In
today’s lecture I am not proposing to go into detail concerning the way Pope
Paul VI’s notorious enyclical Humanae Vitae
(1968) came to be written - for example, concerning the
degree of consultation there may or may not have been with members of the laity,
or with married people specifically.
The Pope did indeed consult widely and carefully
before producing the document, but in the end he made his own decision - as it
happens, this went against the majority verdict of the committee he had set up
to advise him.
But that was his privilege.
I will also
not be dealing with the
question of whether the encyclical falls into the category of ‘infallible’
doctrine that all Catholics are bound to accept as an expression of what is
called the authoritative teaching or magisterium
of the Church (which I believe it does). You may remember Newman’s saying that
he would drink to the Pope, but to conscience first and the Pope afterwards.
Well, without appealing to authority, I simply want
to concentrate on what the encyclical actually says, and whether what it says is
reasonable or not.
I will argue that it is
reasonable: in fact, I would still think so even if it was not a teaching of the
Church.
I will not
be looking at statistics of the numbers of Catholics
who do or do not accept the teaching.
After all, if a thing is true it is
true, whether or not people
agree with it.
We do not decide the truth by a majority vote.
If the whole world, or the whole Catholic world,
voted that black was white or murder was right, then I would have to disagree -
and so, I hope, would the Pope, even if his expert committees advised him to do
otherwise.
So let us look at this
encyclical about the transmission of human life,
which was provoked by the invention and growing availability of the
contraceptive pill.
I know I am not going to convince you to change your
minds about it, if you already have a view, in a few short minutes.
But it seems worthwhile presenting it in some
detail, if only for the reason that many people have not given the Pope’s
teaching on this a fair hearing.
It also happens to be an important element in
Catholic social teaching, which is particularly concerned with marriage and the
family as the basis for human society.
The Pope begins in
section 2 by referring to the widespread fear of a
population explosion on the one hand, and the
well-known economic difficulties of supporting a
large family on the other.
He refers to the ‘new understanding of the
dignity of woman and her place
in society’, and of love and sex in marriage.
And he speaks of
scientific progress that now enables us to exert
greater rational control over the forces of nature.
Then he poses the
question (section 3): Granted the conditions of life
today and taking into account the relevance of married love to the harmony and
mutual fidelity of husband and wife, would it not be right to review the moral
norms in force till now, especially when it is felt that these can be observed
only with the gravest difficulty, sometimes only by heroic effort?
Using technical language (which I will paraphrase)
he asks what is wrong with making individual sexual
acts infertile, as long as the couple are still open
to having children together at some time?
Such people are not ‘anti-life’; they may actually
want children.
But there may be very good reasons for wanting to
delay conception.
You see from this that,
right from the outset, the Pope was by no means ignorant of the issues at stake,
or the strength of the arguments being made in favour of permitting
contraception within marriage.
(He is not
talking, of course, about non-married couples.)
He then goes on to speak
about why he feels as Pope he is called upon to make a pronouncement in this
area (4-6).
That bit I will skip over: we can take it as read.
In Part II he begins by
referring to a key document of Vatican II called
Gaudium et Spes.
The reason he does this is that he is going to try
to base himself on the ‘spiritual anthropology’ outlined in that document.
He thinks it would be too limiting to base himself
on biology, psychology or sociology - important though these are - without
taking into account also the supernatural dimension of life (7).
Marriage, as he defines it, is not just a result of
‘the blind evolution of natural forces’, but the design of God:
husband and wife, through that mutual gift of themselves
which is specific and exclusive to them alone, seek to develop that kind of
personal union in which they complement one another in order to co-operate with
God in the generation and education of new lives.
(Interestingly, the Pope
does not talk much about marriage as a sacrament,
perhaps because this is not intended to be a
theological encyclical but more of a philosophical
one.
More has been written on the sacramental side of the
question since 1968, and I will be saying something about later on.
In section 8, however, he does say that in the case
of baptized Christians
the union called marriage becomes a sacrament, because then it represents or
participates in the union of Christ and the Church.
In such a case the Holy Spirit becomes the bond
between the couple, just as he is also the bond uniting the Church.
It is this, by the way, which makes the union
indissoluble.)
The next section (9)
spells out in more detail the nature of married love as a special form of
friendship, with a vital
spiritual dimension.
This love overflows the couple into the creation of
new life.
But parenthood must always be
responsible.
The Pope goes on to explain the different senses of
responsible parenthood.
·
The couple must be aware
of the biological and psychological processes involved.
·
They must be intelligent,
exerting their reason and will.
