33. You Are Not Your Own: Catholic Principles for Medical Decisions

“Know you not, that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, whom you have of God, and you are not your own? For you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body.” — 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, original Rheims New Testament (1582), spelling modernized¹

Illness can force a family to make grave decisions before it feels prepared to make them.

A physician proposes an operation. A treatment promises some benefit but carries a serious burden. A dying person can no longer speak. Relatives disagree. Fear presses for immediate action; exhaustion whispers that nothing more should be done. Technical language multiplies while the moral question remains obscure.

At such a moment, the Catholic must begin where St. Paul begins:

You are not your own.

The body is not an idol whose earthly life must be prolonged at every possible cost. Neither is it a possession over which man has absolute dominion. It is a creature of God, redeemed by Christ, made a member of Christ through Baptism, and destined for resurrection. Man receives stewardship, not ownership without limit.

This one truth excludes two opposite errors.

The first is medical neglect: refusing reasonable care through despair, stubbornness, contempt for the body, false spirituality, or a hidden desire for death.

The second is medical absolutism: treating biological survival as though it were the highest good, demanding every intervention regardless of burden or hope, and subordinating the soul, family duties, justice, and preparation for eternity to the indefinite maintenance of bodily functions.

Catholic judgment walks between these errors. Life is a great natural good and must be guarded. Eternal life is the final end, and earthly medicine must remain beneath the law of God.

Sacred Scripture does not teach contempt for physicians. Ecclesiasticus commands honor for the physician and recognizes that remedies and medical skill belong within divine Providence. It then orders the sick man first toward God: prayer, amendment of life, sacrifice, and afterward the physician, whose knowledge also comes from God.²

This is the Catholic order.

The patient prays, repents, seeks the sacraments, and employs competent natural help. The physician studies created causes and applies suitable remedies. The priest attends to the supernatural life of the soul. The family gives truthful information, practical care, and moral support. None usurps the office of another, and all remain subject to God.

A doctor possesses real authority within his art. He may know what disease is present, what an operation ordinarily accomplishes, what dangers attend delay, and what burdens a treatment is likely to impose. A patient who dismisses such knowledge merely because it is unwelcome does not display Catholic independence. Prudence listens to competent counsel.

Yet expertise in medicine does not make a physician the author of morality. Technical possibility does not establish moral law. A procedure does not become good merely because it can be performed, is customary, is legal, is insured, or has been approved by a hospital committee.

Pope Pius XII taught physicians in 1954 that medical ethics must rest upon being and nature, must conform to reason and finality, and must finally be rooted in the transcendent. He summarized the proper end of conscientious medicine as helping, curing, and preventing disease—not harming or killing.³

Medicine therefore serves the human person. The person does not become material belonging to medicine, the state, an institution, or scientific progress.

Before deciding whether to accept or refuse a medical proposal, several different questions must be kept distinct.

What is the act itself?

The first question is not, “What result do we hope for?” It is, “What is actually being chosen and done?”

A good intention cannot make an intrinsically evil act good. One may never directly kill an innocent person, directly procure abortion, directly intend suicide, or deliberately mutilate a healthy bodily function without a proportionate therapeutic reason grounded in the good of the whole person.⁴

The moral object must be named honestly. “Ending suffering” may conceal the direct ending of a sufferer’s life. “Reproductive health” may conceal direct sterilization. “Pregnancy termination” may conceal the direct killing of an unborn child. “Comfort only” may describe legitimate relief of pain, or it may be used to disguise intentional abandonment. A Catholic cannot surrender judgment to a softened label.

What is intended?

Two outwardly similar decisions may differ morally because the chosen end differs.

One patient refuses a highly burdensome and nearly useless intervention because he accepts the approach of death and wishes to prepare well. Another refuses an ordinary and effective remedy precisely in order to die. The physical omission may appear similar; the will is not.

One physician administers a proportionate remedy to relieve severe pain, carefully choosing the dose for relief while accepting an unintended risk. Another chooses a dose in order to cause death. The first treats pain; the second kills.

The intention does not excuse an evil means, but it remains an essential part of moral judgment.

What effects are reasonably foreseen?

Many medical acts have more than one effect. Catholic moral theology does not say that every action carrying risk is forbidden. Surgery itself often wounds in order to heal. A diseased organ may be removed for the good of the body. A medicine may bring relief while creating a secondary danger.

