TRAGEDY OF THE CONDOMS
Jerry Harkins
For their own inscrutable reasons, the American Catholic bishops have decided to fight the forthcoming presidential election on the issue of contraception. As usual, they yearn to see the White House occupied by someone three goose steps to the right of Vlad the Impaler but even they understand that Rick Santorum and his ilk can’t win. The true believing right wing crazies agree with the bishops on several issues involving the evil of sexual activity. They disagree on a long list of other things including war, the death penalty and the social safety net but, in the minds of our senior celibates, these are all trumped by sex. So once again they will have to settle; last time it was for John McCain, this time it will be Mitt Romney who at least agrees with them about abortion on Mondays, Wednesdays and alternate Fridays.
If you are one of the few Americans who still pays any attention to the bishops, it may seem refreshing to hear them talk about something other than abortion but the problem is contraception is just not an issue. Pretty much everybody, including probably you and 98% of other Catholics, agree that it is morally acceptable and, in fact, laudable. Even the bishops approve of “natural” contraception otherwise known as Vatican Roulette. They have somehow persuaded themselves that the use of thermometers, mathematical formulas and elaborate charts is a virtuous form of foreplay. Of course, their sexual experience is limited to raping altar boys who do not require foreplay and can’t get pregnant. They know they can’t win a direct attack on contraception so they are framing their argument as being about freedom of religion. The President’s insistence that health care insurance cover contraceptives is said to be a grave threat, the first step on a slippery slope that eventually leads to legislation prohibiting Sunday mass, Ash Wednesday rituals and the death of God. Their rhetoric is so patently absurd that even moderately skeptical people must wonder what compels them.
They say it’s simple: they do not wish to be forced to pay for something they consider gravely immoral. That would be, they think, tantamount to requiring Jews to serve cheeseburgers in Yeshiva cafeterias or Mormons to serve those same burgers with coffee. The brief against contraception is, they claim, so fundamental to the Catholic faith that the government’s proposal represents what Cardinal Dolan called a “radical intrusion into the internal life of the Church.” He and his colleagues have repeatedly threatened to close down all Catholic social service institutions if such legislation is enacted. Not likely but it is a plucky assertion of their absolute right to make foolish statements. Fee, fi, fo fum! God bless these clowns. They really do think certain forms of contraception are “gravely disordered” but, aside from a few vague notions about God’s authorship of life, they’re not about to tell you why. They may have a martyr complex but they have no desire to be laughed out of town. So they leave it up to me. It’s embarrassing but someone has to explain matters.
This is not the first time I have attempted to deal with the moral theology of contraception. In an earlier essay [1] I discussed the emergence in the twentieth century of the notion that contraception is evil because it destroys an imagined “inseparable bond” between the reproductive and the unitive functions of sex as designed by God. In 1930, Pius XI issued the encyclical Casti Connubii which, for the first time, took notice of the obvious fact that sex tends to bring people together and that this function was acceptable as long as the lovers always put reproduction first. Gradually, the new idea morphed into the notion that the two functions are inseparable. John Paul II came very close to saying that trying to force them apart was the heart of the contraceptive evil. He did not actually go quite that far because he was smart enough to realize that separating them was precisely the objective of Vatican Roulette which he still professed to think was “natural.”
The church summons up nature in another guise to explain its teaching on contraception, relying on what it thinks of as “natural law.” This is an ancient and respectable theory but, as Garry Wills has written, “The cartoon version of natural law used to argue against contraception, or artificial insemination, or masturbation, would make a sophomore blush.” [2] It is not clear to me whether Professor Wills actually believes in any version of natural law theory. I do not because I cannot accept that anything is eternal and unchanging. If the Dodgers could leave Brooklyn in 1957, then nothing is sacred. The church, however, promotes a version of natural law based on Aristotle’s Politics as interpreted by the medieval scholastics, notably Thomas Aquinas. Recent Popes, confronted by moral questions not addressed in revelation, turn to it as an anchor for their teaching of almost anything.
