And so is the belief that she doesn't... and in the marketplace of ideas you can have any belief you want. And the Church can too, and always has, depending on what seems to work at the time:
[Pope]
Gregory XIII (1572-85) said it was not homicide to kill an embryo of less than forty days since it was not human. Even after forty days, though it was homicide, it was not as serious as killing a person already born, since it was not done in hatred or revenge. His successor, the tempestuous
Sixtus V, who rewrote the Bible, disagreed entirely. In his Bull
Effraenatum of 1588, he said all abortions for whatever reason were homicide and were penalized by excommunication reserved to the Holy See. Immediately after
Sixtus died,
Gregory XIV realized that, in the current state of theological opinion, Sixtus' view was too severe. In an almost unique decision, he said Sixtus' censures were to be treated as is he had never issued them. Popes can be precipitate. They never did have answers up their sleeve to ongoing moral problems. Moral judgments depend on facts and circumstances, all of which must be kept under review. The nineteenth-century papacy forgot this basic principle on every issue related to liberty. Twentieth-century pope, have forgotten it on every issue relating to sex. ---
The RCC's "traditional" Teaching on Abortion
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II laid out the Church's definition of "pro-life" behavior. His starting point was the Didache, the most ancient non-biblical Christian writing. The Didache explores the differences between "a way of life and a way of death." "The way of death is this...they show no compassion for the poor, they do not suffer with the suffering, they do not acknowledge their Creator, they kill their children and cause God's creatures to perish; they drive away the needy, oppress the suffering, they are advocates of the rich and unjust judges of the poor; they are filled with every sin." Thus the Didache teaches us that to evaluate whether an individual is pro-life depends on far more than his or her position on abortion.
The Pope maintains that abortion at any time constitutes murder. However, he concedes that "
the texts of Sacred Scripture never address the question of deliberate abortion and so do not directly and specifically condemn it." Indeed, although he doesn't discuss this,
for more than 1500 years the position of the Catholic Church on abortion was very close to that of the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade: Early term abortion is not a mortal sin.
St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (ca. 415 AD), one of the most influential of all Catholic theologians, persuaded early Church leaders that abortion should not be regarded "as homicide, for there cannot be a living soul in a body that lacks sensation due to its not yet being formed." He, and Thomas Aquinas after him, taught that the embryo does not acquire a human soul until the end of the first trimester. At the beginning of the 13th century Pope Innocent II proposed that "quickening" (the time when the woman first feels the fetus move within her) should be the moment at which abortion becomes homicide. Abortions occurring prior to that moment constituted a less serious sin. Pope Gregory XIV's declaration in 1591 that early abortion was not grounds for excommunication guided Church policy until 1869. In that year, Pope Pius IX eliminated the distinction between the animated and non-animated fetus and insisted on excommunication for anyone having or providing an abortion at any stage of pregnancy. That instruction was written into the Canon Law in 1917.
==============
For fourteen hundred years until late in the nineteenth century, all Catholics, including the popes, took it for granted that the soul is not infused at conception. If the church was wholly opposed to abortion, as it was, it was not on the basis of the conceptus starting as a human being.
From the fifth century, the church accepted without question the primitive embryology of Aristotle. The embryo began as a non-human speck that was progressively animated. This speck had to evolve from vegetative, through animal to spiritual being. Only in its final stage was it a human being. This is why Gratian was able to say: `He is not a murderer who brings about abortion before the soul is in the body.' (RCC above, op.cit.)
.
.
.
.
.
