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Addresses and Statements

REFLECTIONS ON EVANGELIUM VITAE AND AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 30 YEARS ON AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC MEDICAL ASSOCIATION NICHOLAS TONTI-FILIPPINI ORATION

17 Oct 2025
REFLECTIONS ON EVANGELIUM VITAE AND AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 30 YEARS ON AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC MEDICAL ASSOCIATION NICHOLAS TONTI-FILIPPINI ORATION
Addresses and Statements

CATHOLIC LEADERSHIP CENTRE, EAST MELBOURNE, 17 OCTOBER 2025

1. If only we still had Nick…

In the last month alone, there have been news reports of campaigns here in Victoria both for and against:

  • weaker protections for vulnerable patients and doctors with conscientious objections under the state’s Voluntary Assisted Dying laws
  • Catholic hospitals being forced to provide abortion and contraception
  • puberty blockers and surgery for children with gender dysphoria, even without parental consent, despite the UK Cass Review and more
  • a biologically male basketball player joining a semi-professional women’s team and a convicted male paedophile being incarcerated in a women’s prison
  • better regulation of the IVF industry after several embryo and gamete mix-ups at Monash IVF and elsewhere
  • incentives to encourage marriage and family formation after it emerged that Victorians are postponing marriage and reproduction even later than other Australians and that Australia’s fertility rate has collapsed to 1.48 births per woman, and
  • continuing the abhorrent practice of abandoning babies born live after attempted abortions despite nearly 400 reported cases in Victoria…

My instinctive reaction, each time I hear these or similar reports from anywhere, but especially from Victoria, is to exclaim: Where’s Nick when you need him?! So, it is a privilege to deliver tonight an address named for Nicholas Tonti-Filippini. He taught me so much, through his writings, lectures, interviews and conversations, above all through the courageous witness of his life and death. Nick and Mary’s friendship and support have meant a great deal to me from my student days here in Melbourne forty years ago and ever since. Along with his keen intellect, it was his love for God, his wife Mary, his children Claire, Lucianne, Justin and John, and his friends, that sustained the remarkable achievements of his too-short life.

When first I met him, Dr Tonti-Filippini was a strange new phenomenon in Australia: an institutional bioethicist. His St Vincent’s Bioethics Centre was becoming world famous and Nick was a household name as the media turned to him for comment on an endless series of moral conundrums in healthcare and biomedical research. Bioethics was ‘sexy’ then, and there were soon Catholic bioethics centres in all states, but his was first. I remember attending and learning so much at his St Vincent’s Bioethics Conferences—as a seminarian, he allowed me to attend for free if I did various dog’s body jobs. He also arranged national colloquia for Catholic bioethicists, helped found an international association sponsored by the Order of Malta, and backed Catholic doctors’ groups like our excellent hosts tonight. He was a wise counsellor to church leaders and laity, served on regulatory bodies, and advised governments. Even when exhausted by controversy and dialysis, he seemed indomitable, remaining reasoned, courteous, determined and good humoured.

I remember the young Nick saying to me that he thought much that went by the name of moral theology was just moral philosophy lite for those unwilling to do the hard thinking! Ironically, he ended up Professor in a theological academy, the John Paul Institute in its glory days, where he was genuinely loved and revered by staff and students. He became more and more overtly theological and spiritual in his own thinking and teaching, as if God and he were preparing for an early return to the Father. And so, as I complain “if only we still had Nick with us”, I thank God, Nick’s family and friends, and Nick himself for the years we did have him. I ask for his intercession before the throne of God for each one here, for the state of Victoria, for health professionals and their ethical advisors, and for our world. And I expect his friends, Fr Frank Harman, Fr Tom Daly SJ, Dr Joe Santamaria, Drs John and Lynne Billings, Hon. Kevin Andrews and Bishop Peter Elliott, amongst others, to join him in those prayers from heaven.

