Missing the Moment?

Soon after the HHS contraception mandate was handed down, the prior of Saint Benedict Center, Brother Andre Marie, posted on this website some lines about there having arisen “a teaching moment,” an opportunity for the bishops of the country to explain why Church teaching is opposed to the “evil” (Brother’s word) of contraception.

Brother was correct. Such a moment doubtless had arisen, and contraception is evil. On the latter point, Brother did not undertake to do the bishops’ job for them by offering his own explanation. I shall not presume to undertake what he did not beyond observing: 1) Contraception is evil in the loosely understood sense of something being bad, this in much the way as, say, drinking too heavily every day is bad (or evil). Not simply will such drinking undermine your own well-being, it will negatively color the life of your family and the corner you inhabit of the larger society. The practice of contraception will have similar effects, but more insidiously because the results are not discernible with the same immediacy as alcohol’s.

2) It is also evil in the truer, more serious sense of the word: that anything which destroys life or tends to destroy it, including the life of the spirit, is evil. Indeed, it could be the very definition of it at its worst. In the case of contraception, life is actually prevented, which is why we should speak of life prevention instead of (euphemistically) birth control. Further, it is far too easy a step to go from preventing life one way, with a latex barrier or by taking pills, to preventing it by abortion, especially when that can be done with all the convenience of simply taking another (“morning-after”) pill.

Additional reasons exist as to why contraception is evil, but if I offer more I’ll be doing what I said I would not. What about Brother’s other point, the one about this being a teaching moment for the bishops? We have already said he was correct. Now it is appropriate to observe that so far the bishops are missing the moment. That is insofar as all they’ve done is talk about the HHS mandate in terms of religious freedom and consciences being violated. There has been no attempt at an explanation from them as a body, nor as far as I’m aware from any individual bishop, as to why it would be immoral for Church-affiliated institutions to pay for female employees’ life-prevention pills, whether or not the payment were coerced by government.

Why have the bishops, to date, confined themselves to speaking only in terms of religious freedom? Is it because they want non-Catholics not bound by the Church’s teaching on contraception as allies? Or, is it because they are all too aware — every poll on the matter shows it — that the majority of today’s Catholic couples don’t feel bound by the teaching? If the latter, wouldn’t it be all the more reason to explain why contraception is evil?

One hopes the bishops will explain before the “teaching moment” is entirely passed. More exactly, one hopes they would do more than simply declare: Because it is Church teaching. It is, but expecting the mere declaration to influence behavior in an age when most persons feel themselves free to live according to nothing but their own will would be as unrealistic as to expect a strapping 17-year-old not to do something simply because you tell him not to do it. Couples need to know why. Reasons need to be provided.

All this said, I rise to defend the bishops on one score. They have been criticized, including on this website, for muddying the water, of diluting whatever they have to say on “the moral issues” (defined as contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage) by issuing statements during recent weeks on diverse other matters, like (to cite one) agriculture policy.

I don’t want to defend the “seamless garment.” The brainchild of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, it has never amounted to much more than an effort to stitch the Catholic pro-life position on abortion onto the agenda of the left wing of the Democratic Party. However, there is more to morality than “the moral issues” even as there is more to life than staying open to it, instead of blocking it, when spouses make love. The areas of which I speak generally fall within the scope of the Church’s social teaching. Agriculture would be one.

I haven’t seen the bishops’ recent statement on the subject, the one referred to on this website, but it is the thrust of the historical social teaching that, all things considered, the agrarian way of life is better for a family than life in a city, not to speak of the moral wasteland of suburbia. As recently as the pontificate of Pius XII, within the memory of millions of Catholics now living, we had a pope who proposed that immigrants arriving in a new country should be provided, not with a job on a construction site or in a fast-food restaurant, but with a piece of land, seeds and farming tools. Thus might a man make a good life, or the beginning of one, for himself and his family in their new home.

I don’t suppose the bishops said anything like that in their recent statement on agriculture (or in one they also issued on immigration). My point is that laymen tending to view the bishops critically need to take some care. We are members of a Church hierarchically ordered by Providence so that, within the Church, the bishops are our superiors. It disturbs that order if laymen go beyond certain bounds in criticizing them, and is a positive perversion of it if we attempt to instruct. Yes, what the bishops (or even Rome) do or fail to do can be a real test for the laity. Sometimes it can have consequences far more tragic than any we have ever known in America, as when all the bishops of England save one buckled under to Henry VIII or when the bishops of Mexico ordered the valiant cristeros to lay down their arms. But we mustn’t let anything — not pedophile scandals or a failure to teach as we think they should or anything else — turn us into Protestants, deciding for ourselves what is authentically Christian. We have to remember that the past 47 years since Vatican II are simply that: 47 years — as nothing in the 2,000-year history of the Church.

When the Church sets herself aright after these past recent decades of disarray, as she is doing these days, we shall want the bishops speaking out on much more than one subject, and shall want to listen attentively when they do. Let us not close ourselves off to it now as if it will never be the case. It will not do to have the attitude at any and all times: “They have no business talking about that.” We’ll be adding bricks to the wall of separation which was already too high the moment Thomas Jefferson set it in place. Let us be alert to hearing wisdom from the bishops when it is forthcoming, even as we remain open, at all times, to life itself. Ultimately, after all, as wrongheaded as they as fallible men can sometimes be, the bishops in union with the pope are the voice in this world of the One without Whom there would be no life.