The traditional reasoning commonly called the principle of double effect requires, at minimum, that the act be good or morally indifferent in itself; that the evil effect not be intended; that the good effect not be obtained through the evil effect; and that a proportionately grave reason justify permitting the foreseen evil.⁵

This is not a verbal trick. The causal order matters. One may accept a risk of death while treating disease; one may not cause death as the means of obtaining relief.

Who possesses the right and duty to decide?

An adult capable of judgment ordinarily gives or refuses consent concerning his own treatment, but his authority is stewardship beneath God. He may not demand an immoral act from a physician. Neither may the physician treat his body as available material merely because a form has been signed.

When the patient cannot decide, a lawful representative should judge according to the patient’s true good, Catholic moral law, known lawful wishes, and the concrete medical facts—not according to convenience, inheritance, resentment, panic, or the representative’s private philosophy of life.

Consent is necessary, but consent alone does not make an act moral.

The Fifth Commandment forbids unjust killing, including the unjust destruction of one’s own life. St. Thomas teaches that suicide is contrary to natural self-love, injures the community, and usurps God’s dominion over life and death.⁶

The duty of self-preservation is therefore real.

Ordinarily, a person should take food and drink, obtain shelter, avoid grave and unnecessary danger, seek competent help when seriously ill, and use remedies that offer reasonable benefit without excessive burden. Parents must obtain reasonable care for their children. Those responsible for an incapacitated person must not neglect him because he is inconvenient, disabled, unconscious, elderly, or unlikely to recover fully.

This duty also forbids a counterfeit piety that calls preventable neglect “trust in God.” Providence ordinarily works through created means. The man who refuses a simple remedy while demanding a miracle does not honor Providence; he may be tempting God.

Nor may suspicion become the rule of medical judgment. Institutions can err. Financial interests, ideology, incompetence, and genuine corruption exist. But the possibility of corruption does not prove every diagnosis false or every treatment malicious. Catholic prudence investigates particular claims with proportionate evidence. It does not replace blind trust in experts with blind trust in rumors.

The patient may seek another opinion, ask for records, request time when delay is safe, inquire about alternatives, and demand a clear account of likely benefits and burdens. These are acts of stewardship. But a predetermined refusal to hear any unwelcome evidence is not discernment.

Earthly life is not the supreme good. Martyrs surrender it rather than deny Christ. A mother may accept grave danger in fulfilling duty without directly intending her death. A priest may risk infection to attend the sick. A person may not commit sin merely to extend bodily life.

Neither does the law of self-preservation require every imaginable means.

Long before modern machines multiplied possible interventions, Catholic moralists distinguished means that are ordinarily obligatory from those that are not. Father Gerald Kelly, S.J., surveying that tradition in 1950, explained the received principle: ordinary means of preserving life are morally required, while extraordinary means are not. He also showed that the classification cannot be determined by machinery alone; it concerns reasonable hope of benefit and the burdens imposed in the concrete circumstances.⁷

This distinction protects both life and moral freedom.

It prevents a person from calling basic care optional merely because he wishes to die. It also prevents others from chaining the dying person to every available intervention as though accepting death were equivalent to causing it.

Ordinary does not mean common

An “ordinary means” is not simply whatever most hospitals commonly do. Nor is an “extraordinary means” merely a new, expensive, or mechanical treatment.

A technically advanced treatment may be readily available, highly effective, tolerable, and therefore morally ordinary for a particular patient. A familiar treatment may offer almost no hope while imposing grave pain, danger, expense, distance, or other serious burden, and therefore may be extraordinary in that case.

The terms express a moral relation among:

• the patient’s actual condition;
• the treatment’s reasonable hope of benefit;
• its pain, danger, and side effects;
• the physical and psychological difficulty of undergoing it;
• the expense and availability involved;
• duties owed to dependents and other persons;
• the duration and character of the expected benefit;
• and the circumstances of place, time, and persons.

No single factor always decides the case. Expense alone does not make treatment optional if it is reasonably obtainable. Age alone does not make care useless. Disability does not reduce human dignity. Conversely, the ability of a machine to continue a bodily function does not by itself create a duty to employ it.

Burden must not become a euphemism

Care is not “burdensome” merely because the patient himself requires labor from others. The sick person’s dependence is not a moral defect. Feeding, washing, turning, accompanying, and comforting him are works of mercy.

