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Contents © 2002
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

DECEMBER 2002 CONFESSIONS

WHERE THE CHURCH HAS NO BUSINESS GOING

Scene: a dinner party two years back with fellow Catholics, among them my mother. Somebody wondered why priests didn't say more about divorce from the pulpit. (A depressing game, that, and an interminable one: Why don't priests say more about...? Almost as if priests these days confuse the act of becoming eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven with another sort of castration, and give up the cojones required to say unpleasant things that need saying by men in authority.) It was as good a question as any. Marriage is a public institution, a sign of Christ's love for His Church; that's why it's a sacrament. When Catholics divorce almost as often as non-Catholics, they send a very public message, one that is contrary to Christ's command to spread the Gospel.

A good question, one that got an unusual answer -- unusual coming from my mother, who loves to avoid controversy during mealtime. (Somebody worked hard on dinner, and it isn't right to simply forget about it amid the heat of argument.) This time, she said flatly, "When priests stopped preaching against contraception, they gave up their power to tell anybody anything."

Well, that tore it. The Catholics who shared our table did not share my family's (or the Church's) perception of contraception, so what had begun as a mutual gripe session turned into a proper debate. With one woman, who had raised six children, we had found the place where The Church Has No Business Going. Contraception was just best for her and her husband at that point in life, that was all there was to it, and nobody who was not them could possibly have anything to say in the matter. Her son-in-law, however, was up for sport; he seized on somebody's mention of the word "artificial." Eventually, we ended up discussing the ethics of a contraceptive broccoli. By evening's end, I had figured out that he saw the matter as a kind of calculus -- the "naturalness" of a given contraceptive approaching naturally regulated birth as a limit. But the curved will never be the straight, no matter how close it comes to being so. The difference is a difference in kind, not quantity.

I'm glad I was seated near the husband. He wasn't willing to grant much, but he was at least open to discussion. It's hard to argue with an attitude like the wife's in anything but general terms -- if you think the Faith is true, on what authority do you decide which of its doctrines applies to you?

I remembered both husband and wife following a recent conversation with a friend, a friend who follows the Church's teaching on contraception even though she doesn't really see the difference between abstention during fertility and other methods of regulating birth. I tried to explain that there was an essential distinction between action (contraception) and inaction (abstinence during fertility). One did violence to the conjugal act, and one did not. She quickly tired of my talk of action; what mattered to her was the spirit of the thing -- in both cases, people were seeking to render conception impossible. Still, she obeyed, a marvel of humility in an age where people are loath to accept the possibility that their own understanding is not the measure of all things. The aforementioned son-in-law could have learned something from my friend.

But the same conversation also revealed aspects of the woman, in this case with regard to fellatio. As long as it was not performed to avoid conception, my friend didn't see a problem with it. If conception was impossible due to the wife's period of infertility, what did it matter? Here again, the place where The Church Has No Business. When I tried to counter, she judged my argument "too technical."

I asked my brother about her question, and it took him three rather dense paragraphs to respond fully -- too technical, indeed. Boiled way, way down, it read: "The Church forbids any acts that are not per se ordained toward conception. Intercourse on an infertile night is remotely ordained to conception, i.e., is not a frustration of the created order. Sperm are made to swim up the vagina and uterus to the egg, but sperm not succeeding in making it to eggs on their swim is a perfectly natural event. Sperm ending up in the digestive tract is, on the other hand, not a natural event."

I asked for my own clarification; I do not imagine my friend will find my brother's line more impressive than my own. These things have a way of sounding like so many words when the heart is elsewhere.

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