Authors: Patrick Coffin
Sex Au Naturel (7 page)
In other words, I had to admit that abstaining from sex on a day believed to be fertile is not morally identical with engaging in it while simultaneously undercutting its life-giving power. A no to contraception implied a yes to NFP, which implied a yes to chastity, which implied self-denial, which implied good old-fashioned repentance, which implied a revolution in my whole life. Jesus Christ was telling me through His Church that contraception was a grave sin, a telling that had two thousand years of unbroken unanimity behind it.
All this made me see where the arrow would hit. And I shrank back. Changing a mind is a cinch compared to changing a will, and this is acutely true in the area of sex. The poet W. H. Auden put his finger on what ailed me: “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.”
8
No
; Witness
Sí
I needed to look at Pope Paul’s encyclical on its own terms, not filtered through the kaleidoscope of dissenting commentators. So I did something radical.
I read it.
And what I found, or rather what I did not find surprised me: Paul VI didn’t deploy any arguments to speak of. In fact, he doesn’t appear to have written it to persuade at all. Apart from setting out some basic principles, Paul VI simply reiterates the ancient teaching, albeit in language more in sync with the modern ear. (Indeed, Karol Wojtyla’s hidden hand is said to be in the encyclical’s elliptical style and its overtures to personalism.)
This non-argumentation thing intrigued me. It was as though Paul VI was simply stating, “This is the Christian tradition: every sexual act must be open to new life. Are you with Us or not?” The response is ours to make. After all, the Church hadn’t offered arguments on behalf of the Resurrection either, but apostolic testimony.
Humanae Vitae
was Pope Paul’s apostolic testimony, the one for which history will remember him. Though he reigned a decade more, he never wrote another encyclical.
But I had another problem. If I charged the Church with being wrong on contraception, on what basis did I trust her with being right about, say, the canon of Scripture—or about any other revealed doctrine? I could reject
Humanae Vitae
by an appeal to conscience only if there was some shakiness about the certainty of the teaching. But the shakiness was in me. The first of my dominoes of dissent began to teeter.
In the end, it was a matter of asking for the grace to begin
to begin
to be open to the teaching. That proved a decisive turning point, after which things got easier.
Very often, the timing of one’s openness is as decisive as the openness itself. Within days of willing to be open to the truth, a series of articles, evangelical Catholics, books, tapes, and essays written by defenders of the Church’s teaching popped up in front of me with lovely, almost comic, timing. Not just “facts” I didn’t know, but new ways of seeing the coherence between the part (
Humanae Vitae
) and the whole (Catholic sexual ethics), insights into deep connections between the premise of contraception and the conclusion of abortion, and, finally, a grasp of the moral difference between natural family planning and contraception.
The first domino toppled into the next, then the next. I ran into something I’d only read about: the fresh air of Christian orthodoxy. Here was Frank Sheed, Scott Hahn, Karl Keating; there was Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Peter Kreeft, G.K. Chesterton, and a host of others—my own personal cloud of witnesses—tossing me a climber’s rope, showing me the next foothold, encouraging me upward.
On birth control specifically, one writer swayed above the pack like a sunflower. Her name was G. E. M. Anscombe (1919–2001), an English analytical philosopher whose 1972 lecture was later printed as
Contraception and Chastity.
9
It is a bracing trek across the landscape of marriage, human sexuality, and the role of the Church in bringing Christ’s revelation to us. Dr. Anscombe’s sharp prose chiseled away at what was left of my mental flab. (That she enjoyed a cigar only added to her charm.)
She closed with this observation: “The teaching which I have rehearsed is indeed against the grain of the world, against the current of our time. But that, after all, is what the Church as teacher is for. The truths that are acceptable to a time—these will be proclaimed not only by the Church: the Church teaches also those truths that are hateful to the spirit of an age.”
Dr. Anscombe had my number. Writer-blogger Kathy Shaidle clothes the same idea in Gen X garments:
It’s not called The Holy Girlfriend Church. We don’t get to hold out for the green-eyed redhead of our self-centered fantasies. Mother is Mother: demanding, set in her ways, and often an embarrassment, especially when she talks about touchy topics in front of our cool friends, wears that awful old pantsuit, makes us wear a scarf. Mother says no, and your Girlfriend never would. Your Girlfriend would let you change the rules in the middle of the game, so you could win. Every night would be poker night with the boys. She’d never get old and boring and senile. Or embarrassing. The Holy Girlfriend Church exists. It just isn’t the Catholic one, and never will be.
10
Fickle and ultimately apathetic Girlfriend was no match for the fierce embrace of Mother, in the way a lemming is no match for a lioness. In the end, I found that the only toll to be paid during the escape from dissent was repentance. I got a
deal.