2. Evangelium Vitae thirty years on…

Last year an 86-year-old Adelaide Hills man, Cyril Tooze, made national news.[1] He was living with terminal heart and lung disease and weighed just 42 kilograms. He had been approved for the highest level of at-home care under the federal government’s MyAgedCare scheme in January 2024, but ten months later he was still waiting. His interstate family sought an urgent reassessment and were told he’d be waiting another three to six months for that. The reasons given for the delays were grimly bureaucratic: high demand, lack of staff, funding shortfalls. With no close family in South Australia to care for him and no government help, Mr Tooze decided to seek Voluntary Assisted Dying. “This is no life,” he told The Australian in October, “there is no dignity, no hope.” Mr Tooze died at home on 7 November 2024, a stark illustration of a society unwilling to care properly for the elderly but ready to help them die early.

Three decades before Cyril ended his life, Pope St John Paul II released Evangelium Vitae (1995), the first and only papal encyclical on the field of bioethics, offered at the very time that bioethics, originally a Hippocratic and Christian discipline, was secularising and degenerating in many places into PR for whatever medical practitioners and researchers wanted to do.[2] The Pope offered a “precise and vigorous reaffirmation of the value of human life and its inviolability” and “a pressing appeal addressed to every person in the name of God: respect, protect, love and serve life, every human life!”[3] The encyclical was both a pastoral response to emerging bioethical challenges and a prophetic critique of Western culture.

Among the encyclical’s many contributions, none has proven more memorable than its diagnosis of a “culture of death” in the West that was increasingly colonising the whole world. More than a slogan, this jarring phrase captured the Pope’s central concern: that threats to human life in modernity are not merely isolated moral failures but symptoms of a cultural mood that systematically devalues the weak. Thirty years later, the concept continues to frame Catholic reflection on bioethical questions and has entered the broader lexicon of moral discourse, invoked by commentators to describe societies that have, in the John Paul’s words, lost their sense of the sacredness and inviolability of human life.[4]

In his discerning analysis of the contemporary scene, attacks on the unborn and elderly were situated within the broader context of widespread threats to all human life. He had in mind:   

murder, war, slaughter and genocide… the injustice of poverty and hunger because of the maldistribution of resources… the violence inherent in the arms trade… death caused by reckless tampering with the world’s ecological balance, by the criminal spread of drugs, or by the promotion of certain kinds of sexual activity…[5]

You might say it was ever thus, but after the bloodiest century in all of human history, when more people were killed in more fiendish ways than ever before, many twentieth-century consciences were dulled to the seriousness of using lethal force to solve your problems. Grounding this assault on life, according to John Paul II, were an undervaluing of human dignity, a wrong notion of freedom, and an eclipse of the sense of God. A range of factors added to the culture’s violent tendencies: interpersonal difficulties, family crises, ethical disorientation, isolation in anonymous cities, new technologies, and the promotion of powerful anti-life ideologies that had marched through the institutions of law, academia, media and healthcare, and dominated certain national and international bodies.

The Pope explored some of the ascendent isms of his time and ours:

  • scepticism, which leaves people confused about good and evil
  • individualism, which exaggerates autonomy and fails in solidarity with others
  • materialism, which denies the transcendent and concerns itself only with dominating material reality
  • hedonism, which censors out suffering at any cost and reduces ‘quality of life’ to physical beauty, consumption and pleasure
  • pragmatism, which glorifies results and efficiency, and devalues those regarded as burdensome and
  • utilitarianism, which draws together and systematises these thought patterns.

(Nicholas Tonti-Filippini’s timely work under Peter Singer uniquely qualified him to support and enrich this papal critique.) After identifying the reigning isms, John Paul arrived at his diagnosis: that “a veritable culture of death” now reigns in the West, a vision of reality which denies solidarity with the weak, serves powerful cultural, economic and political interests, and indulges the violent side of human nature.

3. How about Australia?

How effectively has such a culture taken hold in Australia these thirty years past? A brief survey of the legislative landscape reveals a troubling trajectory, particularly of erosion of the sanctity of life doctrine in our law and professional ethics, but also in the consciences of our political masters and citizens; and not just in Victoria, but throughout Australia and beyond. Already in John Paul’s day and increasingly since, the sexual revolution and the culture of death that go hand in hand have delivered us a ‘fluid’ conception of our own natures and the respect due them, and increasing hostility towards those who stand up for human life, dignity and conscience.

