Preti pedofili? No, omosex - di Gerard van den Aardweg e R. Marchesini

In La Bussola Quotidiana

«I casi di abuso dei minori da parte di preti hanno poco a che vedere con la pedofilia, molto di più con l’omosessualità». E’ quanto afferma lo psicoterapeuta olandese Gerard van den Aardweg, rileggendo criticamente i dati delle ricerche compiute per conto della Conferenza Episcopale statunitense dal John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Van den Aardweg è autore di numerosi studi sull’omosessualità, in italiano è stato pubblicato dalla editrice Ares un suo volume, “Omosessualità e speranza”.

Professor van den Aardweg, lo studio del John Jay College offre spunti interessanti per comprendere il problema degli abusi sui minori da parte dei preti. In particolare mostra come la maggior parte degli abusi non hanno niente a che vedere con la pedofilia.

Ci sono due rapporti distinti del John Jay College (JJR), Il primo rapporto (JJR 1), del 2004, presenta statistiche sulle accuse di molestie a minori attribuite a sacerdoti e diaconi tra il 1950 e il 2002. Il secondo rapporto (JJR 2), del 2011 era mirato ad analizzare la personalità dei presunti molestatori e le circostanze esterne che potrebbero averne favorito la condotta, prendendo in esame il periodo dagli anni ’60 fino al 1985, quando le accuse di abusi sono già in diminuzione.

Spesso però si dimentica che tutti i dati contenuti nei JJR sono relativi perché non è mai stato verificato quante di queste accuse si sono poi rivelate vere o false. Se anche un 10% delle accuse fossero state smentite, i risultati della ricerca sarebbero tutti da rivedere.

Le statistiche sulla pedofilia erano già presenti nel primo rapporto, ma gli estensori non spesero troppe parole per dire che il principale problema non era la pedofilia. Nel secondo rapporto questa conclusione viene detta in modo molto più chiaro. Allo stesso tempo però sarebbe esagerato anche dire, al contrario, che la pedofilia non c’entra nulla con le accuse di molestie. Pedofilia significa contatti sessuali di adulti con bambini prima della pubertà, che in generale si assume arrivi attorno agli 11 anni.

Quali sono i dati principali contenuti nel JJR 1 riguardo al comportamento pedofilo dei preti?

Il 12% di tutti i casi tra il 1950 e il 2002 coinvolgeva bambini minori di 11 anni, cosa che viene quindi classificata come pedofilia omosessuale; il 6,6% dei casi riguardava invece le bambine sotto gli 11 anni, quindi pedofilia eterosessuale. Vale a dire che in meno del 20% dei casi totali si trattava di pedofilia. Certo, se consideriamo che ci sono una percentuale di ragazzi fra gli 11 e i 14 anni che non hanno ancora raggiunto la pubertà, possiamo ipotizzare che anche una parte di questi casi sia da classificare come pedofilia, in ogni caso non si supererebbe il 30% dei casi totali. Ma questo è un calcolo teorico, e comunque anche in questo caso il principale problema non è la pedofilia.

Inoltre parliamo di “casi” di pedofilia, non di percentuali di preti pedofili. Infatti nel JJR 1 troviamo che il 3% dei preti accusati erano responsabili del 26% di tutti i casi denunciati tra il 1950 e il 2002. Curiosamente il rapporto non dice l’età e il sesso dei minori molestati da questo 3%. Ma anche se una parte di questi preti fosse pedofila, la percentuale dei preti pedofili tra quelli accusati di molestie è certamente molto al di sotto del 26%.

Per questo il JJR 2 ha dovuto ribadire che è sbagliato definire pedofili tutti i preti accusati di abuso dei minori. Se poi siano il 5 o il 10% o cos’altro, nessuno può dirlo, i due rapporti non lo hanno chiarito.

Ma se il problema principale non è la pedofilia, qual è allora il problema nella sessualità della maggioranza dei preti coinvolti?

L’82% di tutte le presunte molestie consumate tra il 1950 e il 2002 aveva come vittime dei maschi: il 12% sotto gli 11 anni, come abbiamo visto, il restante 70% tra gli 11 e i 17 anni. Il che vuol dire che la grande maggioranza dei casi ha a che fare con l’«ordinaria» omosessualità. In generale i pedofili non si rivolgono a bambini dello stesso sesso, e certamente neanche gli eterosessuali. Inoltre, è innegabile che una rilevante parte di uomini con orientamento omosessuale sia attratta dagli adolescenti e preadolescenti. Secondo una ricerca, circa il 20% dei maschi omosessuali attivi preferisce adolescenti e preadolescenti, un altro 20% preferisce ragazzi nella tarda adolescenza e giovani adulti. Quindi circa il 40% di maschi omosessuali ha un’attrazione per gli adolescenti, che viene chiamata efebofilia.

Una buona notizia è che dagli anni ’80 il numero di casi denunciati di molestie ha iniziato a diminuire, il che sembra coincidere con le misure preventive prese nel 1981 dalla Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, allora guidata dal cardinale Ratzinger.

Sì, questo documento vaticano può avere aiutato, soprattutto se lo vediamo come parte di sforzi congiunti durante il pontificato di Giovanni Paolo II per mettere mano alla confusione morale e dottrinale causata dal dissenso nella Chiesa del post-Concilio, che senza dubbio è stato uno dei fattori più importanti nell’abbassare la resistenza di molti preti ai propri impulsi sessuali, omo o eterosessuali che fossero. Ma sicuramente ci sono stati altri fattori a giocare un ruolo in questa diminuzione di casi. Ad esempio, in alcuni paesi a causa dell’abbandono di tanti preti e religiosi, molte scuole e istituzioni educative hanno dovuto chiudere. La frequenza in chiesa dei ragazzi è diminuita drasticamente: in altre parole sono venuti meno quei luoghi dove alcuni preti con problemi potevano avvicinare i ragazzi.

Non dobbiamo però credere che sia calato allo stesso modo il comportamento omosessuale dei preti. Una visione più liberal riguardo al comportamento omosessuale era già penetrata in profondità nella Chiesa. E contemporaneamente molti giovani con orientamento omosessuale erano entrati nei seminari e diventati sacerdoti. Inoltre l'età dei partner sessuali di seminaristi e preti omosessuali si sposta in avanti man mano che il comportamento omosessuale viene sempre più apertamente tollerato e normalizzato.

Eppure il JJR 2 non tira le conclusioni. Anzi, sposta l’attenzione su una rigida educazione moralistica ricevuta in famiglia come causa di comportamenti scorretti, e comunque non rileva alcuna differenza sostanziale tra i preti accusati di abusi e gli altri sacerdoti. Come mai queste conclusioni, peraltro non suffragate da nessun dato oggettivo?

Sicuramente questa è una parte molto debole del rapporto, io credo per due motivi essenzialmente: il primo è che i ricercatori del John Jay College sono incompetenti quanto a investigazioni “psicologiche”. Secondo motivo, sicuramente più importante, è il tentativo di coprire l’evidente “impronta” omosessuale in tutta la faccenda: questo è un tabù che deve essere protetto. Per questo si è evitato di cercare e presentare i dati come una seria ricerca, non viziata da pregiudizi, dovrebbe fare: dividendo tutti i casi in categorie molto ben individuate: quelli che hanno abusato di maschi minori di 11 anni, quelli che hanno abusato di femmine sotto gli 11 anni, quelli che hanno abusato di maschi tra gli 11 e i 13 anni, le femmine della stessa età, e così via. In questo modo la verità emergerebbe con chiarezza.

Quindi le conclusioni del JJR 2 sono fuorvianti…

Lo sono perché cercano di nascondere la realtà, accreditando una delle parole d’ordine del movimento gay: gli omosessuali non hanno una maggiore inclinazione alle molestie rispetto agli eterosessuali. Così si arriva a fare contorsioni linguistiche per non dire ciò che appare evidente. Ad esempio il JJR 2 rifiuta con sdegno “la diffusa speculazione… che l’identità omosessuale è legata agli abusi… soprattutto a causa dell’alto numero di vittime di sesso maschile”. Speculazione? Quasi l’85% delle vittime sono adolescenti maschi e loro pensano di poter liquidare tranquillamente il fattore omosessuale? Questa è cecità voluta. Nessuno che abbia familiarità con il problema delle molestie subite da parte di insegnanti, in istituti, nelle famiglie adottive e così via, può dubitare delle motivazioni omosessuali che sono all’origine della maggioranza dei casi. Piuttosto è la conclusione del JJR 2 secondo cui i preti che abusano di minori non sono distinguibili dagli altri preti a essere pura fantasia. Questo vorrebbe dire che ci sarebbe stato qualche migliaio di normali preti eterosessuali che hanno cercato gratificazione sessuale con ragazzi invece che con ragazze. E’ una cosa priva di senso, chi può darvi credito?

Padre Serra S. J., la difesa della verità - di Mario Palmaro

In La Bussola Quotidiana

Con la morte di Padre Angelo Serra, avvenuta a Roma nella notte del 20 gennaio, la comunità scientifica perde uno dei più importanti genetisti, e il mondo cattolico perde uno dei più seri e rigorosi bioeticisti italiani. Serra rappresenta un raro esempio di studioso nel quale si univano una grande preparazione scientifica, una modestia sincera e sorprendente, e un rigore dottrinale e morale assoluto.

Ho conosciuto Padre Serra nel 1995, da studente, quando frequentavo il corso di specializzazione in Bioetica presso l’Istituto Scientifico del San Raffaele di Milano. Si trattava di un corso organizzato con serietà, guidato da docenti intelligenti e preparati, ma all’interno di una visione morale piuttosto elastica, disposta a sconfinare dai contorni netti della dottrina cattolica sulla vita e sulla medicina. Fra i docenti si susseguivano monsignor Sgreccia e, appunto, Padre Serra; ma anche Edoardo Boncinelli (“per me – ci diceva – la ricerca scientifica è una cosa, la riflessione morale un’altra”) e Fernanda Pivano, che fu invitata a tenere una lezione sull’eutanasia parlando del suicidio dell’amico Hernest Haminguay. Il tema dell’aborto fu affidato, tanto per dare un’idea, al professor Giovanni Berlinguer, relatore della legge 194 al parlamento italiano.

In quella giornata al San Raffaele, a Serra non ci volle molto per accorgersi che, a dispetto della cornice in cui avveniva la sua lezione, non stava “giocando in casa”: che l’embrione fosse un essere umano fin dal concepimento, che la fecondazione artificiale fosse incompatibile con il rispetto di quell’uomo, che il Rapporto Warnock dicesse delle corbellerie, era tanto chiaro per Serra quanto discutibile per alcuni dei suoi allievi. Sulle prime ebbi l’impressione che quel gesuita, piccolo di statura, dal tratto delicato e gentile, incapace di alzare la voce, con lo sguardo che ti voleva bene a ogni costo; ebbi l’impressione, insomma, che quel buon prete sarebbe stato del tutto inadeguato a far fronte alle obiezioni, talvolta sarcastiche di una platea così provocatoria. Una specie di don Abbondio in mezzo ai “vasi di ferro” della bioetica cattolica-possibilista.

Si trattava, in fondo, di una platea che aveva fatto già perdere la pazienza a Sgreccia, che alla fine della sua burrascosa lezione mi aveva confidato “Io qui non ci vengo più, mi attaccano sempre”. Ma la mia valutazione di Padre Serra si rivelò presto del tutto sbagliata: Padre Angelo, con quell’aria serafica e impassibile, difese le posizioni senza mollare di un millimetro, impugnando di volta in volta le armi della biologia, della genetica, della filosofia, della logica elementare.

