For New Sydney Archbishop, Bioethical Challenges Call For Dialogue
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Archbishop Anthony Fisher, whom Pope Francis named to lead the Archdiocese of Sydney Sept. 18, has a highly varied resume, including degrees in civil law and philosophy and experience coordinating World Youth Day 2008. But if his ministry has been characterized by concern with a particular issue, it is the morality of modern medicine.
The archbishop's accomplishments in the field of bioethics include founding Melbourne's John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family, serving as episcopal vicar with responsibility for health care in the Diocese of Melbourne and the Archdiocese of Sydney, and writing "Catholic Bioethics for a New Millennium," published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press.
Speaking to Catholic News Service at the Vatican in February 2013, while he attended a meeting of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Archbishop Fisher, then bishop of Parramatta, reflected on certain advances in biomedical technology, their impact on contemporary culture and how the church can most effectively respond to them.
"We are just on the edge" of pharmacological and genetic developments that will have "all sorts of implications for what it means to be human," the bishop said. "We might create human beings who are super sportsmen; that's going to be something you could engineer even before their birth."
"We do it in a negative way now in that we genetically test unborn children for a range of things," such as a predisposition to diabetes or asthma, he said. "We can test for that before birth and decide to abort ones who have qualities we don't like. But increasingly we'll be able to actually choose what we want to put into a child."
"We've also got enormous social pressures now on couples; you've got to have the perfect baby," he said. "That's going to get worse and worse, because everyday we're discovering a new test for something," such as future height, eye color, IQ or tendency to obesity.
Archbishop Fisher said another result of this growing "medicalization of reality" -- the expectation of a "medical solution for every human problem" -- is that "what we've branded health care is often doing exactly the opposite, it's making us sick."
"Sterilization, to me, is a fairly pure case of this, but it's happening in lots of other areas," he said. "Now you talk about sexual reassignment, where people decide for one reason or another they want to be a different sex and they're therefore going to have various kinds of mutilation done."
"We have to challenge the very notion that this is health care," he said. "It's actually damaging people; it's something doctors shouldn't touch."
Medical practices that once would have been shocking have gradually come to seem normal, he said, citing abortion as a prime example.
"It's very hard for people who've been through this experience themselves, who are emotionally committed because someone they love has been through this, to then say, 'but it's not right, it's not actually good for us, in fact it's killing one of us,'" he said.
Persuading society of this will require "converting a whole culture, not just trying to get a better law or trying to get something the accepted medical practice," the archbishop said. "You've actually got to change whole attitudes to human beings and to what is a good life."
Opposing abortion "in a way that won't just harden hearts" against the pro-life cause means patient dialogue with the majority of people who are not solidly committed to either side, he said.
It also means sympathy and respect for women who might be tempted to seek an abortion.
"Some of the best pro-life campaigns simply say to women: 'Actually, you can do this; it's not impossible for you,'" the archbishop said. "That's a very different message to a culture that says: 'Look, this is a disaster, getting pregnant now. You've just got to get out of it, and quick, because you just can't cope. You are a weak and helpless thing.'"
Archbishop Fisher said the church can also challenge secular culture by posing serious questions, such as whether a world of designer babies -- where a parent's love implicitly depends on a child meeting certain standards -- really makes people happier.
But before they seek to change the culture, he said, Catholics must ensure their own values are in order.
"Christians always are called to conversion, and that means first us, individually, ourselves, rather than wagging our finger at everyone around us as being corrupt or wicked or wrong," the archbishop said. "Let's look inward first and see what conversion needs to happen there. And then we might have some things to say to our culture, our politicians, our institutions, our professions."
