Biomedical Controversies in Catholic Ireland: A Contemporary History of Divisive Social Issues by Don O'Leary

Abstract

Reviewed by: Biomedical Controversies in Catholic Ireland: A Contemporary History of Divisive Social Issues by Don O'Leary Colum Kenny Biomedical Controversies in Catholic Ireland: A Contemporary History of Divisive Social Issues, by Don O'Leary (Cork: Eryn Press, 2020, 398 p., paperback, $20.99) Don O'Leary frames within an Irish context some continuing controversies relating to conception, care, and the termination of life. The waning role of the Catholic Church in Ireland has been marked and even hastened by related debates. Not just in Ireland but around the world, questions concerning abortion and assisted suicide, for example, have given rise to arguments so heated that they are at times termed "culture wars," although such "wars" may range beyond what O'Leary calls "biomedical controversies" to include marriage equality, gender fluidity, and other issues. He provides a context for debates by examining developments in biomedical science and law and by interrogating central aspects of Catholic moral teaching. O'Leary dedicates a chapter to each of the following topics: stem cell research and assisted reproduction (2000–2005), frozen embryo and stem cell research (2005–6), embryos and the right to life (2006–11), assisted suicide, assisted human reproduction (2013–20), and abortion (1992–2016). He prefaces these six chapters with an opening on "Papal Pronouncements" and follows them with "Challenges to the Catholic Ethos" before finally considering the successful campaign to repeal the section of the Irish constitution that severely limited the government's ability to legislate for abortion in Ireland. His book is a helpful resource for understanding the complexity of the topics on which he touches, although the absence of an index is regrettable. The volume is referenced and includes a useful bibliography. O'Leary's decision to locate his subject expressly in "Catholic Ireland" raises questions. The independent Irish state has never been constitutionally denominational, even if the Catholic Church long enjoyed a special and influential place in its affairs. Insofar as the state's ethos was for decades Catholic, it reflected [End Page 143] democratically the sentiments of a largely Catholic population that was then obedient to its church's teaching in respect to policy and legislation concerning procreation and marriage. The latter relationship changed fundamentally even before the end of the twentieth century. If there was a signal moment when official Ireland crossed some kind of Rubicon in its relationship with Catholic bishops, it was in August 1996 when, during a visit to Chicago and Detroit to attract financial institutions to Ireland, the Irish Minister for Finance Ruairi Quinn TD described his state as a "post-Catholic, pluralist republic." The head of state by then was Mary Robinson, a human rights lawyer and liberal who had been elected president of Ireland in 1990. If at the time Quinn offended some people, and if others regarded his statement as an expression of personal wishful thinking, in hindsight he seems to have been correct. Census returns continue to show the great majority of Irish people still recording their religion nominally as Catholic, yet their level of attendance at church has fallen steadily and their attitudes and behavior are in practice akin to what hitherto were regarded as Protestant or secular types. The dining metaphor "à la carte Catholics" is used by conservatives, often contemptuously, to describe the contemporary exercise of conscience by individuals with respect to Catholic dogma. Even one quite progressive bishop has spoken of "Nicodemus Catholics … living in a sort of de facto atheism." It is unlikely that Minister Quinn was being deliberately provocative. He did not seek publicity for his comment. It was barely reported, appearing as the very last sentence of a story in the middle of page seven of the Irish Times. He had been fielding a range of questions from Irish emigrants in the United States who remembered when their church's hand lay heavily on Irish social policy. Desmond Connell, then archbishop of Dublin, retorted that Quinn had spoken "in a way that seems to endorse a secular hostility to any Catholic influence on our national outlook." Connell would later be discredited for his handling of child abuse cases in the archdiocese of Dublin, especially when he invoked the casuistic doctrine...