Non ci fu niente da fare: più lo provocavano, e più ne veniva fuori con calma e con forza. Ne rimasi molto colpito, anche perché Serra non godeva, né godette negli anni successivi, di quella fama che avrebbe meritato, anche nel mondo cattolico. Era schivo, e non cercava i riflettori; e con quelle idee ortodosse che si ritrovava, tanto meno venivano a cercarlo i responsabili di giornali e Tv, anche cattolici.

Rividi Padre Angelo molti anni dopo, per una circostanza della vita assai strana: insieme ad altri amici, avevamo fondato un’associazione pro life – il Comitato Verità e Vita – spinti dalla necessità di dire pubblicamente che la fecondazione artificiale, anche nella sua forma omologa, quella legalizzata dalla legge 40 del 2004, rimane una pratica inumana, immorale e contraria al diritto naturale. Una pratica che dovrebbe essere vietata dalle leggi di uno stato civile. Una pratica che dovrebbe essere sempre estranea a un medico e a un ospedale cattolico.

Non immaginavamo che questa iniziativa ci avrebbe tirato addosso così tanti guai proprio da parte del mondo cattolico; ma non immaginavamo nemmeno che questa scelta ci avrebbe fatto incontrare tante persone straordinarie, spesso sconsociute ma qualche volta autorevoli e prestigiose, contagiate esse stesse da una certa “emarginazione” culturale per via dell’amicizia con “quelli di Verità e Vita”. Padre Angelo fu uno di questi: quando si trattò di mettere in luce l’altissima abortività indotta dalla fecondazione artificiale, non ebbe esitazioni, e iniziò a tenere pubbliche conferenze, organizzate anche da noi, per spiegare a tutti come stessero le cose.

Ovviamente sarebbe riduttivo limitare a questo snodo bioetico la ricchezza di vita di Padre Serra. Genovese, 93 anni dei quali 78 trascorsi nella Compagnia di Gesù, padre Serra è stata una figura di primissimo piano nel campo della genetica, interpretata sempre nel rispetto della dignità di ogni essere umano. Era uno studioso apprezzato in tutto il mondo: nel 1964 ha insegnato alla Harvard Medical School di Boston. Tornato in Italia, per 30 anni ha risieduto nella comunità della Civiltà Cattolica ed è stato docente presso la facoltà di Medicina dell’Università Cattolica di Roma dove ha fondato e diretto l’istituto di genetica umana. Presidente della Confederazione italiana dei consultori di ispirazione cristiana, negli ultimi anni padre Serra è stato membro della Pontificia Accademia per la Vita e del Pontificio Consiglio per la Salute.

Penso che la sua morte sia una grave perdita per la comunità scientifica, per la Chiesa e per la famiglia della Compagnia di Gesù. Ma è una perdita molto grave anche per l’esiguo (e talvolta tiepido) fronte pro life italiano. Padre Angelo Serra è sempre stato un fiero avversario delle tecniche antiumane applicate alla genetica, e un trasparente nemico delle leggi ingiuste che permettono l’aborto, la fecondazione artificiale, la sperimentazione sugli embrioni umani. Una posizione difficile da sostenere verso il mondo laico dei colleghi; ma per paradosso, difficile da sostenere anche rispetto a certe derive della bioetica e della sanità “cattoliche”.

Per questo mi sembra giusto ricordare di lui questo profilo che lascia a tutti noi una sorta di “testamento bioetico”: Serra sostenne sempre la illiceità di ogni tecnica di fecondazione artificiale extracorporea, e la profonda ingiustizia di una legge come quella italiana, la 40 del 2004, che – fatte salve le buone intenzioni e il contesto in cui venne votata - permette di produrre l’uomo in provetta. Più di una volta, Padre Angelo mi ha confidato la sua sofferenza profonda per la confusione diffusa anche nel mondo cattolico sui temi della bioetica; non capiva i silenzi, i compromessi, le ambiguità, i veri e propri errori, i silenzi intorno alla fecondazione artificiale, e in particolare il clima di generalizzata “difesa” della fivet omologa a norma di legge 40.

Il suo sorriso è la grande lezione che ci rimane più impressa: imparare ogni giorno a difendere la verità, senza odiare nessuno.

The Contraception Deception

Hungarian Pro-Life Constitution Comes Under Attack - By Susan Yoshihara, PhD

New York, January 27 (C-FAM) Hungarian leaders have passed a law protecting the traditional family, defying ongoing criticism that their new constitution would curtail abortion and homosexuality.

The new law says the family, based upon marriage of a man and a woman whose mission is fulfilled by raising children, is an "autonomous community...established before the emergence of law and the State" and that the State must respect it as a matter of national survival. It says "Embryonic and foetal life shall be entitled to protection and respect from the moment of conception," and the state should encourage "homely circumstances" for child care. Read More

Major victory for life in Europe: ‘Euthanasia must always be prohibited’- by John-Henry Westen

STRASBOURG, January 26, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Yesterday, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a non-binding resolution stating: “Euthanasia, in the sense of the intentional killing by act or omission of a dependent human being for his or her alleged benefit, must always be prohibited.”

The purpose of the resolution, entitled “Protecting human rights and dignity by taking into account previously expressed wishes of patients”, defines the principles that should govern the practice of “living wills” or “advance directives” in the 47 States of the Council of Europe.

The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) welcomed the adoption of the PACE resolution. “This Resolution is a major victory for the protection of life and dignity,” said ECLJ Director Grégor Puppinck.

Puppinck noted that because “living wills” or “advance directives” are open to abuses, and are a “backdoor” for introducing euthanasia or assisted suicide into legislation, PACE’s resolution was necessary.

The resolution is comprised of a list of principles already elaborated in three documents previously adopted in the Council of Europe, including the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (Oviedo Convention), which legally binds the majority of member States.

Another positive principle introduced by the Italian MP Mr Luca Volontè, states “in case of doubt, the decision must always be pro-life and in favour of the prolongation of life.”

Last year, on January 20th 2011, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a ruling (Haas versus Switzerland) that while there is a “human right” to suicide, the state has no obligation to provide citizens with the means to commit suicide.

Puppinck noted that although not legally binding on member states, the PACE resolution would nevertheless have a positive effect. “It should have a direct impact on the upcoming judgment of the European Court in the case Koch v. Germany concerning the ban of assisted suicide in Germany,” he said.

Archbishop Dolan says Obama administration 'treats pregnancy as disease'

New York City, N.Y., Jan 27, 2012 / 12:45 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, head of the U.S. bishops' conference, says the Obama administration has revoked the religious freedom of groups that do not regard women's fertility as as “disease.”

“The Catholic Church defends religious liberty, including freedom of conscience, for everyone,” the New York archbishop and conference president wrote in a Jan. 25 Wall Street Journal editorial, addressing the government's final decision to require contraception coverage in most new health plans.

With this decision, the cardinal-designate wrote, “the Obama administration has failed to show the same respect for the consciences of Catholics and others who object to treating pregnancy as a disease.”

On Jan. 20 the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed it would impose the contraception coverage mandate on most religious institutions, with a narrow exception for groups whose main purpose is the “inculcation of religious values” among people of the same faith.

“Even Jesus and his disciples would not qualify for the exemption,” Cardinal-designate Dolan noted, “because they were committed to serve those of other faiths.”

Health and Human Services finalized the contraceptive mandate just days before the annual March for Life, an event that mourns the anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.

As the U.S. bishops' president observed in his editorial, the decision came despite a landmark Supreme Court case in which all nine justices ruled in favor of religious ministries' right of self-determination.

“Scarcely two weeks ago, in its Hosanna-Tabor decision upholding the right of churches to make ministerial hiring decisions, the Supreme Court unanimously and enthusiastically reaffirmed these longstanding and foundational principles of religious freedom,” he recalled.

The court, he said, made it clear that religious institutions had the right “to control their internal affairs.”

But the Obama administration “has veered in the opposite direction.”

“It has refused to exempt religious institutions that serve the common good – including Catholic schools, charities and hospitals – from its sweeping new health-care mandate that requires employers to purchase contraception, including abortion-producing drugs, and sterilization coverage for their employees.”

Cardinal-designate Dolan called the move “an unprecedented incursion into freedom of conscience” that forces an “unacceptable dilemma” on believers: “Stop serving people of all faiths in their ministries – so that they will fall under the narrow exemption – or stop providing health-care coverage to their own employees.”

Non-exempt religious groups have been granted an additional year to comply with the mandate, a concession the future cardinal ridiculed – “as if we might suddenly be more willing to violate our consciences 12 months from now.”

First published in August 2011 as part of federal health care reform, the contraception coverage requirement has drawn criticism from a broad spectrum of groups – including Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians, as well as some Catholics known for supporting the president on other issues.

“Hundreds of religious institutions, and hundreds of thousands of individual citizens, have raised their voices in principled opposition to this requirement,” Cardinal-designate Dolan wrote in his editorial.

“Many of these good people and groups were Catholic, but many were Americans of other faiths, or no faith at all, who recognize that their beliefs could be next on the block.”

In Wednesday's editorial, Cardinal-designate Dolan stressed that religious liberty is also “the lifeblood of the American people” and “the cornerstone of American government,” guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

Now, he warned, this right is jeopardized in the interest of preventing fertility.

“This latest erosion of our first freedom should make all Americans pause. When the government tampers with a freedom so fundamental to the life of our nation, one shudders to think what lies ahead.”

Pittsburgh bishop: contraception mandate tells Catholics ‘To hell with you!’

Pittsburgh, Pa., Jan 27, 2012 / 03:15 am (CNA).- The new federal contraception mandate is “like a slap in the face” that says “To Hell with you!” to Catholics and religious freedom, Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburgh said.

“This is government by fiat that attacks the rights of everyone – not only Catholics; not only people of all religion. At no other time in memory or history has there been such a governmental intrusion on freedom not only with regard to religion, but even across-the-board with all citizens,” Bishop Zubik wrote in the Jan. 27 edition of the Pittsburgh Catholic.

“Kathleen Sebelius (Health and Human Services Secretary) and through her, the Obama administration, have said ‘To Hell with You’ to the Catholic faithful of the United States,” he charged, adding that the administration has damned Catholics’ religious beliefs, religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

The new rules from the Department of Health and Human Services mandate insurance coverage for “preventive services,” a category which the department ruled covers sterilization and contraception, including an abortifacient drug.

Catholic teaching recognizes the use of these procedures and drugs as sinful, but the mandate’s religious exemption is narrow and will not “practically speaking” apply to many Catholic health systems, educational institutions, charities and other organization, the bishop said. It will apply in “virtually every instance where the Catholic Church serves as an employer.”

Bishop Zubik said the mandate treats pregnancy as a disease and “forces every employer to subsidize an ideology or pay a penalty while searching for alternatives to health care coverage.” It also undermines health care reform by “inextricably linking it to the zealotry of pro-abortion bureaucrats.”

He said the mandate tells Catholics “not only to violate our beliefs, but to pay directly for that violation” as well as to “subsidize the imposition of a contraceptive and abortion culture on every person in the United States.”

The bishop asked Catholics to write to President Obama, Secretary Sebelius, their senators and members of Congress.

