Of Pedestals and Fulcrums

As I said in my post on Cardinal Keeler's Boycott of the recent Loyola College commencement, I am a pro-choice Catholic. That puts me at odds with my church. Herein, before I talk about why there needs to be a dialogue among people on various sides of this and similar issues, I'd like to point out where I think the source of our disagreement lies.

Let me sneak up on it this way. In 1952, when I was five and my family had just gotten its first TV set, every adult in America was agog over Lucille Ball's real-life/in-the-show pregnancy on I Love Lucy. But Lucy couldn't tell husband Ricky Ricardo (played by real-life husband and expectant father Desi Arnaz) that she was "pregnant." The word was considered too indelicate. She had to be "about to have a baby."

It seems so antiquated today, that attitude of putting a woman and her fertility — her ability to conceive and bear children — on a pedestal in a hushed inner sanctum of mystic adoration. Except, that is, if you are a member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of a certain age. When Lucy bore "Little Ricky" into the world, William Henry Keeler was already a young man of 21 or so. Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, though he probably never saw I Love Lucy in Germany, was four years his senior.

These men, in other words, underwent their personal formation as regards women, fertility, and sex in a different epoch, on, forgive me, a pre-feminist planet that no longer exists. If life is a see-saw, if it is a plank hopefully balanced on a fulcrum, well, let's just say that this particular teeter-totter board has long since shifted leftward.


Putting female fertility on a pedestal: it explains a lot. It explains why the church opposes artifical birth control to prevent fertility's fruition. Why abortion, which interrupts fertility's outworking, is considered wrong. Why gay and lesbian sex are forbidden: no chance of pregnancy.

Fertility-on-a-pedestal explains why the church considers marriage and the family to be the root of all community. Why divorce is verboten. Why heterosexual sex outside marriage is considered a sin. Why any sexual practice such as masturbation or coitus interruptus that cannot fertilize an egg cell is bad.

Fertility-on-a-pedestal undergirds the erstwhile standard that women should keep silent and cover their heads in church, and bow to their husbands' authority at home. After all, their presumed role in life is not to struggle with the mundane details of how to run a religious (or secular) establishment. That's a job for mere wombless men. So too is the task of organizing and carrying out the family's plan for interacting with the outside world: breadwinning, voting, etc.

Fertility-on-a-pedestal accounts for the church's insistence on a celibate male priesthood. True, women can become nuns, but only in view of the fact that Catholic sisters are considered married, symbolically, to Christ. They offer up their fertility to God for the greater good.

Meanwhile, male priests and religious offer up their sexuality. It's sort of like an OB/GYN setting aside his attraction as a healthy male to female private parts so that he may serve his patients' personal needs properly. There are situations when the best way to affirm a community's most important values is to eschew them personally.

My point here, though, is not to debate which of these assumptions are good and which not so good. Rather, it is to demonstrate that, behind all these assumptions, there is a single overarching core belief: the sanctity of female fertility. It's as if every pregnant woman — or every potentially or imaginably pregnant woman — were a Madonna.

That core principle of life in the world community, as endorsed not only by the Catholic Church but by many other institutions and individuals as well, is not a ridiculous one. Indeed, it was the stated or unstated principle which, in a bygone era, made Lucy Ricardo's being in "the family way" a matter of the utmost delicacy on 1950s' TV.

Idealizing female fertility has, in fact, served the Western World well for millennia. It has been essential to the traditional Judeo-Christian way of life.


The problem today with putting women and their fertility on a pedestal is that it is anti-feminist. Just as from the fertility-on-a-pedestal core value you can derive the whole panoply of traditional Catholic attitudes that are now being called into question, from its opposite belief — that female fertility has to be taken down from its pedestal — you can derive the entire feminist agenda.

From legalized abortion to equal pay for equal work, from an end, sexually, to the proverbial double standard to the need for day care, from the right to vote to the right not to be sexually harassed, everything feminists have fought for flows logically from the axiom that female fertility should no longer be elevated as an object of extreme devotion.

Funny thing about that, by the way: in a world in which the womb is held supernal, the possessor of the womb so often gets no respect. Any woman who is less than a perfect Madonna may get treated as a whore.


Now, along comes Cardinal Keeler with his refusal to share the stage with ex-NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani at the Loyola College graduation, on grounds that Giuliani has supported women's abortion rights as a public official. To me this implies that the cardinal, as the head of the Baltimore Archdiocese, has taken up a strategy by which to fix our society's leftward-tilting teeter-totter.