·
They must decide
for themselves what size of family they should be aiming at.
·
But in all of this they must carry out their
responsibilities with respect for the moral law
that corresponds to the will of the Creator (10).
The Pope adds that sex
is ‘honourable and good’ even when it is foreseen to
be infertile.
In other words, it is not good only because it may lead to
children (11).
The ‘marriage act’ (as the Pope delicately calls it) has a
unitive quality; which
means that it unites the couple ‘in the closest intimacy’, into a single
organism, ‘one flesh’.
That is a good and a holy thing, whether or not
children happen to result from it. The pleasure of sex is part of the gift that
each can give the other. St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas thought that sex
would have been even more pleasurable if Adam had not sinned.
Here you see an
expression of a little-known fact about the Catholic Christian tradition: it
does not devalue the human body and human experience and human love.
In fact, it puts more
value and emphasis on those things than any other tradition, and more (I would
argue) than those who would like us to manipulate those things with technology
and indulge in free love.
The early Church
opposed the Gnostics who wanted to escape the body altogether, and the
medieval Church opposed the
Manichaeans who thought the body was evil.
(More recently she opposed the Calvinists, Puritans
and Jansenists.)
Now the modern Church
opposes materialists who think God has nothing to do with the physical act of
making love.
This modern heresy is the direct result of the process of
secularization, namely the splitting of nature from grace, depriving it of a
supernatural dimension.
The Pope is trying to overcome this dualism in one
of its most dangerous forms.
Let’s get back to the
text.
As we all know, in the plan of God, sexual intercourse is
sometimes (though not always) fertile.
In fact normally the woman is fertile for only two
or three days per month.
On those occasions, the Pope says, sex does not just
have a unitive meaning;
it has also a procreative
meaning (12).
The Pope argues against the separation of those two
meanings.
This is the core of his argument in the encyclical, so it
is worth paying close attention.
(Unfortunately it is very concentrated, and uses
fairly abstract and non-poetic language, so it doesn’t communicate very well!)
I think we would all
agree that one partner cannot force sex on the other (rape her, for example)
without committing a sin against love.
What happens then is that the capacity of sex to
nourish the spiritual unity of the couple is damaged or destroyed.
Thus in marital rape the ‘unitive’ dimension of sex
is under attack.
It no longer serves to unite the couple: in fact it
may then start to divide them.
In the same way, the Pope says, one partner cannot
deliberately impair or damage the capacity to
conceive life without committing a sin against the
procreative dimension of love (13).
To do something (like take a pill) in order to
sterilize the act would be to try to have the unitive aspect of sex while at the
same time suppressing the procreative.
These two dimensions God has bound together in a
single sacred act, and he has not given man the
authority to change them.
In a famous phrase, the Pope says that man ‘is not
the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design
established by the Creator’ (13).
This is the really
difficult bit of the argument, so I will add a comment or two of my own to try
to make it clearer.
Please notice, by the way, that whether a form of
birth regulation is called ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ has
nothing to do with the argument
the Pope is making.*
The crucial thing is whether a person is attempting
to sterilize a given act
of intercourse.
This does not
happen when the couple is using NFP (Natural Family Planning), as the Pope
emphasizes very clearly in section 16.
NFP only involves becoming aware of
exactly when sex would be
fertile, and avoiding intercourse on those few days every month.
He is not talking here about the old ‘Vatican
roulette’.
NFP can be extremely scientific, and as reliable as the
pill in regulating the size of a family.
The intention may still be to avoid conceiving a
child, but there a big difference in what is actually done.
The nature of the act
is not being deliberately changed on a given occasion from one that would create
life to one that would not.
This
is the point that most people do not grasp.
They think that because the intention may be
in both cases to avoid conceiving a child, the two things are morally the same.
But there is an important distinction, even in the intention in these two
cases. Let’s take a couple who are using
contraceptives. There would
obviously be no point in their using a contraceptive if they did not think a
child might otherwise be conceived.
Why take all those horrible chemicals into your body if you didn’t have to?
Therefore the act of taking or using the contraceptive has to have a
point. It is directed against the
good of the specific child who would otherwise be conceived.
For whatever set of motives (whether good or bad) an act is being done
directly against life. The couple
may still be ‘open to life’ in a general sort of way - eventually, somewhere,
sometime - but they are definitely not open to life on this particular
occasion.
There would be nothing
wrong with all this, in my view, if God did not exist, or if the act of
conceiving a child were merely a biological process.
