All this talk of contraception forced me to actually go and read what the Vatican really thinks about the subject. I knew that the Catholic Church teaches that birth control is immoral, but I had never bothered to check their precise reasoning. It appears that the most important document on the subject is an Encyclical Letter that was delivered by Pope Paul VI on July 25, 1968. It was the culmination of a process that had begun five years earlier during the papacy of John XXIII, who had created a commission to study the issue.
This commission included married couples as well as many experts in the various fields pertinent to these questions. Its task was to examine views and opinions concerning married life, and especially on the correct regulation of births; and it was also to provide the teaching authority of the Church with such evidence as would enable it to give an apt reply in this matter, which not only the faithful but also the rest of the world were waiting for.
When the evidence of the experts had been received, as well as the opinions and advice of a considerable number of Our brethren in the episcopate—some of whom sent their views spontaneously, while others were requested by Us to do so—We were in a position to weigh with more precision all the aspects of this complex subject. Hence We are deeply grateful to all those concerned.
Essentially, the sudden widespread availability of the birth control pill starting in roughly 1960, forced the Catholic Church to take a fresh look at their position. And they did listen to all sides. They acknowledged that people were beginning to worry about global population growth and ecological sustainability. They noted that economic realities and social changes were making it harder to sustain large families. They even picked up a hint of the feminist movement:
Also noteworthy is a new understanding of the dignity of woman and her place in society, of the value of conjugal love in marriage and the relationship of conjugal acts to this love.
In other words, people realized that women would prefer to marry for love rather than to increase the influence of their fathers.
Most interestingly, the Vatican took “reason” seriously:
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…
…A further question is whether, because people are more conscious today of their responsibilities, the time has not come when the transmission of life should be regulated by their intelligence and will rather than through the specific rhythms of their own bodies.
They thought about this. But they totally rejected it. And they rejected it for a nobler reason than simply scolding us for being lustful, sinful creatures. It comes down to their peculiar view of marriage. The key is that marriage is a sacrament. It’s a sacred union. For the Church, no sexual activity outside of this sacred union is valid or permissible. But within the sacred union, sexual acts are necessary to help the couple remain close and grow together and maintain their fidelity to each other. The importance of sex for maintaining the strength of marriage is important enough that the Church doesn’t mind if married couples have sex even when they know they are not fertile. Yet, it’s not allowable to intentionally undermine your fertility because that robs God of his role in the sacred union.
Men rightly observe that a conjugal act imposed on one’s partner without regard to his or her condition or personal and reasonable wishes in the matter, is no true act of love, and therefore offends the moral order in its particular application to the intimate relationship of husband and wife. If they further reflect, they must also recognize that an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life. Hence to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the plan of God and His holy will. But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source.
Here the Church has explicitly linked the act of raping your wife to using contraception, which is basically seen as raping God. It is raping God by denying him dominion of your body.
I admit that this is a more graceful line of reasoning than, “don’t do that, you harlot!” It has a lot to do with their concern for marital health, for example. And there’s something beautiful about the way they idealize conjugal love and it’s natural consequence, children.
However, the problem is that they have rejected reason, science, medicine, women’s dignity, and our dominion over our bodies in favor of a highly idealized view of marriage and a totally unrealistic interpretation of human sexuality and happiness.
It’s a strain to the modern American mind to try to think about all sexual activity as occurring only in a marital context. How many people do you know who married as virgins? For all the people who are currently in sexual relationships outside of marriage, the Catholic teaching doesn’t really have any meaning.
I think that’s why so few Catholics follow the Church’s teaching on contraception. It’s too anachronistic and foreign to make sense to most people.
Regardless, the Church is free to have their doctrines, and their doctrines should be respected. But their doctrines cannot replace medical science and best practices. I think Obama’s compromise struck the right balance. No women will be unwillingly denied needed medical care, but the Church can keep a step removed from actions they find morally reprehensible.
A sacrament is an extended metaphor. The metaphor in question is “The church is the bride of Christ.” That correspondence to human marriage and metaphor of faithfulness is what make human marriage sacred for the church. Make churchy folks think they own the word “marriage”.
