Bioethicist Luke Gormally: The ‘Gentle Giant’ Who Stood Up Against the Culture of Death
Professor Luke Gormally, who died April 30 at the age of 83, was a towering figure who was respected and admired for his personal integrity, courage and tireless defense of life at a time when the “culture of death” was taking root in the West.
A former governor, director and senior research fellow at the Anscombe Bioethics Centre — an Oxford-based Catholic institute formerly known as the Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics — for more than half a century, Gormally was a leading pro-life voice in bioethics in the English-speaking world.
Almost immediately after being appointed as a researcher at the Linacre Centre in 1978, he became “the intellectual substance of the activities and achievements of the small staff,” recalled Australian legal philosopher professor John Finnis, who served as the center’s governor in the 1980s.
The center’s governing body, Finnis said, was “always rightly dependent on Luke’s good judgment and willingness to get things done,” whether it was liaising with donors, bishops or medical professionals that would then bear fruit in a growing network of cooperation at home and abroad.
Much of his work at the center was dedicated to advising Parliament and British and Irish bishops on life issues, whether that involved protecting unborn life and speaking out against abortion, euthanasia and artificial contraception.
He served nearly 20 years as the center’s director until 2000 and then as governor from 2011 to 2016, following its relocation to Oxford and renaming as the Anscombe Centre, after the famous British pro-life analytic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001).
Gormally’s wife, Mary Geach, was a daughter of Anscombe, and after his retirement in 2007, the couple worked successfully to bring Anscombe’s lesser-known works to greater prominence. Residents of London, the Gormallys were closely involved with the Neocatechumenal Way.
In the 1980s, Gormally inspired the center’s current director, professor David Albert Jones, to enter the bioethics field, which has since become his life’s work.
“Luke was modest about his own abilities and saw himself as a workman laboring in a field where people urgently needed ethical guidance,” Jones told the Register.
He shaped the center’s mission, Jones said, and his advice was often sought “on subtle ethical problems facing the world and the Church.” In his writings, he said, “he kept returning to the fundamental questions of human life, human dignity and the meaning of medicine.”
