The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly

Sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests has been a persistent and widespread problem in the Church. Although more than 80 percent of victims have been boys, prior studies have rejected the idea that the abuse is related to homosexuality among priests. Available data show, however, that the proportion of homosexual men in the priesthood is correlated almost perfectly with the percentage of male victims and with the overall incidence of abuse. Data also show that while the incidence of abuse is lower today than it was three decades ago, it has not declined as much as is commonly believed, and has recently begun to rise amid signs of episcopal complacency about procedures for the protection of children.

There is a pedagogical method of bringing undergraduate students to conceive the body–soul question. Similarly, there is a simple philosophical argument in defense of the existence of the soul via contemporary autobiographical stories, recent neuroscientific literature, and Socrates’s distinction between condition and cause in Plato’s Phaedo. This method has proved helpful in enabling students to gain access to the mystery and grandeur of the body–soul question and its foundational importance with respect to ethics and, indeed, to the meaning of life. There must be a revival of collaboration between neuroscientists and philosophers to coauthor papers that explicitly challenge the materialist assumptions in the fields of neuroscience and psychology.

In a short section of his 2015 book Beyond the Abortion Wars, Charles Camosy claims that direct abortion to save the life of the mother is consistent with Catholic principles. Joshua Evans published an essay critical of this view in the Summer 2017 issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, to which Camosy responded in the Summer 2018 issue. In the current essay, Evans replies to Camosy’s recent response by offering a further examination of three central issues in dispute: (1) how the history of moral theology bears on public debates, (2) how past authoritative Church teaching applies when the method of moral theology apparently has shifted, and (3) how the analysis of vital conflicts is affected when examined in relation to more fundamental theological considerations.