However distinguished the proponents of natural law have been, their writing about it always seems to have a penumbra of desperation. It’s as though they suspect there is no such thing but they cannot imagine a decently functioning world without it. In this way, it is similar to the secular theory of the social contract or the nineteenth century Missing Link of human evolution. It seems needed to fill a gap in theory but it raises huge questions of its own. Natural Law is full of contradictions which are apparent even to a young child. It posits an especially poignant version of the problem of good and evil. If nature is not evil and did not create evil, it must at least be indifferent to its presence, hardly a function of law. For nature, unlike God, is not endowed with intelligence never mind morality. As Alfred Lord Tennyson put it, “Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation's final law / Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek'd against his creed.” [3] Even Thomas Jefferson’s invocation of “unalienable Rights” and his appeal to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” seem contrived to avoid the necessity of proving or even debating them. Which, of course, is exactly what appeals to the Catholic hierarchy. If contraception is proscribed by natural law, no further discussion is needed. We simply assert that our Magisterium anoints us as the sole legitimate interpreters of natural law. It is the perfect argument: because I say so.
But one plus one does not equal three and if what you say is absurd then there is a problem somewhere in your logic. In the case of natural law, the fallacy may be that there is no such thing. Certainly, in the minds of all religious people, there is divine law but, while divine law and natural law would necessarily be consistent, they are not the same thing. [4] There are laws of nature such as the Law of Gravity but that, too, is not what is meant by “natural law.” The literature on natural law is opaque and often ambiguous but whatever it is, natural law must be eternal and universal and its dictates knowable to all through reason alone (or reason guided by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church). This suggests that reason is the ultimate test of whether an act is or is not moral under natural law.
But the notion that certain forms of contraception are precluded by natural law is unreasonable on its face, indeed it is irrational. To begin with, “universal” and “eternal” are very high barriers to acceptance. Quite the opposite appears to be the case. A huge majority of people, Catholic and otherwise, easily accept what the church thinks of as unnatural contraception. It would appear that the God worshiped by the Catholic hierarchy speaks only to the Catholic hierarchy. Second, the distinction the church makes between “natural” and “unnatural” contraception is ignorant and, in a frightening way, bizarre. The very thought of elderly celibates purporting to give advice on marital intimacy is as rational as referring patients to a vampire for heart surgery. Again then, the question: why do they bother? Why do they obsess about sex in the first place and why do they hone in on contraception after forty years of unsuccessful agitation on abortion?
The answers lie very deep in the psyche of western religion. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have important strains of misogyny which they all vehemently deny. But conservative hierarchs universally despise femaleness. They are revolted by it. They fear women and, at least in the Catholic tradition, have gone to great lengths to exclude them from their lives. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger ruled that little girls could not be altar servers because little boys would not be willing to serve with them. Thus the church would lose its best source of new priests. Wunderbar! Wonderland! Women, beginning with Eve, are seen as God’s test of the male’s ability to resist sin. Woman is the temptress and sex is the lure. Anything that enhances the pleasure of sex by, for example, separating it from its natural consequence of reproduction is evil. Except, of course, Vatican Roulette.
But it goes deeper still. Mainstream Christian theology from the time of Augustine has glorified suffering and condemned all pleasure. Until quite recently, the church prohibited any medical attempt to relieve pain on the theory that it interfered with God’s salvic plan. Suffering was seen as a way to atone for sin and thus gain eternal life. This has softened somewhat but not entirely. In 1984, Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical, Salvifici Doloris of which this is the introduction:
Declaring the power of salvific suffering, the Apostle Paul says: “In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.”
