The Pope, the Book, and Condoms

Light of the World. A Papal First
A book so "risky" has no precedent for a successor of Peter. "Everyone is free to contradict me" is his motto. On the controversial question of the condom, Professor Rhonheimer explains why Benedict XVI is right

by Sandro Magister

ROME, November 25, 2010 – Toward the end of his book-length interview Light of the World, which recently went on sale in various languages, Benedict XVI refers to his other book about Jesus, his "latest major work."

He recalls that "in a completely deliberate way" he wanted that book not to be an act of the magisterium, but the offering of his own personal interpretation.

And he adds: "This naturally represents an enormous risk."

On the afternoon of Monday, November 22, speaking one-on-one with the pope, the director of the Vatican press office, Fr. Federico Lombardi, asked him if he knew that he was facing an even greater risk with the book-length interview that was about to be released.

"When I asked this question, the pope smiled," Fr. Lombardi recounted.

Exactly right. Light of the World is a unprecedentedly audacious book, for a pope. It is the complete transcription of six hours of spontaneous, uncensored interview. On an incredibly wide array of issues, even the most uncomfortable.

The answers are short and to the point. The language is conversational but precise, simple, completely free of jargon. There are occasional flashes of irony.

Of course, the launching of the book was not without its flaws. Fr. Lombardi himself recognized that the preview of a few passages by "L'Osservatore Romano," on the afternoon of Saturday, November 20, right in the middle of the consistory, "was not handled well." On the passage about the condom, breathlessly covered by the media all over the world, it was necessary to run for cover, on Sunday the 21st, with a note of clarification approved word for word by the pope.

So the book ran into one "risk" immediately. The pope saw himself pulled into the fray straight off, on an issue he touched upon in only two pages out of 250, the same issue that in the spring of 2009, at the beginning of his voyage to Africa, had earned him a firestorm of criticism.

But if one looks at what has happened in recent days, the experiment has had surprisingly beneficial effects outside and inside of the Church.

Outside, the voices that are generally hostile to this pontificate have credited Benedict XVI with "openness" this time. And above all, they have been induced to read his arguments. It is startling to see how in such a short time there has been a revival in the media fortunes of this pope, whose resignation was being demanded just a few months ago.

Inside the Church, the discussion of an issue previously kept under wraps has finally come out into the sunlight. The pope has made no "revolutionary shift" on the question of the condom. But the statement on Sunday, November 21 noted how an innovation has indeed occurred, where it states: "Numerous moral theologians and authoritative ecclesiastical personalities have sustained, and still sustain, similar positions. Nevertheless, it’s true that they have not been heard until now with such clarity from the mouth of the pope, even if it’s in a colloquial rather than magisterial form."

Not only that. What has now been brought to light by the pope is a true discussion, with views that are sometimes vigorously opposed. "Everyone is free to contradict me," Benedict XVI wrote in the preface to "Jesus of Nazareth." This is what is now happening with the condom, with "pro-life" groups and representatives highly critical of the positions expressed by the pope in the book-length interview.

Naturally, "Light of the World" cannot be reduced to this. It is the complete profile of this pontificate that leaps out, in magnificent synthesis. Even the individual questions, addressed by the pope one by one, bear the imprint of the whole.

The two texts reproduced here below give confirmation of this.

The first is the commentary on "Light of the World" published in Italy in "L'espresso," a leading weekly of secular culture.

The second is an article by Fr. Martin Rhonheimer, from Switzerland, professor of ethics and political philosophy at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, the Roman university of Opus Dei.

The article appeared in 2004 in "The Tablet," a "liberal" Catholic magazine based in London, and presents with the mastery of the specialist on moral theology the arguments that are at the basis of Benedict XVI's "openness" to the use of the condom in particular cases and for a particular purpose.

It is striking how there is even a verbal correspondence between Rhonheimer's article of six years ago and the recent words from Benedict XVI. Starting with that "act of responsibility" attributed to the "prostitute" who uses a condom to avoid endangering the life of his partner, given as an example by the pope.

In regard to this example, Fr. Lombardi stated that for the pope, it is not important whether the subject is male or female: "The point is the responsibility in considering the risk to the life of the other with whom one has relations. If it is done by a man, a woman, or a transsexual, it is the same."


