The Seamless Garment & Intrinsic Evil

In this potent speech, Archbishop Burke illuminates the great error in this approach to life issues—however well intentioned it may be—through the clarity of the traditional thinking of the Church.

An excerpt.

“Whatever the good intention of using the image of a seamless garment to talk about the moral issues regarding human life, it has become identified with the proportionalist way of thinking in which, for example, acts of war, the use of the death penalty, procured abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, and euthanasia are viewed as matters of equal moral weight. In other words, the image covers over the distinction between intrinsically evil acts and acts which are not evil in themselves but can become evil, if unjustly taken. The moral questions pertaining to the safeguarding and fostering of human life are all related to one another but they are not of the same weight. To use the image of the garment, they are not all of the same cloth. The use of the metaphor of the seamless garment, while it may have been intended to promote the culture of life, has, in fact, been used to justify the acceptance of acts essentially contrary to a culture of life for the sake of attaining some seeming good. Whatever good intention those who have developed the "seamless garment" argument may have had, it falsely places intrinsically evil acts, that is, acts which are always and everywhere morally wrong, on the same plane with acts which, according to prudent judgment, may not sufficiently safeguard human life.

“In a similar way, the language of common ground is employed in the advancement of a proportionalist or consequentialist way of moral thinking. Common ground, rightly understood, is the ground of moral goodness. It is established by what is objectively good. If, on the contrary, it is understood to be the compromise of certain moral truths for the sake of harmony with those who deny a moral truth, for example, the intrinsic evil of procured abortion or euthanasia, then it is a betrayal of the good and can only lead to the harm of self and others, and of society itself.

“Sometimes, we hear that we as Christians or as apostles of the Gospel of Life must be careful to get along in society, not to separate ourselves or to appear to be counter-cultural. One wonders how such language squares with the essence of the Gospel, that is, to be "a sign of contradiction" (cf. Lk 2:34). At the same time, one cannot help but think of what Christians getting along and being politically correct has meant in other nations whose leaders had embraced an agenda of death and the totalitarianism which advanced it.

“In some way, our consciences have become dulled to the gravity of certain moral issues. When insistence on the elimination of legalized abortion in our nation is dismissed as a kind of "single-issue" approach, as the obsession of the "religious right," which fails to take account of a whole gamut of moral issues, then we have lost the sense of the horror of destroying a human life in the womb. In a similar way, when the denial of nutrition and hydration to the gravely ill is seen as a "single issue," then we have lost a sense of the horror of failing to give basic care to a brother or sister who has grown weak for whatever reason. It is not a question of a single issue but of what is fundamental to life itself and to society. I recall the words of the Servant of God Pope John Paul II:

“The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behavior and even in law itself, is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake. Given such a grave situation, we need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception (Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Evangelium vitae, "On the Good and Inviolability of Human Life," 25 March 1995, no. 58).”