(Note: At points marked “——” the recording was inaudible)
QUESTION: I am Father Bruce Williams and I teach Moral Theology at this University. I want to address a question to Mrs. Blair but preface it with a comment if I may.
I was struck with the breadth, the comprehensiveness of your discussion of human rights as they pertain to women in the history of the Church’s broken understanding … broken understanding [of human rights]. For reasons that I think are known to you and me and all of us – I was particularly attentive as to what you had to say on the issues regarding the beginning of life, regulating fertility and the distinction between fertility management on the one hand and suppressing the blooming seed of life on the other. And from what you said, on both subjects which was admirably clear as far as I am concerned, along with what you shared in your personal experiences, it was crystal clear to me that you see abortion as morally repugnant and that you are in line with the teaching of the Church.
The reason I had to pay special attention to those remarks was, as I think we all know, the way you came across was decisively contrary to the way you have been depicted recently by a number of websites who have described you as pro-abortion and anti-family and which protested our university giving you a platform. What you have just said inclines me to, all the more, to think that those accusations were at the very best rash, if not outright calumnious and I regret that you were subjected to that.
I want to ask you, if you have any perspective on this phenomenon yourself – were you surprised to see those descriptions of you on the internet and can you help me to make sense of this because I really want to understand what is going on here.
CHERIE: I am not sure Father whether I can help you make sense of that – having been for ten years in [Downing street], I sometimes wonder when I read about myself in the papers whether I really did have horns and a tail. I am never surprised by what some people who have never met you and never actually listened to what you might say would say about you.
The other thing I always tell my children about the internet is it is a very useful tool but along with a lot of good that comes from there, there are a lot of things that are positively misleading. It is very difficult to say why people should misunderstand what I am about. As someone who has been a practicing Catholic all my life, it would be rather strange if I did not adhere to the teachings of the Church and, indeed, as I said in my speech, my own life, perhaps, illustrates that.
Having said that, however, I think that there is a real danger in this debate where we allied abortion and contraception as the same. The Church needs to engage in this issue properly and I think some of the people who, particularly might——the internet, are actually trying to prevent the Church from engaging in this debate rather than helping it engage in this debate.
The Church has a strong, moral message which deserves to be heard but it isn’t a message to stop – it’s a message which is ongoing, we need to engage in the world as it is today and to do good with how our knowledge has developed and we need to be confident in what that message is.
I am very pleased that this university was confident enough in the Catholic message not to be put off by assertions about me. I am not ‘Miss Perfect’, that is for sure but I really don’t think I have horns and a tail.
PROF. JANNE MATLARY: I was also approached by these rather extremist, very intolerant groups that call themselves Catholic and why I would go to a conference where someone is invited who is not really following Catholic teaching and who opposes this and that…. And they sent attachments putting together statements that you allegedly had made, deducting from their own interpretation of whatever and they took out of context, an opinion and so on that they had basically no reason to misuse. The concoction of things that you can probably find about me and make about me – whatever you please – and one can find sort of ‘evidence’ for this. And I replied to these so-called Catholic organizations, “How is it possible that you have never heard about academic freedom about reason, about discussion, about the whole intellectual Tradition of the Church.” The Angelicum is a University and you know what the main function of a university is. Of course, there was never any reply to this but it is really a danger of our time that we have… this is the exact kind of interest group politics that I was criticizing in my talk, that there are those who have some kind of interest within the wide Catholic Church who just push this and use all kinds of methods of implication to achieve their goals.
So, I thought it was very unchristian and very unCatholic, this kind of approach, to the recent debate that we must have about all things in the Church and I think this constellation of contraception, reproduction, and abortion, mixing them together and this is what happens all the time. Humanae Vitae, the conference some months ago on HV, and clearly there is a very major issue here which is very important – mainly, this danger of complete separation of sexuality and its procreation. This is what we see today in this complete divorce of sexual desire or sexual urges and the context of a family.
This is a much more vital issue than the finer points of reproduction – of how parents space and decide on the number of children. Of course, the method of NFP has proven itself to be extremely cheap, useful and therefore attractive——there are many ways to approaching that issue but it is a much less importance than the issue of abortion. However, one discusses these things and disagrees or agrees on many things in the Church, the main principle of having recent, open discussion is so important, particularly in a university.
I was struck by the, should one say, the very narrow intolerance, and almost evil intention of these groups.