“This mandate can be changed by Congressional pressure. The only way that action will happen is if you and I take action,” Bishop Zubik said.

“Let them know that you and I will not allow ourselves to be pushed around (or worse yet) be dismissed because of our Catholic faith.”

Unless the rules are changed, they will go into effect in one year.

Perché ogni bimbo esige un papà e una mamma - di R.Iafrate e G. Tamanza

In La Bussola Quotidiana

Per gentile concessione, dall'ultimo numero in uscita di «Vita e Pensiero», bimestrale culturale dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, pubblichiamo questa riflessione firmata dagli psicologi Raffaella Iafrate e Giancarlo Tamanza.

Perché oggi parlare di madri e padri rappresenta un argomento sfidante? L’essere genitori parrebbe di primo acchito una delle esperienze esistenziali più note e condivise, una sorta di “universale” indiscusso e indiscutibile dell’umano. Eppure, attualmente, in un clima di individualismo e di relativismo, anche tale tema è ampiamente messo in questione.

L’incremento dell’instabilità coniugale con la diffusione di famiglie monogenitoriali, l’esperienza della genitorialità sempre più vissuta come una scelta e un diritto individuale, la diffusione di forme familiari alternative e il dibattito sui diritti delle coppie omosessuali mettono in discussione l’affermazione da sempre condivisa secondo la quale «un bambino per crescere ha bisogno di un papà e di una mamma». Potremmo riassumere la sfida a cui maternità e paternità sono attualmente sottoposti in un paio di domande che paiono serpeggiare nel dibattito culturale odierno. Perché due genitori? E perché diversi?

In prima battuta sarebbe già possibile rispondere a queste domande semplicemente osservando, dal punto di vista fenomenologico, come tutta la letteratura psicologica metta da sempre in evidenza il ruolo differenziale delle due figure genitoriali, mostrando come madri e padri giochino ruoli e funzioni diversi e complementari nell’educazione dei figli e nella trasmissione di competenze e valori. Se è vero – come è vero – che, per crescere, un individuo ha bisogno di fare esperienza della differenza, ossia di essere in grado di mettersi in rapporto, confrontarsi e imparare dall’altro, la non omologabilità delle funzioni del maschile e del femminile appare decisiva. Molte ricerche di psicologia dimostrano come, lungo il percorso di crescita dei figli, la compresenza di un “codice affettivo materno”, improntato alla cura, alla protezione e all’accoglienza incondizionata e di un “codice etico paterno”, espresso dalla responsabilità, dalla norma, dalla spinta emancipativa, siano fondamentali per garantire un’equilibrata evoluzione dell’identità personale. In particolare, è stata da sempre ampiamente sottolineata l’importanza di instaurare un buon legame di attaccamento con la madre, così come, soprattutto negli studi più recenti, è stata enfatizzata la centralità della funzione paterna man mano che il figlio cresce, a motivo della necessità di regole e di orientamento verso l’autonomia che, specie dall’adolescenza in poi, divengono fondamentali.

Numerosi studi, inoltre, hanno mostrato in più occasioni come, in situazioni familiari peculiari caratterizzate dall’assenza di un genitore, o dalla carenza di una delle due funzioni genitoriali (specie con l’impallidimento della figura paterna, tipico del nostro contesto fondamentalmente “matrifocale”) si possano riscontrare non poche difficoltà, anche a lungo termine, per i figli. Eppure, qualcuno potrebbe obiettare, è possibile crescere senza un genitore: l’esperienza positiva di numerose famiglie in cui anche non per scelta, ma per un’avversità del destino, una figura genitoriale è venuta a mancare, testimonia che, pur nella fatica della perdita e dell’assenza, i figli possono crescere sani e sereni anche con la sola madre o il solo padre. La funzione “differenziante” può essere assunta anche da altre figure di riferimento, nonni, amici, reti di sostegno esterne, così come l’esercizio delle funzioni educative può essere condiviso con altri che non siano l’altro genitore. Le funzioni materna e paterna sono inoltre per alcuni aspetti interscambiabili: sempre più frequentemente si incontrano madri che esercitano alcuni aspetti della funzione paterna e viceversa padri che svolgono parte della funzione materna (per esempio aspetti legati all’accudimento), soprattutto oggi dove il rifiuto dei modelli normativi del passato conduce i padri ad allinearsi maggiormente alle modalità di relazione tipicamente femminili-materne (si parla a tal proposito di new nurturant fathers).


LA CENTRALITA' DELL'ORIGINE

La questione va dunque posta a un altro livello. Il tema della “necessità” per l’umano di un paterno e di un materno, o meglio proprio di “quel padre” e di “quella madre”, implica uno spostamento di attenzione dal piano materiale-fenomenologico a un piano simbolico-antropologico e soprattutto impone un capovolgimento della prospettiva dal punto di vista dei genitori a quello del figlio.

Se c’è un dato indiscutibile, su cui non si può obiettare, è che per nascere “quel figlio” ha bisogno di “quel padre” e di “quella madre”. Le differenze di genere e di generazione sono inscritte nella procreazione e sono metafora della vita psichica: è importante dunque partire non dalla coppia, ma dal figlio. Il figlio è sempre generato da due, e da due “diversi”, da un maschile e da un femminile, da due stirpi familiari, da due storie intergenerazionali e sociali. La differenza (di genere, di stirpe, di storia) non solo consente la procreazione, ma permette anche che nel tempo il figlio diventi a propria volta generativo da più punti di vista. L’incontro con l’altro da sé evidenzia il limite (tu sei quello che io non sono) e al tempo stesso la potenzialità dell’umano (solo insieme a te posso andare oltre me stesso), quindi aiuta a riconoscere ciò che si è e l’obiettivo per cui si è nati. Centrali diventano dunque i temi dell’origine, dell’identità e della generatività. Il figlio, per strutturare la propria identità personale, ha bisogno di riconoscersi nel suo punto di origine che è sempre frutto di uno scambio tra quel materno e quel paterno che lo hanno generato e che consentirà di inserirsi in una storia intergenerazionale e sociale, che lo renderà a propria volta generativo a livello biologico, psicologico e simbolico-culturale, ossia gli permetterà di realizzare pienamente se stesso e la sua umanità.

Senza un’origine non c’è identità. Alla domanda «chi sono io?» non riusciamo a rispondere esaurientemente senza far riferimento alla nostra origine. Solo il semplice fatto di pronunciare il nostro nome e cognome ci fa risalire a chi il nome l’ha scelto per noi e ci ha inserito in un’appartenenza familiare. Ripartendo dal tema dell’origine, si capisce così che questo processo non può che riguardare sia una madre sia un padre. Se il parto è affidato interamente alle donne (per questo mater semper certa est), la nascita è rappresentata dal riconoscimento del padre, dalla nominazione (in nomine patris), dall’ingresso del nuovo nato nella famiglia come persona unica e irripetibile proprio perche “distinta”, “separata” e per questo “nominata”. Françoise Dolto afferma che è il padre a infondere a un atto biologico come la nascita un carattere propriamente “umano”; attraverso l’adozione simbolica del nuovo nato, il padre riconosce e umanizza la nuova vita nascente.

La donna, dunque, mette al mondo, ma non genera da sola. Perché il processo della nascita sia compiuto occorre spostarsi da un piano puramente biologico a uno simbolico-sociale che il riconoscimento paterno e l’assegnazione del “nome del padre” consente di introdurre. È la madre che ospita la funzione paterna e ne consente l’esercizio. È fondamentale che nella relazione madre-figlio/a ci sia il riferimento a un terzo, il padre appunto. È il padre che istituisce la differenza/ differenziazione dall’originaria simbiosi con la madre (come ha sempre affermato la psicoanalisi) e, nominandolo, “taglia”, “separa” “de-finisce” il figlio sottraendolo dallo stato di onnipotenza e introducendo il senso del limite e contemporaneamente il senso e la direzione della sua crescita, favorendo così la sua piena umanizzazione.


PROVOCAZIONI DELLA CULTURA CONTEMPORANEA

In questa prospettiva concettuale e considerando le dimensioni essenziali della paternità e della maternità, la sfida e gli interrogativi che la società e la cultura contemporanea pongono alla genitorialità assumono un aspetto più radicale e complesso. A ben vedere, infatti, la messa in questione del senso della genitorialità non riguarda soltanto le nuove forme di vita familiare. Queste ultime rappresentano piuttosto la condizione empirico-fenomenologica che rende esplicito il tema, ma l’interrogativo circa la necessità per un figlio di accedere e di trattare mentalmente il rapporto con le proprie origini riguarda allo stesso modo le situazioni familiari più comuni o tradizionali. E anche all’interno di queste situazioni familiari ordinarie, dove cioè un figlio sperimenta in modo del tutto aproblematico la presenza di un padre e di una madre, diventa necessario riflettere su quanto le forme contemporanee della paternità e della maternità possano essere sfidate circa la loro funzione essenziale e messe alla prova dai modelli socioculturali emergenti.

La riflessione e le ricerche sociologiche e psicosociali hanno da tempo, a questo proposito, messo in evidenza alcuni caratteri tipici della genitorialità contemporanea. Essi si inscrivono in un più complessivo e generalizzato processo di trasformazione sociale e culturale che ha prodotto un significativo cambiamento del modo stesso con cui sembra strutturarsi la mente e l’identità personale, segnata da un’accresciuta e ormai prevalente centratura sulla ricerca dell’affermazione individualistica del Sé e sulla prevalenza di istanze narcisistiche che inducono a una ricerca immediata e superficiale della soddisfazione personale. Tale assetto ha, ovviamente, delle ripercussioni sulle forme della genitorialità, principalmente in due sensi.

In primo luogo, e questo è un cambiamento assai rilevante, l’accesso alla genitorialità risulta essere percepito come l’esito di uno specifico e deliberato atto di volontà, contrassegnato da tratti di intensa idealizzazione e da elevatissime aspettative di conferma del proprio valore personale, tanto da rendere poco tollerabile e riconoscibile l’irriducibile scarto che l’unicità della realtà personale del figlio porta con sé. Nell’esperienza genitoriale appare, in altre parole, sempre più diffuso il bisogno che il figlio sia conforme non solo all’immagine del “figlio desiderato”, ma che esso sostenga e confermi il senso che il diventare genitori assume nell’economia psichica del padre e della madre. Da qui, del resto, deriva la crescente legittimazione del “diritto alla genitorialità”, inteso non più come possibilità o disponibilità dell’adulto ad accogliere un figlio, ma come opzione del tutto incondizionata e soggetta unicamente alla libera scelta dell’adulto. Tale assetto psichico e culturale che, a prima vista, sembrerebbe produrre un rafforzamento della posizione del genitore rispetto al figlio, comporta in realtà anche un suo indebolimento, nel senso che amplifica gli aspetti di dipendenza del genitore nei confronti del figlio e riduce la sua capacità di porsi come guida autorevole, capace di tollerare le inevitabili frustrazioni e i conflitti che l’emergere dell’autentica e originaria realtà del figlio produce.

