"Dear Professor Rhonheimer, I'd like to share with you..."
Johannes Argentus
cortesía: chiesa.espressonline.it
Dear Professor
Rhonheimer,
I'd like to share with you an analysis I did on the lately fashionable
issue of condom use. If you find all or part of this analysis useful,
feel free to use it without even mentioning me, as I'm sharing it just
to avoid the possibility of "burying a talent".
First I need to address a point related to the statement in your recent
article at www.chiesa: "The Church must always advise people to do the
good, not the lesser evil". While your statement is unquestionably
correct, it should not prevent moral theologians from being able to make
what I call "conditional moral statements under the presupposition of
sinful behavior regarding marginal contribution to sinfulness of
specific aspects of that behavior".
Let me explain what I mean by that. Conditional moral statements are
just statements that are made on the presupposition of a certain fact,
like "given this
fact then that
behavior is or is not licit". The novelty lies in the presupposition of
sinful behavior and the consequent focus not on the morality of the
overall act but on the contribution of specific aspects of that act to
its sinfulness, for which I borrow the term "marginal contribution" from
economics technical jargon, with a positive marginal contribution to
sinfulness meaning that the act becomes more sinful, and conversely a
negative marginal contribution implying a less sinful act.
Let me give an example: "given that
a gang has decided to rob a bank thentheir
choosing to use blank cartridges carries a negative marginal
contribution to sinfulness relative to the base scenario of using real
bullets." Obviously the robbery is still a grave sin and the best course
of action for the gang is always not to rob a bank. But the fact that
the gang has decided to rob a bank should not send the moral theologian
into a complete intellectual paralysis in which he is unable to make any
statement whatsoever on the different possibilities of the specifics of
the gang's course of action, leaving undefined the issue of whether it
is the same for the gang to use blank cartridges, real bullets, or
preemptively kill everybody in the bank with sarin gas.
Having this conceptual tool, I now will apply it to the presupposition
of a particular sinful behaviour, namely a sexual relation outside
marriage, which is always a grave sin. And the specific aspect of that
behavior I will focus on is the use of contraception, so that in the
case of a condom I focus on its use strictly for contraceptive purposes.
I will show from the 1968 Paul VI's encyclical "Humanae vitae" (HV) and
the 1987 CDF's instruction "Donum vitae" (DV) that this choice has a
negative marginal contribution to sinfulness (i.e. makes the act
marginally less sinful).
First I will quote from HV to show that it refers only to marital acts:
"The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the
precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant
doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act
must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation
of human life.
"Union and Procreation
"12. This particular doctrine, often expounded by the magisterium of the
Church, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God,
which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive
significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to
the marriageact.
"The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act,
while uniting husband and
wife in the closest
intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a
result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And
if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative,
is preserved, the use of marriage fully
retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme
responsibility of parenthood to which man is called."
Then I will quote from DV:
"Section II: Interventions for human procreation
"By the term heterologous artificial fertilization or procreation, the
Instruction means techniques used to obtain a human conception
artificially by the use of gametes coming from at least one donor other
than the spouses who are joined in marriage.
"Subsection A: Heterologous artificial fertilization:
"1. Why must human procreation take place in marriage?
"Every human being is always to be accepted as a gift and blessing of
God. However, from the moral point of view a truly responsible
procreation vis-à-vis the unborn child must be
the fruit of marriage.
"For human procreation has specific characteristics by virtue of the
personal dignity of the parents and of the children: the procreation of
a new person, whereby the man and the woman collaborate with the power
of the Creator, must be
the fruit and the sign of the mutual self-giving of the spouses,
of their love and of their fidelity. The fidelity of the spouses in the
unity of marriage involves reciprocal respect of their right to become a
father and a mother only through each other. The child has
the right to be
conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up within
marriage: it is through the secure and recognized relationship to
his own parents that the child can discover his own identity and achieve
his own proper human development.
"Through IVF and ET and heterologous artificial insemination, human
conception is achieved through the fusion of gametes of at least one
donor other than the spouses who are united in marriage. Heterologous
artificial fertilization is contrary to the unity of marriage, to the
dignity of the spouses, to the vocation proper to parents, and to the
child’s right to
be conceived and brought into the world in
marriage and from marriage."
Let us now make a step-by-step logical inference from the final quoted
statement from DV:
"Heterologous artificial fertilization
is contrary to the unity of marriage, to the dignity of the spouses, to
the vocation proper to parents, and to the child’s right to
be conceived and brought into the world in
marriage and from marriage."