The relevant burden is not simply that relatives would prefer freedom from care. Neither is a judgment that another person’s life lacks quality a Catholic reason to end it.

But genuine burdens do exist. A treatment may inflict severe suffering, carry grave danger, demand an impossible journey, consume resources necessary for dependents, or offer only a slight and precarious extension of the dying process. Catholic teaching does not require pretending that these facts are unreal.

Death entered the world through sin, and Christ conquered it through His own death and Resurrection. The Christian neither worships death nor imagines that it can be indefinitely abolished by technique.

There is a moral difference between:

• directly causing death;
• omitting care in order to cause death;
• and declining or discontinuing a means that has become futile, disproportionately burdensome, or morally extraordinary, while continuing the care truly owed.

The first two can be forms of killing. The third can be a lawful acceptance that earthly life is ending.

The decisive questions include:

1. What treatment or care is actually being withheld or stopped?
2. Does it still provide a reasonable benefit to this patient?
3. What burdens does it impose here and now?
4. Is death sought as the goal, used as the means, or merely foreseen and permitted?
5. Will ordinary bodily, spiritual, and human care continue?

The phrase “let nature take its course” is not enough. Nature may be assisted lawfully. Nor is “do everything” a complete Catholic principle. Everything lawful and reasonably due should be done; not everything technically possible.

When a treatment has been started, it does not automatically become obligatory forever. If facts change—if benefit disappears, burdens become grave, or the intervention no longer achieves its medical purpose—the duty may change. Stopping a treatment must be judged by the same moral principles as declining it before it begins.

Food and drink are ordinarily basic means of sustaining life, not weapons against disease. A person able to receive and assimilate them should not be deprived of them in order to bring about death.

Yet hard cases must be described accurately. Ordinary eating and drinking are not identical in every respect with every surgical or technological method of delivering nutrition and hydration. The patient may be unable to assimilate nourishment; the method may itself cause grave complications; the body may be in the final process of shutting down; or the intervention may impose burdens disproportionate to its benefit.

Therefore two shortcuts must be refused.

It is false to say that nourishment may be withdrawn whenever a life is judged unworthy. It is also unsafe to declare, without attention to the medical facts and mode of administration, that every possible technique is obligatory in every stage of dying.

Similar precision is needed with breathing assistance, dialysis, antibiotics, transfusions, surgery, and other measures. Naming the device does not settle the moral duty. One must know what it is doing for this patient, whether it treats a reversible condition or merely prolongs the final dying process, what hope it offers, and what burdens it brings.

Because these judgments are fact-dependent, a family should seek both competent medical explanation and sound Catholic moral counsel. General principles are not substitutes for diagnosis.

Christianity does not teach that every possible pain must be endured without relief.

Pain can be offered to God and united to the Passion of Christ. Voluntary mortification has a real place in Christian life. But sickness already imposes its own cross, and receiving proportionate relief need not be cowardice or infidelity.

Medicines intended to relieve pain may carry secondary risks. Their use must be governed by the moral act, the intention, the dosage, the likely effects, and a proportionate reason. A remedy may not be administered in order to kill. Neither may unconsciousness be chosen merely to prevent a person from facing death, making peace, fulfilling duties, or receiving the sacraments.

Consciousness near death has a profound spiritual value. The dying person may confess, receive Holy Viaticum and Extreme Unction, forgive, ask forgiveness, bless his children, settle obligations, make acts of faith, hope, charity, and contrition, and unite his final sufferings to Christ.

This does not establish an absolute duty to remain fully conscious through every agony. It establishes a grave reason to call the priest early, fulfill religious and temporal duties before heavy medication becomes necessary, and avoid treating the dying person’s consciousness as an inconvenience.

The family should not wait until the last breaths to seek the sacraments. Extreme Unction is not a decoration for a corpse. The Council of Trent teaches that it was instituted by Christ as a true sacrament for the sick, bringing grace, strengthening, and, when expedient, bodily relief.⁸

Call the priest when danger becomes serious—not when speech and consciousness have already disappeared if earlier access was possible.

The patient’s dependence can make him vulnerable to authorities that speak with great confidence.

A physician may recommend; a hospital may set policy; an insurer may limit payment; the state may regulate; relatives may plead. None may make evil good.

