Cardinal Martini's Jesus Would Never Have Written "Humanae Vitae" (original) (raw)
He is a Jesus who struggles against injustice. So he also opposes the "lies" and "damage" of the encyclical by Paul VI prohibiting artificial contraception. So writes the former archbishop of Milan in his latest book. But in the meantime, in another book, two scholars take a different approach to the spirit of that document
by Sandro Magister
ROMA, November 3, 2008 – In his latest book-interview, published first in Germany and now also in Italy, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini calls himself not an anti-pope, as he is often depicted by the media, but "an ante-pope, a precursor and preparer for the Holy Father."
But according to the book, there are many points on which Cardinal Martini seems fairly distant from the reigning pope and his most recent predecessors.
If one compares, for example, "Jesus of Nazareth" by Benedict XVI and the Jesus described by Cardinal Martini in this book, the distance is striking. This is expressed well by the German Jesuit interviewer, Fr. Georg Sporschill, who does not hide which side he takes:
"The pontiff's book is a profession of faith in the good Jesus. Cardinal Martini puts us in front of Jesus from another perspective. Jesus is the friend of the publican and the sinner. He listens to the questions of young people. He stirs things up. He fights with us against injustice."
That's just it. In the words of the cardinal, the Sermon on the Mount is a charter of rights for the oppressed. Justice is "the fundamental attribute of God," and "the criterion of distinction" by which He judges us. Hell "exists, and is already on the earth": in the preaching of Jesus, it was "a warning" not to produce too much hell down here. Purgatory is also "an image" developed by the Church, "one of the human representations that show us how it is possible to be spared from hell." The ultimate hope is "that God will welcome all of us," when justice gives way to mercy.
As always, Martini's style is subtle and opaque, beginning with the title of his latest book: "Nighttime conversations in Jerusalem. On the risk of faith." About priestly celibacy, for example, he says and doesn't say. The same about women priests. And about homosexuality. And contraception. And when he criticizes the Church hierarchy, he doesn't give names, of persons or things.
But this time, there is an exception. In one chapter of the book, the explicit target is Paul VI's encyclical "Humanae Vitae," on marriage and procreation. Martini accuses it of causing "serious damage" by prohibiting artificial contraception: "many people have withdrawn from the Church, and the Church from people."
Martini accuses Paul VI of deliberately concealing the truth, leaving it to theologians and pastors to fix things by adapting precepts to practice:
"I knew Paul VI well. With the encyclical, he wanted to express consideration for human life. He explained his intention to some of his friends by using a comparison: although one must not lie, sometimes it is not possible to do otherwise; it may be necessary to conceal the truth, or it may be unavoidable to tell a lie. It is up to the moralists to explain where sin begins, especially in the cases in which there is a higher duty than the transmission of life."
In effect, the cardinal continues, "after the encyclical Humanae Vitae the Austrian and German bishops, and many other bishops, with their statements of concern followed a path along which we can continue today." It is a stance that expresses "a new culture of tenderness and an approach to sexuality that is more free from prejudice."
But after Paul VI came John Paul II, who "followed the path of rigorous application" of the prohibitions in the encyclical. "He didn't want there to be any doubts on this point. It seems that he even considered a declaration that would enjoy the privilege of papal infallibility."
And after John Paul II came Benedict XVI. Martini does not name him, and does not seem to have much confidence in him, but he hazards this prediction:
"Probably the pope will not revoke the encyclical, but he might write one that would be its continuation. I am firmly convinced that the Church can point out a better way than it did with Humanae Vitae. Being able to admit one's mistakes and the limitations of one's previous viewpoints is a sign of greatness of soul and of confidence. The Church would regain credibility and competence."
That's Martini's view. But those who read only his latest book will learn nothing of the letter, much less the spirit, of that highly controversial encyclical.
Much more instructive, from this point of view, is the address that Pope Joseph Ratzinger dedicated to "Humanae Vitae" on May 10 of this year. Illustrating its contents, he affirmed that "forty years after its publication this teaching not only expresses its unchanged truth but also reveals the farsightedness with which the problem is treated."
Even more interesting, for understanding the immediate and historical context in which "Humanae Vitae" took shape, is the reading of a book published in Italy shortly before the one by Cardinal Martini.