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THE GOOD SHEPHERD AND THE LOST SHEEP

by Sandro Magister


In six hours of conversation with the Bavarian journalist Peter Seewald in the summer quiet of Castel Gandolfo, spread over six days like those of creation, and transcribed just as they took place in a book fresh from the presses, Benedict XVI has given the world the most accurate image of him. That of a man enchanted by the marvels of creation, joyful, unable to bear a life lived always and only "against," happily convinced that in the Church, "many who seem to be inside, are outside; and many who seem to be outside, are inside."

"We are sinners," Pope Benedict says when the interviewer corners him on the encyclical "Humanae Vitae," the one that condemns all unnatural contraceptive acts. Paul VI wrote and published it in 1968, and from that year it became the emblem of the incompatibility between the Church and modern culture. Joseph Ratzinger does not deny one iota of "Humanae Vitae." The "truth" is what it is, and remains such. "Fascinating," he says, for the minorities that are deeply convinced of it. But the pope immediately turns his attention to the endless masses of men and women who do not live that "high morality." To say that "we should seek to do all the good possible, and sustain and support one another."

This is the pope who emerges from the book-length interview Light of the World. He is the same one who revealed himself this way in the first Mass he celebrated after his election as successor of Peter. A shepherd who goes out in search of the lost sheep, and takes it on his shoulders like the lamb's wool of the pallium that he wears, and experiences much more joy over the sheep that is recovered than over the ninety-nine in the sheepfold.

Only that few at the time understood this. The Ratzinger of the caricatures was for a long time the frigid professor, the iron inquisitor, the pitiless judge. It took five years after the perfect storm of the pedophile priests to shred this false image definitively.

Unlike many other Church figures, Benedict XVI does not complain about plotting, he does not twist the accusations back against the accusers. On the contrary, in the book he says that "as long as efforts are being made to bring the truth to light, we must be appreciative." And he explains: "Truth, united with love when understood correctly, is the number one value. And the media would not have been able to give those accounts if the evil had not been there in the Church itself. It is only because the evil was inside the Church that the others were able to hold it against her."

Said by the man who was the first at the summit of the Catholic Church to diagnose and combat this "filth," and then to bear as pope the greatest burden of faults and omissions that were not his own, these are striking words. But this is the style in which Benedict XVI treats other controversial questions, in the book. He goes straight to the heart of the most controversial points. Female priesthood? Pius XII and the Jews? Homosexuality? The burqa? The condom? The interviewer presses, and the pope doesn't dodge it. About the burqa, he says that he does not see the reasons for a generalized prohibition. If it is imposed on women through violence, "it is clear that one cannot agree with this." But if it is worn voluntarily, "I do not see why they should be prevented from doing so."

One might object to the pope that a veil that completely covers the face poses problems of security in the civil sphere. A legitimate objection, because he gave the interview in part to open discussions, not to close them. In the preface to another one of his books, the one on Jesus released in 2007, Ratzinger wrote that "everyone is free to contradict me." And he was careful to specify that this was not a "magisterial act," but "only an expression of my personal search."

Where the magisterium of the Church seems to tremble, in the interview, is where the pope talks about the condom, justifying its use in particular cases. No "revolutionary shift," was the speedy clarification from Fr. Federico Lombardi, the official voice of the see of Peter. In fact, many cardinals and bishops and theologians, but above all countless ranks of pastors and missionaries have for some time peacefully admitted the use of the condom, for many concrete persons met in the "care of souls." But it is one thing for them to do it, and another for a pope to say it out loud. Benedict XVI is the first pontiff in history to cross this Rubicon, with disarming tranquility: he who only two springs ago had unleashed in the world a deafening chorus of protest for having said, on a flight to Africa, that "AIDS is a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, and that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems."

It was March of 2009. Benedict XVI was accused of condemning myriads of Africans to death in the name of blind condemnation of latex protection. When in reality the pope wanted to call attention to the danger – in Africa, backed up by the facts – that wider use of the condom would be accompanied not by a drop, but by a rise in casual and promiscuous sex, and in the rates of infection.

In the interview, Ratzinger resumes the thread of this reasoning, at the time widely misunderstood, and observes that even outside of the Church, among the leading worldwide experts on the fight against AIDS, it is increasingly believed that a campaign centered on sexual continence and conjugal fidelity is more effective than the indiscriminate distribution of condoms.

"Sheer fixation on the condom," the pope continues, "implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves."

At this point, one would expect Benedict XVI to reiterate the absolute condemnation of the condom. And instead no. Taking the reader by surprise, he says that in various cases its use can be justified, for reasons other than contraception. And he gives the example of "a prostitute" who uses the condom to prevent infection: the example, that is, of an action that still remains sinful but in which the sinner has a jolt of responsibility that the pope sees as "a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality."

