Physicians cannot be forced to violate their consciences but can be punished for respecting them, a professor from Toronto's McGill University told a group of Canadian Catholic doctors.

Douglas Farrow, associate professor of religious studies at McGill, acknowledged that conscience rights are under threat in North America, but urged the physicians gathered in Ottawa to "avoid the language of coercion" when speaking of the threats.

"Don't concede in your speech what you hope not to concede when you face the test," he said May 9 during a three-day conference, "Conscience and the Physician."

Farrow also asked doctors not to abandon fields like obstetrics and gynecology, to adhere to Hippocratic principles and to inform themselves of the differences between Catholic and utilitarian ethics. He reminded them to remember the Great Physician, "who has power to save body and soul alike, and to silence critics."

"Don't just be doctors, then, however well-educated," he said. "Be people who are recognizable as having been with Jesus."

Not only are individuals under threat, but so are Catholic hospitals, said John Haas, president of the Philadelphia-based National Catholic Bioethics Center. He told the gathering during its opening session May 8 that New York's former governor, Eliot Spitzer, had plans to force all hospitals in the state to perform abortions, before a prostitution scandal forced him to resign.

Haas showed how the classical understanding of the conscience, as the moral law written on the heart, has been replaced by views that are "fundamentally individualistic, subjective, relativist and based on emotion."

Society lacks shared moral norms, Haas said, and everyone "presumes to determine morality for himself or herself."

"If we try to protect the most vulnerable in our midst, the unborn, the dying, we are told that we cannot impose our moral beliefs on anyone else," he said.

He urged the recovery of the understanding of conscience as something that protects the vulnerable. Otherwise, he said, the views of the powerful will prevail.

Conscience formed "by reality itself, by community, by God and his revelation, and by one's own individual perceptions and decisions" is a guarantor of human freedom, he said. "Conscience is such a radical guarantor of freedom that one would die before relinquishing it, as St. Thomas More and others have shown us.

"To violate conscience means to violate oneself," Haas added. "To violate one's conscience means a willingness not to love, a willingness not to do what is good, since that is precisely what conscience calls us to."

Haas and Farrow were among a roster of speakers at the conference, which inaugurated the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians' Societies.

---CNS