inviolability of life but is also arbitrary and unjust in holding that only patients with arbitrarily defined abilities have a right not to be killed intentionally, that the second fails to recognize that many requests for euthanasia are not really autonomous and, more importantly, that autonomy's value lies not in making just any choice but choices in accord with sound moral values, and that the third clearly

I will first offer a rather full summary of the book, make a few personal observations, and conclude with a final appraisal. This book, which contains an introduction, nine chapters, and a conclusion, is in many ways a splendid commentary on Pope John Paul II 's Veritatis Splendor. With the Pope, Lowery presents the Christian moral life as a matter of living a good life and of "reaping the incredible benefits of participating in [human] goods ordered under the highest good." The first three chapters focus on the true meaning of freedom, its relationship to the truth and to conscience. With John Paul II Lowery opposes both autonomy (the idea that each individual is a law unto himself) and heteronomy (the legalistic concept that morality is a set of arbitrary rules imposed by some external authority to hinder us from doing as we please). Lowery, following the Holy Father, proposes a participated theonomy, i.e. , the idea that the supreme norm of human life is God 's eternal law, or what can be called hi s wise and loving plan of human existence, and that God has so made us that we can, under the gentle disposition of providence, come to an ever-deepening knowledge of this wise and loving plan through the natural law, which is our intelligent participation in God's eternal law (cf. Dignitatis humanae, 3). Conscience plays a role in our cognitive awareness of this wonderful plan, as Lowery amply shows . Lowery notes that we can share in God 's eternal law in two ways, first, through the natural law and second through the divine law made known to us through the divine revelation whose last word to us is Jesus Christ, the Word of God made man for our sake. Natural law 's first directive is that good is to be done and evil avoided, and, Lowery says in company with Aquinas, even evil-doers seek to guide their actions according to this fundamental directive, since they do not do evil for the sake of evil but for the sake of some good apparent to them. Thus they rationalize their behavior by appealing to the good for whose sake they choose to do evil. Lowery goes on to show that the "good" is not a vacuous concept, for we can specify what is good. For Lowery (as well for Karol Wojtyla, the author of Love and Responsibility) the good most central for moral issues is the human person, who is always to be respected as an end and never to be treated as a mere means, as the personalistic principle

This paper will (I) present the context of "Humanae Vitae" and summarize its principal teachings regarding the natural moral law; (2) set forth the understanding of natural law common to those theologians (hereafter referred to as "revisionists") who reject the specific teachings of "Humanae Vitae"; (3) offer a critique of their conception of natural law; and (4) present and defend an understanding of natural law rooted in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, one shared, in large measure, by theologians who accept the specific teachings of "Humanae Vitae".

M any people, both Catholic and non-Catholic, can readily understand why the Catho li c Church teaches that it is morally bad to generate human life by inseminating a married woman with sperm provided by a man who is not her husband or by having sperm provided by her husband inseminate another woman, a so-ca lled "surrogate" mother, who would, after bearing the child, turn it over to the married couple. They recognize that choosing to generate human life in this way does violence to marriage and to human parenthood and does an injustice to the child. Such people can likewise understand why the Catholic Church rejects the deliberate creat ion in the laboratory of human lives which will be discarded or frozen or used for experiments designed only to gain knowledge which may benefit others, but which only poses harm to the lives upon which the experiments are performed. They recognize that such procedures do violence to the dignity of the human lives deliberately brought into existence in the laboratory. And such people also understand why the Catholic Church opposes the monitoring of human lives in utero for the purpose of detecting and then destroying, through abortion, those discovered to be of poor quality. Again they recognize that choosing to act in this way does a terrible violence and injustice to unborn human lives. But many of these same people, Catholic as well as non-Catholic, find the teaching of the Catholic Church (as recently expressed in the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's "Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Human Procreation"), on the immorality of the "simple case" of in I'itro fertilizat ion, a different matter. I n this case, there is no use of gametic materials from third parties; the child conceived is genetically the child of husband and wife, who are and will remain its parents. In this case, there is no deliberate creation of

(1979). Natural family planning: Father Bernard Haring's position: An essay review. Social Thought: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 67-71.