Fortnight for Freedom, Day 7

Ready for a history lesson? Here's the big question: What is the intellectual history of the Catholic Church's opposition to artificial means of contraception?

That teaching, which says using birth control pills, condoms, and so on is downright immoral, is currently the basis of the U.S. bishops' Fortnight for Freedom campaign. F4F, now in its 7th of 14 days, assails the Obama administration for mandating that contraception-covering health insurance be provided by Catholic institutions to all their employees. F4F's point man, Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, says the mandate violates our country's constitutional guarantees of "religious freedom."

Birth-control pills

But why did the Church reject "the pill" and other modern methods of preventing pregnancy in the first place? Margaret A. Farley, in her book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, takes the reader back to the time of Saint Augustine in the fifth century. His seminal writings held that marriage and procreation were good, but that "sexual desire [was] in itself an evil passion (that is, distorted by original sin)."

St. Augustine of Hippo

Augustine firmly opposed the philosophy of the heretical Manicheans of his day, who thought of the human body as intrinsically corrupt and evil. But, Augustine said, the Fall of Adam and Eve — the biblical event that brought humankind into a state of "original sin" — had introduced disorder into human sexuality. To offset that disorder, Augustine insisted on a strictly procreative purpose for sexual intercourse, which, of course, he limited to married heterosexual couples. He felt that only such an unwavering "procreative ethic" could tame unruly passion, a bad thing, with orderly reason, which Augustine deemed intrinsically good.

Augustine's procreative ethic echoed that of the earliest Christian writers, Farley shows, who in turn had been influenced by certain of their pagan contemporaries: specifically, the Stoic philosophers of the late Greco-Roman period. With the Stoics, the early fathers of the Church held that the Gnostics (who were the intellectual precursors of the Manicheans) were wrong to the extent that they asserted "two extreme positions ... one in opposition to all sexual intercourse and the other permitting any form of sexual intercourse so long as it was not procreative." The Stoics and the early Church fathers both wanted — again, strictly within the confines of heterosexual marriage — reverence for procreation as the only way hot sexual passion could be subdued by cooler intentional reason.

All the while, there were numerous competing strands of Christian thought about sexuality, says Farley. One of these held that virginity and celibacy were superior to marriage and procreation — a major reason why Catholic priests are celibate today. Another denigrated marital sex as preeminently a "remedy for lust." Yet another, which had roots in the thought of the late-Greco-Roman philosopher Plutarch, affirmed a different, if secondary, imperative for marital sex.

Plutarch

Plutarch, Farley says, held that "sexual desire represented a fundamental natural drive not only to procreation but to the companionship of spouses." This second legitimate purpose of marital sex would complement the first, that of procreation, in some of the earliest and also in some of the most modern statements issued by the Church regarding sexual morality.

To me, the most telling aspect of early Christian thought about sex and gender relations, as described by Farley, is that women were typically judged to be inferior to men. Their bodies were commonly linked to corruption and defilement; their putative passivity was deemed of lower merit than the supposedly more active male character; they were thought to be of lesser intelligence. If there is one single thing today that serves to call into doubt the whole history of Catholic thought about sex and gender, I believe it's our present-day recognition that women are not inferior, their bodies are not corrupt, their wits are not dim, their attitudes are not passive ... and their sexuality is not threatening to the good order of society.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Writing in the 13th century, though, Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae and his Summa Contra Gentiles, did nothing to elevate the status of women. He did suggest, says Farley, "that marriage might be the basis for a maximum form of friendship," echoing Plutarch and other thinkers from antiquity. But wives were still required to be subordinate to what might be called their "friendship" partners, i.e., their husbands.

Moreover, Aquinas's thinking about "the anatomy and biological functions of the sexual organs," writes Farley, led him to postulate that "the norm of reason in sexual behavior requires not only the conscious intention to procreate but the accurate and unimpeded (that is, noncontraceptive) physical process whereby procreation is possible."

In other words, the use of anything which might do what modern condoms do — impede the "physical process whereby procreation is possible" — was forbidden by Aquinas's theory of "natural law." By extension, the birth control pills of today, insofar as they likewise "impede" the procreative physical process, are considered just as unacceptable by the Church.

Today, 98 percent of sexually active, fertile Catholic women desiring not to become pregnant either are using, or have at some point used, artificial means of contraception, statistics show. A great many women, Catholic or otherwise, feel they would not be able to assert their equality, their intelligence, their bodily sanctity, their inclination to be active in life rather than passive, and the sheer validity of their strong female sex drive were it not for the ready availability of modern contraceptives.

A note, then, to Archbishop Lori: That's why the U.S government is telling the Catholic Church, "No more employee health plans without contraceptive coverage." Life in these modern United States today, I'd urge you to accept, demands exactly that.