Anscombe Centre Tribute to John Finnis Upon His CBE Appointment
The Anscombe Bioethics Centre pays tribute to John Finnis, Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy Emeritus at Oxford, who was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the New Year’s Honours List 2023 for services to legal scholarship.
Professor Finnis was formerly a Governor of the Anscombe Centre (1981-2007, 2010-2016), including former Vice-Chair of Governors (mid-1990s), and has contributed to numerous of our publications, including:
- The Dependent Elderly
- Euthanasia, Clinical Practice and the Law
- Issues for a Catholic Bioethic
- Culture of Life – Culture of Death
- Cooperation, Complicity & Conscience
- Incapacity & Care
He has also contributed to numerous submissions of the Centre to governmental and public bodies – of which the most significant was the Submission to the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Medical Ethics (1993-1994) – and has provided many additional conference contributions and lectures, most notably the Anscombe Memorial Lecture 2014, which you can see here.
This was reproduced in The Moral Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, part of the St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs series.
It was at the request of Professor Finnis that, in 1993, the late Pope Benedict XVI (when he was Cardinal Ratzinger) wrote a recommendation of the work of the Centre, which we mentioned in our In Memoriam for the late Pontiff yesterday. Again, this is reproduced below.

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Staff are grateful to all those who sustained the Centre in the past by their prayers and the generous financial support from trusts, organisations, communities and especially from individual donors, including the core funding that came through the Day for Life fund and so from the generosity of many thousands of parishioners. We would finally like to acknowledge the support the Centre has received from the Catholic community in Ireland, especially during the pandemic when second collections were not possible.
We would like to emphasise that, though the Centre is now closed, these donations have not been wasted but have helped educate and support generations of conscientious healthcare professionals, clerics, and lay people over almost 50 years. This support has also helped prevent repeated attempts to legalise euthanasia or assisted suicide in Britain and Ireland from 1993 till the end of the Centre’s work on 31 July 2025.