When a teeter-totter is alop, there are two ways to fix it. One way is to move the fulcrum. If the left end of the see-saw has sunk down to the ground, it is presumably because the board has slid leftward — or, equivalently, because there are now more people than before on the teeter-totter's left end. Either way, the teeter-totter can be rebalanced by shifting its supporting fulcrum to the left.

But that's not what the Cardinal and the church want. They want to rebalance the teeter-totter by calling our attention to the notion that the present, i.e., traditional, fulcrum position is one (or so they say) eternally ordained by God. Our reaction to that reminder is, hopefully, that we'll run back around to the right end of the see-saw and rebalance things that way.

So the church wants people to start behaving again as if female fertility were sacrosanct. No more abortion, or divorce, or free sex, or uppity women who put career before family. No more condoms or birth-control pills or information thereon in school. An end to gay and lesbian sex, much less gay and lesbian marriage. No more calls for female, or non-celibate male, priests. No more militant feminism.

In other words, back to the future. Take back the night. And other words to that effect.


It should be obvious that I personally object to this. The reasons are manifold, but my main reason is that I don't see how feminism can be served by it ... and I like feminism. I like the idea that women are no longer seen as having one transcendent purpose in life: to make full use of their wombs (or, as nuns, to sacrifice their fertility to God and the broader human community).

I believe the world is better served when female fertility is demoted from its once-lofty status.

At the same time, I recognize and admit that what goes on today — abortions by the millions each year, rampant casual sex, etc. — is no good. It would be wrong to shift the fulcrum as far left as it needs to go to accomodate this.

No, there needs to be a compromise. The fulcrum has to shift some, and we, the people, need to be called back to the other side of the teeter-totter some.

To get that to happen, there has to be a dialogue between the fulcrum-shifters and the people-movers. But, right now, Cardinal Keeler just wants to be a people-mover. His boycott of Mr. Giuliani's Loyola College address should be taken as, at an abstract level, a sign that he is not interested in pursuing this particular dialogue.

I think he's making a big mistake.

Cardinal Keeler's Boycott

Cardinal Keeler

Last Friday, the commencement ceremony at one of my local institutions of higher learning, Loyola College, was boycotted by Baltimore's Cardinal Archbishop William Keeler because former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has said he supports women's abortion rights, spoke. In today's edition of The Sun, in "Abortion views take priority over respect," columnist Susan Reimer had this to say:

The Catholic church is not an open society, and it is not a democracy, but it exists, in this country at least, within the borders of one. Its refusal to participate in any discussion on abortion ... will not advance its cause among this season's college graduates, some of whom are still forming their views on these issues.

Hear, hear! Like Reimer, I am one of Cardinal Keeler's Catholic flock, I am conscientiously pro-choice, and I am mightily incensed that Keeler would not share the stage with a man who was being honored for his courage and leadership on and after 9/11, and not for his views on abortion. Reimer, again:

And finally, Keeler's refusal to share the stage with Giuliani is an inexcusable show of disrespect for a man who, whatever his politics or his personal failings, walked into the mouth of hell on Sept. 11 to comfort his people.

It was the kind of selfless act of service that should recall for Keeler his own priestly vows.

Guiliani, after all, has not been a pro-abortion zealot. He has stated that he personally opposes abortion, but that he, as a public servant, recognizes that the right to choose does exist under American law, and that as an elected official he would be bound by that fact. This earlier article in The Sun says:

In 1989, when Giuliani was running for mayor, his campaign issued a statement firmly stating that he backs abortion rights, according to The New York Times.

"As mayor, Rudy Giuliani will uphold a woman's right of choice to have an abortion. Giuliani will fund all city programs which provide abortions to insure that no woman is deprived of her right due to an inability to pay. He will oppose reductions in state funding. He will oppose making abortion illegal. Although Giuliani is personally opposed to abortion, his personal views will not interfere with his responsibilities as mayor," the statement said.

It's accordingly clear that Cardinal Keeler's boycott was based not on Giuliani's personal support for abortion, since the ex-mayor is actually "personally opposed" to it, but on his stance as an elected official in this great and commodious land.

Since America, unlike the Catholic Church, is an open society with a multiplicity of religions and a diversity of opinions about abortion, I think Cardinal Keeler's boycott was wholly inappropriate.

Not only that, it sends an awful signal. Since it was a boycott not just by Cardinal Keeler personally but by every member of his official staff, it must be seen as a considered action of the church itself. By dint of it the local Baltimore church, if not the whole church worldwide, is trampling the spirit of pluralism so essential to the American enterprise.