In this case, the fathers of the Church seem to have extended the metaphor a bit too far. Another failure of reasoning by analogy.
no, a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. it’s important to understand that in the Roman Catholic theology of sacraments, it’s an ontological category. For example, when the priest consecrates (“sacralizes) the bread and wine it actually becomes (ontologically) the body and blood of Christ. [hence the force of ACT-UP’s desecration of the Host in the 80’s). I am not a Catholic theologian, and I don’t even play one on teevee, but I would think there is/ or will be someday leeway within Catholic doctrine to include God in the human expression of sexuality without necessarily procreation. I believe that’s the theological move that Episcopalian theologians have made – it opens the door to marriage equality, etc.
Pretending like there’s actually a substantive policy issue involved, that needs investigating, is just enabling republicans.
It’s a brouhaha for one reason, and one reason only: because Obama did it.
Pretending otherwise is just supporting republican lies.
It’s not really that I think there is a whole lot of substance here. I can see why officials in the Catholic Church don’t want to offer health insurance that covers procedures or medicines that they think are morally wrong. But my point in writing this was to discuss why they think birth control is morally wrong. I think their reasoning is at least worth discussing.
I pay for a lot of things that I believe are morally wrong.
All you have to do in this country is invoke religion and your wishes are respected and you’re able to exempt yourself from what others must do.
Never mind that moral and legal crimes are committed and covered up by the very church whose morals we’re worrying about here.
I should have said you’re worrying about their moral sensibilities. I am not.
It’s certainly worth understanding, even while I think that calling their rhetoric “reasoning” is incorrect.
But your examination makes clear: they have no business imposing a birth control ban on non-believers. It’s all about the theology.
I just asked Thor, and he said that buggering pedophile-enablers with axe handles is a sacred duty. The only question is “which end of the axe goes in first?”
Is it supposed to snow in Boo’s neck of the woods tomorrow? 😉 But really, it’s more than just PBO doing it. Mitch, The Frothy One and the rest of the GOP would freak out no matter what Democrat did it.
Man, I was thinking about that line about Bob Casey being a warm ziploc bag of vaseline and crushed valium. And I realized how much I hated Casey six years ago. I probably should still hate him that much, but I think the crushed valium crossed over into my bloodstream.
That was some humdinger!! sadly .. I didn’t start reading this blog until sometime after that election .. did Casey ever campaign at all? Fortunately .. he hasn’t been as bad as you feared .. but he certainly hasn’t made a name for himself in a good way either .. he’s been content to hide in the shadows I guess
WOW – what happened to that young firebrand who called it like it was (is)?
Chris’s original post is lost, but Albert linked to it here. The actual quote was “a sandwich bag filled with lukewarm Vaseline and crushed Valium.”
Garry Wills’s Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit shows, from a Catholic perspective, just how badly Paul VI screwed the pooch on this one.
Yeah, maybe the Vatican’s reasoning is more elegant than “Don’t do that, you harlot!” But for the (almost all older male) wingnuts that turned this dustup into an insta-controversy, that was exactly the message. A message, incidentally, that most women heard loud and clear, along with “your body does not belong to you.”
As for being an anachronistic policy, how does channelling God and protecting the purity of His biological creation in the sacred institution of marriage relate to an organization that at its highest levels continues to go out of its way to protect and enable thousands of child-fucking priests?
Well, whether you faithfully observe your vow of celibacy, you nail prepubescent girls, or you stick to boy-toys, birth control really isn’t an issue.
You’re wildly off-topic, Geov.
I’m not fully comfortable with answering everything the Church advocates with a reminder of “CHILD-RAPE!” But I do think the absolutely endemic universality of the pedophilia crisis across all borders and continents, means that there is something deeply incorrect about the Church’s attitude toward human sexuality. They must have some of the most basic things so deeply wrong for this kind of thing to happen over and over again everywhere you care to look.
Yes. very interested in your post because I had assumed that at core the Catholic view was that human sexuality is not an expression of God’s goodness, or goodness of creation in and of itself, but merely instrumental (towards the goal of procreation).
The truth is that celibacy was instituted in the priesthood for pragmatic reasons – keeping bishops from passing down their bishopric and associated lands (money) to their heirs, keeping it in the possession of the Church – so it can (and should) be rescinded for equally pragmatic reasons, namely minimizing the buggering of altar boys.
Well, that would make sense only if marriage had anything to do with sexual abuse or having sex at all. Don’t you think that pedophiles would just get married and keep abusing children, like Sandusky is accused of?
Priests take a vow of not marrying, not a vow to not have sex. The fact that they do often have sex with women is no graver a sin than any other single male engaging in fornication, although it invites scandal because of their teaching authority on moral questions. The fact that some people are also pedophiles in addition to being married or to being priests has nothing to do with either sexual liberty or marriage.