Un secondo carattere dei processi più complessivi di trasformazione sociale e culturale che pare essere strettamente connesso alle forme contemporanee della genitorialità riguarda la difficoltà a riconoscere e tener conto del rilievo, tutt’affatto che semplice e lineare, ma piuttosto contrastato se non addirittura contraddittorio, che gli elementi di legame (e di vincolo) assumono nel determinare l’identità personale. Essi sono assai ricercati nella loro valenza funzionale e strumentale, sia sul piano interpersonale, sia sul piano sociale, ma assai meno riconosciuti nella loro valenza di significazione e di vincolo, poiché ciò è avvertito come un ostacolo o un limite all’affermazione delle proprie istanze individuali. In tal modo, però, si rischia di misconoscere l’essenza stessa della realtà genitoriale, che al contrario non può essere che strutturalmente relazionale, cioè fatta – come allude la sua etimologia – di vincolo (re-ligo) e di senso (re-fero). A questo proposito anche il pensiero psicologico, nonostante da molto tempo siano disponibili evidenze empiriche più che ragionevoli, contribuisce in molti casi a legittimare e rafforzare una visione sostanzialmente riduzionistica della realtà genitoriale, laddove continua ad attribuire un rilievo pressoché esclusivo al determinismo intrapsichico o, al più, al “modellamento” determinatosi nell’originaria interazione diadica con le figure di attaccamento.

Al contrario, il fondamento dell’identità personale, a partire dal suo substrato genetico-biologico, non può che essere ricondotto a una struttura triadico-relazionale che, a sua volta, si inscrive in una più ampia concatenazione transgenerazionale. La genitorialità, in altre parole, non può che dispiegarsi in un “gioco a tre” e il fondamento dell’identità del figlio, in quanto figlio, non può che risolversi in un’unica e specifica collocazione spazio-temporale, cioè in un posto specifico all’interno della storia e della geografia familiare. E non si tratta, ovviamente, di una questione puramente materiale, ma prima di tutto mentale, dal momento che ogni posizione all’interno del “corpo familiare” è unica e raccoglie l’insieme dei significati, delle aspettative e dei desideri che, anche inconsapevolmente, si trasmettono e depositano attraverso le generazioni. Potersi misurare mentalmente con due genitori, nella loro essenziale unicità, e soprattutto potersi identificare e riconoscere nel legame, come elemento “terzo”, eccedente gli individui, è una condizione necessaria per parametrarsi in modo congruo e realistico con le proprie coordinate di origine o, detto diversamente, per dare un fondamento reale e non immaginario alla propria identità.

A fronte di una cultura spesso spaventata dai limiti e dalla differenza – se non addirittura violenta – nei confronti di essi, avversa ai legami, centrata su valori individualistici e poco interessata a dare senso e a indicare obiettivi alle esperienze di vita delle persone, la famiglia, con le sue categorie di paternità, maternità, filiazione, propone dunque la sua sfida presentandosi – come affermano Eugenia Scabini e Vittorio Cigoli nei loro numerosi scritti sull’approccio relazionale simbolico – come il luogo per eccellenza dell’incontro-relazione tra le differenze fondative dell’umano (quelle tra genere, generazione e stirpi) e dunque orientato a un fine generativo, com’è propria dell’incontro tra differenze, sia sul piano biologico, sia su quello culturale.

Per questo la necessità di riconoscersi in un padre e in una madre è un’istanza originaria dell’umano e, al di là della presenza/assenza fisica delle due figure, il diritto inalienabile di chi è figlio, ciò che non può essere censurato e che pretende di essere rispettato è l’accessibilità almeno simbolica alla propria origine, il potersi riconoscere in un’appartenenza che da sempre e per sempre lo definirà come persona pienamente umana.

Whose Conscience? Which Religion? The Enemy Is Partially Us - by E. Christian Brugger, D.Phil., Senior Fellow and Director, Fellows Program

In Culture of Life Foundation

Ruling on Health Care Needs to Be Judged in Light of Truth

WASHINGTON, D.C., JAN. 24, 2012 ( Zenit.org ).- There is a lot of anger over the Obama administration's recently announced decision to require religiously-affiliated employers to cover contraceptive services in their insurance plans, and rightly so. On Friday, the secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Kathleen Sebelius, announced that institutions such as Catholic universities and hospitals have one-year to "adapt" their policies to ensure employee coverage for all FDA approved contraceptives, including the abortion drug Ella, no copays, no deductibles. Opponents of the mandate are crying foul: "Obama has waged a war on religious liberty!" "Conscience rights are being trampled!," and so on. Because I hold the Obama administration in such disdain, I feel sympathy for these battle cries. But I fear the problem is deeper; and that if we don't take a harder look at what's going on around us, we'll all end up like Dr. Seuss' North-going Zax and South-going Zax, puffing out our chests, standing nose to nose with our enemy, barking out disagreements devoid of understanding of the deeper problem. Easy as it is to blame the liberals for this appalling state of affairs, I think the problem to a certain degree is that none of us any longer believe in truth.

This wasn't always so. Once upon a time, "reasonable laws" were the aims of lawmakers. "Reasonable" in the eminent tradition of English common law -- the seedbed for our Anglo-American legal tradition -- meant "in accord with right reason," which meant "true." So reasonable standards were true standards. And true standards were something that stood over and above the standard-bearer. They corresponded in some primordial way with reality, to which republicans and monarchists, conservatives and liberals alike were subordinate. Everyone knew, of course, that error was possible and no one was brash enough to hold that every policy proposed or adopted was timelessly true. But the standard toward which political discourse aimed was a standard of truth.

We are now embarrassed by the term "truth." As an artifact of language ("We hold these 'truths' to be … "), the term is still occasionally heard in the public sphere. But as a normative term affirming the correspondence of some proposition with reality, the term in the public sphere has been dead and buried for decades. It connotes being inflexible and uncompromising, a genuine threat to pluralism, an offense against dialogue, and an insult against inclusivity -- American virtues all. Down deep in our democratic soul, we suspect -- yes, even conservatives -- that those who assert "truth" in the public sphere are dangerously slouching toward tyranny. After all, we rejected in 1776 Britain's Erastian politico-religious system of the "divine" right of kings.

So we talk rather about opinion, consensus and party platforms. We reduce moral judgment and religious belief to sectarian "rights," with the full implication that no moral judgment or religious doctrine is timelessly true. In order to avoid sectarian conflict, we agree to tolerate the ideas of the other side. But we believe they (i.e., the other side and their ideas) are stupid and our side is right. And rightness -- and this is the clincher -- is an essentially subjective concept, no connection to truth. Of course, to sever rightness and truthfulness is philosophically untenable. But dammit we're Americans, not philosophers.

What are we left with? Elections. Get our guy into office so he can advance our view and oppose the other side. Sounds like a bunch of children on a playground: befriend the big kid. We seem content to resolve weighty issues bearing on the future of our civilization through political solutions. But, alas, politicians are sinners. When our guy gets in, he starts an unjustified war, bullies smaller nations whose cultures he doesn't understand, apologizes for American failings, fraternizes with tyrants, fornicates, adulterizes, says he's "sorry" and other maddening things such as "I feel your pain" or "mission accomplished!" We grow disillusioned, throw him out of office, and search for another savior. Has our grand experiment in ordered liberty been replaced by a conception of authority more near to Nietzche's ubiquitous will-to-power? Can the integrity of our community endure five more decades of this modus operandi?

Has "Obama waged a war on religious liberty"? Are "conscience rights being trampled"? He and his defenders certainly don't think so. They think they're waging a war on intolerance and bigotry that has its origin in anti-pluralistic, dogmatic, subjective religious opinion. And our side unwittingly reinforces that view. Ten out of 10 conservative blogs and sites after the HHS decision announced: "Conscience is under attack!" "Religion is under attack!" Rubbish. Truth, reality, human welfare is under attack. "Conscience" to the other side means subjective moral opinion; and when it's our consciences they're referring to, it means dangerous moral opinion; and "religion" means bigotry. Of course they're going to oppose it. But we -- all of us -- have supported the public rhetorical instruments by which those terms have become morally inert.

Yes, there is a lot of anger over Obama's radically illiberal policy. But that anger is only rightly felt if it concerns the violation, not of legal or even constitutional rights, but the violation of truth. We need to stand up and say confidently and resolutely to Kathleen Sebelius, her thugs at HHS and her puppet-master in the White House: Your view is false and untrue; it radically violates human good and is destructive of communal integrity. Forcing persons wrongfully to cooperate in actions they judge to be evil is evil. And no president, king or emperor rightly demands others to do what is evil. We won't do it.

Disability: A Thread for Weaving Joy - by Charles J. Chaput

In The Public Discourse

While some people resent the imperfection, the inconvenience, and the expense of persons with disabilities, others see in them an invitation to learn how to love deeply without counting the cost. God will demand an accounting. Adapted from remarks delivered at the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life.

The great French Jesuit Henri de Lubac once wrote, “Suffering is the thread from which the stuff of joy is woven. Never will the optimist know joy.” Those seem like strange words, especially for Americans. We Americans take progress as an article of faith. And faith in progress demands a spirit of optimism.

But Father de Lubac knew that optimism and hope are very different creatures. In real life, bad things happen. Progress is not assured, and things that claim to be “progress” can sometimes be wicked and murderous instead. We can slip backward as a nation just as easily as we can advance. This is why optimism—and all the political slogans that go with it—are so often a cheat. Real hope and real joy are precious. They have a price. They emerge from the experience of suffering, which is made noble and given meaning by faith in a loving God.

A number of my friends have children with disabilities. Their problems range from cerebral palsy to Turner’s syndrome to Trisomy 18, which is extremely serious. But I want to focus on one fairly common genetic disability to make my point. I’m referring to Trisomy 21, or Down syndrome.

Down syndrome is not a disease. It’s a genetic disorder with a variety of symptoms. Therapy can ease the burden of those symptoms, but Down syndrome is permanent. There’s no cure. People with Down syndrome have mild to moderate developmental delays. They have low to middling cognitive function. They also tend to have a uniquely Down syndrome “look”—a flat facial profile, almond-shaped eyes, a small nose, short neck, thick stature, and a small mouth which often causes the tongue to protrude and interferes with clear speech. People with Down syndrome also tend to have low muscle tone. This can affect their posture, breathing, and speech.

Currently about 5,000 children with Down syndrome are born in the United States each year. They join a national Down syndrome population of about 400,000 persons. But that population may soon dwindle. And the reason why it may decline illustrates, in a vivid way, a struggle within the American soul. That struggle will shape the character of our society in the decades to come.

Prenatal testing can now detect up to 95 percent of pregnancies with a strong risk of Down syndrome. The tests aren’t conclusive. They can’t give a firm yes or no. But they’re pretty good. And the results of those tests are brutally practical. Studies show that more than 80 percent of unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome now get terminated in the womb. They’re killed because of a flaw in one of their chromosomes—a flaw that’s neither fatal nor contagious, but merely undesirable.

The older a woman gets, the higher her risk of bearing a child with Down syndrome. And so, in medical offices around the country, pregnant women now hear from doctors or genetic counselors that their baby has “an increased likelihood” of Down syndrome based on one or more prenatal tests. Some doctors deliver this information with sensitivity and great support for the woman. But, as my friends know from experience, too many others seem more concerned about avoiding lawsuits, or managing costs, or even, in a few ugly cases, cleaning up the gene pool.

In practice, medical professionals can now steer an expectant mother toward abortion simply by hinting at a list of the child’s possible defects. And the most debased thing about that kind of pressure is that doctors know better than anyone else how vulnerable a woman can be in hearing potentially tragic news about her unborn baby.