But if there is
a God, and if he is directly involved in the creation and conception of a child,
then a rather disconcerting fact follows, which I will put rather crudely like
this.
The couple is not actually
alone in the bed when they make love:
God is in there with them.
So the act of contraception - whatever form it takes
- is a way of trying to have sex without God, to ‘push God out of the bed’.
The couple are effectively saying, ‘God might be
going to create a child: so we have to prevent him doing so!’
You could say that it is
therefore God, and not
just the child he might otherwise create, who is the actual target of the
contraceptive.
The act of love may still be pleasurable, comforting, or
psychologically beneficial in various ways.
It may be relatively unselfish, in the sense that it
may be done for the sake of the other, not for one’s own pleasure.
But since it is only God’s presence in the marriage
bed that unites the couple into one spiritual flesh,
we can see that contraception must in some sense corrode the essence of the
sacrament of marriage (attacking at its root even the ‘unitive’ function of
sex).
The physical love of the couple can no longer function as
the channel of the special grace characteristic of
marriage.
Let’s get back to the
encyclical.
The Pope goes on at this point to explain that in Catholic
moral philosophy it may sometimes be morally right to
tolerate something bad in order
to bring about something good - or in order to avoid something worse.
But it can never
be right to deliberately do wrong
so that good may come of it (14).
The end does not justify the means.
In the short term it may seem like a good idea (for
all sorts of reasons) to lie, or cheat on a test, or even to kill, but in the
long run one has always damaged something very important, very deep.
One has ‘gained the world and lost one’s soul’.
Humanae
Vitae also suggests four specific ways
in which the use of contraception - as part of what is called a movement of
‘sexual liberation’ - might damage not just the soul of the individual, but
society at large (17).
·
It might lead to an increase in marital infidelity and a
general lowering of morality, by making promiscuity much easier.
That is in fact exactly what has happened.
·
It might damage the dignity of women, by making possible
their sexual exploitation by men.
That too has happened, as many feminists admit.
·
It might lead to the use of forced contraception or
sterilization as an instrument of government policy.
In fact the Pope was quite right, and we find (not
just in China) a new eugenics movement like that of the Nazis gathering strength
around the world.
·
Fourthly, Paul
VI speaks of the ‘reverence’ due to the whole human organism, especially in the
generation of life, and the danger of exceeding the limits of our own authority
over it.
In regard to the forth
point, we have seen since 1968 the spread of the idea that the human body is
something that can not only be interfered with, but genetically altered and
eventually redesigned at will.
We have seen human fertility not merely treated with
lack of respect, but actually treated like a disease, and this is often linked
to the even worse idea that new life that may have been conceived in the womb -
if for whatever reason it is not wanted by the mother - may be treated as an
infection and killed.
I won’t go on.
I think it is pretty clear why many people regard
Humanae Vitae as a
prophetic document.
The encyclical ends with
a section called ‘Pastoral Directives’.
This includes one particularly important point,
which should not be neglected.
It is the point about the positive
benefit to be obtained from
trying to follow the Church’s teaching.
It is easy to concentrate on the negative things
being said about contraception, and to lose sight of the much more important
thing about the alternative.
NFP is not just an approved way of limiting
reproduction.
NFP, properly practised, is a spiritual path for families.
It is a way to integrate sexuality into love: a way
to humanize and
civilize the energies of the
body and soul.
It requires us to grow in sensitivity and respect for our
own bodies, for each other and for God’s presence in marriage.
It enables us to cultivate what used to be called
the virtue of chastity. The
‘self-mastery’ which makes possible periodic continence is essential for the
development of full human freedom, and therefore for the growth in our ability
to love.
It is this message about NFP (as well as the one about its
effectiveness) that Catholic educators have somehow failed to get across to
large numbers of people.
(There are of course a multitude of reasons for
this, not just the incompetence of educators. One might include the prevailing
‘mood’ in society, the pervasive influence of Freudian ideology, the effects of
the pornography industry, the lack of investment in educational resources, the
fact that few people want to sit down and listen to talks about mucus…)
Let me summarize what I
have been saying.
The encyclical was a defence of the traditional
teaching of the Church on the sacredness of the body, a defence of human
reproduction as a co-creation with God, and an affirmation of the dignity of
women.
It argued that there may well be reasons - whether personal
or ecological - for limiting the size of one’s family, and of having fewer
children.
But it said that this limitation should be brought about by
the development of more reliable forms of NFP practised voluntarily by couples,
rather than through the technological manipulation of fertility, particularly as
an instrument of government policy.