Evangelium Vitae defined as clear Catholic doctrine the inviolability of innocent human life, and thus the intrinsic evils of abortion, destructive human embryo experimentation, and infanticide of the disabled. It had a good deal to say about the responsibilities of lawmakers, health professionals and the faithful in reverencing life. Yet in the decades since we have seen access to abortion on demand spread across our land, not just through judicial interpretation, prosecutorial inaction, and medical collusion, as in John Paul’s day, but now by legislative fiat and policy of governments and professional bodies. Now the killing of the unborn, in many cases right up to birth, has been decriminalised, while dissenting communication and even silent prayer near abortuaries has been criminalised. Access is already greater than for almost any other ‘medical’ procedure, yet fanatics want to force faith-based institutions to provide this ‘service’ also. The profession has abandoned the pro-life absolutes that defined it in the Hippocratic tradition and its modern iterations.

Evangelium Vitae also defined as Catholic doctrine the intrinsic evils of suicide, assisted suicide and euthanasia. Again, in the three decades since, we have seen these practices enabled by civil legislation, government policy and medical professional collusion. Criteria for ‘VAD’ have proven loose and keep being loosened, as suicide and euthanasia are normalised as ways of dying; and rights of conscientious objection are increasingly denied. At the time of the legalisation of euthanasia in Victoria, then-Premier Dan Andrews foreshadowed 12 VAD deaths in the first year before “settling” to 100 or so annually thereafter. As so often he was wrong: the past six years have seen a steady rise to four times that number last year and a now-predicted 1,300 annual requests by 2028.

We could point to many more indications that, thirty years on, John Paul II’s diagnosis of a culture of death was not only an accurate description of his time but prescient about ours. More than just terrible laws plaguing the Western world, we have witnessed the construction of a comprehensive ideological apparatus that champions autonomy abstracted from solidarity and ethics, recasts killing as mercy, and stifles, even criminalises, those who dare to call this out. The legal and professional architecture increasingly reflects those very distortions of freedom and truth, the denial of the transcendent, the utilitarian moral calculus, and the totalitarian denial of conscience rights that the late pontiff identified as the culture of death’s intellectual foundations.

4. Responses to the culture of death

But whilst Evangelium Vitae identified particular violent acts that are affronts to life and dignity, and the ideological underpinnings of these actions, it also commended the many efforts to “preach the Gospel of life, to celebrate it in the Liturgy and in your whole existence, and to serve it with the various programmes and structures”.[6]  This is in keeping with ancient Catholic wisdom about the importance not just of generous vocations and morally sound choices, but of rôle models we call saints and of communities of orthopraxis such as the Christian family, parish, school, hospital, convent and more. Reflecting the contemporary consciousness of the power of cultures, social structures and customary practices to influence individual agents and their actions, the encyclical articulated an alternative moral vision and identified things we might do to provide a counter-witness—things many of you have in fact been doing these three decades past.

The Pope recognized that there are “many different acts of selfless generosity, often humble and hidden, carried out by men and women… the young and the old, the healthy and the sick” which amount to pro-life witness.[7] Some people devote themselves specifically to the life-affirming vocations of parenting and healthcare.[8] Many institutions, programmes and activities celebrate and serve the Gospel of life, such as:

  • centres of natural family planning, marriage and family support, and pregnancy help
  • associations for care of drug addicts, minors, the mentally ill, HIV patients, the disabled, and the dying
  • quality home and institutional care for the elderly and dying, including good medicine and nursing, palliative care and family respite
  • social activism of various kinds, including pro-life groups
  • pro-life and pro-family law and policy making
  • sound moral education and formation by teachers, academics, journalists and thinktanks
  • women developing a pro-life feminism
  • influencers promoting a culture of being over having, the person over things, grateful reception rather than wilful rejection and
  • anyone who cultivates a critical intellect, sound conscience and deep prayer-life, in awe and gratitude for the mystery of life.[9] 

We might think here of Professor Tonti-Filippini’s efforts and those of Fr Harman, Dr Santamaria, the Billingses, Minister Andrews and Bishop Elliott, amongst others, not just to keep our ethics, laws and medical practices sound, but to propose a different moral discourse: responsibility framing autonomy, generosity rather than egoism, community over individualism, reverent ethics instead of moral balancing acts, cultivation of virtue rather than social vices.