For a priest (or any devout Christian) no marriage equals no sex – they are inextricable. The point is that many people who struggle with their sexuality (or aspects of it) often flee to the priesthood thinking that forced celibacy will “cure” them of what ails them.
It doesn’t – never has, never will – and the results are often FUBAR.
No, there is simply no evidence for that. While it has been shown by the church’s own studies that many homosexual men “flee” to the priesthood because of social discrimination in other parts of society, there has never been any documentation that anyone becomes a priest in order to avoid sleeping around any more than people get married for that purpose. Psychologists and counselors are pretty much in agreement that marriage is not an effective remedy for philandering, and neither is the priesthood perceived as such. Philanderers get married and continue to have sex with other women, and they become priests and continue to do so as well.
They do.
And what they have wrong was said for them by the Catholic League in just this battle over contraceptive coverage.
A League spokesman said going without sex doesn’t make you sick.
Their understanding of the place of sex in human life and its role in human happiness is, just as you say, totally wrong-headed.
Thing is, it’s not just the Catholic clergy who think that way.
The Christian clergy of all conservative denominations and the conservative Christian clergy of all denominations share a common outlook on the morality of sex.
Not just the part about the natural (and divine) law and the inherent finality of sex in reproduction that condemns all – ALL – sex other than that between a married straight couple in which the risk of pregnancy is diminished only by monthly timing.
But also the part you may not have looked into, yet, about human personhood beginning at conception with the miraculous infusion of the rational soul by God, right then, on the spot.
The most powerful sermon I ever heard against abortion, based on just this notion, I heard on the radio here in Pittsburgh more than two decades ago.
It was delivered by a Presbyterian minister.
The Penn State case, however, is pretty strong evidence that Catholicism is not the instrument for child sexual abuse or for covering it up, don’t you think? There instead seems to be something much more prevalent throughout society that causes care-giving and educational organizations in general, regardless of ownership, to allow this type of abuse to occur.
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Had Pope John XXIII lived to write Humanae Vitae … the events caused a schism in the church, at least between Vatican politics and the conscience of its members.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Following their reasoning, using this product of medical science (birth control,) you are cheating God of his will. So why is it okay for their followers to take advantage of any other product of medical science?
Isn’t taking antibiotics or undergoing surgery and such also interfering with God’s plans for you?
Seems they want to have it both ways. Who can blame their followers for just picking and choosing which rules to follow?
The answer, however unsatisfactory it may be, it that marriage is a sacrament and procreation is its natural fruit. So, you can’t compare marital sex to antibiotics.
That’s why I spoke about the oddness of considering birth control strictly as a debate about how married people act.
Those days are so far gone.
Well, in MY religion (I’m an atheist) every act in a well-lived life is a sacrament. I’m just happy to be here, is all.
I’m pretty sure they’ve been opposed to feeding tubes and other extraordinary measures before, and it was only recently changed with the latest two Popes. In fact, the last two Popes have changed a lot of Catholic doctrine.
But it’s neither here nor there; the Bishops are an arm of the Republican Party, just like the NRA. No one should pretend otherwise:
it’s not Christian Science (prayer is the only permitted form of healing) the emphasis is on keeping the person alive
The pope’s reasoning is just… flawed. We’ve been denying God’s dominion over our bodies ever since we started wearing clothes to stave off the elements. Perhaps the Pope should be punished for wearing those pretty white robes that deny God’s power to keep him cold and shivering in the winter.
Man’s (and woman’s) feeble control over his (or her) fate does not in any way deny God his/her place in our lives (if he/she exists), since our control is only exerted through Gods good graces. He/she could (and often does) take it away at any time.
Antibiotics frustrate his design to grow vile, but tiny, beasties in your germ infested body.
Parachutes frustrate his design to pancake you appropriately on the hard ground.
Firefighters frustrate his design to burn your little (or not so, in my case) behind to a crisp.
God forbid if we were to impinge on the march of those millions of microscopic newt-tailed buggers on the way to find the egg of their dreams…
That’s all just lovely except that it’s post-hoc justification for their existing position. Sure, there’s a wing of the church that would dump all that nonsense immediately, but the conservatives are too strong for that.
Remember as well that the US Catholic Church is extremely right-wing and conservative by European standards.