If this loving understanding applies to a sinner, it could apply all the more to the classic case encountered in Africa and elsewhere by pastors and missionaries: that of two spouses, one of whom is sick with AIDS and uses a condom to avoid endangering the life of the other. Among the cardinals who so far have conjectured, more or less surreptitiously, the permissibility of these and other similar behaviors are the Italians Carlo Maria Martini and Dionigi Tettamanzi, the Mexican Javier Lozano Barragán, the Swiss Georges Cottier. But in 2006, when "La Civiltà Cattolica," the magazine of the Rome Jesuits printed after inspection by the Vatican secretariat of state, entrusted the argument to a great expert in the field, Fr. Michael F. Czerny, director of the Nairobi-based African Jesuit AIDS Network, the article came out purged of the passages that admitted the use of condoms to prevent infection.

It took Pope Benedict to say what no one had dared to say before, at the top of the Church. And this is enough to make him a humble, meek revolutionary.

(From "L'espresso" no. 48 of 2010).

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THE TRUTH ABOUT CONDOMS

by Martin Rhonheimer


Most people are convinced that an HIV-infected person who has sex should use a condom to protect his partner from infection. Whatever one may think about a promiscuous lifestyle, about homosexual acts or prostitution, that person acts at least with a sense of responsibility in trying to avoid transmitting his infection to others.

It is commonly believed that the Catholic Church does not support such a view. [...] The Church is thought to teach that sexually active homosexuals and prostitutes should refrain from condoms because condoms are "intrinsically evil." Many Catholics also believe [...] that the use of a condom, even exclusively to prevent infection of one's sexual partner, fails to honour the fertile structure that marital acts must have, cannot constitute mutual and complete personal self-giving and thus violates the Sixth Commandment.

But this is not a teaching of the Catholic Church. There is no official magisterial teaching either about condoms, or about anti-ovulatory pills or diaphragms. Condoms cannot be intrinsically evil, only human acts; condoms are not human acts, but things.

What the Catholic Church has clearly taught to be "intrinsically evil" is a specific kind of human act, defined by Paul VI in his encyclical "Humanae vitae," and later included in No. 2370 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, as an "action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible."

Contraception, as a specific kind of human act, includes two elements: the will to engage in sexual acts and the intention of rendering procreation impossible. A contraceptive act therefore embodies a contraceptive choice. As I put it in an article in the "Linacre Quarterly" in 1989, "a contraceptive choice is the choice of an act that prevents freely consented performances of sexual intercourse, which are foreseen to have procreative consequences, from having these consequences, and which is a choice made just for this reason."

This is why contraception, regarded as a human act qualified as "intrinsically evil" or disordered, is not determined by what is happening on the physical level; it makes no difference whether one prevents sexual intercourse from being fertile by taking the Pill or by interrupting it in an onanistic way. The above definition also disregards the differentiation between "doing" and "refraining from doing", because coitus interruptus is a kind of – at least partial – refraining.

The definition of the contraceptive act does not therefore apply to using contraceptives to prevent possible procreative consequences of foreseen rape; in that circumstance the raped person does not choose to engage in sexual intercourse or to prevent a possible consequence of her own sexual behaviour but is simply defending herself from an aggression on her own body and its undesirable consequences. A woman athlete taking part in the Olympic Games who takes an anti-ovulatory pill to prevent menstruation is not doing "contraception" either, because there is no simultaneous intention of engaging in sexual intercourse.

The teaching of the Church is not about condoms or similar physical or chemical devices, but about marital love and the essentially marital meaning of human sexuality. It affirms that, if married people have a serious reason not to have children, they should modify their sexual behaviour by – at least periodic – abstinence from sexual acts. To avoid destroying both the unitive and the procreative meaning of sexual acts and therefore the fullness of mutual self-giving, they must not prevent the sexual act from being fertile while carrying on having sex.

But what of promiscuous people, sexually active homosexuals, and prostitutes? What the Catholic Church teaches them is simply that they should not be promiscuous, but faithful to one single sexual partner; that prostitution is a behaviour which gravely violates human dignity, mainly the dignity of the woman, and therefore should not be engaged in; and that homosexuals, as all other people, are children of God and loved by him as everybody else is, but that they should live in continence like any other unmarried person.

