She Out-Argued C. S. Lewis

and did a number of other cool things:

...For those who are interested, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was one of the greatest Catholic philosophers of the 20th Century.  She was a convert and had one of the toughest minds in the world, combined with a Catholic faith that was childlike in the best sense...

She once debated C.S. Lewis and by universal acclamation, she cleaned his clock so badly that he had to revise his book Miracles in order to take into account the points she made.

One of her principal contributions to Catholic moral theology was her coinage of the term “consequentialism”, which is a three dollar word to describe the moral heresy that the ends justify the means.  She did not, of course, invent that idea, merely the term to describe it.  The idea is already found in St. Paul, when he mocks the assertion, “Let us do evil that good may come of it” and states bluntly that those who say such things deserve condemnation.

Because of her courageous opposition to consequentialism (subsequently condemned in Veritatis Splendor), Anscombe “scandalized liberal colleagues with articles defending the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception in the 1960s and early 1970s. Later in life, she was arrested twice while protesting outside an abortion clinic in Britain, after abortion had been legalized”.  And because she was a consistent thinker, she likewise scandalized the Right by protesting against Oxford’s decision to grant an honorary degree to Harry S. Truman, whom she denounced as a mass murderer for his use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

She was a thoroughly Catholic convert who is one of the Church’s great ornaments in a very dark time.  I hope they canonize her someday...