Unloved and unfinished

A response to the ‘Contraception Crisis’ in Recovering Catholic

“Christ in the Cornfields on the Sabbath,” William Henry Margetson

First of all, I want to thank Sarah Carter from Recovering Catholic for her post that both draws on and challenges my article ‘The Roman Church looks East.’ I’ve been a longtime reader of Recovering Catholic and also appreciate the comments and engagement from other subscribers.

The Contraception Crisis

Sarah emphasized one issue, contraception, from my article about the Roman Catholic drift towards Orthodoxy and this article is my answer.^[1] To get to the point, what stood out to me in both Sarah’s response and the comments from so many of her readers is a struggle - a tension - between loving the Church’s teaching on contraception, Humanae Vitae (HV), and recognizing that in many cases (like “NFProbably”) that it doesn’t work in practice, at times leading to harmful and significant (emotional, economic, spiritual, physical) consequences.

HV says artificial contraception is immoral, yet Sarah admits that in practice the allowed natural contraceptive methods don’t always meet the needs of the spouses. Sarah’s resolution to the struggle is spiritual: embrace the teaching and embrace the Cross. This is the Way. The entire sentiment is crystalized by the last subheading from her article, a passage from the Gospel of John, 6:60: “This Is a Hard Teaching; Who Can Accept It?”

First, a word on method. Invoking the scriptures is exactly the right way to think through a difficult faith-related problem like this.^[2] I embrace the method, but not the message.

Here’s why: The framing from John 6 implies the teaching on contraception is like the eucharist, a hill Jesus is (literally and metaphorically) willing to die on, and for which Jesus has no problem letting disciples turn away. Sarah’s eucharistic framing suggests accepting HV is primarily a spiritual and sacrificial issue, requiring faithful ascent of the will and intellect. Take it or leave it.

I disagree.

I’d like to propose two different and, in my view, better passages to frame the Roman Catholic contraception crisis. I do think the contraception crisis is a spiritual and sacrificial problem, but it is not primarily a spiritual, sacrificial or theological problem, not even primarily a pastoral problem. It’s much more basic.^[3] It’s a policy problem, with serious pastoral, theological and spiritual implications. Let me explain.

The Love of the Law

Policy is at heart about decisions, often decisions expressed as laws or rules with practical implications. Policies and laws have a special significance when applied to faith. Here’s what laws mean for Christians, quoting from Orthodox theologian Peter Bouteneff in “Sweeter than Honey : Orthodox Thinking on Dogma and Truth.”

“They [Hebrews] did not see the law as a code, much less an arbitrary set of rules to be followed. They saw it as a help, a treasure, and a blessing. They also saw it as an expression of reality—the way things are, the way they are ordered in relation to each other and to their Creator. The Hebrews, who sang “Thy law is truth” (Ps 119.142 LXX), felt it natural that any sane person would consider the law as something he would want to get to know, the way he would want to come to understand life itself and its meaning… Early Christians approached Jesus Christ and the teaching about him (dogma) in the same way that Jews approached the law.^[4]

The law of God is “sweeter than honey” and to love the precepts is the right order of Christian faith and affection. At heart is a desire - running from the Old Testament to St. Paul to Christians today - to love the Law of God. We should relish the precepts and commandments of God as a child dips into a comb of honey. With all this in mind, the first passage I propose to frame the contraception crisis, and HV, is:

“The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul;” (Psalm 19)^[5]

Sarah and many readers express several arguments and examples in defense of HV. I agree with them, and by extension they also apply to arguments against divorce. Artificial contraception, pumping chemicals into bodies and other interventions have all kinds of side effects and complications. The fact that non-believers seek NFP and faith-inspired natural contraceptive methods speaks to a deeper truth and beauty about the openness to fertility. Divorce can be messy, painful and create many additional problems that extend for generations. I’d even go as far and say HV is prophetic.^[6]

In short, my answer is “Yes” to loving the ideals proposed by HV (as well as indissolubility of marriage and other ‘hard teachings’ found in Roman Catholic Church laws). The unfulfilling consequences of breaking the law speak to why the law points to the ideal in the first place. As the psalmist sings, a Chirstian should not only uphold the teaching but lovingly aspire towards it.