Let me highlight another aspect of this alternative ‘social imaginary’ only implicit in John Paul’s encyclical but increasingly evident to me as one of the bioethical flashpoints in the culture: receptiveness to the givenness of (many) things. My thought here is that John Paul, Nicholas, and so many in our Catholic moral tradition have rightly presumed that there is a natural order with natures and laws, and for human nature a divine plan and moral absolutes, and that these are not just real—i.e. grounded ontologically and logically in their correspondence with realities beyond private or social interpretation—but also gifts, either gratefully received on trust or ungratefully rejected and hubristically renovated. We might think here of the gift and opportunity of sexuality, “male and female God created them” and the contemporary turn against our sexual natures, as if the maleness or femaleness were options or constraints to be overcome with technology, law and culture. Or of the gifts and opportunities of fertility and of children, “for God said: be fruitful and multiply” and the contemporary tendency to treat perfectly healthy reproductive organs and systems not just as inconvenient but as diseases, and children as disasters, even as our community no longer remotely replaces itself. Or we think of the gift and opportunity that is life itself, something worthy of being celebrated and stewarded as a great good, but which the culture can regard as something optional and often merely burdensome, to be minimised or ended. Or consider faith in God, godly institutions and faithful practitioners, such rich elements of our community and its social infrastructure, expressing some of our highest ideals, but which modernity can write off as mechanisms of control and imposition of narrow dogmas. And so on. My thought here is that in the ‘fluid’ conception of reality, nothing is simply given or set in stone, there is no Giver with a plan for that reality, and no internal logic to a practice like medicine or even the practice of living a good life: with respect to gifts like human nature, life, sex, fertility and faith, all are ours to accept, revise or reject altogether—at will. But so much of what people like yourselves do for our community is a countersign to such thinking: it speaks of receiving gratefully from the hand of God, the cosmos, our ancestors, Church and community, and trusting in such gifts as liberation, possibility and fulfilment.

St John Paul and his followers helped enrich Catholic bioethics from being mostly a series of dos and don’ts for health professionals to being deeper reflection on character and moral decision-making in an important sphere of life, and the ideas and relationships that most influence this. Bioethics becomes social criticism and cultural ideals. After thirty years I think this is where Evangelium Vitae was most creative and insightful. While not buying into the reduction of all evil to the social and impersonal—with the attendant dangers of evading personal responsibility and becoming fatalistic and alienating—the Polish Pope adopted the best of contemporary thought on ethos, structural evil and the need to evangelise not just individuals but cultures. Catholic social doctrine was thereby carried into the bioethical realm. And so John Paul also brought bioethics to consider not just individual but also institutional and societal conscience—the idea that moral communities can be morally responsible for what they foster or tolerate.[10]

John Paul also contributed important thinking on biolawmaking in our cultural context.[11] In a situation where less-than-perfect and often very imperfect laws reign in our polity, he favoured incremental improvements and safeguards, some of which have in fact been achieved, at least for a time, against the tide of the legal culture. This incrementalism was not always well received in John Paul’s time, as the best can be the enemy of the good, but today his wisdom on this matter would be doubted by few pro-lifers.