QUESTION: My name is Brother Ryan Renaud, I am the ex-president of the students at the Angelicum and the current president for the Conference of all Pontifical students in Rome. I just want to echo what Mrs. Matlary said. She said the Church needs to engage itself properly in dialogue – am I correct?
As a pastor for the students here, I have had a lot of input which was worried about your presence here about the possibility of giving you a platform that could be used against what the Church teaches – we like to think of the Angelicum as the heart of the scholastic world, it is probably a bit of an exaggerated opinion but I am not going to say that we were risking a heart attack [laughter] but there was something going on there. Some difficulty. I am, in fact, relieved because what I heard you say today is one, that you are a humble person on a journey and we all are.
You expressed this with your difficulty with birth control, I believe, you said. What you did say was to repeat what the Church says and you repeated this phrase – that human life in all its forms is considered sacred. Mrs. Matlary expressed very well that the family is sacred and we need to protect it and I heard this also in your speech – that we are all made in God’s image, that men and women are not the same. OK, we have the same human rights. Women have rights as mothers as well but I appreciated that considering what our future is – and the dialogue that we are going to have to enter into in our lifetime as seminarians, as young students who are growing up in our world today.
My question to you is, Jesus said, “I leave you in this world but not of it” and to me that identifies two sides and I am just going to call one side, the Christian side for our purposes today and the other side, the secular side. And like that picture of the woman on this manifesto here is divided – and she is looking towards the future and we are looking towards the future – and I repeat what you said, “We need to engage in a proper dialogue.”
So, what is the starting point – what is the heart that we can agree on between the Church’s approach to human rights and a secular approach to human rights because as Mrs. Matlary said, she is one to base this on natural law and not positive law. Our popes continue to repeat that this is based on human dignity and we are on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights – do we need to base ourselves on that, towards our future. That is my question. I hope it was kind of quick.
CHERIE: It wasn’t entirely quick, but I think what we are talking about here is what the Church offers is human rights plus – human rights in the Universal Declaration is like the lowest common denominator. What we have to bring, of course, is that additional insight which says ‘where does this law actually come from’ and hopefully, for me and for you and I am sure everyone here, of course it comes from God and what it means to be a child of God.
That does not mean, of course, that everybody holds that view and that someone who doesn’t hold that view is not a person of good will and that we cannot engage, reach out to people of goodwill. Our observation comes from that understanding of what it means to be a human being which our faith gives us. That gives us the addition certainty that the positivists don’t have.
You see this in the debate that I referred to,——, who is a professor of human rights at——and who is also Catholic and trying to identify what it is then, what makes human rights important. It is easy for us to identify that because we see it as the inherent dignity of people that comes from being made in God’s likeness. For those who see it that way and there is always a bit of a struggle to decide where that does come from, and maybe this idea of unity is one of the things that everybody can agree with.
John Finniss indicates that basing it solely on some sort of intellectual calculation almost is that it is not entirely clear why from a purely calculating intellectual exercise, you get into the idea where some people are worth less than others and you see that particularly with relation to people with disabilities. Actually, you also see it in relation to women. Because, as I mentioned in my speech again, why is it that there are fewer baby girls. It is because those baby girls are not regarded as being of equal worth or equal value to baby boys and that is a terrible tragedy which the Church does speak out about and its voice needs to be heard more and more because it is actually happening now. I think in India it is 1.86 male to female births and a natural way of male to female it should actually be 1.2 baby girls to every 1 boy instead of 86 baby girls to every 100 boys so that is telling you something really shocking.
JANNE MATLARY: I think it is so paradoxical that today women, girls particularly, are discriminated against before birth and being aborted because they are female. In the…being killed by husbands, the more we know about equality, the more we also see this blatant type of discrimination.
It strikes me that, in societies nowadays, that we call it ‘——’, or we ‘sort out’ the ones that are more viable. You sort out the healthy, young, well-off, well-educated men, very often, that are regarded as being strong enough to survive. It is a kind of Darwinist view of human beings and those who are at all sick, handicapped – all of those are regarded as less human. We see it all the time in our societies.
I saw a statistic from Denmark, my husband is a pediatrician, and he deals with all those who are soon not born anymore – children with Downs are not born any more in Denmark they are aborted and this is the same——, the more we know medically about the diagnosis, the more we are able to have euthanasia but a program really for eugenic management. It is exactly the same with Hitler, who was not unique in the way he——things in the 30’s, these were common ideas in the 30’s.