These words seem to be found at the end of the long road that winds through the suffering which forms part of the history of man and which is illuminated by the Word of God. These words have as it were the value of a final discovery, which is accompanied by joy. For this reason Saint Paul writes: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake,” The joy comes from the discovery of the meaning of suffering, and this discovery, even if it is most personally shared in by Paul of Tarsus who wrote these words, is at the same time valid for others. The Apostle shares his own discovery and rejoices in it because of all those whom it can help—just as it helped him—to understand the salvific meaning of suffering. [Emphasis in original.] [5]
Note especially the theme of the joy of suffering. The day before he died, John Paul himself was in terrible pain, but his spokesman only said his “biological parameters are notably compromised.” Later, he was said to be in “very grave” condition but, “…is still lucid, fully conscious and extraordinarily serene.” The implication of lucidity and full consciousness is that no pain therapies were given to the dying man. Of course, he was by no means still lucid and fully conscious. Two days earlier a permanent nasal feeding tube had been inserted when it was found he could no longer ingest food or liquids. The Vatican was walking a fine line between its vehement opposition to anything hinting of euthanasia and its desire to depict a great man bearing great suffering with equanimity and heroic virtue.
Given the salvic value of suffering, it is not surprising that the church is not enthusiastic about earthly pleasure of any kind. This rose to the level of dogma in the fourteenth century during the reign of the second Avignon Pope, John XXII, and is the central motif of Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose. The murder mystery revolves around the search for the long lost second part of Aristotle’s Poetics, the Tractatus Coislinianus which dealt sympathetically with comedy. Comedy in philosophy is happiness of any kind, the antithesis of pain. It may or may not involve humor or laughter. The fictional monk Jorge of Burgos who turns out to be the murderer represents the Augustinian, anti-pleasure faction of the church. The Aristotelian/Thomistic position is represented by the protagonist Brother William of Baskerville and his scribe Adso. Speaking of comedic metaphors, Jorge points out, “Our Lord did not have to employ such foolish things to point out the straight and narrow path to us. Nothing in his parables arouses laughter, or fear.” [6]
Pleasure is always suspect and is portrayed as one of the Devil’s wiles as in the case of Dr. Faust. Sexual pleasure is the ultimate enemy. God invents sexual attraction (Genesis 3:16) to punish Eve for successfully tempting Adam. Thus, the church cannot simply denounce it as inherently evil. For most of its two thousand years, it has taken the position that marital sex open to conception is participation in the divine work of creation and is therefore good. However, care must be taken to experience only the minimum amount of necessary pleasure and that pleasure must never be sought for its own sake. Until recently, sexual activity was prohibited on Sundays, on many important feast days, during Lent, Advent, a woman’s menstrual period, pregnancy and the twenty days before Pentecost. The church taught that children conceived during these periods would be born blind or crippled or with such serious diseases as leprosy. Obviously this was not true but truth has no place at the table of Vatican dogma. Oral and anal intercourse were considered more sinful than murder and intercourse between elderly or sterile couples was forbidden entirely.
The church has never really approved of sex. Saint Paul began the attack by saying it was all well and good for men who found it impossible to remain as pure as he was but obviously virginity was to be preferred. Saint Jerome said several times that the only reason he thought marriage was a moral enterprise was that, without it, there would be no new virgins. The problem for this kind of thinking is that, in many places, the Bible celebrates sexuality. Most notably the Song of Songs is explicitly erotic in its glorification of the entire range of male and female sensuality. The apocryphal Book of Tobit is more subtle but no less sensual in depicting romantic love and its relation to other forms of love including filial piety and works of mercy such as burying the dead. Historically, the church has tried to finesse the issue by making a distinction between agape, an exalted, idealzed love that transcends the physical and eros, the passionate pursuit of sexual and other carnal pleasures. Referring to sexual pleasure in the encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI asks a rhetorical question, “…doesn’t the church with all her commandments and prohibitions turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life?” The truth would be a simple yes but the Pope’s answer is directed at the extremes of eros, as though the extreme is the representative case. He says that when it is used as a means of arousing “divine madness” it exploits lovers. He is talking about what he imagines to be a Bacchanalian orgy of excess. This intoxicated and undisciplined eros is, he says, “…not an ascent in ‘ecstasy’ towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man.” He appears to believe that Bacchus is the great role model in human bedrooms but refrains from describing what he would consider to be sober and disciplined eros. It is fair to be curious about the images going through his head when he is writing such nonsense.
