Good dogma is man's best friend.

In April, 1998, St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto assumed responsibility for the former Wellesley Hospital's programs as part of the hospital restructuring that is occurring throughout the province of Ontario. Among the changes it initiated was the termination of abortions and vasectomies.

This move has, predictably, sparked cries of protest from a number of agencies. In language that has now become warworn with overuse, one critic, in referring to the Catholic authorities behind the move, stated to the Canadian press: "These people are obviously more concerned about Catholic dogma than they are about people's lives."

This is not reasonable criticism. Much less is it justifiable moral outrage. It is unreasonable and unjustifiable abuse. The Catholic Church could hardly have survived for 2,000 years, nor could its hospitals for much less than that, if its members had been serving a dogma that did not serve people. Catholic dogma, particularly in the area of medical ethics, is not what Catholics serve. It is patently inhuman to disregard human needs and serve an abstraction. The Catholic Church has never been an ideology. In fact, throughout history it has fought ideologies, which put programs above people, with unremitting passion.

Serving people requires dogma

Catholic hospital personnel serve people. And the way they insure that their service is always consistent with love and the good of their patients is by adopting a dogma that clarifies and underlines these values. In other words, they need a good dogma to guide them so that their service to patients is truly a service and not some form of exploitation in disguise. To criticize people for having a dogma is the equivalent of criticizing them for having principles.

The vocal critics of St. Michael's Hospital are not without a dogma of their own. The issue is not whether health care professionals should or should not have a guiding dogma (that is, whether or not they should be principled), but whether the dogma they employ is in the patients' best interest. Abortion is hardly in the best interest of an unborn child, nor is sterilization in the best interest of an adult. It is hypocritical for dogmatists of choice to accuse the opposition of being dogmatic.

In addition to being a pretence for affecting moral superiority, it represents a striking unawareness of self. G.K. Chesterton once said: "There are two kinds of people in the world: the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic."

In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Cardinal Newman contrasted the strength of dogma with the weakness of sentiment: "From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion. I know of no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery."

It is people such as those who object to dogma in principle who give dogma a bad name (also consider the pro-choice slogan, "Curb your dogma"). They appear to see the world in a rather curious way in which they imagine themselves to be innocent advocates of human liberty, while branding their opponents as robotic functionaries who carry out some arbitrary dogma. They envision pro-life supporters as mindless creatures upon whom it is raining "catechisms and dogmas." But is this not a case of projecting their own unconscious dogma onto people who are well aware of the humanistic roots of their own proudly held dogma?

What is it like to inhabit a world that is devoid of dogma? Can there be a moral life in any meaningful sense, without dogma? Dorothy Sayers wrote an entire book in an attempt to answer this question. She called it Creed or Chaos? We need dogma in order to avoid chaos. "The dogma is the drama," she exclaimed. Dogma is the doctrine, the body of truths we need in order to live a reasonably ordered life and to avoid chaos. Are the pro-abortion troops merely camouflaging the deeper truth that they are "pro-chaos"?

It is not logically possible to be opposed to all dogma. Even nihilism, which values nothing, nonetheless values its own nihilistic dogma. It would not be nihilism if it did not. The central issue is not "how can we eliminate dogma from society?" but "how can we distinguish dogma that is true from dogma that is false?" A good dogma, one that helps people to live well and to serve each other's need well, is a good friend. A bad ideology is man's worst enemy. Every dogma will have its day, one might say, meaning that the day will come when it becomes clear whether a particular dogma does or does not serve the interest of human beings. Dogmas are exposed to the light of truth. For two thousand years, the Catholic Church has survived the assaults of her critics, even the most dogmatic ones, very well. To quote Chesterton once more: "the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect."

Donald DeMarco, a frequent contributor to Catholic Insight, is professor of philosophy at St. Jerome's College, University of Waterloo, ON.