My wife is more-or-less Catholic and we got married in church. As part of that we had to do a pre-marriage course. During that, the Jesuit priest giving the course gave a very complicated theological justification to explain that it was perfectly fine to use contraception in marriage under certain circumstances. Which boiled down to “If you think it’s necessary”.
One rule for the uneducated poor and another for the educated rich.
I hope you haven’t been exercising any mental reservations….
What strikes me is that they claim to feel so strongly about this issue, that public policy must be reshaped around their scruples, and they seem insulted to be asked to adhere to the rules everyone else is. No one is asking Catholics to use birth control themselves, no one is being forced to use it at all. They’re not directly giving the pills the patient, they’re only paying insurance premiums, and under the current compromise they don’t even have to do that. How different is it than paying employees benefits and the employees themselves using the money to buy contraception? And yet it’s just intolerable that they should be asked to sully themselves, it’s as though we had demanded that a devout orthodox Jew eat pork.
And yet when we go into their justifications as you have, they’re abstract, complicated, they admit there’s too sides to the issue. I could understand if we were talking about abortion, but this is an issue that the vast majority of their flock ignore them on. If this was the heinous mortal sin they make it out to be, shouldn’t they be frantically addressing they’re own members before they dictate public policy?
Really, this seems to me to be more about power and ego than sincere religious conviction.
That battle has been fought and long lost even within the vast majority of the Catholic Church.
It is about the inalienable right of the Catholic Hierarchy to make up the rules as they go along and to scream blue bloody murder if anyone ventures a contrary opinion.
It’s also all about misdirection. If you have betrayed your faith on protecting children, working for the poor, and fighting with the oppressed, you pick on some other inane issue to distract attention from your own guilty conscience.
So the whole issue of contraception is recast as an issue of religious freedom, of interfering in God’s plan for MANkind. In this world, insurance cover for contraception costs shouldn’t be available to anyone regardless of the religious beliefs.
Religious freedom in this case becomes the freedom only to be religious, and to be religious only in the way the religious establishment says you should be. Democracy, freedom of choice, conscience, and Obama be damned.
All over the world women and men are being commanded by the CC not to practice birth control and to have children. And quite a few multimillionaire gasbags in the US government and media openly defend the CC on this issue but they never seem to consider it’s ramifications in the daily lives of poor people around the world. We can only suspect that in spite of the public standpoint they go their own way taking a birth control pill or putting on a condom. They will never tell us, of course, so we cannot know for sure and call them hypocrites. Honesty is very hard to find on this issue.
I think some of us might have mentioned all this before.
Still, good that you checked up for yourself.
To all assorted religious wingnuts and Catholic Hierarchy:
What a great, well-researched post, BooMan.
I think the only thing I would add to it is a clarification of the role of idealism in the way the Catholic Church engages in moral reasoning.
Here in America, especially, but throughout the English-speaking world in general, our understanding of law is that it represents a minimum standard for human behavior. Law tells us what is permissible, not what is morally right, and people are sanctioned more or less severely for failing to uphold the bare minimum standards.
But in the historical Roman world, from which both the Catholic Church as well as most of the Western world have adopted their political institutions, the rules and standards represent ideals to which people should attempt to attain, although failure is certain to be frequent. Where sanctions are provided for in the Roman framework is where violations are egregious challenges to the institutions themselves, not merely failing to live up to them. Catholics priests, for example, really do frequently engage in sex, just like single males everywhere. They have made a formal vow to never marry, not to never have sex which only implicitly exists due to the fact of not marrying and the ideal of God’s presence in sexual relations because of its inherently life-giving, creative nature. But fornication occurs and gets forgiven, just like in workplaces and college campuses everywhere in secular society. So the Church just leaves the ideal in place as a moral guide and accepts the fact of human mortality in failing to live up to those ideals at times. It just a different way of understanding the instrumentality of laws and norms on human outcomes than our English political heritage has provided us.
In this context, it is more understandable why Church teaching on birth control has to match up with an ideal specification for the institution of marriage in society,and why the original rules proposed by HHS were so objectionable. They forced the Church to compromise its ideals and therefore its own framework for moral reasoning — essentially making it agree that birth control is a moral ideal, not just acceptable or forgivable under the circumstances.
Serious question: why should their doctrine be respected?
because our government should make no law respecting a religion.
The prohibition isn’t absolute. Congress banned polygamy even though it interfered with Mormons’ ability to freely exercise their religion. But anything that touches on religious practice should be very carefully considered. You and I don’t have to show wacky religious beliefs any respect, but Congress should.