Conscience and the Pill

When I first read the encyclical Humanae Vitae I had a mingled sense of grief and relief – relief because the Pope’s view of artificial contraception was the same as my own had been for a long time, and because the Church had not contradicted herself; grief because I knew how many cases there would be of bad conscience, divided conscience, and clear though erroneous conscience. The encyclical was like a sword coming down and cutting not just a Gordian knot of ideas but the lives of people (married and unmarried) at a most delicate and intimate point. Some would say that the discussion is now over – ‘Peter has spoken.’ But that is not the case. Certainly Peter has spoken; but discussion was held over specifically in the past because the Commission had tendered its information and suggestions to the Holy Father, and he had not yet given a magisterial ruling. If we say that obedience demands silence now that he has given a ruling, we are in fact saying that discussion is forbidden before the event for the sake of discretion in a doubtful matter and after the event because the issue has been decided and no discussion is now relevant. This is in effect to forbid all discussion, and would be singularly unrealistic when the Church herself is torn by conflicting opinion and in some cases conflicting allegiances. Discussion implies a reasonable examination of the grounds of experience, taking into full account the fact that a magisterial ruling has been given. To fail to think, examine and discuss would imply non-rational obedience. And that is not what is required of us. Belief is not brain-washing.

I think there are already many cases of bad conscience. For one reason or another Catholics are using artificial contraception, though they have no real doubt that the Church’s traditional teaching on this issue is correct and commands their obedience. There are also cases of clear but erroneous conscience, where Catholics, according to their circumstances, may or may not practise artificial contraception, but hold that the teaching against such page 664 a practice is neither infallible nor binding. I think they do have the ghost of a right reason on their side. The teaching on this issue is possibly not infallible. It seems that the Holy Father deliberately left this loophole open. He may have had in mind just such cases. Nevertheless the magisterial ruling is binding on all Catholics under pain of sin.

The third category is the more common. These are people of divided and confused conscience. I think of a devout Catholic woman with whom I was once in correspondence, not long married and the mother of several children. There was no likelihood of her endangering her life by having another child. She had several times expressed to me her loyalty to the Church regarding artificial contraception and her heart-felt conviction that the practice was aesthetic, abnormal and unnatural. But the psychological weight of rearing a young family in a modern New Zealand suburban environment began to rest more and more heavily on her shoulders, and she went through a rapid and confused nervous crisis, from which she emerged as a user of the Pill and a believing Catholic who felt unable to receive Holy Communion. Such cases are frequent and tragic. I wrote to her and urged her most strongly either to abandon the Pill – if she honestly thought the use of it brought her into a state of mortal sin – or to go on receiving Communion while using the Pill – if she thought equally honestly that her subjective circumstances were such as render the use of the Pill either a venial fault or no fault at all. I pointed out that in the second case there could be no obligation on her to confess her use of the Pill to a priest in the Sacrament of Penance. I believe that the use of conscience means that ultimately a Catholic believer must decide concerning the state of his or her own conscience. One cannot be at one and the same time both in and out of a state of mortal sin. The exact and formal categories of moral theology can be misleading at this juncture. Moral theology can provide an objective map. But it cannot provide a measure of subjective factors. Only God, who knows us perfectly in our subjectivity, can do that; and after God, ourselves, though always imperfectly and with the real danger of self-deception. The Pope does not decide for us whether or not we use artificial contraception. It is we who decide, in the light of the Pope’s magisterial ruling and our own moral experience. To set aside the second factor is to think and act without reference to the voice of God speaking in our own hearts. That voice may come to us through the static of self-willed opinion and passions of fear and desire. Ideally the magisterial ruling and the voice of conscience cannot conflict. But if they do conflict it is useless to pretend that they don’t.

I would like here to make a rough and primitive distinction. If the voice of God speaking in my heart, either by a locution or by simple conscience, were to urge me to found a branch of Masturbators Anonymous in Dunedin under the special patronage of St Simeon Stylites – then I would try, however painfully, to obey that voice. But if the local Bishop were to forbid me to page 665 proceed with this merciful enterprise, I would obey him, not only as a fortunate way out, but also because Christ in the Church has priority over Christ in the heart. If I believed otherwise I would be a Protestant. But if I command my fifteen-year-old daughter to come home from a dance at one in the morning instead of in the milkman’s van at six o’clock, I am exercising – however uselessly – discretion and authority within my own kingdom, since God gave me the disturbed and disturbing vocation of being a husband and father. The Bishop cannot effectually tell me what time I should tell my daughter to come home. And if my wife, who may happen to be a Calathumpian – a sect who believe that the Pill was brought down from Heaven by an angel on a golden tray – insists on practising artificial contraception then I am likely to have a genuinely divided conscience. The Holy Father may tell me, authoritatively and correctly, that my wife is wrong in practising artificial contraception, and that if I sleep with her I will be co-operating with and condoning an unnatural act and so will become her accomplice in what must objectively be regarded as mortal sin. What am I to do then?

