St Augustine: What has been injured shall be renewed.

had made a point of not watch­ing the recent videos expos­ing the bar­bar­ic evils of Planned Par­ent­hood and Stem Express, put out by the Cen­ter for Med­ical Progress. You find out what is in them with­out that. Why expose myself to see­ing images I would not be able to erase from my mind? Why watch babies be sev­ered and cut apart and sliced open so their insides could be boxed and shipped and sold for prof­it? Who wants to look upon any of that hor­ror?

But then, ear­li­er this week, per­haps because I had an arti­cle to write, I watched the sixth of them. I knew what I was going to see.

In that video, titled “Human Cap­i­tal – Episode 3,” we watch an intact child, pink and smooth and wet, its eyes closed but its heart still beat­ing, slow­ly move its arms and legs. It is still alive.

Hol­ly O’Donnell, who was a pro­cure­ment tech­ni­cian at Stem Express, describes how she cut open the face of one such baby in order to remove his brain for har­vest­ing. The super­vis­ing tech­ni­cian begins by start­ing an inci­sion from the chin to the lip. Then, she hands scis­sors to O’Donnell, who con­tin­ues cut­ting from the lip all the way to the crown. She removes the brain. The whole time, the child was alive and had a beat­ing heart.

That is what is being done in the name of med­ical research and women’s health.

St. Augustine’s Enchiridion

I am going to talk more about Hol­ly O’Donnell, but first I want to talk about St. Augus­tine.

Today is the feast day of St. Augus­tine of Hip­po, whom dis­sent­ing Catholics some­times cite as though he is an ally in their defense of abor­tion. The idea is that, because Augus­tine was unsure when a child in the womb acquired a soul, and thought that abor­tion might not be the same as homi­cide, pro-choice Catholics today are jus­ti­fied in think­ing that the Church is unde­cid­ed on the ques­tion and allows lat­i­tude.

This arti­cle is not the place to go into a thor­ough rebut­tal of all that. Oth­ers have done that very well before (here and here). But one par­tic­u­lar pas­sage from Augustine’s Enchirid­ion often gets cit­ed in this con­text, and it is worth look­ing at for what it tells us about Augustine’s view of the human­i­ty of the child in the womb. Augus­tine wrote the Enchirid­ion, or “Hand­book,” to answer a series of ques­tions posed by one Lau­ren­tius. The top­ic comes up in chap­ter 85:

Hence in the first place aris­es a ques­tion about abortive con­cep­tions, which have indeed been born in the mother’s womb, but not so born that they could be born again. For if we shall decide that these are to rise again, we can­not object to any con­clu­sion that may be drawn in regard to those which are ful­ly formed. Now who is there that is not rather dis­posed to think that unformed abor­tions per­ish, like seeds that have nev­er fruc­ti­fied? But who will dare to deny, though he may not dare to affirm, that at the res­ur­rec­tion every defect in the form shall be sup­plied, and that thus the per­fec­tion which time would have brought shall not be want­i­ng, any more than the blem­ish­es which time did bring shall be present: so that the nature shall nei­ther want any­thing suit­able and in har­mo­ny with it that length of days would have added, nor be debased by the pres­ence of any­thing of an oppo­site kind that length of days has added; but that what is not yet com­plete shall be com­plet­ed, just as what has been injured shall be renewed.

Here, Augus­tine is not talk­ing about induced abor­tion, but “abortive conceptions”—that is to say, mis­car­riages. Those who want to claim that the Church has not been able to decide when life begins, and who cite Augus­tine to their sup­port, read his words that “unformed abor­tions per­ish, like seeds that have nev­er fruc­ti­fied” and stop there. But Augus­tine describes this view only as what some are “dis­posed to think”; he sets it up only to strike it down. He con­tin­ues; he says:

At the Res­ur­rec­tion, every defect will be made per­fect. [God ful­fills in an abort­ed child] what length of days would have added. What is not yet com­plete shall be com­plet­ed, just as what has been injured shall be renewed.

What­ev­er the insuf­fi­cien­cies of Augustine’s knowl­edge of biology—and we would expect that from some­one who lived in the fifth century—he approach­es the ques­tion more from a the­ol­o­gy of the Res­ur­rec­tion. He views the human per­son less in the light of its cur­rent imper­fec­tions, or stage of devel­op­ment, and more in the light of what Res­ur­rec­tion will make us.

In chap­ter 86, Augus­tine puts the mat­ter more direct­ly. He admits that no one knows when a child in the womb begins to live and won­ders whether that will ever be known. But then he says this:

To deny that the young who are cut out limb by limb from the womb, lest if they were left there dead the moth­er should die too, have nev­er been alive, seems too auda­cious. Now, from the time that a man begins to live, from that time it is pos­si­ble for him to die. And if he die, where­so­ev­er death may over­take him, I can­not dis­cov­er on what prin­ci­ple he can be denied an inter­est in the res­ur­rec­tion of the dead.

