Birth Control Clinics are the New Temples

Pope Paul’s encyclical on birth control has roused both strong support and criticism that has in some cases contained an element of aggrieved surprise. For myself, I have no intellectual problem whatever in accepting the traditional teaching which this encyclical re-affirms; before I ever became a Catholic I had realised that the practice of artificial birth control was one of the chief causes of tension and aridity in modern family life.

On the other hand, I can see equally well that some honest men and women within the Church may find the doctrine intellectually unacceptable, chiefly because they have allowed themselves to be very solidly conditioned by a mode of thinking that is at one and the same time abstract, clinical and morally subjective.

The critics of the encyclical should not be so deeply astonished. In all ages, at times when the Church is not being persecuted – or at least not persecuted in certain countries – those who live in such countries drift into a Utopian dream of a perfect union of Catholic morality and secular expediency. In a sense this dream can be more dangerous than the whips and drugs of the persecutor, for it comes to us gently when our stomachs are full and our mind’s more or less vacant, and whispers – ‘Be tolerant. Times are changing. Man can change himself if he so desires. A religion that can’t move with the times is an affront to one’s neighbours and belongs to the age of the ghetto . . .’.

What those who are swayed by the dream have forgotten is that Christians are not allowed to be pagans, even if the pagan temple is re-erected in the guise of a hydro-electric dam or a birth control clinic where the doctors and nurses issue propaganda on behalf of artificial contraception.

In India Nehru said to the people – ‘Let the dams be your temples.’ He also said to the young Indian intellectuals – ‘Go to the villages if you want to learn about life.’ He did not say that the two statements were contradictory. If the people allowed a faith in modern technology to oust their relatively sane and highly developed natural religion which incidentally did not favour artificial contraception) then the young intellectuals would go to the villages in vain, for they would find that the sources of peasant wisdom had dried up as the peasants became worshippers of the new god of technology.

In the early Church Christians were forbidden to eat the food which had been piled up as a sacrifice round the altars in the pagan temples. I can imagine a vigorous controversy going on between a ‘conservative’ and an ‘advanced’ Christian of those times:

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‘Frankly, Sibylla, I think it’s a lot of nonsense. It’s superstitious. The food that’s been offered to idols is precisely the same food as any other food. There’s no change of substance. If somebody with a big family has a chance to grab some of it, I’d say, let them go ahead, and good luck to them . . .’.

‘Peter has forbidden it.’

‘Peter is Jewish and old-fashioned. He’s well-meaning, but he doesn’t understand the different cultural condition prevailing in the Greek and Roman centres. The Jews have this horror of idolatry.’

‘He’s guided by the Holy Spirit.’

‘I rather doubt if he has the competence to judge. If it were a unanimous decision by the Twelve, instructed and helped by a group of the educated laity, I’d feel more happy about it. As it is, it puts the pagan priests in a bad temper, and it may let us in for another persecution. I’m not prepared to admit that the Holy Spirit can ever inspire a decision that is contrary to common sense . . .’.

Again, there were similar discussions going on when King Henry VIII announced that he was the Spiritual Head of the Church of England. It seemed that Catholics were being asked to become martyrs for a point of obscure theological principle. After all, the King had acted often enough as if he were the Spiritual Head of the Church. Didn’t his being anointed mean something of the kind? And even if he weren’t, what normal man would be prepared to be dragged away from his shop and his family and be disembowelled at Tyburn because the Pope and the King couldn’t come to an amicable agreement with one another?

Nowadays a good many of us had come to the conclusion that the fences dividing Catholics from non-Catholics were breaking down at last. There was nothing a non-Catholic New Zealander could do which a Catholic New Zealander couldn’t also do. We worked in the same jobs; we read the same books; we went to the same films; we played bowls together; we sat on the same Play Centre committees. To say that we couldn’t limit our families in the same way was like saying that we couldn’t eat all of the social orange except for one segment. What nonsense! It wasn’t as if we were claiming the freedom to commit a crime! We needed higher education for our children just as much as the non-Catholics did. We had to live in the same houses, carefully built by the State to accommodate two and a half children.

Maybe among the M’Bongabongans a woman was honoured if she had had four children and was carrying her fifth, but here in God’s Own Country she would know that her neighbours regarded her as a weak-minded fool. How could she go out and get a part-time job if she didn’t practise the safest kind of birth-control that the doctors had to offer?

I can sympathise with the dilemma of those who had begun to think this way. But I fear that they had quite innocently forgotten what God does not forget – that Catholics are a royal race, the New Israel, a people set apart, a group whom He has gathered together to be a sign to the rest of the world page 619 that a life flooded with supernatural power is possible for men.

Our fault then was not so much to practise artificial birth control as to identify ourselves indistinguishably with the code of morality and prudence and respectability which our secular community provided us with. Pope Paul is reminding us that an unavoidable sign has been set on our foreheads. We are the direct descendants of a million saints and martyrs. We cannot just submerge ourselves in the secular bog and remain the servants and friends of Christ.

It is perhaps harder for us than it is for the persecuted Catholics behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. They at least know exactly where the boundaries lie between loyalty and betrayal. But for us loyalty may make us seem fools, and betrayal will trouble nobody much, not even our fellow-Catholics.

To obey the Pope means more than limiting oneself to particular methods of family planning. The obedience will hardly be possible for us unless we first become revolutionary Christians – fountains of mercy, embracers of poverty, sufferers of all things for the love of God. From that standpoint the new encyclical will not look strange to us at all.

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