Catholics, condoms and contraception

Me, I’m a nice Catholic girl. There are some things I just don’t like talking about in mixed company or, for that matter, in print. My mother reads this column, you know. And so I am aggrieved that my conscience says I have to write about what the Holy Father said about condoms, and what the secular press said he said, and what Catholics are saying he said. But it’s either that or I write about the Muslim kid who tried to blow up thousands of Christians in a tree-lighting ceremony in Portland.

The problem of our age is not that we talk too little about sex-related matters but that we talk about little else. Light of the World is 256 pages long, and yet the part that excited the world’s media — including the Vatican’s own paper — into a frenzy was a few lines about condoms. Although the Pope said that they are neither a moral nor a real solution to the problem of AIDS, he suggested that in certain circumstances their use to prevent disease might be a first step in the user’s conscience towards an understanding of the expression of love sex is meant to be.  

I thought that this was damning condoms with faint praise, but the media went insane with joy. They decided that Benedict had “baptized condoms” and had lifted or “softened” the Church ban on contraception. Britain’s Daily Telegraph screamed, “Pope drops condom ban in historic shift.” Instead of putting a ridiculous spin on reality to foster contempt for the Pope, as it usually does, the media put a ridiculous spin on reality to foster a sense that the Pope is a good sport after all. I’m not sure which is worse.    

I wasn’t around to witness the shrieks that greeted the promulgation of Humanae Vitae, and I still wasn’t around when the 1968 Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops published their “Winnipeg Statement” in response. But I first read Humanae Vitae at age 14, and I got around to the Winnipeg Statement yesterday. To open a can of elephant in the room, the Winnipeg Statement is much more exciting than the Holy Father’s nuanced thought on the moral development of prostitutes. It might explain why so few of my classmates had more than one brother or sister.   

Of Humanae Vitae’s absolute ban on artificial contraception, the Winnipeg Statement says, “In accord with the accepted principles of moral theology, if these persons (married Catholics) have tried sincerely but without success to pursue a line of conduct in keeping with the given directives, they may be safely assured that whoever honestly chooses that course which seems right to him does so in good conscience.”

Subtle. Theologians are a subtle bunch. The problem is that most of us are not. Many read the Winnipeg Statement to see if they could (despite Humanae Vitae) use artificial contraception, and the Canadian bishops seemed to say “Yes.” Bingo. The Canadian Baby Boom gave birth to the Canadian Baby Bust. As Hemingway didn’t say, we are all a small generation.

You know and I know that many (if not most) Catholics of child-bearing age in Canada use artificial contraception. That makes life more difficult for those Catholics who don’t. One of my pals has seven kids now; in his note congratulating me on my late marriage, he observed that I would be spared a lot of sacrifice. Believe me, I know that. I was one of five kids in a decade when big Catholic families had become rare and even risible. So when so-called “ultra-conservatives,” sometimes people who have made great sacrifices in their obedience to Humanae Vitae, became distraught last week over the Pope’s supposed change in Church teaching on sexuality, I understood why. But the thing is, the Pope didn’t change Church teaching on sexuality. He said something kindly about the most miserable and marginalized people who use condoms to prevent disease.

In one of my ethics courses down at Boston College, we were taught that the Church is in a bind when it comes to sexually transmitted diseases. She can’t tell people how to sin more safely; she can only urge them not to sin. She is not the Church of the Bare Minimum or the Lowest Common Denominator. She is the Church of Him who told us to be “perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” But there is one condom-related issue on which the Church must and may soon address: that of conjugal relations between spouses when one spouse, perhaps through no sinful action of his own, has contracted HIV. The intent of these spouses, in using condoms, would not be to prevent, but to sustain, human life.  

Her response to this issue, needless to say, will not take the form of an off-the-cuff remark of a Pope to a German journalist.