Thus Augus­tine asserts their human­i­ty in the light of their “inter­est in the res­ur­rec­tion of the dead.” This is not a bio­log­i­cal argu­ment (and we would not want to acquire our biol­o­gy from Augus­tine, any­way) but a the­o­log­i­cal one. It is the cer­tain­ty of Res­ur­rec­tion that assures him of the human­i­ty of the child, even in the womb. That is why he can con­demn abor­tion (On Mar­riage and Con­cu­pis­cence I.17) as a form of “lust­ful cru­el­ty,” equal­ly cru­el regard­less of the stage of devel­op­ment.

Consciences That Are Broken and In Ruins

Augus­tine, whose feast we cel­e­brate today, assures us that those infants “cut out limb by limb from the womb,” and those whose face is cut off from the jaw to the crown to rob them of their brain, will be put back togeth­er, will be renewed, will be res­ur­rect­ed.

But I hope we already knew that.

What inter­ests me a great deal more in this pas­sage from Augus­tine, par­tic­u­lar­ly in light of the videos that have come out, is what it may remind us about con­sciences that are bro­ken and in ruins.

How wound­ed and dead must a con­science be to be able to laugh about the ship­ment of sev­ered infant heads?

The things that are being exposed in these videos are bar­bar­ic beyond descrip­tion or adjec­tive, and yet the peo­ple who are doing those things seem casu­al, unmoved, unem­bar­rassed, even amused.

In his first let­ter to Tim­o­thy, St. Paul describes peo­ple like that, who have “giv­en heed to … doc­trines of demons.” Their con­sciences, he says, have been “seared” (1 Tim­o­thy 4:1–2). (The King James trans­la­tion adds “with a hot iron,” which is an espe­cial­ly strik­ing image, although it is not in the Greek text.) You get the sense of a con­science where all the nerve has been burned away so there is no longer any feel­ing. Feel­ing has been replaced with cold­ness, a lust for mon­ey, and joy­less laugh­ter.

Sure­ly St. Paul would not have been sur­prised by Planned Par­ent­hood and those who defend it. Sure­ly he would not be sur­prised that many of us remain unmoved by, or will­ful­ly igno­rant of, those things shown in the videos, or that they insist on denial and soft euphemism.

“I told you before,” he would say.

But con­sid­er Hol­ly O’Donnell, the tech­ni­cian who cut off the face of a liv­ing child and took out his brain. This is what she says:

I didn’t want to do this. So she gave me the scis­sors and told me that I had to cut it down the mid­dle of the face. And I can’t even describe what that feels like. And I remem­ber pick­ing it up and fin­ish­ing going through the rest of the face and Jes­si­ca pick­ing up the brain and putting it in the con­tain­er. … And she left and said, “Okay, you can clean it up.” And I sat there think­ing, “What did I just do?” And that was the moment I knew I couldn’t work for the com­pa­ny any more.

In all the dis­cus­sions I had read on social media about this video, before I watched it, I nev­er once heard this men­tioned: that the very per­son who cut that face off left Stem Express because of it and is now work­ing with the Cen­ter for Med­ical Progress to expose their evil.

It was that very act that res­ur­rect­ed a dead, or bro­ken, con­science. She repent­ed, and what­ev­er the cost to her­self she left. And it may be that work­ing to expose the evil of Planned Par­ent­hood and Stem Express is how Hol­ly O’Donnell is try­ing to find heal­ing. We must pray for her. We must ask Mary to com­fort her.

That part of this sto­ry needs to be told too. Every defect in the con­science of those who kill can be repaired and made new.

It is not enough to expose the evil of Planned Par­ent­hood, and abor­tion, and try to defund it, and over­turn Roe, and save babies from death. It is not enough to express out­rage over all this bar­barism in our midst, and the car­nage of near­ly 60 mil­lion abor­tions in the Unit­ed States since 1973, or rough­ly five times as many inno­cent peo­ple as Hitler killed.

Those are nec­es­sary and upright things to do, to be sure. But the guilty are in need of sav­ing too. The guilty were also made for res­ur­rec­tion. We admit this, but often it seems we admit it only as an after­thought to out­rage and our desire for the guilty to be pun­ished. But when we pray in front of abor­tion clin­ics and Planned Par­ent­hood, we must pray not only for babies and moth­ers but for those who work there, because those who work there can be saved. Their con­sciences can be reclaimed and redeemed and res­ur­rect­ed. And they are in des­per­ate need of heal­ing. We must love them.

Hol­ly O’Donnell reminds us of that. When we talk about these videos, that too is part of the sto­ry that we need to tell peo­ple about.

What has been injured shall be renewed. What is dead shall be made alive again.

 

Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished at Catholic Stand, August 28, 2015.