It is often difficult to discern exactly what the Vatican is driving at with it convoluted prose and cryptic logic. It seems the American bishops have come to the conclusion that their best hope for defeating President Obama is to paint him as an anti-Catholic, anti-religion, Bacchanalian bigot because he disagrees with them on contraception. Such a position is good political theater but terrible political strategy. It attracts attention but at the cost of making the bishops look foolish. It is not the first time. The church had little public role in the great obscenity and contraception debates that led to the federal Comstock Act of 1873. The Comstock movement began as an evangelical crusade and gradually attracted support from most other Protestant denominations. The bluenoses did not want Catholic support any more than they would later in the drive toward Prohibition. [7] However, the Catholic bishops ultimately became the law’s principal defenders even as its provisions began to be repealed in the 1930’s. The bishops remained steadfast, still opposing repeal in 1983 when Congress removed the last vestiges of birth control prohibition. Once again, they are fighting a rearguard action. Even if they are successful, condoms and birth control pills will not disappear from the nation’s shelves which is their ultimate goal. Victory would not mean the use of one less contraceptive in America or elsewhere. But they have learned from the abortion battles the strategy of chipping away at the edges of a policy they oppose and they hope thereby to develop momentum.
The Catholic hierarchy has reached a pathetic juncture. Their absolute power no longer evokes fear and trembling in the pews. Since the Council of Trent, they have been whining about the decline of morality by which they mean the rise of modernism. They are men who have given up much for a share of divine power and it has all turned to bitter ashes. Pope Paul VI agonized about contraception and appointed a blue ribbon commission to advise him. They voted decisively for change but Paul lacked both courage and intellectual integrity. In his introduction to the disastrous encyclical Humanae Vitae, he wrote about the challenges of modernism:
“But the most remarkable development of all is to be seen in man's stupendous progress in the domination and rational organization of the forces of nature to the point that he is endeavoring to extend this control over every aspect of his own life—over his body, over his mind and emotions, over his social life, and even over the laws that regulate the transmission of life.”
Poor Paul. Change happens. He inherited the joy, hope and optimism of Vatican II, without doubt the most promising moment in the history of the church. He blew it away with a stroke of his pen in order to preserve Vatican power for his successors. They—John Paul II and Benedict XVI—proceeded to do their best to extinguish all joy and hope by casting his timid ruling in definitive concrete. They issued the apostolic letter Ad Tuendam Fidem in 1998 which vastly expanded the range of subjects about which no disagreement would be tolerated. But the fault is Paul’s. His predecessor, John XXIII had known of his tragic fault, calling him “mio amleto.” Paul knew it too. As he told Cardinal Suenens, “Yes, pray for me; because of my weaknesses, the Church is badly governed.”
Notes
1 See, “The Theology of Contraception” jerrysfollies.blogspot.com/2009/02/theology-of-contraception-jerry-harkins_11.html.
2. Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, Doubleday, 2000, p. 5.
3. “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Canto 56. As used here, “ravine” means violence.
4. Aquinas has it that natural law is, “nothing else than an imprint on us of the Divine light. It is therefore evident that the natural law is nothing else than the rational creature's participation of the eternal law” (Summa Theologica, First Part, Book Two, Question 91). He says eternal law is God’s plan for the governance of the world and we “participate” in that by understanding our place in the world. There are many fallacies in his analysis not the least of which is the idea that natural law does not apply to irrational creatures. His entire distinction between Eternal (divine) Law and Natural Law is perfectly circular.
5. Both quotations from St. Paul are taken from his first epistle to the Colossians, 1:24. Neither I nor the Pope knows what Paul meant about completing what is lacking in Christ’s suffering.
6. The Name of the Rose, Harcourt Brace, 1983, p.81.
7. In some ways, Prohibition was part and parcel of the anti-Catholicism that swept America from the 1840’s through the 1930’s. Know Nothings, Republicans and other anti-immigration nativists finally linked their causes in the slogan “Rum Romanism and Rebellion” in which the latter word conjured up the anarchist movement that began during the Civil War and developed into the labor wars.