The Law in Incarnate Reality

Jesus both embraced the Jewish reverence for the law and he also corrected some legal distortions preached by the religious elites of his time: rigidity, judgment, using the law to lord it over others. When the disciples picked grains on the Sabbath the Pharisees questioned Jesus about breaking the law, he responded,

“The Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2, 27)

The centrality of the human person, above even the Sabbath law, is second biblical passage that must frame the contraception crisis. When I propose that economia must complete HV (as well as communion for divorced and remarried, the precept of Sunday Mass attendance and other Church laws) I am taking nothing away from the duty to love and uphold the law. All I am saying is that these laws are incomplete or unfinished and must be combined with another principle proposed by Jesus himself. Every law serves a greater purpose: the good of the human person.

There are 1.3 billion Roman Catholics around the world. There are and will be cases where the law as written, intended for good of individuals and the community, can lead to individual harm in unique circumstances. One of the responders to Sarah’s article gave a great example - after a traumatic childbirth the mother was at high risk of becoming blind if she conceived again so the husband contracepted to protect her health. Recently, I’ve witnessed three divorces of family and friends, two of which where the husbands were unfaithful and walked away from the mothers caring for pre-teens or teenagers. In two cases the mothers felt unsafe with their spouse.

The Catholic hardliners, in the first case, will say the husband and wife must abstain from sex or use natural contraception in order to live HV faithfully – forsaking intimacy or inviting tragedy in an already crushing situation. Or the abandoned mothers may separate and even find another spouse (while preserving the indissolubility of marriage) but should refrain from sex with the new spouse to be in full communion with the Church (or secretly wish the unfaithful husband would die so they can be formally widowed?). All of this is painful, inhuman and eerily twisted, examples of “man made for the Sabbath” - the opposite of Jesus’ message.

Unloved and unfinished

My answer is “no” to HV in the unique cases (due to medical, economic, psychological or other reasons) when natural contraception becomes an obstacle to the health of individuals and the marriage. Before getting to the “how” to account for unique cases without sacrificing principles (the answer is economia) let me explain “why” HV as written is unloved and unfinished.

When the law becomes an impossible standard for the broken and wounded it begins to subtract from the love for the law. The law, which is good in itself, may become unlovable for the person who is crushed under its weight. The reason for the lost love, in these cases, is that laws don’t provide a path forward for the downtrodden (abandoned mothers or gravely ill spouses) to participate within the norms set by the community of faith in good conscience - a cruel outcome.

The responsibility lies with “the lawmakers,” the clergy who have enacted legislation with lofty principles but no flexibility (and also happen to not be subject to these laws). Contraception in HV and the ban on communion on the divorced are ‘unfinished’ laws, they have no escape valve. The tragedy is that there is another way, rooted in the early Christian tradition, which upholds the same noble principles but also completes them: economia.

“Christ and the Sinner”, Vasily Polenov

The practice of economia is the embodiment of mercy and Jesus’ exception to the law. As Orthodox Bishop Athenagoras explains, economia is “allowed for exceptional and severe reasons, but creates no precedent.” Economiatakes nothing away from the principle of the law, which for most people in most circumstances must be upheld and cherished, but it gives an opportunity to the broken and wounded.

“It is the precise goal of economia that the weak person not be irrevocably banned from the church communion, according to Christ’s example, who came, after all, to save the lost” (emphasis original).^[7]

One need not be Christian to grasp economia. Being human is sufficient. Traffic laws, such as traffic lights and speed limits, exist to keep people safe while allowing them to travel. The goal is to provide safety through norms and limits applied to everyone. Once I blew through a red light and got a ticket in the mail with a photograph of my deviance. I refused to pay and went to court – the reason for my infraction was an ambulance turned the corner as I was committed to cross the intersection, so I slowed down. In that unique case, while breaking the law I simultaneously fulfilled the goal of the law itself: safety. In court, the judge sent me to the video room where my description of facts checked out and my ticket was waived.