It is evident the statement above holds if we replace "artificial" with
"natural":
"Heterologous natural fertilization is contrary to the unity of
marriage, to the dignity of the spouses, to the vocation proper to
parents, and to the child’s RIGHT to be conceived and brought into the
world in marriage and
from marriage."
In the situations addressed specifically by DV, this would apply e.g. to
bypassing sperm donation, sperm bank and insemination, and having the
donor directly have sex with the wife with the consent of the husband,
which we could call consented adultery. In this case, in
addition to and apart from the
factors mentioned by DV, the act is illicit due to extra-marital sexual
pleasure.
Moving one step further, it is clear that the statement above applies
exactly to non-consented (i.e. by the other spouse) adultery. Seeking
conception in such an act, in
addition to and apart from the
illicitness of the act due to extra-marital sexual pleasure, "is
contrary to the unity of marriage, to the dignity of the spouses, to the
vocation proper to parents, and to the child’s right to
be conceived and brought into the world in
marriage and from marriage."
Considering now seeking conception by fornication, the factors of being
contrary "to the unity of marriage, to the dignity of the spouses, to
the vocation proper to parents" do not apply, but that regarding the
child’s right still does, so that seeking conception in fornication, in
addition to and apart from the illicitness of the act due to
extra-marital sexual pleasure, "is contrary… to the child’s right to be
conceived and brought into the world in marriage and from marriage."
Thus, a straightforward logical inference from the teachings of DV leads
to the unequivocal conclusion that intentionally seeking conception in a
sexual relation outside marriage is evil in and of itself, for exactly
all (in the case of adultery), or part of (in the case of fornication),
the same reasons that make heterologous artificial fertilization evil in
and of itself, that is independently of the search for extra-marital
sexual pleasure. It is clear then that:
1. The intentional prevention of conception, whether through the use of
condoms or oral contraceptives, is a sin only in the case of conjugal
relations.
2. In the case of relations outside marriage, the conditional moral
statement could be stated as: "Given that
a couple not married to each other has decided to have a sexual
relation, and that they know that the woman may be on a fertile day, then not
using contraception, if it is available to them, increases the total
sinfulness of the act." In other words, in the case of sexual relations
outside marriage, contraception has a negative marginal contribution to
sinfulness, meaning that it makes the act marginally less sinful, though
it always remains a grave sin.
Having thus completed the demonstration of my thesis in the previous
paragraph, I provide the rest of the article as a kind of "visualization
aid" to help potentially shocked readers to perceive that the above
conclusion is not illogical or unreasonable after all. To start with,
the conclusion (which agrees with the recent statement by "Giovanni
Onofrio Zagloba") is readily supported by the consideration of a
hypothetical concrete case: Mr A leaves next door to family B, who are
of an extremely different race from that of Mr A. When Mr B goes on a
business or military trip for a few months, Mr A and Mrs B get into an
affair. Given that
they have decided to have sex and that they know that Mrs B is on a
fertile day, which is then the
more sinful course of action: having sex with contraception or without
it? Through the latter choice, Mr B will immediately take notice of the
adultery on return of his trip and will be reminded of it each and every
day by the skin color of the baby. Doesn't this choice push Mr B to seek
divorce?
And the first example of the gang robbing a bank may provide another apt
analogy of the essential difference between the cases of contraception
within and outside marriage. Let us consider a policeman: it is
essential to his duty to be able to neutralize the bad guys, which in
practice means being able to cause them physical harm. Therefore a
policeman would be commiting grave dereliction of duty if he used blank
cartridges instead of real bullets when shooting at criminals or
terrorists: since he must be
able to harm the bad guys, it would be a grave sin for him to render his
action ineffective. On the other hand, the gang should not be robbing a
bank in the first place, much less to harm anybody in doing that.
Therefore, if they have already decided to rob the bank anyway, their
using blank cartridges does not add to the sinfulness of the overall act
but rather detracts from it, as there is some good in not risking
people's health and there is nothing bad in risking the effectiveness of
something which should not be done in the first place. The key point is
that, while the shooting of a gun by both a policeman and a criminal may
be externally the same action, at a moral level they are essentially
different acts: one good and the other evil. Likewise, while a sexual
relation both within and outside marriage may be externally the same
action, at a moral level they are essentially different acts: one good
and the other evil. In both cases, it is a grave sin to thwart the
effectiveness of the good act, and it is no sin at all, and actually
good, to thwart the effectiveness of an evil act.
Hope you will find the above useful.
Best regards,
Johannes Argentus
December 15, 2010
(Dear Sandro Magister, ... I chose the alias "Johannes
Argentus" from St John Baptist, with whom I share the awareness of not
being worthy to untie Jesus' sandals, and from my Argentinian
nationality).