The Pope, the Church, and the Condom: Clarifying the State of the Question
Dec 17, 2010
George Weigel
cortesía: firstthings.com
In Light of the World, his book-length interview
with German journalist Peter Seewald, Pope Benedict XVI, who is both a
brilliant theologian and a compassionate pastor, tried to reconfigure the
world’s conversation about several pressing issues: the meaning of sexuality
in a fully human life; stemming the plague of HIV/AIDS; serving those who
have already contracted HIV/AIDS and helping them to lives of human
fulfillment and moral integrity.
The world being what it is, those three questions frequently intersect at a
crossroads of intense controversy marked “condoms.” The world press being
what it is, and the state of Vatican communications being what they are,
some subtle distinctions Benedict made in Light of the World were quickly
lost, putting new obstacles in the way of the deeper, more humane
conversation the Pope hoped to ignite.
Four weeks into the ensuing controversy, it is worth reviewing precisely
what the Pope said, before parsing the debate that followed.
Seewald asked the Pope to respond to the media’s contention that, as the
German journalist put it, “it is madness to forbid a high-risk population to
use condoms” in the face of the AIDS epidemic. Benedict responded that the
world press’s obsession with latex had not only distorted coverage of his
March 2009 pastoral visit to Africa; it had also deflected attention from
the fact that, as the Pope put it, the Church is “second to none in treating
so many AIDS victims, especially children with AIDS.” Moreover, the Pope
repeated his conviction (which is borne out by serious empirical research)
that the crisis of AIDS cannot be solved “by distributing condoms,” a
widespread practice whose ubiquity “goes to show that condoms alone do not
resolve the question itself.”
Benedict then went on to note the success of so-called ABC programs that
stress abstinence outside marriage and fidelity within marriage, with condom
use as a last resort. The Pope then proposed that “the sheer fixation on the
condom implies a banalization of sexuality. Which, after all, is precisely
the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the
expression of love, but only [as] a sort of drug people administer to
themselves.” The condom, the Pope concluded, is “not . . . a real or moral
solution” to the HIV/AIDS plague; changed behaviors, rooted in changed
understandings of what it means to be sexual beings, are the only long-term
solution to the crisis, and indeed to the myriad forms of human suffering
caused by the sexual revolution and its reduction of sex to another contact
sport.
It was not these reflections, however, that caught the world press’s
attention, but rather this sentence, which appeared toward the end of the
Pope’s discussion:
There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male
prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of
a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward
recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot
do whatever one wants.
Published without the necessary contextualization or commentary in the
Vatican’s own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, that sentence was
inaccurately but almost inevitably interpreted, first by the Associated
Press and then by virtually the entire global media, as the break in the
dike for which so many had long been waiting, and toward which so many had
applied so much pressure: the Catholic Church had finally, at long last,
acknowledged what all enlightened people had long known to be the truth—that
salvation was to be found in latex.
Reuters was a few minutes behind the AP on November 20, but its headline
crisply summarized what many were writing: “Pope Says Condoms Sometimes
Permissible to Stop AIDS.” The London Telegraph was even less equivocal:
“The Pope drops Catholic ban on condoms in historic shift.”
The Pope had in fact not said that condoms were a morally appropriate or
clinically effective means of AIDS prevention. Indeed, the Pope had gone out
of his way, in Light of the World, to say precisely the opposite, in the
very next sentences in his interview: “But it [the condom] is not really the
way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a
humanization of sexuality.”
What the Pope was speculating upon was a subtlety that seemed beyond the
comprehension of virtually every reporter who wrote about p. 119 of Light of
the World: namely, the interior or subjective moral intentions that might be
discerned in a habitual sinner who decided to sin in a way that was less
threatening to those with whom he was sinning. Might one find here a glimmer
of moral insight, on the part of a habitual sinner, from which deeper moral
insights into the evil in which he was engaged might emerge in time?
To read into that papal speculation some radical shift in the Catholic
Church’s moral teaching was more than a stretch; it was a serious
distortion. But as more than one veteran observer of these matters noted,
when you put the words “Pope,” “AIDS,” and “condom” into one sentence
without the further word “no,” it’s not hard to figure out what’s coming
next in the reporting.
Unfortunately, a clarification issued by Vatican press spokesman Fr.
Federico Lombardi, S.J., made matters worse. Rather than trying to explain
the difference between the Church’s settled convictions on the ethics of
human love and the Pope’s speculations on how one might discern the
beginnings of moral growth in a man committing what the Church understood to
be serious sins, Lombardi, focusing on the fact that several translations of
Light of the World had not rendered “male prostitute” accurately, talked to
Benedict and reported back to the press that the Pope wasn’t limiting his
musings about possible growth in moral insight to male prostitutes; one
could imagine similar interior dynamics at work in females and even
transsexuals.
This comment from Lombardi was obvious, banal, and, worse, completely beside
the crucial point of distinction that the world media continued to miss.
Yet, even more inevitably than the Pope’s choice of example in his book,
Lombardi’s clarification led to another wave of distorting stories; the AP’s
headline on its November 23 story from Rome can stand for virtually all the
rest: “Vatican—Everyone can use condoms to prevent HIV.”