Furthermore, it calls seriously into question the 1965 Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), also called "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World," which asserts that each of us must act according to "the voice of conscience." Can anyone doubt that Mr. Giuliani's stance vis-à-vis the legality of abortion is a personally difficult one, taken in all good conscience?

Modern Immaturity

Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth

“What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?” Bill Moyers asked the late guru of myth Joseph Campbell in the mid-1980s interviews that became The Power of Myth, the TV series and book. “What we’ve got on our hands,” was Campbell’s reply. “If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read The New York Times.”

Moyers: And you’d find?

Campbell: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don’t know how to act in a civilized society.

Moyers: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. I think of that passage in the first book of Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Campbell: That’s exactly it. That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done (The Power of Myth, pp. 8-9).

No longer, though, is scarifying physical trauma inflicted in the name of turning children into adults. That's an excellent thing, but perhaps it's not equally good that there is not much of an emotional, psychological, or spiritual rite of passage either. In our Peter Pan culture, we never really grow up.

No wonder today's polarized politics take on an odor of playground rumbles, Sharks vs. Jets with verbal stilettos. No wonder we turn so much more frequently to lawyers and law to settle our manifold differences. We don't have a unifying mythos any more, a common ground upon which to base our personal and communal rites of passage into maturity.

We desperately need one again, Campbell told Moyers. We need "the literature of the spirit" once more to guide us to eternal values, center our lives ... and save us from terminal immaturity. We need myths, particulrly those which speak of “youth coming to knowledge of itself," as “guidesigns” to our “inner thresholds of passage.”

But it can't just be the old myths recycled, without reinterpretation. They served particular cultures, often justifying hostility to other cultures, and often promoting indifference to nature. The myth we need now is a new, worldwide, nature-friendly myth:

... the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future [Campbell told Moyers] is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. … And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with – the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through [late adulthood and old age], and then to the exit; and then how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That’s what the myths have all talked about, and what this one’s got to talk about. But the society that it’s got to talk about is the society of the planet. And until that gets going, you don’t have anything (p. 32).

As Campbell pointed out, one of the things we lose when mythos falters is ethos, a set of shared — if not necessarily written — rules for conduct. Without ethos, there is no shame. Without ethos, there is Janet Jackson's accidental-on-purpose "wardrobe malfunction" at the recent Super Bowl halftime show. Without ethos, there is Abu Ghraib.

And how puerile, how juvenile both situations were, though one was as trivial as the other was horrendous. I mean, really: peeking at women's nipples is the preoccupation of a twelve-year-old boy. As is humiliating other people while mugging for the camera and saying, "Hi, Mom."

Christianity — my own religion, as a Roman Catholic — is supposed to be a unifying, worldwide myth. The word "catholic" means "universal." Joseph Campbell was a Catholic who departed from his church to spend his life finding what was, for him, a more satisfactory myth.

I don't necessarily agree with Campbell that the way to save the Christian myth is to make Jesus into a sort of Buddha walking the paths of the Middle East. I think the Gospel message concerning the existence, love, and forgiveness of God goes well beyond recapitulating the wise teachings of Gautama Buddha.

But, at the same time, I don't think the cultural conservatives who want to yank the church back 50 years, or a century, or five, have the right idea either. Campbell was correct to point out that monotheism has a long history of intolerance toward others, including other monotheists. No, we have to reinterpret the monotheist myth so that never happens again.

Actually, I see that in the offing. Under Pope John Paul II, and now under Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has been digesting the modernity implicit in its Vatican II reforms of the early and middle 1960s. It's been touching base with its eternal values, trying to see how to move forward without undermining them.

This is why we see such apparent contradictions as Pope Benedict reaching ecumencially out, as he recently did, to the Anglican Communion, while as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger he refused to accept Anglicans as members of a "sister church."

In other words, all the hairsplitting going on now bespeaks a gathering of energies in preparation for a great leap forward in harmonizing the Catholic message with that of other Christian and non-Christian communities. It is like negotiators first laying out the boundaries within which all subsequent negotiations can proceed.

Seeing that is so doesn't necessarily make me all that happy or comfortable, as I happen to be a "liberal" who would like more respect paid to the earth-shaking 1965 document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), also called "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World," one of the highlights of Vatican II pronouncement. (See my earlier post The City of God.) This (in the words of TIME magazine) "mandate for the church to come into synch with modern Western culture [meant] loosening its hierarchical authority, encouraging internal debate and external outreach and honoring individual freedom of conscience."