5. Towards a more virtuous culture

Having considered some of the enduring wisdom of Evangelium Vitae in bioethics, biosocial commentary and biolawmaking, we might consider how it spoke and still speaks to biocharacter: to the virtues (or habits of character that orient us toward the good) necessary for a sound ethics, law and community. The culture of life must, for instance, be a prudent culture. Practical wisdom requires doing what Nick called ‘the hard thinking’ before acting: asking the right questions and answering them on the basis of sound principles. Instead of accepting the prevailing narrative that depicts Cyril Tooze’s death as a vindication of autonomous choice-making, prudence asks: Why did our society find it impossible to provide home care within a year to someone who desperately needed it, whilst making VAD available within days? What are the obvious and subtle pressures in such situations? What might we do individually and together to achieve better end-of-life care, including genuine palliative care and pastoral care? What moves can we make to improve imperfect laws, policies and practices, at least incrementally, without colluding in or being corrupted by the imperfections? How do we best address the cultural or systemic failures behind many individual choices for abortion or euthanasia: misunderstandings of freedom and truth, nature and suffering, healthcare and health ethics; inadequate support for pregnant women, new mothers and their babies, the elderly, sick and dying; and resource allocation decisions that value efficiency over solidarity? How might we evangelise with the Gospel of Life those institutions such as hospitals, parliaments, courts, academies, old media and new, that have to a lesser or greater extent embraced the culture of death? Bioethical prudence will attend to both the big picture and the small, and seek the best morally and practically available options moving forward.

The culture of life must also be a just one. So much of the Catholic tradition’s wisdom on the life issues is about justice towards the weak. It unashamedly calls out the wicked violence of abortion and euthanasia, calling things by their proper name.[12] But justice extends further: it requires attending to those forms of killing-by-neglect that occur through unrelieved poverty, inadequate healthcare, medical and social abandonment. It means ensuring that the unexpectedly expectant are well supported so they are more likely to make life-affirming decisions, those caring for a disabled child or frail adult are likewise backed up in their generous loving, and the isolated elderly and dying never abandoned by the system the way Cyril Tooze was. In morally complex situations and in the face of enormous pressures to collaborate in wrongful actions, justice examines acts and intentions honestly, distinguishes reasonable and permitted cooperation from unwarranted and illicit, and makes space for conscience. And in the classical tradition, justice includes pietas—grateful reverence toward God and elders. A just culture would regard seniors not as burdens or resource wasters, but as bearers of our history and wisdom, deserving our love and honour. It would seek to recover, as John Paul urged, “a covenant between the generations”[13] in which elders receive from subsequent generations the acceptance and solidarity they gave themselves.

The culture of life will be a courageous culture. Suffering and how we respond to it lies at the heart of many bioethical debates. St John Paul observed that decisions against life often “arise from difficult or even tragic situations of profound suffering, loneliness… [poverty], depression and anxiety about the future”.[14] Women who have abortions make “a painful, even shattering decision” in the face of various pressures and abandonments.[15] Those seeking euthanasia may be suffering from physical or psychological pain, loss of control or demoralisation. Courage calls forth patience and perseverance in the face of such difficulties. A courageous culture acknowledges suffering without being overwhelmed by it, accompanying those who suffer rather than eliminating the sufferer. It rejects the notion that all suffering is meaningless and to be eradicated at all costs and, without romanticizing it, seeks to transform the experience of dependence and hopelessness through acts of genuine solidarity and compassion.

The culture of life must also be a temperate one. Earlier I suggested that the sexual revolution and the culture of death go hand in hand: there’s a whole conference to be had on that relationship. Suffice it here to say, amongst the complex of connections, unchastity is a major driver of contraception and abortion. Likewise, a kind of medical promiscuity, even addiction, can so over-medicalise reality that we think we have to drug or surgery our way out of fertility, grief, gender, angst—every problem. Healthcare professionals must, like the rest of us, learn a certain humility and restraint, accepting that there are proper limits to their art and science.

Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the culture of life must be a culture of faith, hope and love. St John Paul’s pressing appeal was addressed to every person “in the name of God: respect, protect, love and serve life, every human life!”[16] Faith, hope and charity are not mere information, mood or sentiment, but character, direction and concrete service. It means a Good Samaritan-like neighbourliness that recognises interdependence rather than exalting autonomy; it entails a reverence for the image of God in human persons, such that killing, harming or abandoning ourselves or each other is an unthinkable sacrilege for us; and it yields a solidarity with the weak and needy that means they are saved, healed and cared for rather than victims of isolation and indifference. “Yes, every man is his brother’s keeper,” Pope John Paul says in response to Cain and the culture of Cain, “because God entrusts us to one another.”[17] A virtuous bioculture will express itself in ideas and formation for this, in generous acts of protection and nurture, in structures of support and care, altogether making up what John Paul the Great called “a civilisation of life and love”.[18] For this we pray, in the words of Evangelium Vitae:

O Mary, bright dawn of the new world and Mother of the living,

we entrust to you the cause of life.
Look down, O Mother, upon the vast numbers

of babies not allowed to be born,
of the poor whose lives are made difficult,
of men and women who are victims of brutal violence,
of the elderly and the sick killed by indifference or misguided mercy.

