The condom debate MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS
Not quite what he seemed
After the Pope’s remarks about condom use, the ether in the United States has been flooded with reaction, particularly from conservative Catholics who had initially cheered Benedict XVI’s election but now fear that he is not the leader they expected
H
eadlines notwithstanding, con- doms have not been distributed at all Masses this past couple of Sundays. However, Pope
Benedict’s now overly parsed remarks about condom use, in an interview with Peter Seewald, have produced a curious reaction. Conservative Catholics, quick to charge their liberal co-religionists with “dissent” from church teaching, exhibited their own willing- ness to differ quite boldly from the Pope. The first reaction among some conservative Catholics in America was to blame the mes- senger, in this instance Giovanni Maria Vian, the editor in chief of L’Osservatore Romano, which ran excerpts of the book-length interview in advance of publication. Phil Lawler, director of
CatholicCulture.org, wrote that “the Vatican’s own newspaper violated the embargo” against publishing excerpts of the book. He called for Vian’s firing. That charge was repeated by Denver’s Archbishop Charles Chaput who wrote: “Ironically, the message of this good and bril- liant Pope has been hobbled nearly as much by the baffling failures of some of his own aides as by unfriendly coverage from the world’s media.” In fact, the Vatican’s news- paper received permission from the publisher, the Vatican Publishing House, to print the excerpts.
When the “blame the messenger” dog refused to hunt, some observers turned their attention in another direction, arguing that Pope Benedict’s comments lacked magisterial authority because they were made in an inter- view, not in an encyclical. “Reporters who insist on parsing every papal utterance as if each were equally authoritative – and who often do so in pursuit of a ‘gotcha’ moment – do no good service to their readers,” objected George Weigel. Such distinctions are impor- tant, but they do not obscure the fact that something had changed. A third barricade erected by conservatives was the idea that the Pope’s comments had been taken out of context and that he did not say what he clearly did say. But the quotes were rendered in most news accounts at some length. Context was not the issue. And it was abundantly clear that what Pope Benedict said was at least different from anything that had been said before. Certainly, no one can recall Benedict himself, or any other pontiff, raising such a hypothetical situation where
things, not acts. In the 1989 movie Steel Magnolias, the groom’s brothers blow up con- doms and tie them to the limousine that will drive the newly-weds off to their honeymoon. That use of condoms may be vulgar, but a careful search of church documents revealed no condemnation of the use of condoms as balloons. And the argument that condoms do not “prevent” Aids is disingenuous. Only abstinence is 100 per cent effective, but condom use has dramatically decreased the spread of Aids. Fred Rotondaro, chairman of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a progressive organisation based in Washington DC that addresses public policy issues from a Catholic perspective, told The Tablet: “Denying the role of condoms in decreasing the spread of Aids is not that far removed from denying the environmental effects of climate change.” At least one Catholic conservative had the
condom use was, if not a moral good, a step in the right direction. At first, before a further clarification from
the Pope’s press spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi, many commentators were led to believe that the Pope was speaking only about male prostitutes. “We must note that what is intrinsically wrong in a homosexual sexual act in which a condom is used is not the moral wrong of contraception but the homosexual act itself,” said Professor Janet Smith of the Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit. “In the case of homo- sexual sexual activity, a condom does notact as a contraceptive; it is not possible for homo- sexuals to contracept since their sexual activity has no procreative power that can be thwarted.” Professor Smith used another analogy to explain what Benedict was saying: “If someone was going to rob a bank and was determined to use a gun, it would better for that person to use a gun that had no bullets in it. It would reduce the likelihood of fatal injuries.” The most trenchant claims about the
Church’s teaching came from Archbishop Chaput, who wrote: “The Church holds that condom use is morally flawed by its nature, and that, equally important, condom use does not prevent Aids and can actually enable its spread by creating a false sense of security.” This statement suffers from several diffi-
culties. The Church has condemned the act of contraception as immoral. Condoms are
courage of his convictions. “I think the Pope’s wrong,” Dr John Haas of the National Catholic Bioethics Center told The New York Times. “This is really shaking things up big time.” What, precisely, is “shaking things up”?
Nothing the Pope said indicated any change in the Church’s teaching against contraception. Indeed, as New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan said, the Church can’t simply change its mind on certain moral teachings. “You get the impression that the Holy See or the Pope is like Congress and every once in a while says, ‘Oh, let’s change this law,’” Dolan said in an interview. “We can’t.” What, then, had the more conservative figures in a lather? In her essay, Professor Smith noted that
Pope Benedict was “speaking about the psy- chological state of some who might use condoms. The intention behind the use of the condom (the desire not to harm another) may indicate some growth in a sense of moral responsibility”. This is what has caused the most controversy among those who consider the moral life not in terms of a person’s psy- chological state but in all-or-nothing terms. But this misses what Pope Benedict has high- lighted: the moral law is applied to actual, lived lives, in a variety of circumstances. For one person, beginning to use condoms might be the start of a movement towards a more ethically coherent life while for another, such use might be a step away. A moral theo - logian must focus on the act itself, but a pastor must focus on the person who commits the
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