The book is entitled: "Due in una carne. Chiesa e sessualità nella storia [Two in one flesh. Church and sexuality in history]." The two authors were both militant feminists during the 1970's and are both historians, one of them secularist, the other Catholic: Margherita Pelaja and Lucetta Scaraffia.
Scaraffia dedicates a full chapter to "Humanae Vitae," reconstructing its origin, content, and development. Here is the concluding part:
Then came the Billings method
by Lucetta Scaraffia
Paul VI was unable to explain himself, to express himself to the "men of our time," because his words were unable to overcome the wall of disappointment and protest that was immediately raised against "Humanae Vitae,"even among Catholics. The dialogue among the disappointed innovators and the Church, if one revisits it today, seems to be a dialogue among the deaf, so much so that this remains the encyclical least remembered by the Church itself among all of those of the twentieth century, almost like a nasty accident to be forgotten.
This does not change the fact that the ideas of the encyclical were developed by the Church's magisterium in the following years. The condemnation of human intervention in procreation, which was decisively established in it – although it was unambiguously anticipated by John XXIII in the 1961 encyclical "Mater et Magistra" – would constitute an important precedent for Catholic morality, not only regarding birth control, but also concerning the techniques of artificial fertilization and the manipulation of embryos that would take hold at the end of the twentieth century; and the understanding of the natural law expressed in it, an understanding with a personalist character but still connected to the idea of a human nature to be respected because it is created by God in his image and likeness, would be taken up and developed by John Paul II.
One of the most eager and courageous defenders of the encyclical was, in fact, precisely Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who had been one of Paul VI's advisors. Wojtyla was also one of the few cardinals who had addressed sexual morality, in a book entitled "Love and Responsibility," published in Polish in 1960 and then translated into other European languages. In the book, Wojtyla addresses topics like "the meaning of the verb 'to use',"the libido and neo-Malthusianism," "interpretation of the sexual urge," and "chastity and resentment," with a clarity and frankness of language that was certainly not customary in the Catholic tradition.
His description of the sexual urge is contrasted with "a spirit entranced with the biological order," and gives significant emphasis to personal integrity: "the fact that the sexual urge is the source of what happens in a man, of the various events which occur in his sensual and emotional life independently of his will, shows that this urge is a property of the whole of human existence and not just of one of its spheres or functions. This property permeating the whole existence of man is a force which manifests itself not only in what 'happens' involuntarily in the human body, the senses and the emotions, but also in that which takes shape with the aid of the will."
The future pope criticizes the Freudian concept of libido because of its strict correlation "with the utilitarian attitude," which confers an exclusively egocentric significance on the sexual act: "This further means that sensuality by itself is not love, and may very easily become its opposite."
But he does not condemn either sexuality or the body for this reason: "It is perhaps worth noting here that there exists a difference between carnal love and 'love of the body' – for the body as a component of the person may also be an object of love and not merely of concupiscence."
In conclusion, after denouncing the error of a culture that "refuses to recognize the great value of chastity for the sake of love," he refutes the increasingly widespread idea that "a lack of sexual relations is harmful to the health of human beings in general, and of men in particular. Not even a single illness is known that could confirm the truth of this idea," while "sexual neuroses are above all the consequence of excess in sexual life, and manifest themselves when the individual does not conform to nature and its processes."
This book demonstrates that Wojtyla, even before the encyclical, had seen the danger – which "Humanae Vitae" would warn against – of leaving the problem of the conjugal act and procreation outside of the ethical sphere, thereby removing man's responsibility for actions that are profoundly rooted in his personal makeup. In the article written in defense of the encyclical in "L'Osservatore Romano" on January 5, 1969, he revisits the personalized interpretation of the conjugal act, and maintains that conjugal love is not identical to its privileged expression, the sexual act: "This love is also expressed in continence – which can be occasional – because love is capable of renouncing the conjugal act, but it cannot renounce the authentic gift of the person."
Ten years later, shortly before becoming pope Wojtyla again wrote about the encyclical, trying to explain "the holistic vision of man" of which Paul VI was speaking, and to show in what "the dignity of the person" consists: man is not a divided being, because "being and value must together constitute the hermeneutical principle of man." Man and woman, therefore, must live the conjugal act in truth: this interior truth of the act that is indicated by the text of the encyclical.