I’m not suggesting that doctors should hold back vital knowledge from parents. Nor should they paint an implausibly upbeat picture of life with a child who has a disability. Facts and resources are crucial in helping adult persons prepare themselves for difficult challenges. But doctors, genetic counselors, and medical school professors should have on staff—or at least on speed dial—experts of a different sort.

Parents of children with special needs, special education teachers and therapists, and pediatricians who have treated children with disabilities often have a hugely life-affirming perspective. Unlike prenatal caregivers, these professionals have direct knowledge of persons with special needs. They know their potential. They’ve seen their accomplishments. They can testify to the benefits—often miraculous—of parental love and faith. Expectant parents deserve to know that a child with Down syndrome can love, laugh, learn, work, feel hope and excitement, make friends, and create joy for others. These things are beautiful precisely because they transcend what we expect. They witness to the truth that every child with special needs has a value that matters eternally.

Raising a child with Down syndrome can be demanding. It always involves some degree of suffering. Parents grow up very fast. None of my friends who has a daughter or a son with a serious disability is melodramatic, or self-conscious, or even especially pious about it. They speak about their special child with an unsentimental realism. It’s a realism flowing out of love—real love, the kind that forces its way through fear and suffering to a decision, finally, to surround the child with their heart and trust in the goodness of God. And that decision to trust, of course, demands not just real love, but also real courage.

The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is never between some imaginary perfection and imperfection. None of us is perfect. No child is perfect. The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is between love and unlove; between courage and cowardice; between trust and fear. That’s the choice we face when it happens in our personal experience. And that’s the choice we face as a society in deciding which human lives we will treat as valuable, and which we will not.

Nearly 50 percent of babies with Down syndrome are born with some sort of heart defect. Most have a lifelong set of health challenges. Some of them are serious. Government help is a mixed bag. Public policy is uneven. Some cities and states provide generous aid to the disabled and their families. In many other jurisdictions, though, a bad economy has forced very damaging budget cuts. Services for the disabled—who often lack the resources, voting power, and lobbyists to defend their interests—have shrunk. In still other places, the law mandates good support and care, but lawmakers neglect their funding obligations, and no one holds them accountable. The vulgar economic fact about the disabled is that, in purely utilitarian terms, they rarely seem worth the investment.

That’s the bad news. But there’s also good news. Ironically, for those persons with Down syndrome who do make it out of the womb, life is better than at any time in our nation’s history. A baby with Down syndrome born in 1944, the year of my own birth, could expect to live about 25 years. Many spent their entire lives mothballed in public institutions. Today, people with Down syndrome routinely survive into their 50s and 60s. Most can enjoy happy, productive lives. Most live with their families or share group homes with modified supervision and some measure of personal autonomy. Many hold steady jobs in the workplace. Some marry. A few have even attended college. Federal law mandates a free and appropriate education for children with special needs through the age of 21. Social Security provides modest monthly support for persons with Down syndrome and other severe disabilities from age 18 throughout their lives. These are huge blessings.

And, just as some people resent the imperfection, the inconvenience, and the expense of persons with disabilities, others see in them an invitation to learn how to love deeply and without counting the cost.

Hundreds of families in this country—like my young friends in Denver, Kate and JD Flynn—are now seeking to adopt children with Down syndrome. Many of these families already have, or know, a child with special needs. They believe in the spirit of these beautiful children, because they’ve seen it firsthand. A Maryland-based organization, Reece’s Rainbow, helps arrange international adoptions of children with Down syndrome. The late Eunice Shriver spent much of her life working to advance the dignity of children with Down syndrome and other disabilities. The Anna and John J. Sie Foundation committed $34 million to the University of Colorado to focus on improving the medical conditions faced by those with Down syndrome. And many businesses, all over the country, now welcome workers with Down syndrome. Parents of these special employees say that having a job, however tedious, and earning a paycheck, however small, gives their children pride and purpose. These things are more precious than gold.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer once wrote that, “A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.” Every child with Down syndrome, every adult with special needs; in fact, every unwanted unborn child, every person who is poor, weak, abandoned, or homeless—each one of these persons is an icon of God’s face and a vessel of His love. How we treat these persons—whether we revere them and welcome them, or throw them away in distaste—shows what we really believe about human dignity, both as individuals and as a nation.

The American Jesuit scholar Father John Courtney Murray once said that “Anyone who really believes in God must set God, and the truth of God, above all other considerations.”

Here’s what that means. Catholic public officials who take God seriously cannot support laws that attack human dignity without lying to themselves, misleading others, and abusing the faith of their fellow Catholics. God will demand an accounting. Catholic doctors who take God seriously cannot do procedures, prescribe drugs, or support health policies that attack the sanctity of unborn children or the elderly, or that undermine the dignity of human sexuality and the family. God will demand an accounting. And Catholic citizens who take God seriously cannot claim to love their Church, and then ignore her counsel on vital public issues that shape our nation’s life. God will demand an accounting. As individuals, we can claim to believe whatever we want. We can posture, and rationalize our choices, and make alibis with each other all day long—but no excuse for our lack of honesty and zeal will work with the God who made us. God knows our hearts better than we do. If we don’t conform our hearts and actions to the faith we claim to believe, we’re only fooling ourselves.

We live in a culture where our marketers and entertainment media compulsively mislead us about the sustainability of youth, the indignity of old age, the avoidance of suffering, the denial of death, the nature of real beauty, the impermanence of every human love, the oppressiveness of children and family, the silliness of virtue, and the cynicism of religious faith. It’s a culture of fantasy, selfishness, sexual confusion, and illness that we’ve brought upon ourselves. And we’ve done it by misusing the freedom that other—and greater—generations than our own worked for, bled for, and bequeathed to our safekeeping.

What have we done with that freedom? In whose service do we use it now?

John Courtney Murray is most often remembered for his work at Vatican II on the issue of religious liberty, and for his great defense of American democracy in his book, We Hold These Truths. Murray believed deeply in the ideas and moral principles of the American experiment. He saw in the roots of the American Revolution the unique conditions for a mature people to exercise their freedom through intelligent public discourse, mutual cooperation, and laws inspired by right moral character. He argued that—at its best—American democracy is not only compatible with the Catholic faith, but congenial to it.

But he had a caveat. It’s the caveat that George Washington implied in his Farewell Address, and that Charles Carroll—the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence—mentions in his own writings. In order to work, America depends as a nation on a moral people shaped by their religious faith, and in a particular way, by the Christian faith. Without that living faith, animating its people and informing its public life, America becomes something alien and hostile to the very ideals it was founded on.

This is why the same Father Murray who revered the best ideals of the American experiment could also write that “Our American culture, as it exists, is actually the quintessence of all that is decadent in the culture of the Western Christian world. It would seem to be erected on the triple denial that has corrupted Western culture at its roots: the denial of metaphysical reality, of the primacy of the spiritual over the material, [and] of the social over the individual . . . Its most striking characteristic is its profound materialism . . . It has given citizens everything to live for and nothing to die for. And its achievement may be summed up thus: It has gained a continent and lost its own soul.”

Catholics need to wake up from the illusion that the America we now live in—not the America of our nostalgia or imagination or best ideals, but the real America we live in here and now—is somehow friendly to our faith. What we’re watching emerge in this country is a new kind of paganism, an atheism with air-conditioning and digital TV. And it is neither tolerant nor morally neutral.

As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed more than a decade ago, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized.” But even more importantly, she added, “As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral—the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called—is now seen as pathological” and exclusionary, concealing the worst forms of psychic and physical oppression.

My point is this: Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.

A friend of mine has a son with Down syndrome, and she calls him a “sniffer of souls.” I know him, and it’s true. He is. He may have an IQ of 47, and he’ll never read The Brothers Karamazov, but he has a piercingly quick sense of the people he meets. He knows when he’s loved—and he knows when he’s not. Ultimately, I think we’re all like her son. We hunger for people to confirm that we have meaning by showing us love. We need that love. And we suffer when that love is withheld.

These children with disabilities are not a burden; they’re a priceless gift to all of us. They’re a doorway to the real meaning of our humanity. Whatever suffering we endure to welcome, protect, and ennoble these special children is worth it because they’re a pathway to real hope and real joy. Abortion kills a child; it wounds a precious part of a woman’s own dignity and identity; and it steals hope. That’s why it’s wrong. That’s why it needs to end. That’s why we march.

Never give up the struggle that the March for Life embodies. No matter how long it takes, no matter how many times you march—it matters, eternally. Because of you, some young woman will choose life, and that new life will have the love of God forever.

The great Green Bay Packer theologian, Vince Lombardi, liked to say that real glory consists in getting knocked flat on the ground, again and again and again, and getting back up—just one more time than the other guy. That’s real glory. And there’s no better metaphor for the Christian life. Don’t give up. Your prolife witness gives glory to God. Be the best Catholics you can be. Pour your love for Jesus Christ into building and struggling for a culture of life. By your words and by your actions, be an apostle to your friends and colleagues. Speak up for what you believe. Love the Church. Defend her teaching. Trust in God. Believe in the Gospel. And don’t be afraid. Fear is beneath your dignity as sons and daughters of the God of life.

Changing the course of American culture seems like such a huge task; so far beyond the reach of this gathering today. But St. Paul felt exactly the same way. Redeeming and converting a civilization has already been done once. It can be done again. But we need to understand that God is calling you and me to do it. He chose us. He calls us. He’s waiting, and now we need to answer him.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Roman Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, is the author of Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. This essay is adapted from a lecture Archbishop Chaput delivered this past weekend at the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life.

Why Contraception Matters - by Stephen Patton M.A., J.D.

In One More Soul

Good afternoon. I need to begin with a “viewer’s discretion advisory.” In this talk I’m going to discuss some details about the marital act: what takes place, what it means, and how it can be distorted. So if you’re listening now with young children, either live or on the recording, please take their ages into consideration and perhaps listen later when they’re not present.

I’d like to tell you about three people: a priest and a married couple. They’re fictional characters, but in a sense they’re quite real. Each represents a composite of the views of many actual priests and married couples in the United States today.

First, let me introduce you to Fr. Friendly. Fr. Friendly is loved and respected by his parishioners, and he loves and respects them. He knows all about the many temptations and tensions they face every day, and so he makes it a point to teach them often about God’s compassion and mercy. But of all the many issues that weigh down upon his flock, and so weigh down upon him, two stand out: abortion and divorce.

While he’s not what you might call an activist pro-life priest, he knows that abortion is a grave crime against the unborn. He has even occasionally preached about it, although always with compassion. He knows that most women make that awful decision not so much as a free choice, but because they didn’t think they really had a choice. He wants to reach out to them, and he wants to keep anyone else from making that same terrible decision. He wishes he could pinpoint why it is that so many people, including so many seemingly good Catholics, still fall prey to this sin by the hundreds of thousands.

He likewise grieves the epidemic of divorce. He has personally ministered to dozens of broken marriages and families. It saddens him deeply that this could happen to so many good couples, especially those who seemed to have it all together: regular church-goers, kind people, parents who love their children. He has preached about the sanctity of marriage, he has encouraged distressed couples to go to counseling, he promotes marriage enrichment programs. And yet the divorces continue to multiply.

One topic Fr. Friendly has never preached about, though, is contraception. He knows use of it is against the official teaching of the Catholic Church, and he knows that most Catholics don’t comply with that teaching. He doesn’t preach about this or bring it up in confession, though. He figures, with all the other burdens his flock is already carrying, he shouldn’t lay that one on them too. He suspects there is something wrong with contraception, but he’s always figured that it’s really not that big a deal, and that there are more important things to talk about.

