ABORTION
Catholics against the Vatican
CHARLES GOODHART
The choice facing many otherwise more or less loyal Roman Catholics is indeed now an agonizing one—whether or not to go on using contraceptive methods which have been authoritatively condemned in the Encyclical Humanae Vitae of July 29, 1968, and if they are priests what advice to give in the confessional. Good sense tells them that birth control won't work with the methods. allowed by the Church which, while by no means disapproving of responsible married people limiting their families for good reasons, forbids the use of all but highly unreliable methods, and for reasons which seem of dubious validity to most of those directly concerned. Catholics have a duty to follow their own consciences in all things, when properly informed, but to do so in direct opposition to the teaching of the Church, as solemnly proclaimed by the Pope, is a choice that many will feel they ought not to have to make.
Mr St John-Stevas, after searching his soul as a conscientious Catholic is expected to do, has come out firmly opposed to this teaching, and in a well-documented and closely argued book' he presents the Catholic case against Humanae Vitae. Respectfully sympathetic towards the Pope, the line he takes is more moderate and the language more restrained than most of the polemic on this question, and all the more effective for that. As an unmarried man with no personal axe to grind, and yet not subject to priestly discipline, he is well placed to perform what was presumably a painful task and his arguments, if not unanswerable, certainly seem to require an answer. Whether they will get one is another matter, for when Rome has spoken she is seldom disposed to seek to justify what has been said.
For Paul VI, also, the choice must have been an agonizing one. So easily could he have got himself acclaimed as the trendiest of all the Popes, and finished his reign in a blaze, if not of glory, at least of popularity, had he been prepared to compromise with what his conscience told him was wrong. For there is no disputing that the teaching of Humanae Vitae does represent what has always been taken to be the mind of the Church, and little more than a decade before under Pius XII it would have seemed so obvious as hardly to have been worth repeating.
By character and training Paul VI is clearly not cut out to be a revolutionary leader, and if he had been he would never have been chosen as Pope. He is where he is by no choice of his own, but elected by a Church which believes the choice to have been directly inspired by the Holy Spirit. He also must have searched his soul and looked to the Holy Spirit for guidance: and no doubt to him the answer came back loud and clear. As the Abbot of Downside put it, in rebuking critics of the Encyclical : "Do you want the Pope to give his judgment as the Vicar of Christ, or instead to approve of your own private views?"
And that really is the heart of the matter, touching upon the apostolic authority of the Church of Rome. The Pope himself is supposed to have crossed out ex infallibile auctoritate from a preliminary draft of the Encyclical, so the problem of papal infallibility doesn't arise; but if you won't accept the judgement of the Vicar of Christ when it conflicts with your own, it isn't easy to see what remains of the exclusive authority claimed by Rome. After all, apart from this question of authority it would be a remarkably pernickety Catholic who couldn't find somewhere within the capacious bosom of the Church of England practices, doctrines, and beliefs, to match anything he was accustomed to in Rome; not to mention a liturgy expressed in language more dignified, perhaps, than some of the latest fashions he is getting used to now.
The recent upheaval in the Church is a major historical event by any standards, of which the fuss over contraception is probably a symptom rather than the cause. But of course it is important also for its own sake, and Mr St John-Stevas has made a significant contribution to the discussion, even if most of what he has to say will be of more interest to those who have every intention of remaining within his Church than to spectators from outside. But to an outsider the present positions looks basically unstable, and as there can hardly be any going back it isn't easy to see that the teaching of Humanae Vitae will long outlive its author. In the meanwhile even those who believe the Pope to have been tragically mistaken should not withhold their admiration from a man who sticks steadfastly to what he believes to be right.
There are bigger issues than contraception affecting human life which face the Church today in abortion and euthanasia, and many will regret that in taking so firm a stand upon the treacherous ground of contraception the Pope will weaken the impact of anything he has to say about what he must regard as even greater evils. But artificial contraception and procured abortion are coupled together in a single sentence of Humanae Vitae, which condemns both of them unequivocally and equally. That would seem to concede the point so strongly contested by non-Catholic opponents of free abortion, and also of course by Mr St John-Stevas, that abortion is no more than one among many methods of artificial birth control, and morally equivalent to others not involving the destruction of a human organism already conceived and started upon its life.
The Catholic attitude towards abortion is discussed in seven essays' edited by Professor John T. Noonan Jr, a canon lawyer from California, dealing with the legal and theological status of a child before birth. Professor Noonan himself provides a concise summary of Catholic thinking on these matters from the early Fathers on wards, and there is a theological evaluation by Bernard Haring from a reasonably liberal modern Roman Catholic point of view. Several of the authors are Protestants, though decidedly conservative on abortion, and some of them make heavy going. One Harvard divine, for example, is of the opinion that :
Although the quasi-political theory of the condominium presupposes that the fetus is at least an inchoate person in consonance with the yatristic-papal line of development, the theory of co-rule also reinstates something of the scriptural-rabbinical view that the mother is sovereign over the fruit of her womb, even if she can no longer maintain anatomically and hence morally that the fetus is merely a limb or growth. Our updated theistic fetology thus combines the patristic-papal and the scriptural-rabbinical lines of development in a Protestant quasi-political construct from which he concludes that the mother may in some circumstances and for sufficient reasons, after due legal process, have the right to a therapeutic abortion.
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