Finally, I want to refer
to one obvious objection to what I have been saying, and then to mention
developments since Humanae Vitae
in two areas (the theology of the body, and NFP).
The obvious objection is
that Pope Paul VI is speaking about an ideal of
marriage that only a handful will ever attain.
The first answer to that is that the same objection
also applies to Christianity itself (the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the
Mount, etc.).
Besides, some people do manage, by and large, to attain
that ideal.
But the more important point is that if you abolish the
ideal no one will even try.
The Church has to teach the truth about
what God wants us to do.
At the same time, though, the Church has to be
understanding and forgiving
when we fail and fall short.
Here you may feel there is plenty of room for
improvement – although if you read the official documents from Rome for
confessors and priests about how to handle people who have problems in this
area, you might be surprised how well the balance is maintained (of course, it
is easier to do that in a document than in a real life confessional).
[Take the 1997
Vademecum for Confessors from
the Pontifical Council for the Family.
On the one hand, it says, ‘Christian couples are
witnesses of God’s love in the world.
They must therefore be convinced, with the
assistance of faith and even in spite of their experience of human weakness,
that it is possible to
observe the will of the Lord in conjugal life with divine grace.
Frequent and persevering recourse to prayer, to the
Eucharist and to the sacrament of Reconciliation, are indispensable for gaining
mastery of self.’
On the other hand, ‘The principle according to which
it is preferable to let penitents remain in good faith
in cases of error due to subjectively invincible ignorance
{my emphasis}, is certainly to be considered always valid, even in matters of
conjugal chastity.
And this applies whenever it is foreseen that the
penitent, although oriented towards living within the bounds of a life of faith,
would not be prepared to change his own conduct, but rather would begin formally
to sin.
Nonetheless, in these cases, the confessor must try to
bring such penitents ever closer to accepting God’s plan in their own lives,
even in these demands, by means of prayer, admonition and exhorting them to form
their consciences, and by the teaching of the Church.’
And the document goes on to consider those
difficult cases where one
spouse insists on using contraception even though the other would prefer not to,
carefully explaining the conditions under which it would
not be a sin for the other to
cooperate.]
The teaching of
Humanae Vitae is non-negotiable
in a very basic sense.
However, even if we accept that, we are left with
the question of how to understand and communicate it, and secondly of how to
apply it - both within
marriage, where difficulties arise or where marital love is already under
attack, and also outside Christian marriage altogether.
Progress has been made
since 1968 in two main areas.
Firstly, there have been enormous advances in the
technology and
techniques of NFP, and in the development of
training programmes suitable
for Third World situations.
(Of course more could have been done more quickly if
the same money had been invested in it that had been put into the technology of
contraception.)
I believe it can truly be claimed now that if a
population problem exists in any given part of the world, that problem could be
solved by grass-roots education in NFP.
(It has also become fairly widely admitted that the
dangers of population explosion have been in any case greatly exaggerated,
although my argument does not depend on that being the case.)
Secondly, progress has
been made under Pope John Paul II in understanding and explaining the doctrine
of Humanae Vitae in
moral and theological terms (the “theology of the body”).
In the Christian anthropology developed by John Paul
II, biology as a dimension of personhood becomes a
language for expressing love - a language rooted in
the Trinity and in the divine likeness in man and woman.
According to Gaudium et
Spes (24), ‘man can only find himself by making a
sincere gift of himself’.
This gift echoes the loving exchange that goes on
eternally between the Persons of the Trinity.
Contraception can then be understood in terms of the
language of the body as the moral equivalent of a lie: for it falsifies the
statement which the body makes every time the couple give themselves to each
other in the act of love.
When
Humanae Vitae was published,
the arguments to support it remained largely undeveloped and implicit.
That is no longer the case, although there is still
much more to be said.
If anyone’s curiosity has been aroused by this talk,
and they wish to explore the subject for themselves, I would be happy to help
them do so.
NOTE
*
Nevertheless, it could be argued that NFP (even when it employs technological
means, such as thermometers) will always be more in
harmony with nature than contraception is, because
it does not aim to hinder the normal functioning of human biology – just as a
medical technique aimed at restoring health could be called more ‘natural’ than
one that aimed at damaging or temporarily impairing it.
It is in this sense of ‘natural’ that G.K.
Chesterton writes that ‘birth control’ is ‘a name given to a succession of
different expedients (the one that was used last is always described as having
been dreadfully dangerous) by which it is possible to filch the pleasure
belonging to a natural process while violently and unnaturally thwarting the
process itself’ (‘Social Reform versus Birth Control’).
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