Now let me introduce you to Mr. & Mrs. Goodpeople. The Goodpeople’s are active, contributing members of Fr. Friendly’s parish, and in each of the areas I just mentioned their views are virtually identical to his. They know that abortion is wrong and they don’t think anyone should ever have one. They’re also saddened at the epidemic of divorce all around them, in their own family and among their closest friends. They just can’t understand what’s going on. They take their own marriage seriously and they wish every couple would do the same.

But if they’re in tune with the teachings of the Church when it comes to abortion and divorce, they’re not when it comes to contraception. Mrs. Goodpeople has been on the Pill since she became sexually active as a teenager. No one ever told her there was anything wrong with this – not her parents, not her peers, not her teachers, not her doctors, not her priests. They’ve either said contraception was the good and responsible thing to do, or they’ve said nothing at all. For Mr. Goodpeople it was much the same way. So, the two of them took this way of thinking into their marriage. Except for when they wanted to conceive, they’ve always used contraception.

Every now and then they’ve heard something about the Catholic Church “frowning upon” contraception, or that it “disapproves of” it. But they’ve never heard that it’s a serious sin. It’s never been explained to them how it offends God and harms us. Somewhere along the line they’ve also heard rumors about something called NFP, but they’ve never looked into it. They don’t know anyone who takes it seriously, apparently including Fr. Friendly. The Goodpeople’s want to do the right thing, and they’d probably be open to learning about the church’s teaching if it was ever presented to them. But unless that happens they’re going to just keep on using contraception and eventually they will also probably choose to get sterilized.

It’s to all of you Fr. Friendly’s and Mr. and Mrs. Goodpeople’s out there that I offer these thoughts. I want to show you two things. First, I want to show you why contraception really is a big deal. I want to show you that no matter how passionate you or any of us might be about stopping abortion and divorce, until we start changing our contraceptive views and practices, we’re never going to see an end to either of those two evils.

Second, I want to bring all this home to us as a Church. What kind of effect, on us, does our complicity with the contraceptive mentality have? And what can we do about it?

Our Culture of Dual Death

So let’s look first at how contraception leads to both abortion and divorce.

You’ve probably heard the terms “culture of life” and “culture of death” that were coined by Pope John Paul II. I think we could split the term culture of death into two sub-categories: death to life and death to marital love.

By death to life, I mean not just to death to tens of millions of pre-born babies, but to a growing death to the very idea of babies. Across North America, Europe, and in virtually every other culture where abortion has become common, we can also observe declining birth rates and in many instances dramatically declining birth rates.

So a culture of death to life is culture with a generally declining view toward new human life. We’re either outright killing a huge percentage of our babies through abortion, or we’re taking a dimmer, more pessimistic view of conceiving them at all.

Our culture of death to marital love shows a similar pattern. We’re more and more seeing not just outright death to marital love in the form of divorce – which is tragic enough at about 50% of all marriages – but also a kind of death to the very idea of making such a commitment. Fewer people are getting married at all. Marriage rates in the U.S. have been steadily declining for decades.

What’s happening here? This notion of a man and a woman making a life-long commitment of love, and staying in it, has been around for thousands of years in every human culture. Why is it now, in our culture, gradually dieing away?

Look at abortion and divorce side by side. Keep in mind: neither is new to the human experience. Both have been around for thousands of years, but usually only as the extreme fall-back option. So why is it that both of them, at basically the same time suddenly came out of the dark fringes and mushroomed to epidemic levels?

What I suggest, is that all of this death and withering – in the forms of abortion, declining birth rates, divorce, declining marriage rates – all of this mushroomed together right along with the mushrooming use of contraception.

Our Culture of Contraception

I’d like to show you now what I can only describe as our culture of contraception, but first, I want to ask you to consider the terms “contraception” and “sterilization” to be virtually interchangeable. After all, contraception is basically a temporary form of sterilization, while sterilization is a permanent form of contraception. Each, though, is essentially the same thing: an act that intentionally renders the sexual act sterile. So when I refer to our culture of contraception, what I’m really referring to is our culture of sterilized sex. What do I mean by that?

The dominant, modern American view of sex is that for most if not all of a person’s reproductive life, their natural, healthy state of fertility needs to be sterilized. If you don’t sterilize it, then it is not, quote unquote, “safe”. The possibility that sexual activity could lead to pregnancy is something you need to protect yourself from. We understand the phrase, “responsible sex”, as in, “responsible people use birth control; irresponsible people don’t” in the same way.

Indoctrination to this way of thinking starts early. Whether it’s from our peers, parents, teachers, doctors or the media, instruction about birth control usually comes to us hand in hand with instruction about sex in general. It’s considered to be the normal, safe, responsible thing that people do. Now, please understand, we can and must oppose with this view. What I’m saying, though, is that there is wide support for it. You can be a well respected parent and civic leader not just in spite of holding this view but because of holding it.

The result of all this accumulated cultural pressure is that well over 90% of Americans will engage in sterilized sex in one form or another over the course of their lives, and Catholics like the Goodpeople’s are no exception. They and millions of others like them build their entire lives around this view of fertility. It’s just a given. It’s the air we breathe. Take sterilized sex out of the picture, and most Americans would feel their entire world seriously threatened. Even people who would oppose teaching children about condoms, or putting contraceptives into the hands of young or unmarried people, would see it, for married couples, as American as apple pie. It’s no wonder Fr. Friendly won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.

But just stop and think about the enormity of what’s going on here.

Just think about what it means from a medical standpoint to sterilize the reproductive organs, either temporarily or permanently. All of medicine, all of health care can be boiled down to this: you either help sick organs get healthy or you help healthy organs stay healthy. That’s it. Medical care is never supposed to make healthy organs sick or interfere with their natural operations. Sometimes we have to make healthy organs suffer as an unintended side effect, like when a person gets ill from chemo-therapy for cancer. But that’s only when the greater good of the person’s health is at stake. We’re never supposed to make an organ sick or mutilate it as the central, intended purpose. Doctors understand this, nurses understand this, we all understand this.

But for some strange reason how we treat the reproductive organs stands as the one, glaring exception to this rule. But fertility is a natural, healthy state. It’s not an illness that needs to be corrected with surgery. It’s not a disease that we need to be healed of with a pill. But sterilizing these healthy organs is not only widely accepted by health care providers; you’re considered backwards and irresponsible if you don’t accept it. In the medical community, contraception and sterilization have become the “standard of care.”

Why sterilized sex causes abortion and divorce

Now, let’s return to the question, why would this widespread acceptance and approval of sterilized sex give rise to widespread abortion and divorce?

I’m going to answer this question at two levels, first, the more apparent level, which I’ll call the tip of the iceberg, and then the more subtle level below the surface.

- The Tip of the Iceberg

So, let’s first look at the more obvious level of how a culture of sterilized sex leads to a culture of death.

- Death to Marital Love

First, by it leading to a culture of death to marital love, I mean this. It used to be, before the contraceptive revolution, that there was a pretty clear and firm connection between sex and marriage. Married people had sex, unmarried people didn’t, or if they did, they more or less knew that they weren’t supposed to. Most everybody knew this.

But over the course of the twentieth century, as contraception became more socially accepted, more available, and more effective, all that began to change. By the time the sixties rolled around it was becoming clear, to married and unmarried people alike, that you didn’t have to be married to have sex. Contraceptive practice had made sex into a recreational activity that everyone has a right to.

What did this mean for the unmarried? Well, you probably heard the old saying, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” Widespread acceptance and availability of contraception has led to widespread fornication. Pre marital sex is now not only socially acceptable, but socially respectable. It’s no different among Catholics. 90% of engaged couples in the U.S. who come to the Catholic Church for marriage are already sexually active. 90% Yes, people do still get married, but in fewer numbers. Why? Well, one of the reasons a man and woman used to get married was to start having sex, and contraception basically removed that as a reason.

What did the contraceptive revolution do to married people? There are three ways that it led to an increase in divorce rates.

First, it’s the flip side of what I just mentioned: if sex is no longer a reason to get married, then it’s also no longer a reason to stay married. Anyone can have it. It’s pretty much a commodity. But once sex is removed from the portrait of all those things that make marriage unique and valuable, then a married couple at risk will have one less reason to try to make it work.

Second, widespread contraceptive practice in many cases removed another reason that has traditionally held together married couples, namely, children. There is something to be said for a couple trying to make their marriage work for the sake of the children. But what happens when there are no children? More contraception has led to fewer children, and in many cases to no children at all. Divorces naturally followed.

Third, widespread use of contraception by married couples also led to an increase of adultery. Once you take away one of the greatest fears of extra-marital sex – which is pregnancy – you’re going to see an increase of that activity. And when there is an increase in adultery there’s also going to be an increase in divorce.

In net effect, our culture of sterilized sex has made marriage on the whole a less attractive institution to enter into, and an easier institution to get out of. It’s contributed to the demise of millions of marriages, both those that actually took place and those that should have taken place, but never did.

- Death to Life

Let’s look now at how our culture of widespread sterilized sex has also led to our culture of widespread death to pre-born human life. Keep in mind that for the moment we’re looking only at the tip of the iceberg. We’ll look at the deeper level in a moment.

How does widespread contraception lead to declining birth rates? Well if the life-giving potential of sex is pervasively removed from the picture, a cultural mindset is gradually fostered in which children themselves are pervasively removed from the picture. They tend to be viewed not as gifts but as liabilities, spoilers of a pleasurable lifestyle. We might have one or two, if that would be pleasurable to us, but after that the norm is to reject them.

How does widespread contraception lead to widespread abortion? I credit Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse with summing up the motto of our culture of sexual liberation this way, and keep in mind that our culture of sexual liberation was made possible only by our culture of contraception: She says ours is a culture in which, “all adults are entitled to unlimited sexual activity without a live baby resulting.” I’ll say that again, “all adults are entitled to unlimited sexual activity without a live baby resulting.”

What Dr. Morse touches upon is our culture’s prevailing disconnection between sex and babies. Before contraception was king, the prevailing assumption was that a baby was a natural consequence of sex. If you chose to engage in sex, you knew it could result in a baby. You might not have wanted that to happen, but you assumed that it could happen. If a baby did result, it was because of your freely chosen action, and so you were likely, not necessarily, but likely, to feel a certain kind of responsibility toward that child.

The contraceptive revolution changed all that. It led to the prevailing assumption that babies really shouldn’t have anything to do with sex. That is, not unless you wanted a baby to have something to do with sex, not unless you allowed that. Or as Dr. Morse said, not unless you’re into that kind of thing.

Now couples who think this way do know that keeping a baby out of the picture doesn’t just happen by itself; you have to do your part. You have to do something to the sexual act to make sure that a baby won’t be conceived. That’s what, quote unquote, taking responsibility for your actions now means with respects to sexual activity.

But if a couple has this kind of attitude, then when the contraception fails, as it often does, and there’s a pregnancy, they’re not going to tend to think the baby’s there because of their actions. They’re going to tend to think the baby’s there in spite of their actions. In other words, their mindset is not so much that this is their child that they conceived. Rather, they’re going to tend to think it’s an invader that they failed to repel. This kind of thinking is likely to foster quite a different sense of what’s the responsible thing to do next.

