If any Catholic student needed a reminder of the challenges they face at university and in the wider community, the actions of the University of Queensland Union against the UQ Newman Society in May this year should have been a sharp jolt to their consciousness. The Australian newspaper published an article detailing how the Union placed the Newman Society on probation and effectively forbade it from further displaying a medical image of a fetus and distributing flyers deemed to be ‘pro-life’. The Union justified their actions by interpreting a 15 year-old referendum to require that the UQ Union and affiliated clubs be pro-choice in nature and only inform women of their right to an abortion. It is strange that the Union’s administration failed to spot any contradiction within the policy itself passed at the referendum, that

the University of Queensland Union supports free, safe abortion on demand so that women have a genuine choice when faced with unplanned pregnancy.

And it is also interesting to note that a UQ Pro-Life Club, to which several well-known Catholic identities once belonged, continued to operate for several years after the referendum was passed.

While the incident is more complex than alluded to above, that outline is sufficient for the present purpose of exploring the issues which emerge from the Newman affair, especially the values of freedom and truth in both academia and the wider society. Within this paradigm, the article will then examine the implications for Catholic students and possible ways to confront these issues.

The national headlines sparked off a lively debate amongst student circles that was mainly focused upon the principle of free speech, an especially valuable right in the academic environment. But unfortunately, this is only one example of biased opinions holding sway over the institutions that are meant to be promoting the search for truth.

A young person’s time at university is meant to be a place where they are exposed to a variety of different views: a chance for them to re-examine their own opinions and sometimes even change them. George Steiner’s paradoxical insight that “to read well is to live dangerously” should be heeded not as a warning but as a calling. For Catholic students, it is necessary to understand and confront views that are in opposition to their own faith. The search for truth apart, how can one engage meaningfully in public life if they know only their own opinions and fail to understand a broader spectrum of views?

But this is precisely what the Union has failed to do, in its desire to give women a “genuine choice” but only a choice of the approved opinions. One can only imagine where this can leave a student, who is told what to think rather than how to think. Bias in higher education generally has been a well discussed topic in recent times. In fact, the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee only recently initiated an Inquiry into Academic Freedom which, as part of its terms of reference, will look into

the level of intellectual diversity and the impact of ideological, political and cultural prejudice in the teaching of senior secondary education and of courses at Australian universities; ... the need for the teaching of senior secondary and university courses to reflect a plurality of views, be accurate, fair, balanced and in context; and ways in which intellectual diversity and contestability of ideas may be promoted and protected.

The existence of this inquiry certainly suggests that a lack of academic freedom may exist, and the fact that an incident such as the Newman affair could be so casually perpetrated at one of Australia’s leading universities indicates that the approach taken towards marginalised views leaves something to be desired. It is an obvious insight that the opinions fostered within the lecture theatre contribute significantly to those held on the greater world stage.

While it is hard to know what the Senate Inquiry will achieve, hopefully it might play a part in causing the academic world to re-examine itself. Education needs to be approached in such a way that students are taught to question and explore rather than blindly accept what is fed to them – this way, popular opinions will be scrutinised to the benefit of students’ intellectual vision.

Yet in these postmodern times it is fair to expect opposition to such attempts to address academic bias. This opposition is often found in the form of postmodern relativism, which leads to what Pope Benedict XVI terms ‘the dictatorship of relativism’.

In her latest book Ratzinger’s Faith, Tracey Rowland notes that such relativism is prevalent in the area of private morality, but that “eighteenth century ‘Enlightenment’ conceptions of freedom and truth continue to provide the dominant political cultures of the West. Whether the latter remains the case in the future is a matter of concern. Only a couple of years after the fall of the USSR, John Paul II in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, pointed out that

the root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate.

Already, fundamental human rights have been circumvented by convenience, to promote women’s “free choice”. The importance of truth in resisting this ‘dictatorship’ was further highlighted by John Paul II as he continued: 

if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.

Nor does the Church close her eyes to the danger of fanaticism or fundamentalism among those who, in the name of an ideology which purports to be scientific or religious, claim the right to impose on others their own concept of what is true and good. Christian truth is not of this kind.

Pope Benedict took up this theme in his Regensburg Address, where according to Rowland “he was clearly trying to encourage the development of Islamic thought in the direction of a consideration of Greek ideas about reason”. Rowland also states that Benedict, though he believes in natural law, “thinks it is a ‘blunt instrument for those who no longer accept a Genesis account of the creation”.

And thus it is important for the pro-life argument to be made on a level that might be acceptable to those who are “non-religious”, so that it cannot be caricatured as the hard-core ‘right-to-life-Catholic’ telling ‘the lie’. Books and medical research have openly published the effects of abortion. Giving Sorrow Words published in 2000, documented a handful of personal testimonies of post-abortion experiences but these were only the tip of the iceberg, considering the author received more than 250 different accounts while writing the book. Research of sound methodology and analysis consistently report that women who experience a termination of pregnancy are not of equal wellbeing (either mentally or physically) with women who kept their child, both in short- and long-term time frames. Zoë Bradshaw and Pauline Slade reported that up to a month after a termination procedure, 30% of women continue to experience emotional problems. This was confirmed and complemented by Anne Broen and others, who found that even after 5 years women continued to suffer from their abortion experience.

A pregnant woman’s autonomy relative to the unborn child is campaigned for to such an extent that the intrinsic value of an unborn child and woman’s wellbeing are disregarded. We always have to be mindful that the ultimate aim is to evangelise and preach Christ. But using such scientific research, coupled with a language of values even a secular person can relate to, may be the first step along this road. 

However, while the above might suffice for content, it says only a little about the attitude that Catholics should hold in an environment that is generally dismissive of or disparaging to their beliefs. A place where your ‘conservative’ opinion is rarely understood or allowed to go unchallenged by your peers.

This can be discouraging but does not make the job impossible. In the case of abortion, no material or temporal value could ever be equivalent to a human life and therefore no act to support a pregnant woman and unborn child would ever be in vain, whether it be educating women about their options or supporting those suffering as a result of abortion. While we face these challenges to our freedom of speech, we cannot fail to continue fighting for what we believe. It is rather ironic that during the upcoming World Youth Day such a paradigm will be turned on its head, and the secular majority will find themselves, for a few days at least, drowned out by the youthful voices of the Church.

In this sense, Catholic students must use this youthful energy to their advantage. We should discover a sense of activism, a sense of being ‘philosophically conservative’ but ‘temperamentally radical’ in our attitude towards the secular orthodoxy.

Although the Newman affair marks a major setback to open religious participation in the public square, it is part of a wider battle that we cannot lose. And we should take heart that the extensive debate which resulted and spread, by means of the internet, across the world, led to a flood of encouraging e-mails. So it is evident that although seemingly a minority, there are still supporters out there and women in need of support. I’m sure all of these people would also encourage the pursuit of truth and freedom by the Church’s next generation.