Cardinal Elio Sgreccia
Catholic bioethicist, universally respected in Italy, who warned of creeping ‘social Darwinism’
CARDINAL ELIO SGRECCIA, who has died in Rome on the eve of his 91st birthday, was for many years the Roman Catholic Church’s leading guide on bioethics; in Italy he was considered a public intellectual of considerable standing, in a country where intellectuals are still deeply respected.
He was born on June 6 1928, the youngest of six children in a devout farming family in the village of Nidastore, near Arcevia, in the province of Ancona, which had once formed part of the Papal States. The Marches were deeply divided between anti-clericalists and devout Catholics, something that Mussolini’s treaty with the Vatican, signed in 1929, had gone some way towards healing.
Sgreccia discovered a vocation to the priesthood at early age, but his entry into priestly training was delayed by the War, and he was only admitted to the local seminary in Fano in 1945, and ordained in 1952. Being a young man of considerable intellectual promise, he was sent to study letters and philosophy at the University of Bologna, Italy’s oldest, and in those days a stronghold of Left-wing thought.
While in Bologna, the young priest was chaplain to the youth wing of Catholic Action, the association dedicated to furthering Catholic social teaching and engagement with public life. This idea, hugely prevalent in Italian Catholicism, of a socially engaged religion, was the main inspiration behind Italy’s Christian Democrat party, which was to hold power for decades after the War, as well as being the hallmark of Sgreccia’s career.
Sgreccia taught in the seminary of Fano, later becoming the vicar-general of the local diocese of Fossombrone. In 1974 he was invited to become chaplain to the medical students at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome. It was thus relatively late in his career, despite not being a medical man, that he developed an interest in the ethical questions raised by medical cases.
The mid-1970s saw the rise of the Italian Radical party, which, with others, was campaigning for the legalisation of
abortion, a campaign that was finally successful in 1978, despite well-organised opposition by the Church. Law 194, as it was called, was not as liberal as the Radicals would have liked, thanks to Christian Democrat opposition, which had been stiffened by the intellectual heft provided by Sgreccia and others.
By 1984 Sgreccia was teaching bioethics at the Sacred Heart University in Rome, and from 1985 to 2006 he headed the new department there dedicated to bioethics, the first of its type. In that role he became a leading expert on complicated questions to do with embryo experimentation, in vitro fertilisation, and the deeply contentious – at least in Italy – question of surrogate births.
Though the tide of legalisation was unstoppable, the fact remained that the strength of opposition meant that Italy’s laws on all these matters were restrictive compared to those of other nations.
Most important of all, from 1990 until his retirement from active teaching in 2006, Sgreccia was a member of Italy’s National Bioethics Committee, the body of experts that advised the government on bioethical issues.
Sgreccia’s book on bioethics became the standard textbook for Catholics and was translated into numerous languages. He described his position as that of “ontologically grounded personalism”.
In other words, his opposition to abortion and embryo destruction was not religiously based, and he rejected the idea that these things were wrong simply because God had decreed them to be (so-called “divine command theory”, much loved by many evangelicals).
Rather, Sgreccia argued that human beings deserved absolute protection at all stages of development simply because they were human, and as such the bearers of human rights, which, he was at pains to point out, were recognised by the state, but never bestowed by the state. What counted, he insisted, was being – not action, or possession of faculties, both of which presupposed being itself.
Sgreccia’s position was that of Pope John Paul II, who made opposition to abortion and embryo experimentation one of the main themes of his Papacy.
When the Pope set up the Pontifical Academy for Life, in 1994, which was designed to strengthen the Church’s already robust pro-life activism, Sgreccia was its vice-president and leading light. Later he was promoted to president. In 1992 he had been made a titular bishop (of Zama Minor, a defunct diocese in Tunisia), and in 2010 Benedict XVI made him a Cardinal, though by that time, being over 80, he was barred from voting in papal elections.
Sgreccia was vehement in his defence of human life in all circumstances. He condemned the legalisation of child euthanasia in Belgium and the Netherlands, warning of the development of “a kind of ‘social Darwinism’ that is intended to facilitate the elimination of human beings burdened by suffering or defects”.
In the months before his death Sgreccia had published his autobiography. In it he observed that the sower of the seed in the Gospel parable needed to scatter his seed with open hands, and would return home in the evening empty-handed, having given away everything he had.
Commentators saw this as emblematic of Sgreccia’s lifelong dedication to the service of the Church.
In appearance, Sgreccia was a typical Italian priest of peasant stock, short, fat and ugly, though not without dignity. He was universally respected, even by his opponents, and revered as a popular and generous teacher by generations of his students.