But if they ignore this teaching, and are at risk from HIV, should they use condoms to prevent infection? The moral norm condemning contraception as intrinsically evil does not apply to these cases. Nor can there be church teaching about this; it would be simply nonsensical to establish moral norms for intrinsically immoral types of behaviour. Should the Church teach that a rapist must never use a condom because otherwise he would additionally to the sin of rape fail to respect mutual and complete personal self-giving and thus violate the Sixth Commandment? Of course not.

What do I, as a Catholic priest, tell AIDS-infected promiscuous people or homosexuals who are using condoms? I will try to help them to live an upright and well-ordered sexual life. But I will not tell them not to use condoms. I simply will not talk to them about this and assume that if they choose to have sex they will at least keep a sense of responsibility. With such an attitude I fully respect the Catholic Church's teaching on contraception.

This is not a plea for "exceptions" to the norm prohibiting contraception. The norm about contraception applies without exception; the contraceptive choice is intrinsically evil. But it obviously applies only to contraceptive acts, as defined by "Humanae vitae," which embody a contraceptive choice. Not every act in which a device is used which from a purely physical point of view is "contraceptive", is from a moral point of view a contraceptive act falling under the norm taught by "Humanae vitae."

Equally, a married man who is HIV-infected and uses the condom to protect his wife from infection is not acting to render procreation impossible, but to prevent infection. If conception is prevented, this will be an – unintentional – side-effect and will not therefore shape the moral meaning of the act as a contraceptive act. There may be other reasons to warn against the use of a condom in such a case, or to advise total continence, but these will not be because of the Church's teaching on contraception but for pastoral or simply prudential reasons – the risk, for example, of the condom not working. Of course, this last argument does not apply to promiscuous people, because even if condoms do not always work, their use will help to reduce the evil consequences of morally evil behaviour.

Stopping the worldwide AIDS epidemic is not a question about the morality of using condoms, but about how to effectively prevent people from causing the disastrous consequences of their immoral sexual behaviour. Pope John Paul II has repeatedly urged that the promotion of the use of condoms is not a solution to this problem because he holds that it does not resolve the moral problem of promiscuity. Whether, generally, campaigns promoting condoms encourage risky behaviour and make the AIDS pandemic worse is a question of statistical evidence which is not yet easily available. That it reduces transmission rates, in the short term, among highly infective groups like prostitutes and homosexuals is impossible to deny. Whether it may decrease infection rates among "sexually liberated" promiscuous populations or, on the contrary, encourage risky behaviour, depends on many factors.

In African countries condom-based anti-AIDS campaigns are generally ineffective, partly because for an African man his manliness is expressed by making as many children as possible. For him, condoms convert sex into a meaningless activity. Which is why – and this is strong evidence in favour of the Pope's argument – among the few effective programmes in Africa has been the Ugandan one. Although it does not exclude condoms, it encourages a positive change in sexual behaviour (fidelity and abstinence), unlike condom campaigns, which contribute to obscuring or even destroying the meaning of human love.

Campaigns to promote abstinence and fidelity are certainly and ultimately the only effective long-term remedy to combat AIDS. So there is no reason for the Church to consider the campaigns promoting condoms as helpful for the future of human society. But nor can the Church possibly teach that people engaged in immoral lifestyles should avoid them.

(From The Tablet, July 10, 2004).
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Rhonheimer's article on the website of The Tablet:

> The truth about condoms

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The note of clarification released on November 21 by Fr. Federico Lombardi, read and approved by the pope:

> "At the end of chapter 11 of the book..."

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Among the voices of the Catholic hierarchy that have spoken out on this matter in recent years, here is that of Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, in a 2006 interview with L'espresso:

"Everything possible must be done to oppose AIDS. Certainly, in some situations the use of condoms can constitute a lesser evil. Then there is the particular situation of spouses, one of whom is infected with AIDS. The infected one is obligated to protect the other partner, who should also be able to take protective measures. But the question is instead whether it is convenient that the religious authorities be the ones to promote such a means of defense, almost as if it were believed that the other morally sustainable means, including abstinence, should be put in second place, while the risk arises of promoting an irresponsible attitude. So the principle of the lesser evil – which is applicable in all the cases provided for by ethical doctrine – is one thing, while the matter of who should express such things publicly is another. I believe that prudence and the consideration of the different particular situations will permit everyone to contribute effectively to the fight against AIDS without this fostering irresponsible behavior.”

Retrieved November 25, 2010 from http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1345703?eng=y