2002 CONFESSIONS
December
November
October
September
July/August
June
May
April
March
February
January

Little Notes
Letters

Talk About Movies
Roamin' Catholic
Follow Me




Contents © 2002
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

NOVEMBER 2002 CONFESSIONS

DEATH BEFORE SIN

The Onion is a very funny -- if bawdy and mildly sacrilegious -- satirical weekly newspaper. I read it faithfully, chuckling over wry-dark headlines like "New Mommy A Lot Prettier" and "All Seven Deadly Sins Committed At Church Bake Sale." The paper has made exposing the accepted absurd its stock in trade, and it holds no cows sacred. So it was only a matter of time before they got around to the Catholic Church and contraception.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites Humanæ Vitæ in stating that "'every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible' is intrinsically evil." It does not make this claim about bringing children into a world of suffering and misery. The target was too tempting to resist; the October 9 edition of the Onion ran a feature titled, "Starving Third World Masses Warned Against Evils of Contraception."

In the article, a missionary in Calcutta, "a city where 53 percent of residents are under 18," tells villagers, "God does not want you to choke the rivers of fertile bounty with immoral birth-control pills. He wants you to continue expanding your families. If your babies starve, Jesus will forgive them." A resident of Bogota assents, saying, "Life in this shantytown is difficult, but our troubles are nothing compared to what we will face in the Lake of Fire if we try to live within our means and regulate the number of offspring we produce, as Satan teaches." Natural Family Planning -- here equated with the "rhythm method" -- comes in for a parting shot, naturally.

It is cited as being 87 percent effective, which, according to a cardinal, "is more than suitable for maintaining a reasonable household. So long as no seed is spilled, God will not immediately strike you down."

Once, the article would have left me spluttering with fury -- the distortions! The oversimplification! The misinterpretation! But that was before Planned Parenthood began its latest side-of-the-bus ad campaign, the one featuring an African mother and her undernourished baby. The caption reads something like, "As long as there is a Third World, we can never be One World." The message is clear: as long as overpopulated, impoverished people are denied the glories of birth control, they will remain overpopulous and impoverished. And that is intolerable.

My wife was upset by the ad. I agreed that it felt disingenuous -- I'm not ready to grant the pure, uninterested goodwill that Planned Parenthood claims as a motive. But I wasn't outraged. I found myself thinking of the wonderment that a Planned Parenthood activist might feel if I were to tell them what I believed, namely, that it is better for a child to be born into a life of unremitted misery, to suffer unspeakable horrors, and even to die prematurely than for a man and woman to take part in a single contraceptive act.

The statement is outrageous, and it is backed by an equally outrageous principle: death before sin, even the death of another, even the death of one's child. Though I suppose that it is possible to sin against prudence -- and even against charity -- in deciding to conceive a child, it is still only possible. Conception is never intrinsically evil, contraception always is so.

The non-Christian world is not unfamiliar with the idea of dying for a principle, and it probably bears the Christian martyrs some measure of respect for their integrity and commitment. But here, the activist would be listening to me, a comfortable white male living in the sweetest spot of the richest nation on earth, upholding an ideal that might mean the suffering and death of thousands (millions?) of people other than myself. I imagine this is what gets some people upset about the pope's statements on human sexuality -- the man isn't even married; what can he possibly have to tell me? How can he -- how can I -- be so arrogant as to make such claims?

I can make them because I believe in that preposterous-sounding Lake of Fire, and that suffering is not the greatest evil in this world. "Do not fear those who can harm the body; rather, fear the one who can kill the soul." The Christian walks in the world, and he may share many of the virtues of his non-Christian fellows. But eventually, and at crucial junctures, they will part company.

TOP