Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Person

Karol Wojtyla

PERSON AND COMMUNITY

Selected  Essays

Translated by Theresa Sandok, OSM

(1993)

Peter Lang


15

Subjectivity and the Irreducible in

the Human Being

1. THE STATE OF THE QUESTION

The problem of the subjectivity of the human being seems today to be the focal point of a variety of concerns. It would be difficult to explain in just a few words exactly why and how this situation has arisen. No doubt it owes its emergence to numerous causes, not all of which should be sought in the realm of philosophy or science. Nevertheless, philosophy—especially philosophical anthropology and ethics—is a privileged place when it comes to clarifying and objectifying this problem. And this is precisely where the heart of the issue lies. Today more than ever before we feel the need—and also see a greater possibility—of objectifying the problem of the subjectivity of the human being.

In this regard, contemporary thought seems to have more or less set aside the old antinomies that arose primarily in the area of the theory of knowledge (epistemology) and that formed an as though inviolable line of demarcation between the basic orientations in philosophy. The antinomy of subjectivism vs. objectivism, along with the underlying antinomy of idealism vs. realism, created conditions that discouraged dealing with human subjectivity—for fear that this would lead inevitably to subjec­tivism. These fears, which existed among thinkers who subscribed to realism and epistemological objectivism, were in some sense warranted by the subjectivistic and idealistic character—or at least overtones—of analyses conducted within the realm of "pure consciousness." This only served to strengthen the line of demarcation in philosophy and the op­position between the "objective" view of the human being, which was also an ontological view (the human being as a being), and the "subjec­tive" view, which seemed inevitably to sever the human being from this reality.

Today we are seeing a breakdown of that line of demarcation—and for some of the same reasons that gave rise to it in the first place. By "some of the same reasons" I mean that this is also happening as a result of phenomenological analyses conducted in the realm of "pure conscious­ness" using Husserl's epoché: bracketing the existence, or reality, of the conscious subject. I am convinced that the line of demarcation between the subjectivistic (idealistic) and objectivistic (realistic) views in anthropology and ethics must break down and is in fact breaking down on the basis of the experience of the human being. This experience auto­matically frees us from pure consciousness as the subject conceived and assumed a priori and leads us to the full concrete existence of the human being, to the reality of the conscious subject. With all the phenomenologi­cal analyses in the realm of that assumed subject (pure consciousness) now at our disposal, we can no longer go on treating the human being exclusively as an objective being, but we must also somehow treat the human being as a subject in the dimension in which the specifically human subjectivity of the human being is determined by consciousness.

And that dimension would seem to be none other than personal sub­jectivity.

2. THE HISTORY OF THE QUESTION

This matter requires a fuller examination, in the course of which we must consider the question of the irreducible in the human being—the question of that which is original and essentially human, that which ac­counts for the human being's complete uniqueness in the world.

Traditional Aristotelian anthropology was based, as we know, on the definition o anthropos zoon noetikon, homo est animal rationale. This definition fulfills Aristotle's requirements for defining the species (human being) through its proximate genus (living being) and the feature that distinguishes the given species in that genus (endowed with reason). At the same time, however, the definition is constructed in such a way that it excludes—when taken simply and directly—the possibility of accentuating the irreducible in the human being. It implies—at least at first glance—a belief in the reducibility of the human being to the world. The reason for maintaining such reducibility has always been the need to un­derstand the human being. This type of understanding could be defined as cosmological.

The usefulness of the Aristotelian definition is unquestionable. It be­came the dominant view in metaphysical anthropology and spawned a variety of particular sciences, which likewise understood the human being as an animal with the distinguishing feature of reason. The whole scientific tradition concerning the composition of human nature, the spiritual-material compositum humanum—a tradition that came down from the Greeks through the Scholastics to Descartes—moved within the framework of this definition and, consequently, within the context of the belief that the essentially human is basically reducible to the world. It cannot be denied that vast regions of experience and scientific knowledge based on that experience reflect this belief and work to confirm it.