Conscious of the discontent that accompanied the publication of "Humanae Vitae," a discontent that was still active ten years later, as soon as he became pope Wojtyla implemented the plan of Paul VI to convene a synod on the family, which was held in September of 1980. During the synod assembly, he had the opportunity to take up the theses of the controversial encyclical, which he defined as prophetic, and to present the ideas that would be contained in his apostolic exhortation "Familiaris Consortio," which he issued in 1982. He gave a personalist presentation of the ideas contained in the encyclical: love involves man as a whole; sexuality "is by no means something purely biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such"; marriage is sacred because it touches upon the deepest essence of man, the point at which he is connected to God. The vocabulary of the ends of matrimony was definitively set aside, while the understanding of sexuality that emerges from the document is fully human, connected to the person, who can never be used as an object. In this context, the body takes on a complete positivity, connected to the spirit of unity: the personalist principle implies that all dimensions of the human person participate in personal dignity, and are therefore worthy of respect, and must never be considered mere instruments. For John Paul II, sexuality, intimately connected to the person, is the corporal sign of the total donation of the person in his relating with another person.
The pope's attention to this theme is also demonstrated by the catecheses that he gave beginning in May of 1984, on the theme of "human love in the plan of God" in which he sought to establish the relationship between truth and ethics by reviewing the roots of the understanding of the body in the tradition of Scripture.
During the pontificate of John Paul II, there was also the breakthrough in scientific research that Paul VI had wished for in "Humanae Vitae": the discovery of a method of birth control based on the monthly period of infertility, easy to apply and reliable. But the news of this breakthrough did not extend beyond Catholic circles in the developed world, and even there it was not sufficiently promoted in Western countries like Italy, while it had much more success in the Third World.
In Western countries, in fact, natural methods have continued to be considered not only completely ineffective, but also inconvenient and difficult to apply. And there is another characteristic, which is never mentioned, that has contributed to giving them a bad name: the fact that they are free. No pharmaceutical company had any interest in financing research on this form of birth control. Instead, it was to their advantage to heap ridicule on it and discredit it.
But two married Australian doctors from Melbourne – Evelyn and John Billings, he from Irish Catholic ancestry, she a convert to Catholicism at their marriage – dedicated their lives to this research, obtaining significant results beginning in 1964. The new, natural method that took their name is not complicated and ineffective like the ones that use temperature and menstrual cycles, but instead is simple and reliable. In fact, it is extremely simple, costs nothing, and is based on the knowledge of her own body that any woman should be prepared to have. For those who remember the campaigns of the feminists for the discovery of the female sexual apparatus – in the 1970's, they advised women to use a mirror to examine their genitals – the Billings method seems perfect: the woman controls her power of procreation through her own knowledge of herself, without the mediation of doctors and medicine, in perfect autonomy. In reality, the feminists always treated with disdain.
But in the meantime, the Billings method spread all over the world: the Australian couple even founded centers in China, where the government immediately understood the value of a free method with no side effects for women's health, and in India, where the method was taught by Mother Teresa of Calcutta and her sisters. The lack of enthusiasm for the method in rich, modern Western countries might also be explained by observing the model of sexual behavior considered ideal: the Billings method, in fact, presupposes sexual fidelity, practiced as a couple and in mutual responsibility, far from the myth of complete sexual freedom and the separation between sexuality and procreation that has become rooted in the societies of the West.
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The books:
Carlo Maria Martini, Georg Sporschill, "Conversazioni notturne a Gerusalemme. Sul rischio della fede", Mondadori, Milano, 2008, pp. 128, euro 17,00.
Margherita Pelaja, Lucetta Scaraffia, "Due in una carne. Chiesa e sessualità nella storia", Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2008, pp. 324, euro 18,00.
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The encyclical published by Paul VI in 1968:
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The address delivered by Benedict XVI on May 10, 2008, at the fortieth anniversary of "Humanae Vitae":
> "Venerable Brothers in the Episcopate..."
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English translation by Matthew Sherry, Saint Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.
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3.11.2008