Like in my traffic example, conscience is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for economia. The concessions of economia must be granted by an external authority.^[8] At the same time, it is “a notion that cannot be compared to ‘dispensation’ in the Roman Catholic Church, which provides a juridical norm parallel to the official regulation.” As such, economia doesn’t circumvent the law. It simply recognizes that something has been broken and the law as written can’t fix it. It also does not imply that one has sinned and must be forgiven – such as an abandoned spouse or a contracepting husband wanting to protect his wife. Economia accepts the Fall (the world is broken) and that sometimes the law needs to be flexed – “mercied” is my verb of choice - for people in broken situations to be able to get closer to the ideal.

“Mercied” - compassion as a verb - is not only about forgiving individual sins (the way Pope Francis uses it) but also recognizing that the world doesn’t work as it should. Sometimes life crushes souls and it is nobody’s fault. A Christian response to the fallen world includes both upholding high principles to build a better society and supporting the weak - a “both/and” that does not subtract from the former for the latter. The Eastern Christian tradition embodied this “practical mercy” in economia, and when - to use St. John Paul II’s celebrated phrase – Western Christianity lost one of “its lungs” during the Great Schism with Orthodoxy, economia was mutilated with it.^[9] The contraception crisis today is a symptom of the Roman Catholic loss of its Eastern lung.

Jesus Unrolls the Book in the Synagogue, James Tissot

Conclusion

Economia recognizes that the Fall is not an abstraction but a lived condition, and that laws ordered to human flourishing must sometimes be applied with discernment if they are to remain salvific. Properly understood, economia does not suspend the moral law, relativize truth, or excuse sin; it acknowledges that the law, while true, cannot always heal without pastoral mediation what has been broken. Where economia is present, the ideal remains luminous and credible, because the wounded are not excluded from the path toward it.

Where economia is absent, the law is transformed from a medicine into a test of endurance: it produces moral exhaustion, quiet dissent, scrupulosity, and resignation, and it teaches the faithful—often unintentionally—that grace is reserved for the strong. A law becomes unjust not when it proposes a high ideal, but when it refuses to recognize the human wreckage left by a fallen world and then blames the wounded for collapsing under its weight.

Finally (and a task for another article), just as important as the practical application of economia to remedy the contraception crisis and other present ecclesial policy failures (I provide a list below)^[10] is to unearth the underlying theological reasons why so many Roman Catholic practices today (compelled by unfinished ecclesial norms) struggle to accept the both/and, resist the Fall in some prelapsarian fantasy and resort to moralizing white-knuckling (neo-Pelagianism) to make up the difference. None of this reflects the Gospels. With the life and teaching of Jesus as a true north, I look forward to further discussion and dialogue with Sarah and others.

---

^[1]I said the Orthodox approach - economia - is better because it upholds the same principle but with greater humanity.

^[2] Somewhere in Peter Seewald’s book length interviews, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger admired and modeled Pope John Paul II’s method for dealing with difficult problems, which starts with finding a biblical passage to frame the issue – we see Francis employing the same method addressing the sex abuse crisis.

^[3] Here the comparison with communion for divorce and remarriage is very helpful, and I also want to push back on the characterization of one of Sarah’s readers on the position of Cardinal Ratzinger on these matters. The address by Pope Benedict XVI on the issue of divorce and remarriage in Aosta, in 2005, is critical. As pope, Ratzinger recognizes the communion for divorced and remarried is “a problem” and that he “personally thought” that “a sacrament celebrated without faith” could be invalid – note this is a much more radical solution than the one provided by Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia. Ratzinger’s solution was not approved by Pope John Paul II, and - my commentary henceforth - is that while theologically sound (and creative) his approach is simply impractical: determining faith retrospectively is unworkable for practical purposes. What I want to highlight is 1. the complex, messy humanness and nuance involved in ecclesial policy decisions and 2. dispel the neat Francis liberal vs. Benedict conservative narrative to approach these complex ecclesial policy issues. Both popes identified a divorced-communion problem, wrestled with it and tried to find solutions to the best of their abilities. Note Benedict XVI also mentioned economia and Orthodoxy in this address, unfavorably.