Now, I realize, we’re not talking about abortion, yet. Not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer, and not everyone who uses contraception goes on to have an abortion when it fails. What I’m saying, though, is that contraception, by its very nature, and as a broad social phenomenon, tends to incline the heart of a nation toward abortion. As John Paul II put it in Evangelium Vitae, Latin for the Gospel of Life, the contraceptive mentality strengthens the temptation to abort. Contraception and abortion are not the same thing, but as John Paul put it, they are as closely connected as “fruits of the same tree.”

Under the Iceberg

We’ve looked at the tip of the iceberg. I want to show you now a deeper view of how widespread sterilized sex leads to both abortion and divorce. To do that, I need to show you first the way sex is supposed to look like, the way it was made by God.

When God created sex, he made it to serve two purposes or meanings: # 1. to express the bond of marital love between a husband and a wife, and #2. to create new human life. And here’s a crucial point. He also made those two meanings or purposes to be intimately, organically bound up in one another. In other words, together the two form a whole, such that anything a person might do to disrupt the organic union of those two meanings would jeopardize the well-being of both. The meaning of marital love would be jeopardized, and so would the meaning of human life.

How are these two meanings – marital love and openness to life –expressed together in the sexual act as it was made by God?

The pinnacle moment of sex, for both the husband and the wife, is the moment of orgasm. In that one moment, which ideally happens for them at the same time, they experience together the most intense sensations of physical pleasure and emotional connectedness. By that act their bodies express all the values of the union of love which holds them together as husband and wife. They are each saying to the other, with the language of their bodies, “Oh my Gosh! I love you and I want all of you and I give all of myself to you!”

Meanwhile, consider what’s happening physiologically to heighten and reinforce this sensation of union. During orgasm, in both the man and the woman, the hormone oxytocin floods into their bloodstreams. Now ordinarily it’s understood that this happens for the woman, but it also happens for the man, at a lower level of intensity, but it still happens for the man as well as for the woman.

Oxytocin is nicknamed the hormone of love because it is involved in social recognition, bonding, and the formation of trust between people. So orgasm is deeply wired to express and affirm a bond of love. This doesn’t mean that sex is actually always used in that way, but at a deep organic level that is what it was made to do.

What about the life giving meaning? Consider what happens with the man’s and the woman’s reproductive organs. For the husband, the moment of orgasm is the moment in which he releases, into his wife’s body, not just a fluid, but literally his seed, his genetic identity. For him then that act of orgasm simultaneously expresses not only his loving union with her, but also any hope he has ever had or ever will have of becoming a father with her. Perhaps, in his mind, he may not actually want to become a father with her by this particular act. But, and this is crucial, his body nevertheless craves to express openness to that possibility. In and through his body he is saying, “Oh my gosh! I could become a father with you!” And even more, “Oh my gosh, my body is actually trying to become a father with you!”

Meanwhile, for the wife, just as with her husband, the experience of orgasm is also deeply connected to the possibility of creating a new life. For her, orgasm comes in the form of uterine contractions. The neck of her uterus literally dips down repeatedly toward the pool of her husband’s semen, in a kind of lapping motion. Please understand what’s happening here. Her body is not just launching into some kind of non-directional ecstasy; it wants that seed! It wants to help it reach its goal! So, just as with her husband’s act of ejaculation, in the very act of her uterine contractions she is simultaneously expressing not only the most intense feelings of union with her husband, but also her own deepest bodily desires to become a mother by him.

Let me add another physiological fact about the woman’s body that illustrates this deep wiring to reproduce. For the man, sexual desire for his wife is fairly constant from one day to the next. Not so for her. As you may know, the days when she is likely to feel the most intense sexual desires for her husband are those few fertile days of the month when she is most likely to conceive. In her mind, she may actually want to conceive, or not, and she may actually be able to conceive, or not. But in a sense, none of that really matters. What matters is that her body in its own way, and her husband’s body in its own way, are both deeply wired such that they are always trying to say the following two things by way of sexual intercourse, and to say them simultaneously: “I love you forever” and “I yearn to create new life with you.”

Now let’s look at what happens to this marvelously complex picture of human sexuality when a couple purposefully thwarts the life-giving meaning, and see how that can incline them toward both divorce and abortion. By the way, please don’t think in any of this that I’m referring to couples who are infertile through no fault of their own. The decisive factor is not sterility, but deliberate sterility.

- Divorce

Let’s look at divorce first. The bond that holds a married couple together is made up of a variety of forces: moral, social, religious, emotional, economic, and so forth. As any one of those forces fades or weakens, so too will the strength of the marriage bond also fade or weaken. Divorces likewise will increase. One of these forces that holds a married couple together is regular, meaningful sexual relations. “Meaningful” is the key word here. If for whatever reason their sexual relations become less meaningful, or perhaps altogether meaningless, then so too will their marital bond weaken. So, if marital sex, as a broad social phenomenon, is becoming less meaningful, then we can expect that divorces will begin to multiply.

This is indeed what has happened to the meaning of sex in our day. By our nation’s pervasive removal of the life-giving meaning of sex, we have made sex that much less meaningful. Think of the millions of couples who have contracepted themselves right up to the point where one or both of them complains that their sex has become basically meaningless. God hard-wired that life-giving meaning into the core of the sexual experience. It was made to be a major part of the wow factor of sex: the spark, the mystery of life itself. So then we turn around and do everything we can to cancel that meaning out? Don’t we think negative consequences might follow?

Please ponder the irony here. The married couple who sterilizes their sex imagines that by doing this they will enhance their relationship. You know, they get to have sex, when maybe they wouldn’t have had it otherwise, and that will strengthen their relationship, right? Well it doesn’t work that way. Yes, they might have an orgasm together and that would probably feel pleasurable at a purely physical level. And it could also be an affectionate, tension-relieving moment for them. But what they’ve lost through doing this is the fullness of the meaning of their sexual relations, and that is a huge loss. However much they might truly love one another, and want to express that love, if they’ve done something to remove that “we could have a baby” meaning, by doing that, they have diminished the meaning of the act as a whole.

And it gets worse. John Paul II pointed out that because of that organic, symbiotic connection between the two meanings of sex, if a couple takes away the life-giving meaning they are, by doing that, in some mysterious way, also taking away the love-giving meaning. In this view, to sterilize sex is to completely rob it of meaning.

A study just published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine seems to support this view (J Reprod Med 2007; 52:263-272). The authors of the 2007 study, entitled, “Effects of Tubal Ligation Among American Women,” found that women who have had a tubal ligation were more likely than women who have not had one to report two things: #1. stress interfering with sex, and #2 seeing a physician regarding sexual problems. In addition to their own findings the authors refer in their article to past research which has shown, and I quote, “that women with a tubal ligation have a tendency to report a kind of mutilated body image.” They conclude, and again I quote, “it is reasonable to ask whether tubal ligation in some way disrupts the emotional bond between the partners.” In some way it disrupts the emotional bond. What they can’t quite identify, this “some way,” is that mysterious connection between the life-giving meaning and the love-giving meaning. To disrupt the life-giving purpose or meaning is to disrupt the love-giving meaning or purpose.

And the tragedy, again, is that this is not at all what the couple that gets sterilized desires. Quite the contrary. They do it because they think it will enhance their emotional bond. But like drinking salt water to quench one’s thirst, engaging in sterilized sex will not quench the human thirst for love. Not only is the deep need not met, it is worsened. Our contraceptive culture has left us bloated with sex, and dehydrated for love. And thereby inclined toward divorce.

- Abortion

Let’s look now at what distorting the sexual act means for abortion. Recall how in the moment of orgasm, the man’s and the woman’s bodies each in their own way convulse together in a shared effort to conceive a new life. I repeat what I said a moment ago: their bodies will try to do this every time independent of either their intention or their ability to actually conceive a new life.

In light of this fact, I think it’s beautiful to think about a couple in their seventies making love. She hasn’t ovulated in decades. There’s no possibility of conceiving a new life. And yet there are their bodies, still doing that mysterious fertility dance together, still striving, against all odds, to conceive a baby. From the beginning of their marriage all the way to its end, their love for one another is somehow always mysteriously connected to creating new life together.

But what does a young, fertile married couple do about this if it really isn’t the right time for them to have a baby? Well, if they want to live in harmony with their bodies, they will wait for a naturally infertile time. When that time comes, their bodies will again come together and do that fertility dance. They will strain to conceive. That’s very likely not going to actually happen, but it won’t be because they have done anything to thwart the life-giving potential of their own bodies. This is a natural, holistic way of living with your fertility. You always treat it with reverence, awe, and gentleness. You always receive it and work with it, even if this means having to suffer occasionally.

Compare this approach with the far more popular alternative that couples choose these days, which is not to work with the life-giving mystery of their own bodies, but to work against it. The gift of fertility is not received, it is rejected. It is not treated gently, it is interfered with, or manipulated, or surgically mutilated. By whatever method they choose, couples who sterilize their sex apply force against themselves. It’s a kind of violence done to the human body, and mind you, violence done to very special parts of the human body at the very moment when they are eagerly trying to carry out a very sacred function: to create new human life.

Speaking of self-violence, guys, think for a moment what really happens when you have a vasectomy. Your testicles are still there, but they’ve been sliced away from the act that they were created for. Now they’re just hanging there, inert, like the living dead – little zombies. By the way, if you have been sterilized, either by a vasectomy or a tubal ligation, the procedure can be reversed. You can return those organs in exile to the land of the living.

I’m not here to cast stones. I’m just asking you to stand back and think about what we’re actually doing with sterilized sex. Regardless of our motives, or our moral culpability, or whatever, we are engaging in a kind of alienation and war with our own bodies. And think about it happening not just with one couple one time, but over and over again, by millions of couples, year after year, to the point that this is now the normal way our nation, and our Church, treats the mystery of life in sex.

So here’s the punch line: Do you think that our nation’s common pattern of rejecting our fertility might have a spill-over effect in how we treat our surprise pregnancies? Is it not reasonable that violence regularly done against the life-giving potential of sex could lead toward violence done against life itself? Again, I’m not saying that any given couple, like the Goodpeople’s, who sterilize their sexual relations will necessarily themselves get an abortion or even think that anyone else should ever get one. What I am saying, though, is that any couple who uses contraception needs to know that their acts of sterilized sex are not isolated. They fit into a broad cultural pattern, and they contribute to that pattern. And it’s the very same cultural pattern that encourages abortion.

What Does This Mean for Our Church?

At the beginning of this talk I said I wanted to show you two things. I’ve just tried to do the first, which is to show you that contraception really is a big deal; that it’s at the root of our modern day cultures of abortion and divorce. Now I want to show you the second, which is what our Church’s complicity with the contraceptive mentality has done to us, and what we as a Church can do about it.

First, what do I mean by our Church’s complicity? Poll after poll, study after study, show that contraception is just as popular with us Catholics as it is with the rest of the United States public. And this is not just the case for those who say they’re Catholic, but never go to church. It includes active members like Mr. & Mrs. Goodpeople, people who attend Church regularly, who say their religion is very important to them, and who otherwise hold orthodox views. This was shown again in a May 2007 study published by Marquette University researchers, Ohlendorf and Fehring. (“The Influence of Religiosity on Contraceptive Use Among Roman Catholic Women in the United States,” The Linacre Quarterly, May 2007, Volume 74, Number 2, pp. 135 – 144.) In fact, their study showed that regular, church-going Catholics are more likely to get sterilized than Catholics who don’t go to church.