On the other hand, a belief in the primordial uniqueness of the human being, and thus in the basic irreducibility of the human being to the natural world, seems just as old as the need for reduction expressed in Aristotle's definition. This belief stands at the basis of understanding the human being as a person, which has an equally long tenure in the history of philosophy; it also accounts today for the growing emphasis on the person as a subject and for the numerous efforts aimed at interpreting the

personal subjectivity of the human being.¹

In the philosophical and scientific tradition that grew out of the defini­tion homo est animal rationale, the human being was mainly an object, one of the objects in the world to which the human being visibly and physically belongs. Objectivity in this sense was connected with the general assumption of the reducibility of the human being. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is, as it were, a term proclaiming that the human being's proper essence cannot be totally reduced to and explained by the proximate genus and specific difference. Subjectivity is, then, a kind of synonym for the irreducible in the human being. If there is an opposition here, it is not between objectivism and subjectivism, but only between two philosophical (as well as everyday and practical) methods of treating the human being: as an object and as a subject. At the same time, we must not forget that the subjectivity of the human person is also something objective.²

I should also emphasize that the method of treating the human being as an object does not result directly from the Aristotelian definition itself, nor does it belong to the metaphysical conception of the human being in the Aristotelian tradition. As we know, the objectivity of the conception of the human being as a being itself required the postulate that the human being is 1) a separate suppositum (a subject of existence and action) and 2) a person (persona). Still, the traditional view of the human being as a person, which understood the person in terms of the Boethian definition as rationalis naturae individua substantia, expressed the individuality of the human being as a substantial being with a rational (spiritual) nature, rather than the uniqueness of the subjectivity essential to the human being as a person. Thus the Boethian definition mainly marked out the "metaphysical terrain"—the dimension of being—in which personal human subjectivity is realized, creating, in a sense, a condition for "build­ing upon" this terrain on the basis of experience.

3. LIVED EXPERIENCE AS AN ELEMENT IN

INTERPRETATION

The category to which we must go in order to do this "building" seems to be that of lived experience. This is a category foreign to Aristotle's metaphysics. The Aristotelian categories that may appear relatively closest to lived experience—those of agere and pate—cannot be identified with it. These categories serve to describe the dynamism of a being, and they also do a good job of differentiating what merely happens in the human being from what the human being does.³ But when the dynamic reality of the human being is interpreted in Aristotelian categories, there is in each case (including in the case of agere and pate) an aspect not directly apprehended by such a metaphysical interpretation or reduction, namely, the aspect of lived experience as the irreducible, as the element that defies reduction. From the point of view of the meta-physical structure of being and acting, and thus also from the point of view of the dynamism of the human being understood meta-physically, the apprehension of this element may seem unnecessary. Even without it, we obtain an adequate under­standing of the human being and of the fact that the human being acts and that things happen in the human being. Such an understanding formed the basis of the entire edifice of anthropology and ethics for many cen­turies.

But as the need increases to understand the human being as a unique and unrepeatable person, especially in terms of the whole dynamism of action and inner happenings proper to the human being—in other words, as the need increases to understand the personal subjectivity of the human being—the category of lived experience takes on greater significance, and, in fact, key significance. For then the issue is not just the metaphysical objectification of the human being as an acting subject, as the agent of acts, but the revelation of the person as a subject experiencing its acts and inner happenings, and with them its own subjectivity. From the mo­ment the need to interpret the acting human being (I'home agissant) is expressed, the category of lived experience must have a place in anthropol­ogy and ethics—and even somehow be at the center of their respective interpretations.⁴

One might immediately ask whether, by giving lived experience such a key function in the interpretation of the human being as a personal subject, we are not inevitably condemned to subjectivism. Without going into a detailed response, I would simply say that, so long as in this in­terpretation we maintain a firm enough connection with the integral ex­perience of the human being, not only are we not doomed to subjectivism, but we will also safeguard the authentic personal subjectivity of the human being in the realistic interpretation of human existence.