Pope Pius XII rejected the notion that scientific interest, social usefulness, public authority, or even a person’s own consent gives unlimited power over the human body. The individual is not a mere physical part of the state. The community exists to assist human persons in their proper development; it does not own innocent life. A person himself may dispose of bodily organs only according to the good of the whole organism and the moral law.⁹

This yields several firm conclusions:

• A patient may not authorize his own direct killing.
• A family may not request death as treatment.
• A physician may not obey an immoral request merely because consent was given.
• The state may not sacrifice an innocent individual to experimentation or collective utility.
• No institution may compel direct abortion, euthanasia, direct sterilization, or another intrinsically evil act.
• A Catholic professional must refuse formal cooperation in such evil, whatever professional penalties may follow.

True compassion does not ask another person to sin.

Because the body belongs to God, deliberate mutilation requires moral justification. But Catholic morality does not forbid surgery that removes or disables a diseased part for the health of the whole body.

St. Thomas uses the relation of part to whole to explain why a corrupted member may lawfully be removed when necessary for the welfare of the body.¹⁰ Pope Pius XII applied this principle of totality to medical ethics: an organ may be sacrificed according to its natural subordination to the good of the whole organism, but the principle cannot be stretched until any desired alteration becomes lawful.¹¹

The relevant questions are:

• Is there a true pathology or grave threat to bodily health?
• Is the intervention directed toward the good of the whole person?
• Is the harm to the organ intended as the therapeutic means reasonably necessary for that good?
• Is there a proportion between the loss and the expected benefit?
• Is a less harmful effective means reasonably available?

Direct sterilization chosen precisely to destroy the generative power is not made lawful by social convenience, economic fear, or dislike of future responsibility. Pope Pius XI expressly condemned direct sterilization and direct attacks upon innocent life in Casti Connubii.¹²

The principle of totality serves nature; it does not authorize man to redesign nature according to appetite or ideology.

When time permits, the following order can prevent both panic and evasion.

1. Put the soul in order

Pray. Make an examination of conscience. Receive Penance and Holy Communion if possible. Ask for grace to accept either recovery or death according to God’s will. Fear becomes tyrannical when eternity has been pushed out of sight.

2. State the medical facts plainly

Ask the physician:

• What is the diagnosis, and how certain is it?
• What is this treatment intended to accomplish?
• Is it curative, restorative, preventive, experimental, or merely delaying decline?
• What benefit is reasonably expected, and for how long?
• What pain, risk, impairment, expense, and aftercare are likely?
• What happens if we decline or delay it?
• Are there less burdensome alternatives?

Request ordinary language. A person cannot give intelligent consent to words he does not understand.

3. Name the moral act

Do not begin with slogans such as “quality of life,” “choice,” “heroic measures,” or “natural death.” Determine what will actually be done or omitted, to whom, by what means, and toward what immediate end.

4. Exclude what is intrinsically evil

If the proposal directly intends the killing of an innocent person, direct abortion, direct sterilization, suicide, euthanasia, or another act contrary to divine or natural law, no calculation of benefits can make it lawful.

5. Judge benefit and burden concretely

Ask whether the means offers a reasonable hope of benefit and whether the burdens are proportionate for this person in these circumstances. Avoid judging the value of the person’s life; judge the value and burden of the proposed means.

6. Examine the intention

Is the decision seeking health, relief, preservation of life, fulfillment of duty, or peaceful acceptance of death? Or is it secretly seeking death, escape from responsibility, removal of an inconvenient person, or control at any cost?

7. Seek competent counsel

Medical facts belong first to competent medical judgment. Moral principles belong to the Catholic moral tradition. Difficult cases often require both. A priest’s collar does not make him a medical specialist; a medical degree does not make a physician a moral theologian.

Seek counsel from persons faithful to perennial Catholic doctrine. Describe the facts fully. Advice obtained by concealing the most important burden or intention is not reliable counsel.

8. Decide without claiming certainty God has not given

Some cases admit a clear answer. Others involve prudential judgment after evil has been excluded. Two Catholics may sometimes judge a genuinely borderline burden differently without either desiring sin.

The purpose of conscience is not to manufacture perfect emotional certainty. It is to judge honestly under God using the light available, and then to act without surrendering to scruple or fear.

9. Record the decision truthfully

When incapacity is foreseeable, make lawful wishes known to trustworthy persons. Avoid vague directions that could be interpreted as permission for euthanasia or neglect. Identify someone who understands both the Faith and the patient’s real good.