What has this done to us as a Church? I found some insight from an unusual source. When I was preparing this talk, I was trying to come up with words and images to describe a world with contraception, and a world without contraception. I turned to the 6th edition of the Roget’s International Thesaurus, copyright 2001. If you’re not familiar with this book, it is, first of all, THE authority on the English language, and, second of all, it’s a totally secular resource. It has no religious or moral agenda, good or bad. It simply does what a thesaurus is supposed to do: it groups words, as they are commonly understood, into categories of similar words, and then contrasts those categories with other categories.

The word contraception was grouped in a word category entitled “Unproductiveness.” Before I read some of the words and phrases from that category, I want to read you some of the words and phrases from the contrasting category right next to it entitled “Productiveness.” Now there are dozens of words in each of these categories, and I’m not going to read all of them. This is just a sampling to help create a picture for you.

First, under the category, Productiveness, are these words: fruitfulness, fertility, fecundity, pregnancy, richness, lushness, generousness, abundance, rich soil, compost, manure, swarming muck, land flowing with milk and honey, hotbed, and here’s the kicker: teeming loins.

Now contrast this picture with the words from the category, Unproductiveness: dryness, famine, sterility, contraception, barren wasteland, lunar landscape, howling wilderness, ineffectual, drained, childless, impotence, planned parenthood, dry womb, and finally: withered loins.

If it is indeed true that at any given time 85 percent of American Catholic couples of childbearing age are either contracepting or sterilized, then we have indeed become a Church of withered loins. Is this what we want to be? Is this what the Mystical Body of Christ is supposed to look like? Or do we want to become again what we once were, a Church of teeming loins? Let’s compare the two.

A Church of withered loins is a Church with little to say to the sexually confused world around it. If we, the devout church-goers, can’t get it straight, or refuse to get it straight, about the God-given connections between sex, love, marriage and babies, then God help the rest of the world. For example, take the growing normalization of homosexuality. There was an article by a gay activist that came out a few years ago entitled, “We Are All Sodomites Now.” He basically argues, now that you heterosexuals have completely embraced your style of sterile sex, then you’re hypocrites to question our gay style of sterilized sex. He gets a lot wrong in that article, but he sure has a point there.

A Church of withered loins likewise stutters when it tries to talk to its own young people about chastity. Millions of concerned parents like Mr. and Mrs. Goodpeople know all about the sexual meat-grinder of a world out there, and they dearly want to protect their children from it. But how will they be able to speak convincingly to their children about how a young person can go happily without sex, maybe for years, when they can’t go without it for even a few days a month? Please don’t get me wrong – we need abstinence education programs. But until we, the grown ups, can start walking the talk, then we’re pretty much just wasting our time.

A Church of withered loins also produces only a trickle of priestly and religious vocations. Vocations do not spring forth from a vacuum. They spring forth from lives, families, and parishes that are characterized by hopefulness, generosity, self-sacrifice and self-control. Sterilized sex reinforces the exactly opposite values of fearfulness, self-absorption, and self-indulgence.

What does a Church of teeming loins look like? Well it has struggles of its own. It’s not an entirely pretty picture. By the way, to help make this point, I made sure to include words like swarming muck and manure in the image of productiveness I painted a few minutes ago. But unlike the struggles of a Church of withered loins, the struggles of the Church of teeming loins are wholesome, natural, and, in the end, redemptive.

If you want to imagine what a Church of teeming loins looks like, imagine an immigrant parish of a hundred years ago, or an Irish parish of fifty years ago, or an African parish of today. It’s a parish with lots of babies: smiling babies, crying babies, soiled babies, drooling babies, sniveling babies – all those liquids of life and all their smells. It’s a parish of large families, poor families, struggling families, sacrificial families, families that help other families, families that stick together no matter what, families that build cathedrals. And oh by the way, a parish of teeming loins is also a parish with a teeming abundance of priestly and religious vocations.

Encouragement to Married Couples

How can we become this kind of a Church again? Let me offer some encouragement now to all of you Mr. & Mrs. Goodpeople’s out there, and then to all of you Fr. Friendly’s.

Mr. & Mrs. Goodpeople, I hope you know, that I know, that life can be difficult and there really can be legitimate reasons for a married couple to forestall having a child. The Church is not saying you need to have fifteen children to be good Catholics. What I’m asking you to do, though, on behalf of the Church, is to look at this over-sexualized world around us, and consider how it has maybe influenced some of the ways you view sex, fertility and babies. Those ways of the world, in many respects, are contrary not only to God’s plan but to your own happiness.

Let me quickly add this, in case you’re thinking, well, Steve, we’re pretty happy as we are with contraception, thank you very much. First, if you were to live your entire lives in a contraceptive mindset, you’d never know what a great difference you might have seen without it. Couples who make the switch regularly talk about the profound improvements they’ve seen in their marriages, their faith lives, and in their sexual lives.

Second, and this is even more important, what you think, or what I think, or what anybody thinks, is going to make us happy is not the bottom line when it comes to doing what God wants us to do. Sometimes he wants us to do things that might not feel so good, but we’ve got to do them anyway. Rejecting contraception is one of them. It’s a bad choice, but it’s not just a bad choice, like eating a Twinkie. Objectively speaking, it can sever us from friendship with God. Therefore, it is something we have to confess.

Maybe you’re still not convinced. Maybe you’re thinking that you don’t need the teachings of the Catholic Church to figure out what’s pleasing to God. Friends, please understand that this teaching and any teaching of the Catholic Church is true not because the Church teaches us that it’s true. It’s the other way around. The Church teaches it because it is true. So sure you can choose to disobey the Church’s teaching on contraception, but that’s not going to make it untrue. And it’s also not going to mean that you won’t have to suffer the consequences that will flow from your choice.

The bottom line you need to keep in mind, though, as you ponder what to do, is that this teaching of the Church is not given to us to spoil our enjoyment of life. It’s given to us so we might enjoy life to the full. So, yes, the Church lovingly invites us to treat God’s gifts of sex, fertility and babies in a way very different from the easy way the world says we should treat them. But I say to you that that easy way of the world, that way of contraception and sterilization, is the way that leads to death. Death to life. Death to love. We can choose to follow it, and we may stay married, and we may still look okay and feel okay, but in the end the sin will still have its effect, one way or the other, on our souls, on our marriages, on our church and on our country.

Or you can choose the way of God taught by the Church, which means choosing the way of life. It would mean taking time to learn about the natural cycles of your fertility. It would mean never intentionally doing anything to your bodies that would alter, mutilate, block or otherwise mess up your fertility. If there are times in your marriage that you really do need to avoid getting pregnant, it would mean abstaining from sex during the wife’s time of fertility, which is usually around five to eight days every month. No doubt, this can be difficult, but you can do it, you really can! And for making these small sacrifices you would get to live your sexual lives and your marriages in full harmony with the divine plan.

Encouragement to Priests

To our priests, and also to our bishops, I would respectfully offer these thoughts. From what I’ve observed, some married couples will discover, on their own, without any guidance from you, the truth about contraception and Natural Family Planning and make changes. But I think you know, as well as I do, that without your leadership in this area not much is ever going to change. Your influence is enormous.

I gave a presentation once about NFP to some priests, and afterwards one of them pulled me aside and said, referring to the laity, “Steve, they’re just not buying it.” And I said to him, Father, respectfully, if they’re not buying it, it’s because you’re not buying it. I know this because I know priests who do buy it, who really do understand the gravity of contraception, what’s really at stake, and who are able and willing to talk to their people about it. And they have seen their people rise to the challenge and make the necessary changes.

These priests need not thunder down threats of hell. They just firmly and lovingly explain what human sexuality is about and what we do to ourselves and our relationship to God when we use contraception. Will some people still choose to contracept and get sterilized, no matter how kindly and lovingly you speak? Sure. It happens with other issues. Will some leave the Church? Maybe. But, respectfully, Father, that is not your problem. That’s between them and the Holy Spirit. Your job as the clergy is to preach to us the truth in love, the whole truth. Our job as the laity is to hear it. When the seed falls on good soil it will bear fruit a hundred-fold. But the seed has to be sown first.

If you want to address this topic in your parish, but you don’t yet feel equipped to deliver a full homily on it, consider using what Dr. Janet Smith calls “drive-by orthodoxy.” This is when you raise the sinfulness of contraception indirectly when you’re addressing another issue. So, for example, in a homily on the sacrament of confession you could include contraception and sterilization in a list of serious sins for which a person should go to confession before receiving communion. You could also bring in a priest to give a homily. An organization called NFP Outreach, nfpoutreach.org, has several priests on staff who travel to parishes around the country giving missions on this subject. They also have lots of other resources on their website to help you educate yourself and your parishioners about this issue.

Here are some other resources: One More Soul, at omsoul.com, has probably the largest variety of educational materials on NFP, contraception, sterilization and sterilization reversal. Ascension Press, which is at AscensionPress.com, also has a wide assortment of resources on Theology of the Body, including many resources by Christopher West.

Other things you can do. Bring the issue up in confession. I know people who would have never even thought about confessing contraception until a priest gently asked them about it in confession. Always cover the matter of birth control when you’re preparing a young couple for marriage. Give them materials to review and then go over it with them afterwards. Let them know not only that God expects them not to use contraception, but that couples who use NFP have much happier marriages on average and a divorce rate that’s a fraction of the general population.

You can also make your parish as baby friendly as possible. At the end of mass many priests will openly recognize those who are celebrating a birthday or an anniversary. You could also recognize anyone who has just had a new baby or a new grandbaby. There might be many Sundays when there would be no response to that question, but that’s part of the point, right? Then when there is a new one lifted up, and she is greeted by thundering applause, the point will really be made. And give special, positive recognition to couples who have made the heroic decision to have a number of children. Usually, if they get any recognition at all, it’s negative, like, “So are you stopping now?” Let that never be the case with us, and, Father, you please lead the way. It doesn’t mean you can’t be playful. I just would love to hear a priest say something like this at the end of mass, “How many is that for you now, Ed & Ruth? What’s your secret? What kind of water are you drinking?! That’s wonderful! God bless you from all of us.”

It’s also important, though, to go beyond mere words like these and to recognize the very real financial and emotional challenges that many couples face, challenges that might make it hard for them to welcome a new child, or that might make it easy for them to succumb to the lure of contraception or sterilization. Just like it is with our fight against abortion, our fight against contraception must be more than just trying to persuade people not to do something. We also need to respond pastorally by helping to create home and parish environments where it is easy and desirable for families to care for children and to welcome new children. So let’s identify the couples that need our help, and, yes, let’s pray for them, but let’s also ask them what they really need, and help them find it.

Final Words

In this talk I hope I’ve shown you that I love our Church. It is because of that love that I want us to be freed of what I can only describe as our bondage to contraception. For that to happen, we need to change a lot of hearts and minds and that will only come by a lot of prayer and a lot of work. But if we will turn to the Lord about this serious matter, with humble and contrite hearts, then he will renew us and heal us and set us free. New fountains of living water will well up within us and flow out from us. In time we will become what God made us to be, and what the culture of death around us so desperately needs us to be: uncompromised witnesses to the sanctity of human life and marital love.

Let me close now with these words of God, spoken through the prophet Isaiah, which give us a picture of what our Church, newly freed from her bondage, can become to the dry and withered land around us: “See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In the desert I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers. For I put water in the desert and rivers in the wasteland for my chosen people to drink, the people whom I formed for myself, that they might announce my praise.” Isaiah 43:18-21.