Condoms, Catholicism and Casuistry
Nov. 23, 2010
Amid the ongoing furor surrounding Pope Benedict’s comments about condom use in his latest book-length interview with Peter Seewald, it’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time that Seewald and Benedict (then Joseph Ratzinger) have discussed the question of contraception. In their first interview, published as “Salt of the Earth” in 1996, Seewald asked Ratzinger if he understood why so many Christians find the Church’s teaching on birth control so incomprehensible. The then-cardinal replied as follows:
Yes, I can understand that quite well; the question is really complicated. In today’s troubled world, where the number of children cannot be very high given living conditions and so many other factors, it’s very easy to understand. In this matter, we ought to look less at the casuistry of individual cases and more at the major objectives the Church has in mind.
…. the first and most fundamental is to insist on the value of the child in society. In this area, in fact, there has been a remarkable change. Whereas in the simple societies of the past up to the nineteenth century, the blessing of children was regarded as the blessing, today children are conceived of almost as a threat. People think that they rob us of a place for the future, they threaten our own space, and so forth. In this matter a primary objective is to recover the original, true view that the child, the new human being, is a blessing. That by giving life we also receive it ourselves and that going out of ourselves and accepting the blessing of creation are good for man.
The second is that today we find ourselves before a separation of sexuality from procreation such as was not known earlier, and this makes it all the more necessary not to lose sight of the inner connection between the two … [Third], the Church wants to keep man human … we cannot resolve great moral problems simply with techniques, with chemistry, but most solve them morally, with a life-style. It is, I think — independently now of contraception — one of our great perils that we want to master even the human condition with technology, that we have forgotten that there are primordial human problems that are not susceptible of technological solutions but that demand a certain life-style and life decisions … I would say that in the question of contraception we ought to look more at these basic options in which the Church is leading the struggle for man. The point of the Church’s objections is to underscore this battle. The way these objections are formulated is perhaps not always completely felicitous, but what is at stake are such major cardinal points of human existence.
At this point, Seewald pressed him further. “The question remains whether you can reproach someone, say, a couple who already have several children, for not having a positive attitude toward children.”
And Ratzinger replied: “No, of course, and that shouldn’t happen, either.” Then Seewald again: “But must these people nevertheless have the idea that they are living some sort of sin if they …” And Ratzinger interrupts:
I would say that those are questions that ought to be discussed with one’s spiritual director, with one’s priest, because they can’t be projected into the abstract.
More even than in the latest interview, in this decade-old exchange with Seewald I have the sense that Ratzinger understands both the power and the weakness of Catholic teaching on contraception.
As a critique of culture, and as an expression of the gulf between the modern West’s understanding of sexuality and the traditional Christian approach to love and sex and marriage, the Church’s brief against artificial birth control looks, if anything, much more compelling today than it did when Pope Paul VI reaffirmed it in the famous/infamous 1968 encyclical
Humanae Vitae.
The Church was right to prophecy that a contraceptive-friendly culture would become increasingly hostile to traditional Christian sexual ethics across the board. (Many critics of traditional Christian sexual ethics would happily concede this point — Andrew Sullivan’s argument that “we are all sodomites now”, for instance, is premised on the assumption that heterosexual contraceptive use has played a significant role in undercutting the old Christian sexual consensus — and many Protestants have gradually become more sympathetic to the Catholic position for exactly this reason.)
Likewise, the Church’s assumption that the widespread use of artificial birth control would lead to more divorces and more abortions (rather than fewer of both, as many voices argued in the ’60s) was largely vindicated by subsequent trends.
The Church was also right to worry, as Paul VI put it in his encyclical, that advocates of contraception wouldn’t stop with protecting individual choices, and instead would ultimately “give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.” (The whole sorry story of population control efforts testify to papal prescience on this front.)
It was right to suspect that the advance of artificial reproductive technologies wouldn’t stop with ortho-trycyclen, and that the quest for technological “solutions” to intimate problems would lead to the commodification of human life on a grand scale.