I can stop sleeping with my wife; and when we finally obtain our legal separation, I can perhaps hike off to the Trappist monastery at Kopua, convinced in my serenely Pharisaic conscience that Peter has spoken and I have obeyed him, that the possible adultery of my wife and the probable taking over of my children by the Welfare Department is God’s worry and not mine. I have been an obedient Catholic and that is that. If I continue to sleep with my wife the text-books of moral theology will be no help to me. They will tell me that if I were a woman and it was my husband who was practising artificial contraception then I could co-operate without cooperating – that is, lie down like a cleft log, move no muscle of the face, and say the Rosary with one hand while my husband went about his unlawful business. But being a man, and therefore technically the active partner, I have no choice but to sleep with her sinfully or keep myself morally intact by leading a life of celibacy. Her erroneous but honest conscience has no bearing on the question. I, a Catholic, was stupid enough to marry a wife who believed in the Pill. And she, a devotee of the Pill, was stupid enough to marry a Catholic. We must lie down on our bed of nails till one or the other dies, goes mad, or leaves the house not to come back again.

At this point one raises one’s eyes to the Figure on the Cross and observes a strange grimace on that beloved Countenance. It is caused by the extremity of His suffering? No. Peculiar as it may seem, He is on the verge of laughing. And these words filter down through the static – ‘Dear son, I know human life is frequently impossible. But you must realise I am not a Divine Accountant. I am only finally interested in whether you love Me and your wife and children and the two thousand million other tormented individuals on the face of the globe. There is a point where moral measurements break down and you have to go forward both naked and ulcerous, without any sense of religious page 666 security. You and your wife are the thieves who hang on either side of Me. If you love your sister-thief, in agony and self-blame, not forgetting the true words of my servant the Pope, not forgetting that she is an image of the sinful Church and you are a sinful image of Me, I promise I will not fail to support you. You wanted to have a clean conscience? At what price? At the cost of avoiding being crucified? I’m afraid I love you too for that. You will be crucified till the moment of your death and possibly after that with Me in Heaven. Love and suffer. Suffer and love.’

Then the usual darkness comes and hides that Face from view.

These are some of the issues involved when objective truth conflicts with certain very real subjective factors. But the discussion so far has been very one-sided. I have rarely heard any mention of the kind of situation that may come in to being when the conscience of an individual conflicts with a different authority: the consensus of opinion among educated and knowledgeable neighbours. Though this consensus has no Divine authority, many modern men and women may regard it as almost infallible.

In particular the women may so regard it. I think that the hard core of social support for artificial contraception is located chiefly in the feminist area. Take the interesting case of Sally Jones. Sally was a bright girl at school. She absorbed with no visible effort the information contained in the course offered by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. She had a particular flair for Science. It was a foregone conclusion that she would go on to varsity and get an M.Sc. with Honours. After that she took a job doing industrial and chemical research. It was at this time that she met John M’Gurk, a local grog-artist and a Catholic journalist. John’s advances were pressing. Sally was both flattered and frightened. She did not find her laboratory work dull; but all the same, there was something lacking. She had never intended to spend her whole life as a career girl. John had an immense reservoir of energy. Being with him was like being alongside a hot fire – it was nice to be warm, but there was always the danger of getting scorched. Sally did get scorched. When they entered together into the state of Holy Matrimony Sally was already three months pregnant.

She had not intended to get married so soon. And the huge kerfuffle made by her mother and aunts about her pregnancy drove one lesson home firmly to the bottom of her mind – ‘Fertility can be dangerous. It can be quite agonising.’

In a quiet way Sally was fond of Our Lord. She sometimes went to Mass on weekdays. She was also well up in all literature dealing with that delicate boundary where theology touches on modern science. She was a Teilhard de Chardin fan and was fond of saying that an intelligent Catholic need find no conflict whatever between science and belief.