Civil forms vary and may contain dangerous ambiguities. They should be examined carefully; this chapter does not settle their legal effect.

Serious illness reveals the moral condition of a household.

Old grievances can enter the room. One relative tries to control every decision. Another disappears. A third confuses visible activity with love and demands intervention after intervention because accepting death feels like betrayal. Someone else speaks of burdens when he means inconvenience.

The family must return to order.

If the patient is capable, do not speak over him as though he were already absent. Tell him the truth with prudence and charity. Allow him to fulfill duties. Do not force him to spend his remaining strength managing everyone else’s denial.

If he is incapable, the representative must not ask, “What would make this easier for us?” but, “What is truly owed to him before God?”

Children should not be taught that dependence destroys dignity. They can be given age-appropriate ways to serve: a prayer, a glass of water, quiet companionship, a letter, the Rosary at the bedside. The sickroom can become a school of mercy.

No one should promise a cure that has not been promised by God. No one should announce doom with cold finality. Christian hope is not optimism about a medical outcome. It is confidence that neither sickness nor death can separate a soul in grace from the love of Christ.¹³

Medical fear can imitate Pharaoh’s bargaining.

God commands trust, repentance, lawful stewardship, and readiness for death. Fear replies: I will obey, provided You guarantee the outcome I demand.

The frightened soul may bargain in either direction.

It may say, “I will accept any procedure, any moral compromise, any debt, any neglect of spiritual duty—only let this body remain.” Or it may say, “I will refuse every physician and every remedy—only let me preserve the illusion that no created authority can limit me.”

Both make self-will the center.

Repeated refusal of known duty hardens judgment. The person who habitually chooses comforting claims over tested truth may eventually become unable to hear unwelcome facts. The person who habitually treats technical authority as infallible may become unable to recognize an immoral command. In both cases, lesser surrenders prepare a greater operation of error.

God is not the author of deception. But, as St. Augustine explains when treating the mystery of lawlessness, God may justly permit those who refuse truth to be deceived by the falsehood they have preferred.¹⁴

The remedy is not panic. It is repentance from obstinacy:

• hear competent facts;
• reject moral evil;
• surrender the desired outcome to God;
• fulfill present duty;
• and refuse to call either fear or defiance “conscience.”

The modern world often treats the ill person as a problem to be managed: a consumer while profitable, a research subject while useful, and a burden when neither applies.

Holy Mother Church sees a member of Christ.

She commands care of the sick as a work of mercy. She sends the priest. She hears confession. She gives the Eucharistic Lord as Viaticum. She anoints the failing senses. She places the crucifix before the eyes and the holy names upon the lips. She continues prayer after medicine has reached its limit.

The Church also protects the sick by condemning false mercy. She will not call killing compassion. She will not call direct mutilation health. She will not call experimentation without moral limit progress. Her prohibitions are maternal because error wounds those whom she loves.

Father Faber’s maxim therefore reaches even the hospital room: “Where there is no hatred of heresy, there is no holiness.”¹⁵ Hatred of heresy here means hatred of every false doctrine that makes man master of innocent life, reduces the body to material, or turns usefulness into the measure of dignity. It never means contempt for the frightened patient, the burdened relative, or the mistaken physician. Truth must serve their conversion and salvation.

The Church’s maternal care also corrects the Catholic patient. He must hate within himself the pride that will not receive help, the cowardice that will not face death, the resentment that makes caregivers suffer, and the superstition that makes private claims more authoritative than reason.

When facing a medical decision, ask:

1. Have I remembered that my body belongs to God?
2. Am I preserving life as a duty, or worshipping survival as the highest good?
3. Am I accepting death when God sends it, or choosing death as my end?
4. What act is actually proposed beneath the language used to describe it?
5. Is anything intrinsically evil being requested?
6. What benefit is reasonably expected?
7. What burdens are real, and which are excuses born of selfishness?
8. Have I confused the burden of a treatment with the worth of the patient?
9. Have I sought competent medical facts rather than rumors?
10. Have I sought sound Catholic moral counsel rather than an answer chosen in advance?
11. Have the sacraments and preparation for eternity been delayed?
12. Am I willing to obey God whether He grants recovery or calls the soul home?

These questions cannot remove every anguish. They can place anguish beneath truth.

