Jesuit priest raps cardinal's critics

HITTING back at critics who oppose religious leaders' right to speak out over ethical issues, a leading Catholic intellectual has defended interventions in debates such as the one over embryonic stem cell research.

HITTING back at critics who oppose religious leaders' right to speak out over ethical issues, a leading Catholic intellectual has defended interventions in debates such as the one over embryonic stem cell research.

Jesuit priest and law professor Frank Brennan has also singled out Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd and Health Minister Tony Abbott as exemplary Christian politicians.

Only a week after furious argument erupted over Sydney's Cardinal George Pell publicly counselling NSW Catholic politicians to vote against a bill which would allow embryonic stem cell research, Father Brennan has reasserted "a rightly circumscribed place at the table for religion" in public deliberation about law and policy, and endorsed Cardinal Pell's right to speak out.

"When people like me agitate for native title or refugees, politicians tend to treat us as if we are trendy lefties, spared the need to be elected," Father Brennan says in a paper to be delivered at the Uniting Church's Centre for Theology and Ministry in Melbourne tomorrow.

"But when I, hoping to apply a consistent ethic for the protection of the vulnerable, raise ethical quandaries about legislation on things like embryonic stem cell research, I am labelled a conservative Catholic.

"Religion is one of the social and cultural foundations which can correct too ready a recourse to short-term, popular consequences whether the issue be war and peace, indigenous rights, refugee rights, stem cell research or the right to life of the vulnerable at either end of the life cycle."

Father Brennan praises Mr Rudd as "a politician who takes religion seriously in the political process".

"We need more politicians like Rudd and Abbott who are prepared to enunciate a coherent political philosophy for a pluralist society while being inspired and held accountable by their religious understanding of the world," he says.

Frank Devine - Page 11