Contraception Can’t Be Reha-Pill-itated

Recently, the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) ran an article on the morality of contraception. The article was occasioned by a conference held in Rome this past December that offered a critical response to the Pontifical Academy for Life’s publication last summer of its base text, Theological Ethics of Life (TEL).

In his presentation of TEL, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia called for a “radical paradigm change” in the Church’s moral teaching, especially as it bears on contraception. Feigning fairness in its reporting on TEL and on the criticism it received by the Rome conference, the NCR article offers what could aptly be described as a hit piece on Humanae Vitae (HV) and the pontificate of John Paul II. In the NCR article’s presentation of the issue, we find something old—a rehash of the “same old, same old”—and something new.

The new is the attempt to turn the dissent argument (dissent against Church teaching on contraception) on its head, and instead recast the rejection of HV as—wait for it—representing the real infallible teaching of the Church’s ordinary universal magisterium. (Note that this latter refers to the longstanding teaching of the bishops around the world in union with the supreme pontiff. Catholic doctrine holds this teaching to be infallible and thus irreformable.) To pull off this quixotic feat, the authors resort to sophistry and a highly flawed view of magisterial teaching.

The key move centers on how the authors interpret the vote of the papal commission of Paul VI that was tasked with considering the issue of birth control; here nine bishops voted against the view that contraception constitutes an intrinsic evil, whereas three bishops voted for it and three others abstained. The same nine bishops voted in favor of the commission’s majority report favoring the moral permissibility of contraception (the commission comprised seventy-one members).

“Given the votes of the commission’s bishops,” the NCR article concludes, “it is an incredible stretch of the imagination and dishonors the consciences of the bishops to claim that the ordinary universal Magisterium declares this teaching irreformable.”

Wow. Never mind that for bishops to partake in the infallibility of the Church’s ordinary universal Magisterium, they must teach in union with the bishop of Rome. And never mind that not one, but two bishops of Rome—in two encyclicals and not merely by way of approbation of the vote of a papal commission—have expressly condemned contraception as an intrinsic evil: Paul VI in HV and John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor (80). And never mind the biblical foundation of the Church’s teaching, as Genesis 38:9-10 provides a manifest condemnation of unnatural contraception—which thereby attests to the truly longstanding nature of the Church’s traditional position. Instead, the NCR article would have us believe that the opinion—framed as the sacrosanct “consciences”—of nine out of fifteen bishops on a papal commission suffice to represent the “ordinary universal Magisterium.”  Now, that marks an incredible stretch of the imagination.

Furthermore, few know that the “consciences”—and subsequently the votes—of the nine bishops labored under an erroneous understanding of the science of contraception. They believed that the birth control pill acted not as a block or inhibition of the natural procreative process, but as a kind of medication that “helped nature” by prolonging the woman’s natural period of infertility. (We know this from the testimony of Georges Cardinal Cottier, a close friend of the Swiss Dominican who served as the secretary of the papal commission.) It goes without saying that a proper judgment of conscience requires that it be rightly informed.

What is not new in this article, despite its attempt to dress it differently, is the tired and worn-out framing of the moral terms of the debate. The key line runs thus: “The two positions [on contraception] reflect two different models of marriage: the traditional procreative model [enshrined in HV] focused on the ‘natural’ outcome of the act of sexual intercourse; the majority report [of the Paul VI commission] was based on the new interpersonal union model that emerged from the council that focused on the total meaning of marriage and of sexual intercourse within the marriage relationship” (emphasis original). The interpersonal union model, we are further told, gives priority to “pastoral guidance and subjective conscience” and is “principle-oriented, relational-focused, dynamic, developmental, and inductive.” Proponents of this model include “the majority [of] faithful” and “credible, mature, and adult Catholic theologians” along with “most Catholic couples [whose] faith and practice” rest on “practical judgment” and on “conscience before God.”

Opposed to this, the procreative model gives priority to “objective norms” and to “absolutist” magisterial pronouncements and is “largely law-oriented, legalistic, act-focused, static, and deductive.” Adherents of this model constitute a “concerted minority” of “conservative” theologians who are “scathingly critical” of the interpersonal union model and of Archbishop Paglia’s call for a paradigm shift in the Church’s moral teaching. More fundamentally, the procreative model, we are assured, has been “thoroughly deconstructed,” since the evident “flaws” in its “foundational principle” have been exposed for all to see—so much so that the “entire edifice” of Catholic teaching that stands on this model “crumbles.”

You get the idea. Ogres, those pesky “conservative” theologians.