And it was right (and is right) to argue that condoms by themselves do not represent a solution to the problems of disease and deprivation in the developing world, and to suggest that Western man is rather too quick to just hand out Trojans and declare victory.
The problem is that the power and persuasiveness of this critique diminishes when the subject turns from the broader cultural issues back to what Benedict/Ratzinger termed “the casuistry of individual cases.” (“Casuistry” is case-based moral reasoning; the term is often used pejoratively because of the way it was allegedly abused by certain 17th-century Jesuits.)
Here I don’t just mean individual cases like the kind the pope alluded to in his more recent comments — cases where someone is going to commit a serious sexual sin anyway, whether it’s prostitution (male or female) or adultery or something else, and the question is whether using a condom makes the sin worse or whether it can be instead (as Benedict puts it) “a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants.”
Nor do I mean the arguably more pressing question of whether condoms can be licit in cases where a husband has AIDS and his wife does not (or vice versa), and the prophylactic is being used primarily to prevent infection rather than to forestall conception.
I mean the more common kind of case that many people stumble over, and that Seewald brought up in 1996: The Catholic married couple that’s just trying to space out their children, whether for financial or emotional or medical reasons, and that either has trouble practicing natural family planning, or simply can’t grasp the distinction between using N.F.P. and occasionally using a condom.
Here the Church struggles and struggles, in ways that it doesn’t on other controversial issues, to make its teaching understood and its moral reasoning transparent. (This is apparent in polling data: There are many millions of Catholics who accept the Church’s demanding, countercultural teachings on divorce, premarital sex, priestly celibacy, embryo-destruction and abortion, but then look more like dissenters when the subject of artificial birth control comes up.)
Orthodox Catholics sometimes argue that the problem is simply that the teaching hasn’t been adequately explicated and defended, whether by bishops or priests or laypeople — and there’s truth to this. But the problem probably runs deeper than that: It isn’t just that the arguments for the teaching aren’t advanced vigorously and eloquently enough; it’s that the distinctions that the Church makes bump up against people’s moral intuitions more than they do on other fronts, and the Church’s arguments often take on a kind of hair-splitting quality that’s absent on other hot-button questions. (As in: The natural law permits me to rigorously chart my temperature and/or measure my cervical mucus every day in an effort to avoid conception, but it doesn’t permit me to use a condom? Really?)
I think a lot of Catholics can follow the argument that contraceptive use is an occasion of sin, or even that it reflects a kind of “social sin” (to borrow the jargon of progressive Catholicism for a moment), but then still have trouble getting all the way to the logic of the absolute ban, or grasping the distinction between barrier methods and fertility charting as means of regulating family size.
Which is why, more than in other instances, the Church’s leadership tends to fall back on the arguments from tradition and authority: You rarely hear Catholic bishops saying of abortion, “we won’t change the teaching because we can’t change the teaching,” but you’re more likely to hear that argument when the subject turns to birth control, because (I suspect) they’re less confident about the other arguments at their disposal.
Now for a serious Catholic, the argument from tradition and authority is a real argument, not just the dodge that many people assume it to be. And the fact that the Church’s moral reasoning seems unpersuasive may just reflect the distorting impact of a contraceptive culture on the individual conscience. (I imagine that would be Elizabeth Anscombe’s view of the matter, for instance, if the great Catholic philosopher were alive to elaborate on her famous 1972 essay on this subject.)
But whatever the impact of cultural prejudices, the problem of widespread unpersuasiveness remains, and I think you can see that difficulty at work in the way Ratzinger talked about the issue in 1996, and the way (as Benedict) he talks about it today.
In what he chooses to emphasize and what he chooses to downplay, he seems aware that the Church’s view of contraception is more easily grasped in the general than in the particular, and more compelling in its judgment of Western culture than in its condemnation of every individual case where contraception is employed.
[Benedict XVI is very well aware that some Catholic teachings are probably more honored in the breach, and he says so in the new book when he talks about Humanae vitae, referring to the 'minorities' who gind its precepts 'fascinating' and live it as a model for all those we might call 'conscientious objectors'.].
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 29/11/2010 05:14]