Grant that all who believe in your Son

may proclaim the Gospel of Life with honesty and love

to the people of our time.

Obtain for them the grace to accept that Gospel as a gift ever new,
the joy of celebrating it with gratitude throughout their lives,
and the courage to bear witness to it resolutely,

in order to build, together with all people of good will,
the civilization of truth and love,
to the praise and glory of God, the Creator and lover of life.[19]

[1] Aslea Kunowski and Summer Woolley, “Terminally ill man’s heartbreaking decision to end his life after 10-month wait for home care in Australia,” 7 News 223October 2024 https://7news.com.au/news/terminally-ill-mans-heartbreaking-decision-to-end-his-life-after-10-month-wait-for-home-care-in-australia-c-16471785; David Penberthy, “Death better than wait for aged care,” The Australian 20 October 2024; Anna Townend, “Vale Cyril Tooze: The face behind the figures,” National Seniors Australia 15 November 2024,

[2] Samuel Dale, “A critique of principlism,” Voices in Bioethics 9 (2023); H.T. Englehardt, After God: Morality and Bioethics in a Secular Age (St Vladimir’s, 2017); John Finnis and Anthony Fisher, “Theology and the four principles of bioethics: A Roman Catholic view,” in R. Gillon (ed), Principles of Healthcare Ethics (Wiley, 1993), 31-44; Edmund Pellegrino and Martin D’Arcy, “The Catholic physician in an era of secular bioethics,” Linacre Quarterly 78(1) (2011): 13-28; Christopher Tollefsen, “The future of Roman Catholic bioethics,” Journal of Medicine & Philosophy 43(6) (2018): 667-685.

[3] Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae: Encyclical on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life (1995) (hereafter ‘EV’) 5.

[4] See for example: David Alton and William Gribbin, Life After Death: looking Beyond a Culture of Death (Christian Democrat Press, 1997); William Brennan, Confronting the Language Empowering the Culture of Death (Sapientia, 2008); James Charoa, The Dramatic Clash between the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death (Africa World Books, 2023); Luke Gormally (ed), Culture of Life, Culture of Death (Linacre Centre, 2002); Donald de Marco, The Value of Life in a Culture of Death (Mission House, 2010); Donald de Marco and Benjamin Wiker, Architects of the Culture of Death (Ignatius Press, 2004); John Ling, Responding to the Culture of Death: A Primer of Bioethical Issues (Day One Pub, 2001); Mark Neilsen, Reaffirming Life in a Culture of Death: A Catholic Response to Critical Issues (Ligouri, 1995); Benjamin Noys, The Culture of Death (Berg, 2005); John Pasquini, Pro-Life: Defending the Culture of Life against the Culture of Death (iUniverse, 2003); Wesley Smith, Culture of Death: The Age of Do Harm Medicine (Encounter Books, 2016) and Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America (Encounter Books, 2002); Robert Way, “Engaging the Culture of Death with the Gospel of life: Integrating Catholic faith and practice of law and medicine,” Linacre Quarterly 80(4) (2013): 363-75; Patrick Yanke, Defeating the Culture of Death: The Pro-Life Vote (2020);

[5] EV 10.

[6] EV 79.

[7] EV 86. 

[8] EV 87, 89.

[9] EV 88-100.

[10] EV 24.

[11] E.g. EV 74-75.

[12] EV 20 & 58.

[13] EV 94.

[14] EV 18.

[15] EV 99.

[16] EV 5.

[17] EV 19 & 41.

[18] EV 100; cf. 5, 27 & 105.

[19] EV 105.