As one of the presenters at the Rome conference that the NCR article seeks to discredit, I reject this article’s caricature of the so-called “procreative model.” The article falls prey to a specious definition of marriage and to an underlying reductive and fragmented anthropology.

Catholic moral teaching defines marriage as a procreative-unitive institution. This follows upon the way our sexuality participates in the nature of the human person as a body-soul composite unity. Because our bodies are of an animal-like sort, they are sexually (biologically) differentiated. From this perspective, human sexuality is for the obvious purpose of procreation. Yet, as we are not pure bodies, but incarnate (rational) spirits with an ordering to interpersonal love, human sexuality also owns an essential ordering to interpersonal unitive love. In brief, God has endowed us with a sexed design for the joint purpose of procreation and unitive love, as HV makes plain.

The NCR article gets it flatly wrong, then, when it holds that the so-called procreative model “focuses”—exclusively, it seems—“on the natural outcome of the act of sexual intercourse.” By focusing on human sexuality as both procreative and unitive in design, this model—let us call it instead the Humanae Vitae model—focuses more fundamentally on the truth of the human person (the entire person) as a body-soul unity. Because body and soul are inseparable in the human person, so are the procreative and unitive orderings. In truth, then, it is the HV model that focuses on “the total meaning of marriage,” a meaning that includes—indeed, unites—the procreative and unitive dimensions of sex.

But the NCR article insists that it is the so-called interpersonal union model that focuses on “the total meaning of marriage”—a total meaning that can, in the name of “interpersonal union,” embrace the direct suppression of procreation by sterilizing the sexual act . The problem here is obvious: the interpersonal union model implies not a total, but a partial meaning of marriage—namely, as unitive. Even if the article acknowledges that the total meaning of marriage encompasses the “act of sexual intercourse” and its “natural outcome,” it is only as a lower, secondary or accidental good, one that remains at all points subordinate to, and thus governed by, the unitive dimension. That the article reduces the procreative dimension to a mere “act” (no doubt similar to other acts, like paying the bills) underscores this.

Marriage, on this view, is essentially a unitive bond, an interpersonal union in love. Only accidentally is it procreative.

The anthropology on which this view of sex and marriage stands clearly emerges. By elevating the unitive dimension (“interpersonal union”) to a rank above the “act” of sexual intercourse, to the extent that this dimension captures “the total meaning of marriage,” the authors of this article disconnect the act of sexual intercourse from the proper human meaning of marriage. This could be only if the body were not integral to the essential identity of the human person, and thus to the moral agency of the acting person. In other words, we are confronted here with a reductive and fragmented view of the human person, where the body in its biological structuring, inclusive of sex, becomes relegated to a sub-human sphere, detached from the rational dimension of human life and operating with its own processes and laws. (We witness the same approach in the wider educational field, where sex education is typically offered in a “health” class rather than in a morality class.)

Objections to HV and to the Church’s moral condemnation of contraception always run along these anthropological lines. Always. And it is high time we tag this for what it is: a derisive, dismissive disdain for the body, especially in its biological structuring. We can attach many labels to this view of the human person—gnostic, angelistic, dualistic, Cartesian—but one designation that such a view, and the moral position that follows, cannot lay claim to is “interpersonal.” Since the human person is his body and his soul, interpersonal action is always embodied, biologically structured action, particularly when it involves sex. Period. Full stop.

There are numerous other errors in the NCR article. I will mention here only the most egregious: that the moral difference between natural family planning (NFP) and artificial contraception is supposedly contrived and “morally unjustifiable.” This issue has been treated thoroughly many times, but for the present, suffice it to say that the authors fail to distinguish between the act considered objectively in itself and the subjective intention of those committing the act. The moral difference between NFP and contraception arises from the former, not the latter.

In sum, despite what the NCR puts forth, the Church’s moral teaching on contraception has not been “thoroughly deconstructed.” It has not “crumbled.” And the “inseparability principle” on which it stands (the inseparability of the procreative and unitive dimensions of marriage) has hardly been “demonstrated to be false.” To suggest as much is illusory. Worse, it is a ruse masking a disdain for the human body, as if it were an object to be manipulated and hygienically controlled in a purely utilitarian manner, like a specimen in a lab.

At its core, the Church’s teaching on contraception champions the nobility and sacred dignity of the body. This it does by insisting that moral meaning and purpose suffuse the procreative (biological) ordering of sex (to the extent that we can never impede this ordering), just as the body is suffused with moral meaning and purpose. Church teaching on contraception remains true because the human person as a body-soul unity—the foundation of this teaching—remains true. This the Church will never forsake.