^[4] Bouteneff, Peter. Sweeter than Honey: Orthodox Thinking on Dogma and Truth (Foundations Series Book 3) (Function). Kindle Edition.

^[5] Psalm 19.7–10: “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the LORD is clean, enduring forever; the ordinances of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb.”

^[6] Prophetic especially in light of the fertility catastrophe ahead of us. Look at these fertility stats below: we don’t want children anymore and world population will decline soon if we continue on the present path.

Relatedly, what I love the most in Humanae Vitae is the challenge to a contraceptive mentality, controlling the world, our bodies, our decisions through technology, chemicals and the resulting throwaway culture. I love the common thread that draws a line from Humanae Vitae to Laudato Si’, taking aim and the technocratic paradigm which explains so much of how we got to the world of today.

^[7] Bishop Athenagoras: http://www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org/articles/liturgics/athenagoras_remarriage.htm

^[8] “Only the bishop, as head of the local Church, enforces them.”

^[9] “I must also say that my visit to Constantinople has given me much hope. [...] In this environment, which clearly constitutes a great spiritual reality, a complementary reality [to ours]! Well, one cannot breathe as Christians or, better, as Catholics, with only one lung; one must have both lungs, that is, eastern and western. [We hope that the Lord will allow us to see the day when we will be united, and certainly - we can be sure of this - on that day we will look differently at the difficulties that seem so great to us today”
(Message to non-Catholic Christian communities at the Nunciature, Paris, 31 May 1980) https://jp2online.pl/en/publication/two-lungs-of-christianity%3F-john-paul-ii-and-eastern-europe;UHVibGljYXRpb246MTIx

^[10] Here’s a short list of 10 Roman Catholic policy failures, in no particular order. What I mean by “failure” is that these policies aren’t effective, not that the goals/principles that inspire the policies are failed. To the contrary, the point of recognizing the failure is to improve the policy so the good principles they uphold can be more effectively embraced. Policy is fertile ground for differing views, perspectives and disagreements, all of which I respectfully welcome:

1. Contraception in Humane Vitae (ignored in practice by the majority of Roman Catholics)

2. Communion for divorce and remarried (for which Amoris Laetitia provided an adequate policy fix, economia is better)

3. The precept of Sunday mass attendance being grave matter (keep the precept, nuance the gravity)

4. Fasting and abstinence after Vatican II (the failure here is not the excess of rigor of the law but the lack of guidance and laxity)

5. Latin rite liturgy after Vatican II [both Summorum Pontificum (SP) in 2007 and Traditionis custodes (TC) in 2021 are (among there things) failed policy fixes for the incomplete implementation of liturgical reforms following Sacrosanctum Concilium guidelines - in my estimation both SP and TC failed, each making the problem worse than the inherited and already precarious prior policy. I both embrace the Novus Ordo/Vatican II and think TC is very bad policy.]

6. Accountability for abuses by the presbyterate and episcopacy (Vos estis lux mundi is an improvement but incomplete)

7. Accountability for Sunday homilies (there is no policy but one is sorely needed)

8. Participation of the laity in ecclesial governance while fully respecting the role of the hierarchy

9. Blessings of homosexuals (Fiducia Suplicans provided a policy reminder rather than a fix, nothing really changed. The root of the matter is the ethics of sodomy - see Catechism 2357 – practically relevant to both heterosexual and homosexual Catholics, and a very uncomfortable topic for the clergy.)

10. Expectation of infant baptism in the first few weeks/immediately after birth (see canon 867.1, written in 1917 during WW1 when tragically infant mortality in Italy retreated in the direction of the mortality rate of hunter gatherer societies. In the 1983 Code of Canon Law update some monsignor forgot to think through the baptism policy, which is ridiculous today, limbo issues aside.)

Credit: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality