Who is Odum? This from the diary of Odum found on DailyKos.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/1/23/135916/363
on abortion: The BISHOPs ALL BEG TO DIFFER- THUS, THE BISHOPs ALL NEED A TRIP TO THE VATICAN LIBRARY TO BRUSH UP ON THEIR HISTORY.
odum's diary :: ::
As with any history, its complicated - but suffice to say there has rarely - if ever - been consensus on the issue. Still, this history informs the debate, and the false history that's now been fully riveted into the brains of the American public is one of the anti-choice movement's most powerful weapons, even if they're ignorant of it themselves (which - in most cases - I'm willing to bet they are).
Here's a nutshell version with some links to follow for more details.
Few influenced the perspective of the early church more than Aristotle, and the Aristotelean view of the soul in the unborn was the "delayed ensoulment" - that is, the fetus isn't animated with a human soul until 40 days after conception for males, 90 days for females - both having a vegetable soul before then. In fact, there are early Greek texts and advice on how to perform abortion, so this is the history that Aristotle's views emerged from and which informed early Christian thinking.
When the Church became more organized, opinions started changing. As a theological narrative took shape in th mid 2nd Century into the 4th, more Christian thinkers began to equate abortion with infanticide. St. John Chrysostom called it "murder before the birth" (Homily 24 on Romans). Worth noting here is that thinkers like St. Jerome (infamous for, among other things, blaming women for the fall from grace) and St John Chrysostom (women are "a necessary evil") are also responsible for hardwiring some of the most disturbingly anti-woman theology into early Christianity - presenting women as something other than human, and sexuality as evil, or at least the pathway to evil. It's no coincidence that, even at this early date, anti-choice extremism goes hand-in-hand with misogyny. Still even Jerome - while saying some of the most awful garbage about women in recorded history, was not as hardcore about abortion as today's Religious Right, writing "The seed gradually takes shape in the uterus, and it [abortion] does not count as killing until the individual elements have acquired their external appearance and their limbs ("Epistle" (121, 4))"
Neither were early church organizational meetings unanimous. The Synods of Elvira and Ancyra (306 ACE, 314 ACE) explicitly called abortion a sin, while the Apostolic Constitutions (380 ACE) disallowed it only after the fetus took on a "human shape."
Although eastern Christianity vectored toward an absolutist stand, the western church did not. St. Augustine refocused the church on the Aristotelan delayed ensoulment model ("On Exodus", (21, 80)), and by this time the church was a much more defined hierarchy, leaving less room for disagreement.
In the early 7th Century, the Church began codifying what it considered sexual sins and abortion made the list, but was well behind the "sins" of birth control, oral sex, and anal sex. In fact, the punishment for oral sex was at least 7 years of penance, while the punishment for abortion was a mere 120 days.
In the centuries that followed, Popes came on the scene with widely varying viewpoints - changing and re-changing the rules as the mitre passed on. Significantly, Pope Innocent III in the early 1200s ruled that the fetus had no soul until it was "animated" (the "quickening" - when the mother can feel the fetus' movements, usually around the 24th week. In his ruling - and this is significant -- a monk was found not guilty of homicide for aborting his lover's unborn child under this argument. Pope Sixtus V in 1588 made all abortions illegal, but was reversed again by Pope Gregory XIV, codifying abortions at up to 16 ½ weeks as not equivalent to the killing of a human being, as no soul was present.
Even St. Thomas Aquinas himself - arguably the most influential theologian in Roman Catholic Christianity, did not consider a fetus human until the quickening.
This was the way it was for the most part until - and are you sitting down for this? - 1869. That's when Pope Pius IX declared all abortion to be homicide. That's right, for nearly the entire history of Christianity, the Catholic Church was officially tolerant of first trimester abortion. The change was well after the Enlightenment, after the Civil War, and into the modern scientific era. In fact, it was only as recently as 1983 that all vestiges of the distinction between the "fetus animatus" and "fetus inanimatus" were quietly purged from Canon Law. (Yes, that was 1983... only 23 years ago)
So much for the traditional Christians versus those pesky godless, postmodern liberals, eh?
And its not just the Catholics, but Protestants as well. English Common Law did not recognize abortion as a crime before quickening, and was only a misdemeanor afterwards. This began changing in 1803 with a series of changes to the written Law, but it is largely this fact that has lead many legal scholars to suggest that Roe v Wade should have been argued based on English Common Law rather than a debatable, "inferred" right of privacy.
Of course these scholars make the argument based on legality, but I'd argue such a common-law based decision would have, perhaps more importantly, gone a long way to framing the debate. After all, it would be far more difficult to perpetuate the notion that a right to an abortion is based on the whims of "liberal activist judges" if it was based on arguments that rise from the very foundations of our American legal system.
So anyway, the point is that WE are the "traditionalists" here, and the supposedly monolithic, unchanging, "old-fashioned" party line from the Catholic Church and other protestant institutions are anything but traditional and unchanging.
The next time you hear a Catholic saying that anyone suggesting that abortion may be permissible publicly should be denied Communion, ask them if that would include Saints Jerome, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
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