Benedict XVI had hoped to remove the condom from the center of the world’s
conversation about a global plague. Yet here was the condom, back at center
stage, with Joseph Ratzinger’s longtime critics applauding his concession to
reason (as they understood it). Meanwhile, those who had long toiled to
defend the reasonableness of the Catholic Church’s ethic of human love were
left wondering just what the Pope’s book, and the inability of both the
Vatican newspaper and the papal spokesman to bring some order into the
conceptual chaos, had set in motion.
Were the teachings of the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor [The Splendor
of Truth], in which John Paul II rejected the moral-theological method of
proportionalism and reaffirmed that the Church’s moral judgment was focused
on acts, including acts that could be known by reason to be intrinsically
evil, now under review—or being reversed? Had a new subjectivism, or
intentionalism, been given a tacit papal seal of approval? Was the highest
teaching authority of the Church endorsing a method of moral analysis
focused on the lesser-of-evils?
While the media furor remained, in the main, vulgar (with one prominent
Catholic commentator from the port side declaring the Pope’s statements in
Light of the World and Father Lombardi’s attempted clarification a
“game-changer,” as if these questions involved the sort of games academics
and journalists play), one serious debate did break out in the Catholic
blogosphere. It centered around the Swiss theologian Martin Rhonheimer, a
priest of Opus Dei, who in 2004 had speculated that the use of the condom to
prevent HIV/AIDS infection, when motivated by a prophylactic intention,
might not fall under the Church’s settled opposition to contraception.
Some (including Fr. Rhonheimer) found echoes of those speculations in the
Pope’s book and Fr. Lombardi’s statements. Others, including Dr. Steven
Long, found real trouble brewing. As Long put it in an exceptionally
thoughtful blog posting, Rhonheimer’s position, no matter how intelligently
argued, is intentionalism.
It is to argue that because one intends prophylaxis, therefore condom use is
not contraceptive. This is precisely the effort to define ‘direct’ and
‘indirect’ with respect to moral action by reference solely to intention
while excluding essential reference to the nature of that which is chosen.
And much more was at stake here than was evident from the media rumpus:
“Condoms are not the whole story; causal realism in the moral life is. . . .
Surrender of the causal realism of Catholic moral analysis is what is at
stake in these discussions.”
Nor, Long concluded, were these disputes a matter of interest to academics
alone. If the Rhonheimer approach were adopted, he cautioned, that would
“signal the end of any distinctive Catholic presence in hospitals, or in the
bio-medical conversations of the day, because intentionalism is frankly a
doctrine that can justify anything. . . . [The] hall of mirrors comprising
modernity and post-modernity has many uses for intentionalism; and none of
them is good.”
So: a very serious debate has begun, if not precisely the one that Benedict
XVI wished to ignite. The internal Catholic theological debate that has been
generated by Light of the World, and by various attempts to interpret the
Pope’s remarks (and Fr. Lombardi’s) to advance distinct theological agendas,
may, in time, produce new insights. But it is difficult to see, a month into
the controversy, how any of the Pope’s public goals—to correct media
misimpressions of the Church’s stance towards AIDS victims; to begin a new,
non-condom-focused international discussion about preventing the spread of
HIV/AIDS; to draw world attention to the success of non-condom-obsessed
programs that drive down the incidence of new HIV infection; to bring the
Church into the center of a new global discussion about the humanization of
sexuality—have been advanced.
Rather, the international discussion has been re-focused on condoms, with
the Church now being mocked for being so late in recognizing “reality” (the
condom-as-papal-miter is now a staple of editorial cartooning); gay
activists have been reinforced in their conviction that sufficient pressure
will bring the Catholic Church to heel on a variety of controverted issues,
including the question of who may marry whom; and governments have likely
been emboldened to dun Catholic health care institutions into accepting
secular standards on issues ranging from Plan-B “contraception” to abortion
to methods of AIDS prevention.
While the media misreporting and over-reporting of radical change has played
its usual, mischievous role over the past four weeks, it cannot be doubted
that a certain lack of clarity has characterized the Holy See’s response to
the controversy. That lack of clarity could impede the possibility of a
genuine deepening of Catholic moral insight as the internal theological
debate unfolds. There is little question that it will put Catholic bishops
who have taken a strong line in defending the Catholic integrity of Catholic
medical institutions and Catholic health care professionals in a very
difficult position vis-à-vis an increasingly aggressive and secularist
ambient culture.
Thus, both to ensure that the theological debate generated by Light of the
World is a genuine advance rather than a moment of retreat from the truths
taught in Veritatis Splendor, and to provide armor for those bishops who are
determined to defend the integrity of their institutions and the consciences
of those members of their flocks who are medical professionals, it would
seem opportune for an indisputably authoritative voice, capable of speaking
in the name of the Church, to publish a substantial clarification of the
issues that have surfaced over the past month.
Such a clarification might usefully touch several key points. It would
reaffirm the Church’s classic teaching on marriage and human sexuality,
underscoring that the basic principles at stake here are true and can be
known to be true by reason. It would reiterate the intrinsic wrong of
contraception. It would endorse educational and pastoral programs affirming
chastity and fidelity as the morally appropriate and empirically effective
response to HIV/AIDS, while recommitting the Catholic Church to the relief
of those already suffering from HIV/AIDS.
It would also be helpful if such a statement would reaffirm that what the
Catholic Church teaches in these complex and delicate areas of human life is
not a matter of “positions” that can be changed if sufficient public
pressure is brought to bear. Rather, the Church brings the light of both
reason and revelation to bear on these questions, in the certain conviction
that the truth liberates us in the deepest meaning of human liberation.