Sister Renee Mirkes OSF, Ph.D. a Franciscan Sister of Christian Charity and the director of the Center for NaProEthics, the ethics division of the Saint Paul VI Institute, Omaha, NE reflects on Cardinal Sarah’s description of the “crisis of the logos”,
collapse of reason. (Photo: Nongni Kana Loic, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Cardinal Robert Sarah’s address this summer to the European Parliament identifies a foundational problem in contemporary bioethical discourse: the widening gap between language and reality. Words that once conveyed stable meanings – “healthcare,” “rights,” “dignity” – are increasingly deployed with ideological elasticity.
Sarah warns this linguistic instability constitutes a “crisis of the logos or of reason,” a breakdown in the relationship between words and the realities they signify. Language ceases to correspond to reality; reason loses its footing, and moral judgment becomes vulnerable to sentiment, ideology or political coercion.
Sarah’s thesis rests on three philosophical principles deeply rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition.