The Catholic does not enter sickness alone.

Christ touched the sick, accepted care in His Passion, refused the stupefying drink before the Cross, tasted death consciously, and rose with the wounds still glorious. He did not teach that suffering is meaningless. Neither did He command men to manufacture it or refuse lawful relief.

The final measure of a medical decision is therefore not whether earthly life was extended by the greatest number of hours. Nor is it whether death came with the least possible discomfort. The measure is fidelity to God in the concrete duties of life, sickness, and death.

Use the physician gratefully.

Ask questions honestly.

Receive ordinary care.

Refuse evil without compromise.

Do not demand the extraordinary merely because fear cannot let go.

Do not abandon the dependent because love has become costly.

Call the priest early.

Set the soul in order.

And when medicine can no longer cure, let Christian charity continue its work: watch, pray, forgive, accompany, and place the dying soul beneath the Cross.

For the body is not ours to worship or destroy.

It is God’s gift, Christ’s purchased possession, the temple of the Holy Ghost, and the seed of the body that shall rise.

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Sources and notes

Footnotes

1. 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, original Rheims New Testament (1582), spelling and capitalization lightly modernized. The 1582 text reads in part, “you are not your own. For you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body.” ↩

2. Ecclesiasticus 38:1–15, original Douay Old Testament (1609–1610). The passage honors the physician as created by God, directs the sick man to prayer and amendment, and then commands that place be given to the physician. ↩

3. Pope Pius XII, address to the Eighth Assembly of the World Medical Association, September 30, 1954, especially the three principles of medical ethics and the description of medicine’s end: to aid, cure, and prevent disease, not harm or kill; Acta Apostolicae Sedis 46 (1954), pp. 587–598. This address falls within the project’s December 31, 1954 boundary. ↩

4. Exodus 20:13; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, aa. 5 and 7; Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii (December 31, 1930), nos. 63–65 and 70–75 in commonly numbered English editions, on direct abortion, innocent life, and direct sterilization. ↩

5. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, a. 7, especially the distinction between an effect intended and one beside the intention; compare II-II, q. 65, a. 1, on bodily mutilation ordered to the welfare of the whole body. The familiar four-condition formulation is the later scholastic articulation of these causal and moral distinctions. ↩

6. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, a. 5; Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part III, treatment of the Fifth Commandment. ↩

7. Gerald Kelly, S.J., “The Duty of Using Artificial Means of Preserving Life,” Theological Studies 11, no. 2 (May 1950), pp. 203–220. Father Kelly surveys the traditional authors and explains ordinary and extraordinary means in relation to reasonable hope of benefit and excessive burden. This is a pre-1955 Catholic theological witness, not a substitute for a definitive judgment of the Church in every later technical case. ↩

8. James 5:14–15; Council of Trent, Session XIV (November 25, 1551), Doctrine on the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, chapters 1–3 and canons 1–4; Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part II, “The Sacrament of Extreme Unction”; Codex Iuris Canonici (1917), canons 940–947. ↩

9. Pope Pius XII, address to the First International Congress on the Histopathology of the Nervous System, September 14, 1952, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 44 (1952), pp. 779–789; address to the Twenty-sixth Congress of the Italian Association of Urology, October 8, 1953, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 45 (1953), pp. 673–679; and address to the Eighth Assembly of the World Medical Association, September 30, 1954, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 46 (1954), pp. 587–598. ↩

10. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 65, a. 1. ↩

11. Pope Pius XII, address to the First International Congress on the Histopathology of the Nervous System, September 14, 1952; address to the Italian Association of Urology, October 8, 1953; address to the Eighth Assembly of the World Medical Association, September 30, 1954. ↩

12. Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, nos. 63–65 and 70–75 in commonly numbered English editions; Acta Apostolicae Sedis 22 (1930), pp. 539–592. ↩

13. Romans 8:35–39, original Rheims New Testament (1582). ↩

14. 2 Thessalonians 2:9–12, original Rheims New Testament (1582); St. Augustine, The City of God, Book XX, chapter 19. God is never the author of sin or falsehood; the passage concerns His just permission that those who refuse truth suffer deception. ↩

15. Frederick William Faber, C.O., The Precious Blood; or, The Price of Our Salvation (London: Burns and Lambert, 1860), chapter VI, p. 316: “Where there is no hatred of heresy, there is no holiness.” ↩