Vatican warns against Church doing State’s ‘dirty work’ on abortion

The Vatican has given its strongest indication yet that the Irish Church in Ireland should act to prevent abortions from taking place in hospitals owned by religious orders.

“The Church cannot be a party to the dirty work of others [abortion] and I don’t think that it is right that the law [in Ireland] now enables Pontius Pilate to wash his hands of the affair,” Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, has told the Sunday Independent’s Paddy Agnew.

The academy is a Vatican body dedicated to studying and informing on major problems in the fields of biomedicine and of law, related to the promotion and defence of life, especially in relation to Christian morality and Church teaching.

“I will never accept to be complicit in the cold-blooded aiding of the dirty work of death,” Archbishop Paglia continued.

The archbishop’s comments come against the background of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar having told the Dáil that hospitals with a Catholic ethos will be required to perform abortions after new legislation on abortion comes into effect.

Waterford and Lismore’s Bishop Phonsie Cullinan has said that in a genuinely open and tolerant society, a Catholic hospital should be respected and allowed to uphold its ethos in full.

Canon law and Church teaching forbid Catholic hospitals from facilitating abortions, and effectively bar religious bodies from selling their hospitals so that abortions could be performed there by others.

The Church has strict rules on the ‘alienation of temporal goods’ – the transferal of property by sale or by gift – with goods being valued at market rates and all goods taking place above a certain ‘maximum’ value needing Vatican approval to be handed over.

In the late 1980s the Irish hierarchy decided that the relevant figure should be stg£1,000,000, approximately equivalent to €3.5m today.  Religious bodies would typically need approval from the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, which has hitherto tended to act on the advice of the local bishop in whose diocese the property is located.

Dr Paglia’s comments suggest, however, that the Vatican may have its own ideas this time.