Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and the child called “only scar tissue”

On September 24 in St. Louis, the Catholic Church will beatify Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the bishop whose Life Is Worth Living once filled American living rooms.

More than fifty years after Roe v. Wade, and four years after Dobbs returned to the states the authority to protect unborn children, the country still talks as if the central fact were unsettled. Sheen did not. He named the act, named the victims, and named what follows when a society treats a human being as optional.

After Roe, he refused the Court’s language about “potential life” and the clinic’s leftover tissue. A human embryo or fetus is a human being at that stage of a human life, as a toddler and a teenager are human beings at theirs. Abortion is the killing of that child. It is a mother ending the life of her own offspring, a destructive act that wounds the woman in body, mind, and soul. It erodes motherhood and trains a culture to assign human worth instead of recognizing it.

In a January 1975 column titled “The Peril of Over-kill,” Sheen said the pattern was old and familiar. Cain treated Abel as a disposable life, and the world treated Jesus Christ in the same way. In the 20th century, a culture was learning to treat the unborn child as throwaway tissue. The sacredness of life, he wrote, “depends on who produced it.”

“Life is sacred,” Sheen explained, “because it is produced by humans; tadpoles beget tadpoles, elephants generate elephants, humans beget humans.”

That sentence is not piety. It is the objective fact of the biological science of human embryology, documented since 1942 in the Carnegie Stages of Human Embryonic Development. A thing acts according to its nature. In human sexual reproduction, before fertilization there are only parts of already-existing human beings: a sperm and an oocyte. At fertilization (Carnegie Stage 1), those parts cease to be, and a new, whole, individual, living human being begins to exist.

There is no later upgrade at implantation, heartbeat, “viability,” or birth. The human embryo is not a potential human being. He or she already is one. Later stages are the same human organism growing and developing along the continuum of human life. The human being and the human person are not two different things. Roe treated the start of an individual life as a mystery. It is not.

Unfortunately, scientific literacy remains low today. Among younger adults, nearly 40 percent believe a human life begins at birth.

Sheen saw what the mystery-claim was for. If the embryo is not a human being, nothing stops the next redefinition. To call the human embryo non-human, he warned, “opens the door for Nazis to say Jews are not human, for the mugger who needs money for his ‘fix’ to say the pedestrian is not human.” Give mothers the legal right to destroy a child for “defective traits” (or, say, for a mental-health exception wide enough to cover almost any case) and someday a child may claim the right to destroy a mother for the defective traits of poverty or senility.

We have watched the assignment travel: from unborn children to children with disabilities diagnosed in the womb, to born-alive infants, and to the elderly and those despairing under expanding assisted-suicide laws.

Sheen was just as direct about the effect of abortion on women. “Just think, my dear ladies,” he said, “of how many mentally disturbed women we are going to have in the United States in the next 10 or 15 years when the guilt of abortion begins to attack the mind and soul.”

For the present, he added, they would justify it on the ground that everyone was doing it and that it was “only scar tissue anyway.” Sheen recalled a doctor who asked a girl using that line: “What did you intend to call the scar tissue?” The guilt, he said, would surface later, “in a peculiar way.”

Once a nation agrees to call a child “tissue”, it has already decided which human beings it may discard.

The argument was never only about the baby. A civilization that tells women that their flourishing requires the death of their children is not honoring women. It is teaching them that the smallest, most innocent, and vulnerable members of the human species are a problem to be solved. If human worth depends on wantedness, size, location, etc., it is no longer inherent in the human being. It is assigned afterwards, as a matter of convenience.

Sheen refused the first euphemism, i.e., the first lie. That is why he could see where it led.

He also refused the claim that nothing could be done. He wrote a prayer of spiritual adoption:

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,
I love you very much.
I beg you to spare the life of the unborn baby
that I have spiritually adopted who is in danger of abortion.

Plain speech was part of the same work. So is telling the truth about when a human being begins to exist.

Declaring Sheen Blessed does not establish the fact. But, hopefully, it can give many people a public glimpse of what Sheen saw: once a child is mere tissue, human worth is assigned, not recognized. What remains is whether we will use the science, or keep eroding the meaning of “human being” until almost anyone can be reduced or recoded as a non-person.

Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen would not. Neither should we.