Nicholas tonti filippini biography

Nicholas Antony Tonti-Filippini AO (5 July 1956 – 7 November 2014) was an Australian bioethicist.
Nick was, for decades, a leading light among Australian Catholic bioethicists and the best known Catholic voice in this area in Australia.
Dr Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, Australia's first hospital ethicist, prolific author, internationally acclaimed bio-ethicist and Associate Dean of the John Paul.

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Nicholas Tonti-Filippini

Australian bioethicist

Nicholas Antony Tonti-FilippiniAO (5 July 1956 – 7 November 2014) was an Australian bioethicist. He was a leading spokesman against voluntary euthanasia.^[1]

Tonti-Filippini was born in Melbourne, and raised in Bendigo, where he attended St Vincent's College. He studied at Monash University and later obtained a PhD from the University of Melbourne. At age 21, he was diagnosed with rheumatoidautoimmune disease and given just five years to live.^[2] He became director of the Bioethics Department at St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne, and later worked as research officer for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.^[3] At the time of his death, he was associate dean and head of bioethics at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne.^[1]

Tonti-Filippini was posthumously given the Officer of the Order of Australia award as part of the 2016 Australia Day Honours, for "distinguished service to tertiary education, particularly in the area of bioethics, through academic leader

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When I first met Nick, I was a young Dominican student, and he was a strange new phenomenon in Australia: an institutional bioethicist. His St. Vincent's Bioethics Centre was becoming famous around the world as well as in Australia, and Nick became a household name as a series of bioethical waves hit our shores and the media turned, more often than not, to Nick for comment. I remember well attending and learning so much at his St. Vincent's bioethics conferences—by being a water-boy, microphone porter, and general dog's-body, I was able to attend for free. Later, the annual National Colloquium for Catholic Bioethicists continued this tradition of Melbourne bioethics conferences established by Nick—though I no longer have to attend as water-boy.

Nick was, for decades, a leading light among Australian Catholic bioethicists and the best known Catholic voice in this area in Australia. He contributed to public debate, conferences, and publications, and gave wise counsel to church leaders and laity, Catholic or not. For many years his contribution as a public bioethicist was recognize

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Editor's Note: Last Friday, 7 November, renowned Catholic ethicist Nicholas Tonti-Filippini died in Melbourne, aged 58, after living for nearly four decades with chronic auto-immune disease.

In a time when a particularly vulgar brand of utilitarianism holds sway in Australian public debate, and when any system of expansive moral reflection invariably gets reduced to a what it has to say on that predictable clutch of "hot-button issues" - euthanasia, abortion, same-sex marriage - Nicholas represented a kind of miracle. He embodied a commitment to ethical inquiry that was at once intellectually rigorous and pastorally deft, that remained moored to the Catholic tradition and was unceasingly generous to interlocutors from other philosophical persuasions.

It is impossible, it seems to me, to separate the suffering that Nicholas bore in his flesh from his fierce determination to celebrate all that is good and beautiful and sacred in bodily, family and social life. Much like St. John Paul II, he thereby bore eloquent witness to both the sufferings of Christ and the gra