As iconic British Catholic bioethics center closes, fellow academics dub move a 'tragedy'

(OSV News) -- One of the most highly respected Catholic bioethics institutes in the world is to close amid a funding crisis.

The Oxford-based Anscombe Bioethics Center, which serves the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom and Ireland, will close on July 31 "on financial grounds," according to a July 2 statement.

The director of the center, Professor David Albert Jones, said the decision was made by the Catholic Trust for England and Wales, the center's "corporate trustee."

Announcing the closure with "immense sadness," Jones said it was the "earnest hope" of staff that "some means may be found to continue to make available the resources that the center has generated, and also to continue the vital work of bioethical research and education that fully respects the dignity of the human person."

He said: "Even where it has not been possible to prevent an unethical law from being passed … the center has maintained a witness (to) the dignity of human life from conception to natural death.

"We have been able to give advice to professionals, carers, and patients about how to act ethically despite the establishment of unethical practices within healthcare."

He said: "Much of the focus of the work of the center over the past year has been the attempt in Scotland and in England and Wales to decriminalize 'encouraging and assisting suicide' in the case of people deemed to have a 'terminal' illness.

"Our work has been cited in Parliament and we have helped inform many people who are concerned about this issue," he said.

The closure of the center comes in a dark time for bioethical issues in the U.K., with an assisted suicide bill passing in the House of Commons by a narrow majority June 20 and members of British Parliament voting overwhelmingly in favor of decriminalizing abortion up to birth only three days earlier.

"Despite the efforts of many people of good will, assisted suicide Bills continue to make progress both in Scotland and in England and Wales, albeit by narrow majorities," Jones said.

Professor David Paton, chair of industrial economics at Nottingham University Business School, told OSV News that "the timing of this move is particularly worrying, coming as it does whilst parliamentary efforts are ongoing to try to reverse the recent moves to decriminalise abortion up to birth and to legalise assisted suicide."

In a written message sent to OSV News, he said that the Anscombe Center "was one of the leading bioethics research centers not just in the UK but in the world," and he called it "a real tragedy" that the center is closing.

While the center "will no longer be in a position to provide new resources," Jones said in his farewell statement, "we urge people to make use of the resources we have already made available and to engage with the Scottish Parliament and with the House of Lords as these bodies continue to debate dangerous and ill-thought-out legislation." He added that generous donations through the years had "helped prevent repeated attempts to legalize euthanasia or assisted suicide in Britain and Ireland from 1993 to the present."

Signing the statement "in sorrow but with gratitude and in steadfast hope," Jones added: "We give thanks to God, and to our patron St Raphael, for all that has been done through our work."

Founded in 1977 at the London Catholic Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth originally as the Linacre Center for Health Care Ethics, the center changed its name in honor of Elizabeth Anscombe, a Catholic philosopher and bioethicist, after it moved to Oxford in 2010.

It has published many books and papers on such matters as euthanasia and assisted suicide, in vitro fertilization, prenatal diagnoses, destructive experiments on human embryos, organ transplantation and donation, and abortion.

That kind of research "provided invaluable resources for laity, academics and clergy alike," Paton said in an email to OSV News.

Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney has worked closely with the center, and Cardinal Willem Eijk of Utrecht in the Netherlands is among those prominent Catholics to have given the annual Anscombe memorial lecture.

The Catholic bishops of England and Wales were approached by OSV but declined to comment.

Lay Catholics, however, have expressed their disappointment at the closure of the center.

In a July 3 email to OSV News, David Alton of Liverpool, a Catholic member of the House of Lords, said that the Anscombe Center "has been an invaluable resource in providing sound, coherent analysis of ethical dilemmas which confront legislators on an almost daily basis.

"Parliamentarians, policymakers, academics and campaigners need access to reliable and rigorous thinking," said Alton, who is not affiliated with any political party. "The Anscombe Center has consistently provided this and its closure will leave a significant gap."

Paton, for his part, said, "Questions also need to be asked about why the closure was announced as a fait accompli without any public effort to try to find alternative sources of funding to enable the center to stay open in some form," adding, "I hope that it might still prove possible to find a way to save the center."