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.
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