Many people today equate authority with authoritarianism. The next few chapters will turn to the sources of Catholic authority to see how God’s revelation is in harmony with human reason; then we’ll see how these sources have treated artificial birth control since biblical times.
1
^
Even for liberal sympathizers, the late Ms. Daly’s profanity-laced appearance was astonishing. She kept to her custom of refusing to answer questions from males. Men were instructed bluntly to pass on any question we might have to a nearby woman in the crowd and she (Daly) would answer her, not the man asking the question.
2
^
The term “parallel magisterium” was coined by Richard McCormick, SJ, after whom a public lecture series was named at Mount Saint Vincent.
3
^
Mark Link, SJ,
Path through Catholicism
(Thomas More Book Association, 1991), 204–205.
4
^
Cf. Vincent N. Foy,
Birth Control: Is Canada Out of Step with Rome
? (Toronto: Life Ethics Information Centre, 2005), 93. Also, Lambert Greenan, OP, former English language editor,
L’Osservatore Romano
. Personal interview, March 20, 2004.
5
^
As quoted in John-Henry Westen, “Archbishop: For the Clergy, Obedience to Church Requires Preaching about the Moral Evil of Contraception,”
LifeSiteNews
,
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/may/08051302.xhtml
.
6
^
Vincent N. Foy, “Tragedy at Winnipeg,”
Challenge Magazine
, 1988, reprinted with permission by LifeSite.net. As of this writing, a Catholic movement known as The Rosarium is charitably petitioning the Canadian bishops to withdraw the Winnipeg Statement. See
www.therosarium.ca
for more information.
7
^
See
http://www.cccb.ca/site/content/view/2636/1214/lang,eng/
8
^
W.H. Auden,
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue
(London: Faber, 1948).
9
^
Elizabeth Anscombe,
Contraception and Chastity
(London: Catholic Truth Society, 1977).
10
^
Kathy Shaidle, “so this morning I woke up thinking…,”
Relapsed Catholic
,
www.relapsedcatholic.blogspot.com
, May 4, 2007 (accessed February 18, 2008).
Chapter Three
Sources of Catholic Authority
About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.
—Saint Joan of Arc at her trial
The question, “Where is
that
in the Bible?” often presupposes that the Bible is the only source of God’s revelation. But before we examine the trees (the specific biblical passages that underpin the Church’s teaching), it’s advantageous to first see the forest (the way God has revealed Himself to us).
As we said in the introduction, behind the debate over birth control lurk broader questions such as who gets to say what God has revealed, and why. We all know what Christ said. But what did He
mean
? And who says?
This chapter attempts to answer the “Who Says” question by demonstrating how God’s self-communication flows from a two-fold source: Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. It may seem at first far removed from our topic, but the rewards of looking at the big picture of Catholic authority are well worth it.
Humanae Vitae
did not emerge out of nowhere, but flowed from a legitimate exercise of authority given by Jesus Christ.
The central plank on which the encyclical is built is not primarily biblical, but philosophical. Still, the Bible itself supports and confirms the Church’s claim to be the authentic interpreter of natural law. This interpretation, or body of teaching about the meaning and application of the Bible, dating back to apostolic times, is known as Sacred Tradition.
When Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and other “non-denominational” Christians see the word “tradition” used in the context of religious authority, they invariably identify it with Christ’s condemnation of the “traditions of men” (Mk. 7:8, 13; Mt. 15:3, 6–9) that “nullify God’s word” and add useless practices that hinder the journey to salvation. Because they hold to
sola scriptura
(the belief that the Bible alone is the rule of faith), they conclude that any “addition” to God’s written word is superfluous and confusing at best, blasphemous and dangerous at worst.
But when the Catholic Church speaks of Tradition with a capital T, it means something entirely different. Since the time of the apostles, Catholics have understood that God has revealed Himself by way of two distinct modes of transmission: the oral transmission of the Gospel by the apostles and their successors (which came first), and the written transmission, in particular the twenty-seven books of the New Testament (which came second).
1
The entire deposit of faith (
depositum fidei
) given by Jesus Christ is the Sacred Tradition of which the New Testament is the written aspect.
In other words, Scripture is part of the greater Tradition. More accurately still, as popular Bible teacher Jeff Cavins observes, “Scripture
is
Tradition” (emphasis mine).
2
The Second Vatican Council summarizes their interrelationship this way:
Hence there exists a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing out of the same divine well-spring, come together in some fashion to form one thing and move towards the same end … Therefore both sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence”
3