Josef Seifert calls on PAV President to step down | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: abortion, josef seifert, pav

Personalist Project Adviser Josef Seifert is the seventh member of the Pontifical Academy for Life to call for its president, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, to step down or be removed from office over public comments that “appeared to condone the abortion of the unborn twins of a nine-year-old rape victim in Brazil.”
Here is an article about the scandal.
See also Professor Seifert’s open letter on the question.  The whole thing is more than worth reading, but below is a sample paragraph, responding to the Archbishop’s published suggestion that the moral status of such “therapeutic abortions” was a difficult question addressed to the consciences of those directly involved.

He even said that it was an act of mercy and life-saving, given the alleged danger the girl had been in and the terrible abuse the girl had suffered and the pains she might have had to suffer in the future. All of this implies that it was even a good act under the circumstances. All of these and similar statements are in full tune with a moral theological position that has been widespread among many Catholic moral theologians for decades and still is held by many, mainly among those theologians who opposed Humanae Vitae. This ethical view is called proportionalism or consequentialism. According to it, there are no intrinsically morally wrong acts which to commit is sinful under all circumstances. There is no intrinsically wrong act at all, according to this opinion, that could not be justified by its consequences, i.e., if it’s foreseeable good consequences outweigh the bad ones. This position, which also I have criticized in many articles and an unpublished book, would undermine the basis not only of Church doctrine but of Socratic ethics and of morality itself, and was clearly condemned in Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical Veritatis splendor, which taught unambiguously that this position (defended by Fuchs, Demmer, Böckle, Schüller, and many other Catholic moral theologians), is gravely false and contrary to Catholic ethical teaching.