Moral Awakenings?Anthony McCarthy

Oh for the days when the pope was a prisoner in the Vatican and spoke in the first person plural!

Author of

Is Notre Dame Still Catholic?

"The pope said that condom use to prevent the transmission of HIV is ‘a first step in amovement toward a different way, a more humane sexuality.’ This admission is theCatholic hierarchy’s own first step in addressing the realities about sex and sexuality.

Catholics for Choice 21

November 2010Pope Benedict’s latest statement on condoms has provoked a storm of differentreactions. On the one hand, many welcome what they see as a change or clarificationof Church teaching - or at least the start of a debate. These include not only liberalCatholics, who have never accepted the Church’s teaching on sex, but conservativeCatholics who wish to support the Church’s teaching on sex but assume (in theabsence of definitive teaching) that it applies to condoms used for contraception, notfor ‘saving lives’. Other orthodox Catholics have rushed to say that the media has gratuitouslymisrepresented the Pope’s words, and that what he has said is simply true andcommendable and changes nothing. The Pope has done no wrong: it is all the fault of the Vatican newspaper

l’Osservatore Romano

for premature and selective quotingfrom a mistranslated text. One ethics centre described the Pope’s comments as“significant and thoughtful”.What is going on here? To answer this question, it may be helpful to go back a fewdecades to the 1960s. Many Catholics, including highly orthodox Catholics, expectedthat the Church would change her mind on the question of contraception. Sexualliberation and population control were two growth areas at the time, and a great dealof US elite Foundation money was pumped into promoting both worldwide. Duringthis period a papal commission was set up to deliberate on whether the Church’straditional absolute prohibition on contraceptive acts should remain. Thatcommission, peopled, as it turned out, by members funded by the Population Counciland the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, unsurprisingly decided it should not. In 1968, Pope Paul VI definitively reiterated the Church’s traditional teaching byissuing the encyclical Humanae Vitae. However, during the years leading up to 1968,speculation had grown so rife, and the sexual revolution had become so victorious,that by the time a seemingly dithering Church got around to upholding her teaching,she had lost many Catholics on the ground. Why is the teaching of Humanae Vitae, whatever we might think of it, so important?Elizabeth Anscombe, the great philosopher, bluntly pointed out that “If contraceptiveintercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be, after all, to mutualmasturbation, or copulation

in vase indebito

, sodomy, buggery...But, if such things are

all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexualintercourse for example...you will have no solid reason against these things.” In 1930, at the 7

Lambeth Conference of the Church of England, approval was givento married couples for the use of birth control in hard cases. The current Archbishopof Canterbury recently admitted that this move did indeed open the way to acceptanceof the very things Anscombe mentioned - something he, unlike her, appears towelcome. So, ideas have consequences, and ideas about sexual ethics have especially significantconsequences. The Pope knows this. So, more importantly, do the leaders of institutions committed to condom-promotion on a multi-billion dollar scale. Anystatement by the former on this matter will be met with great interest on the part of thelatter. After all, the only major religious institution that has a consistent and seriousopposition to condom-use in practice is the Catholic Church. And maintaining suchopposition coheres with a whole set of propositions about the nature and dignity of thehuman person when it comes to sex and its nuptial meaning. Those propositions donot sit easily with a population-control and/or sexual liberationist agenda. Using a condom to prevent the transmission of disease is not contraception, if there isno intent to prevent conception. However, there is reason to see the Church’s teachingas applying to all condomistic sexual acts, regardless of whether there is any intent tocontracept. For the only morally good sexual acts are those of a married couple whoare truly united, in a way that refers to conception even in the infertile. Sexual love isabout a physical uniting: in the process of loving, procreation can occur and in theopenness to procreation, love is expressed. Pope Benedict’s predecessor John Paul IIexplained it thus: “The contraceptive act introduces a substantial diminution into thisreciprocal giving, and expresses an objective refusal to give to the other

the whole good

of femininity and masculinity.” By extension, a condom used for disease- prevention, even by a married couple, makes an act incapable of being a trulyunifying act. The act, like an act of buggery, is no longer capable of expressing theunity that only an act open to procreation can achieve. What did Jozef Ratzinger have to say on these matters, before he became Pope? OnMay 29

1988, in a letter to Archbishop Pio Laghi on the subject of AIDS, he pointedout that ‘safe sex’ programmes ignore the real cause of the problem, i.e. sexual permissiveness, and that one is dealing not just with

a form of passive toleration but rather with a kind of behavior which would result inat least the facilitation of evil.

Ratzinger added that

The problem of educational programs in specifically Catholic schools and institutionsrequires particular attention. These facilities are called to provide their owncontribution for the prevention of AIDS, in full fidelity to the moral doctrine of thechurch, without at the same time engaging in compromises which may even give theimpression of trying to condone practices which are immoral, for example, technical instructions in the use of prophylactic devices.

So far so clear. Even giving an ‘impression’ of condoning certain practices is to becondemned. Fast-forward to the present day, and the now-famous

Light of the World

interview, inwhich the Pope again speaks on condoms, but in a way that has confused the world. Condoms are not, the Pope says, “a real or moral solution” to the problem of AIDS. Nonetheless, there may be a “basis” (or persons may be ‘justified’ (begründete)) inthe case of some individuals (male prostitutes, say), where using a condom “can be afirst step in the direction of a moralisation” even if “not really the way to deal with theevil of HIV infection” . (One might add here that condoms do not in any case offer significant safety to those engaged in homosexual penetration.)Since “basis” or “justification” cannot mean objective justification of something(condom use) which the Pope appears here to condemn, it must mean some kind of grounding from the person’s own perspective and/or a factual basis for some processof ‘moral awakening’. Well, that wouldn’t directly contradict the prohibition. But whyon earth say this? Compare: “There may be a basis, in the case of some individualairmen, to issue a few not terribly effective radiation suits for people in cities they aregoing to drop nuclear bombs on. That can be the first step toward a moral life; it could be the first instance of taking responsibility toward developing a consciousness thatnot everything is permitted and that a man can’t do everything he wants to do.” Of course, as a factual statement (as opposed to a recommendation) this could be correct – but would still be unwise to say. How many nuclear bomb-dropping pilots mighttake comfort from such words, and tarry before exiting from their immoraloccupations? The Pope seems to be recognising an element of concern for others which (necessarilywrongful) preparation for wrongful acts - the male prostitute donning a condom, the pilot dropping the suits as a preparatory act - may nonetheless involve. Such peoplemay be moving in the direction of greater humanity in the midst of very serious moralevil. To say this is not to say that use of condoms or protective suits by those withthese criminal occupations is recommended; on the contrary, it is vital not to lull people into a false sense of security by inviting them to prepare for wrongful acts.Prostitutes should be helped out of prostitution, not encouraged to continue "moresafely". As if all this weren’t confusing enough, the Papal spokesman, Fr Lombardi, later claimed that Pope Benedict had said his comments also applied to female prostitutes.This is more relevant than it might seem. A man using a condom who has sex with a prostitute is showing some concern for her and his own health; he is also, on at leastone view of Catholic teaching, engaged in perverse sex – as is always the case withmale prostitutes. So while the heterosexual client’s choice to use a condom is better from one perspective, in that it shows a glimmering of concern for others, it is worsefrom another perspective. One might equally say that in choosing

not

to use condoms,an unmarried couple could be showing the beginning of moral awakening concerningthe true meaning of sex (or even that, in certain extraordinary circumstances, thechoice of a homosexual

not

to use a condom might be due to some specialconcern/moral awakening of concern for a male prostitute). However, such astatement would be less confusing than the Pope’s actual statement, as no-one would