It’s quite frightening. Sometimes I think, ok, if I get really old and sick will I be killed by my state? In Switzerland and Holland, this happens. It is frightening. I think we can see sort of this lack of understanding of human dignity very clear today – politics has a utilitarian approach to human life and this includes women and girls in very obvious ways.
CHERIE: It is interesting actually because we just had some research that has come out in England which actually shows that more Downs babies are now being born because society is much more accepting and we understand just how much Downs children can do that parents are feeling more confident and able to welcome such babies which actually is a very positive thing and shows how science and faith and reason can work together to make things better. We mustn’t be too despairing, of course, in that assumption that simply because you might have a Downs baby that you wouldn’t want to have it. That is actually a terrible reflection when you think of utilitarianism.
Question in Italian.
CHERIE: Well, I think personally that, if, as we do, we find new diversity and the more different voices that we can bring into the government, the better. Just by itself, diversity is a good thing and it is astonishing really that, in our political life, which, after all, is dominated by this idea of representative democracy, that the voices and the faces of 52% (women around the world.) are not seen – it’s quite an extraordinary thing.
But talking about what actually happens in practice, I think we saw that very clearly as I said in my speech, in the UK. In 1979, we elected a woman as Prime Minister but at that time, there were more men in our Parliament named ‘John’ across the years, than there were women in Parliament [laughter] which is extraordinary. There were not many other women in Parliament when Mrs. Thatcher was Prime Minister and in the late 1990’s, the Labor Party made a deliberate decision to promote more women and we had a policy whereby, when seats came up which the party was likely to win, we selected from an——short list. That caused a lot of controversy and many men were unhappy about it but the result was that in 1997, for the first time ever in the British Parliament, the number of women who went in over 100 – it was 116.
The vast majority of those were, over a hundred of them, Labor party women – the balance being from the other parties who didn’t go out to positively recruit them in and therefore, found that they had much more of the numbers. Now, did that make a difference – I absolutely think it did make a difference. It reflected the priority of women in the policies that we had in relation to domestic violence, for example, in relation to policy about maternity leave, the things that you might naturally think that women were concerned with. In addition to that it made a difference because suddenly, Parliament looked different and you really shouldn’t underestimate the value of role models and of what you actually see.
An example of that came to me when I——, the first African woman to be elected president, the president of Liberia, and she told this wonderful story about shortly after she was elected, she took a visiting dignitary around to a primary school and I have been on these visits and after a bit the children were getting a bit restless and one of the teacher’s started to reprimand the children and a little 8 year old girl said to the teacher, “Sir, be careful what you say to me because one day, I could be president.” [laughter, applause]
When you think about two years before that when there was no woman——- the African presidents in the world, that little girl would never have dreamed that a woman could be president and yet we see it today in a different way don’t we. The fact is, actually, appearance and role models are also important and if Parliament doesn’t reflect the population in all its diversity, and the biggest diversity is, I suppose, between men and women, then it is not really being truly representative. That is why it’s important. That is why I think it’s important that the Church needs to also reflect that.
JANNE MATLARY: You mentioned the Roman Curia of the Church and I think this is a very interesting thing as well. Women and men are different and yet equal in many ways and in all my service in the Curia, in Vatican delegations, I have always been appreciated for two things that I miss in other places. One is motherhood – when I was in Beijing and my son started school and he was crying on the phone each time I called – I said to Cardinal Martino, “I should go home and be with him instead of being here negotiating for the Holy See.” And Cardinal Martino said, “Yes, that is much more important that you be with him – so just leave.” And I left, early. I could never have done that normally in a delegation.
This is, in a way, a very natural appreciation of motherhood. But also an appreciation of reason – I have sat in many discussions with Catholic clergy and I have always felt that they are interested with what is in here – in my brain. So, this is also an appreciation of women who are educated – if you have a valid argument, say something – if you don’t, shut up.
And this I appreciate a lot so that there is no sort of mixture of a false appreciation of women but having said that, however, I think it is important that the talent of the Church, the enormous female talent of the church, be used much more and there are so many positions in the Curia and in the church itself that do not require ordination and we could see much more female talent being used in the Curia in diplomatic service and so on and this, I think, is a question of maturity, development and change. Because this society, this Italian society, in Italy itself, is one of the most backward in Europe concerning the role of women, it must really underlie this——-.
We must realize that almost half of the population is female and half of the population is now gradually becoming, ‘serving’, in a way, in society in all its variety and the suffrage of women was late. It was very late in some European countries so this is kind of a new revolution in history but it is happening but I think this is an evolutionary thing but it should also be pushed a bit.