But I do see that top-down authority can be loosened, debate can be encouraged, and individual freedom of conscience can be nourished only in an atmosphere of widespread personal maturity. Contrast that type of situation with the late-'60s outburst of radicalism. On the heels of Vatican II, "yippies" and New Lefters self-righteously throwing glorified temper tantrums became the norm.

So we have a sort of chicken-and-egg problem today. We need an aggiornimento, an updating of our central organizing mythos, if we are to reinstitute the rites of passage that can make us mature adults and give us a shared ethos. But we must be ready to manifest that greater maturity, if we are to be trusted not to rip the nascent new ethos to shreds, late-'60s-style, when erstwhile liberals like Joseph Ratzinger felt "mugged by reality."

Miguel de Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno

A while back, in "Throw Those Crutches Away ... ", I had occasion to mention the Basque-Spanish writer-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), who said, "To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as though He did exist."

I have another blog, Beyond Darwin, in which I also mentioned Unamuno (see Grounding Faith in Reality? (I.D. IV)). I noted that Wikipedia's article on the man says:

Unamuno's philosophy was not systematic, but rather a negation of all systems and an affirmation of faith "in itself."

The topic of Unamuno's thought had come up briefly in a book I was (and still am) reading, William A. Dembski's Intelligent Design. In it, Dembski presents an argument to the effect that biological evolution has "information content" that may be detected scientifically, thereby demonstrating that the origin of living species has "intelligent causation." Theologically, that cause is God.

Dembski insists that signs from God must have what he refers to as "empirical content," of which "information" is a prime type. Early on, Dembski, a Christian (as was Unamuno), equates such empirically detectable signs to the significance inherent in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here in particular is where Miguel de Unamuno comes in:

For signs to induce conviction they actually have to occur. It is not enough to pretend a sign has occurred or to wish that it had occurred. According to [the Basque-Spanish writer and philosopher] Miguel de Unamuno [in 1913's Tragic Sense of Life], "To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as though He did exist." The faith de Unamuno describes is not grounded in reality. The faith confirmed by signs is. (p. 42)

Just from that and what I then looked up in Wikipedia, I knew Unamuno's thought resonated with me deeply and personally ... even though I admitted I knew next to nothing about Unamuno. I also found that I disagreed deeply with Dembski about the need for "empirical content" in signs from God. Basically I discovered that, to me, the search for "empirical content" empties faith and hyperinflates reason.

Tragic Sense of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno

At any rate, I sought out Unamuno's book, Tragic Sense of Life, which I have begun to read. The book apparently goes back to 1912, or 1921 in its English translation. The excellent introduction by Salvador de Madariaga (1886-1978), the Spanish diplomat, writer, historian and pacifist, confirms that Unamuno and Dembski would not have gotten along:

It is on the survival of his [Unamuno's personal] will to live, after all the onslaughts of his critical intellect, that he finds the basis for his belief — or rather for his effort to believe. Self-compassion leads to self-love, and this self-love, founded as it is on a universal conflict [between faith and reason], widens into love of all that lives and therefore wants to survive. So, by an act of love, springing from our own hunger for immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the Universe — that is, to create God. (p. xvii)

Madariaga says Unamuno, before anything else, is

... a whole man, with all his affirmations and all his negations, all the pitiless thoughts of a penetrating mind that denies [religious truths], and all the desperate self-assertions of a sould that yearns for eternal life. (p. xvi)

Madariaga's subject is, simply because of "that passion for life that burns in Unamuno," a "knight errant of the spirit" (ibid.). Accordingly, Unamuno embraces all the contradictory aspects of the life of a man, including — especially — "his inner deadlock" (p. xvii).

Dembski avoids the deadlock; Unamuno embraces it. Dembski looks for ways reason can bypass doubts about God and the afterlife. Unamuno leverages those doubts into "love of all that lives." Dembski whistles past the graveyard which taunts us that our "reason can rise no higher than scepticism" — a reason that, says Madariaga, "unable to become vital, dies sterile." Unamuno admits to the problem ... and declines to knuckle under to it:

... [H]e feels that, despite such conclusive arguments [for atheistic skepticism], his will to live perseveres, [so] he refuses to his intellect the power to kill his faith. (p. xvi)

I consider Unamuno's outlook — which I chucklingly characterize as "I fret, therefore I am" — as handsome as Dembski's is homely. Dembski's makes us merely rational; Unamuno's makes us human.

(More later.)