A good example is Anscombe's essay On Transubstantiation, first published as a pamphlet by the Catholic Truth Society. She offers no contemporary mantra to put us at ease with a mystery that is rather identified than dissolved by the traditional language. Mary Geach tells us that her mother was converted to Catholicism when still at school, and then instructed and received at Oxford. Her parents sent her to an Anglican ecclesiastic who assured her that he believed the sacrament to be the body of Christ. "Is it bread?" she asked toughly, and there they had to disagree. In her pamphlet, Anscombe embraces mystery, though not absurdity or contradiction. Yet, without questioning orthodoxy, she locates the greater mystery elsewhere: whether the faithful eat the flesh of the risen Christ really or only symbolically, it is a symbol of something else, and neither a natural nor an easy one. In either case, we are somehow sharing in his resurrection; and this is what we need to be confident of.

A wise shift of focus also marks her essay The Early Embryo: Theoretical Doubts and Practical Certainties. Is the zygote that comes into being when a human egg is fertilised already a human being, and a member of the human species? Anscombe no more believes that than that an acorn is already an oak. To say that, if a group of cells contains the XY pair of chromosomes, it is already male appears to her to read back into the early stage what applies to a human being with human organs. Moreover, there is the phenomenon of twinning, which occurs, when it does occur, about 14 days after fertilisation. Surely it couldn't be that we already have a human being before it is determinate whether we have one or two. And we don't want to ground a practical certainty upon a theoretical uncertainty that may be a mistake. Anscombe denies that the uncertainty matters in practice: once we have a human zygote, we have an individual living thing whose life is a stage in the development of one or more human lives, "the coming human life (or lives) of that very same living thing as you are proposing to kill". Such killing, she says, "has evidently the same sort of malice" as what later would unquestionably be murder. Those who dogmatically insist that a person comes into being at the moment of conception, or even incoherently suppose (like the supporters of Amendment 48 to the Colorado constitution) that this is at once a metaphysical truth and a possible content of legislation, make controversial what should be common sense.

At the heart of Anscombe's central philosophical concerns was the nature of intentional action, a topic of her book Intention. Following Wittgenstein (whom she befriended and translated), she did not invoke some undetectable prior act of will that, supposing it to occur, would be nothing to us. It is rather the mark of an intentional action that it invites a question "Why?" that asks not for a cause, but a reason. But here it is crucial to grasp that one action is the performing of many acts, so that it will be intentional under some descriptions and not under others. Thus, as I intentionally write this, I also unintentionally displace various molecules of air. It is especially, though not only, as intentional that an action comes up for ethical assessment. (I say "not only" because unintentional negligence can be culpable.) It may be permissible to do what it is not permissible to do intentionally. This thesis can look fishy if it is only invoked to resolve a controversy, but is again common sense. Kenny has given an easy example: a host may have compelling reason to place two guests together whom she predicts won't get on (any alternative might be worse), but is malicious if she intends them not to get on.