It was when she found that she was pregnant for the third time that Sally really blew her top. For some time she had been feeling the pressure of page 667 monotony in her home life. She never quite felt she was born to be a mother. One of the kids, the second one, little Francis Xavier M’Gurk, had suffered from vomiting as a baby and nearly driven Sally up the wall with anxiety. And John wasn’t much help either. He did get up sometimes at night to feed little Francis. But he had become somewhat gruff and uncommunicative and absorbed in his job. Luckily he had laid off the grog completely and become a Pioneer. But he seemed to have abandoned the frills of courtship. The activity of the marriage bed was very little pleasure to Sally. For one thing, she had a real dread of becoming pregnant; and for another, she seemed to be always tired. When she knocked John back, he didn’t take it in a very good spirit. He didn’t complain. But he tended to become even more gruff and snappy. Sometimes Sally sat down on her own and had a good cry.

Sally was a responsible woman. When that thrill of horror and revolt and sheer blazing anger had subsided and she began to examine her situation as a Catholic wife pregnant for the third time, she saw what was the matter. Theology and science couldn’t conflict. Maybe down on the lower rungs of the Catholic ladder they needed this cut and dried moral instruction; but really it was a relic from the Dark Ages. The Church was ruled by celibate men anyway, and though she admired the Pope’s ascetic expression, Sally felt that there were some things only a woman could know about. After the third child was born she decided to go to her old friend Dr Shona Cragg, and get fitted with a diaphragm. She felt a certain sadness at abandoning what she had learnt when she was a girl. But she also felt another mood of freedom and daring. She felt she was one of the pioneers.

John was a little difficult at first. But when Sally explained carefully and patiently that she believed in principle in the Church’s teaching on contraception, but felt that the chief aim of marriage was mutual love, and she’d be able to make love so much more happily without that terrible anxiety, and any way it was a question of her psychological and physical well-being, and if he didn’t see eye to eye with her perhaps he could make some kind of mental reservation – then John said nothing more about it. Sally was much happier than that. She became President of the local Play Centre Committee. John was not so happy. He felt that something had gone wrong in the relation between him and Sally. He felt that in some ways she had turned into a different woman – harder, more brittle, more wooden. He couldn’t put a finger on the trouble.

There was the problem of the sex relation itself. If he wanted to make love to his wife, he had to approach her an hour before bedtime and say – ‘Would you like to sleep with me tonight, dear?’ It sounded peculiar; too rational, too planned in some way. And curiously enough his actual wish to make love to her would often fade to zero. And if he woke up from a bad dream at two in the morning, and reached out towards Sally, he would immediately remember that that was impossible, because things might get started, and it page 668 wouldn’t be fair when she wasn’t wearing her diaphragm. He decided finally that his nature was far too sensual; and he did a lot of reading of the works of St John of the Cross. Sally didn’t exactly like this. She felt that he wasn’t really the intellectual type, and married life should be more spontaneous and warm and natural. She felt too that John had become rather too indecisive. He would apologise to her about small things that really didn’t matter, and she felt that the apology didn’t quite mean what it said. She hoped he was not becoming neurotic.

When the Pill arrived Sally was happy about it. She felt that in a hidden way God had answered the prayer of modern women. She knew that Father Smith took an opposite view; but what could you expect from a priest? She used to travel across town to make her Confession to a very charming modern priest who understood about these things and who thought that in another two generations the Church would be entirely democratic. But when she had been using the Pill for six months a rather dreadful thing happened. John became impotent. She insisted that he should go and see a psychiatrist at once. But the psychiatric treatment was not effective. He wasn’t nasty to her. It was worse than that. He seemed to have withdrawn into himself completely – inside a kind of hard shell where she couldn’t reach him. And he kept on reading St John of the Cross. Sally began to regret that she had ever got married.

I think the case of John and Sally shows what can happen when it is the consensus of educated opinion which is regarded as practically infallible, and the only protest that can be made against it is subconscious. John was a humane man. He could never have suggested to his wife that she should put herself in physical or psychological danger in order to comply with the Church’s authoritative teaching. But this didn’t change the fact that he knew perfectly well that artificial contraception was (if theologians will pardon the paradox) innocently diabolic. He knew it in his guts and his guts revolted. He became aware that sex without the dimension of potential fertility was no longer actually sex, but something else. And he took the one road left open. He became a contemplative ascetic.

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