4. THE NECESSITY OF PAUSING AT THE IRREDUCIBLE

In order to interpret the human being in the context of lived experience, the aspect of consciousness must be introduced into the analysis of human existence. The human being is then given to us not merely as a being defined according to species, but as a concrete self, a self-experiencing subject. Our own subjective being and the existence proper to it (that of a suppositum) appear to us in experience precisely as a self-experiencing subject. If we pause here, this being discloses the structures that determine it as a concrete self. The disclosure of these structures constituting the human self need in no way signify a break with reduction and the species definition of the human being—rather, it signifies the kind of methodological operation that may be described as pausing at the irreducible. We should pause in the process of reduction, which leads us in the direction of understanding the human being in the world (a cosmological type of understanding), in order to understand the human being inwardly. This latter type of understanding may be called personalistic. The personalistic type of understanding the human being is not the antinomy of the cosmological type but its complement. As I mentioned earlier, the definition of the person formulated by Boethius only marks out the "metaphysical ter­rain" for interpreting the personal subjectivity of the human being. 

The experience of the human being cannot be derived by way of cos­mological reduction; we must pause at the irreducible, at that which is unique and unrepeatable in each human being, by virtue of which he or she is not just a particular human being—an individual of a certain species—but a personal subject. Only then do we get a true and complete picture of the human being. We cannot complete this picture through reduction alone; we also cannot remain within the framework of the ir­reducible alone (for then we would be unable to get beyond the pure self). The one must be cognitively supplemented with the other. Never­theless, given the variety of circumstances of the real existence of human beings, we must always leave the greater space in this cognitive effort for the irreducible; we must, as it were, give the irreducible the upper hand when thinking about the human being, both in theory and in practice. For the irreducible also refers to everything in the human being that is invisible and wholly internal and whereby each human being, myself in­cluded, is an "eyewitness" of his or her own self—of his or her own humanity and person.

My lived experience discloses not only my actions but also my inner happenings in their profoundest dependence on my own self. It also dis­closes my whole personal structure of self-determination, in which I dis­cover my self as that through which I possess myself and govern myself—or, at any rate, should possess myself and govern myself. The dynamic structure of self-determination reveals to me that I am given to myself and assigned to myself. This is precisely how I appear to myself in my acts and in my inner decisions of conscience: as permanently as­signed to myself, as having continually to affirm and monitor myself, and thus, in a sense, as having continually to "achieve" this dynamic structure of my self, a structure that is given to me as self-possession and self-governance. At the same time, this is a completely internal and totally immanent structure. It is a real endowment of the personal subject; in a sense, it is this subject. In my lived experience of self-possession and self-governance, I experience that I am a person and that I am a subject.

These structures of self-possession and self-governance, which are es­sential to every personal self and shape the personal subjectivity of every human being, are experienced by each of us in the lived experience of moral value—good and evil. And perhaps this reality is often revealed to us more intensely when it is threatened by evil than when—at least for the moment—nothing threatens it. In any case, experience teaches that the morale is very deeply rooted in the humanum, or, more precisely, in what should be defined as the personals. Morality defines the personalistic dimension of the human being in a fundamental way; it is subjectified in this dimension and can also be properly understood only in it. At the same time, however, the morale is a basic expression of the transcendence proper to the personal self. Our decisions of conscience at each step reveal us as persons who fulfill ourselves by going beyond ourselves toward values accepted in truth and realized, therefore, with a deep sense of responsibility.

5. A CHALLENGING PERSPECTIVE

This topic has been the subject of many penetrating analyses, some already completed and others ongoing. While not continuing those analyses here, I wish only to state that, when it comes to understanding the human being, the whole rich and complex reality of lived experience is not so much an element or aspect as a dimension in its own right. And this is the dimension at which we must necessarily pause if the subjective structure—including the subjective personal structure—of the human being is to be fully delineated.

What does it mean to pause cognitively at lived experience? This "paus­ing" should be understood in relation to the irreducible. The traditions of philosophical anthropology would have us believe that we can, so to speak, pass right over this dimension, that we can cognitively omit it by means of an abstraction that provides us with a species definition of the human being as a being, or, in other words, with a cosmological type of reduction (homo = animal rationale). One might ask, however, whether in so defining the essence of the human being we do not in a sense leave out what is most human, since the humanum expresses and realizes itself as the personals. If so, then the irreducible would suggest that we cannot come to know and understand the human being in a reductive way alone. This is also what the contemporary philosophy of the subject seems to be telling the traditional philosophy of the object.

But that is not all. The irreducible signifies that which is essentially incapable of reduction, that which cannot be reduced but can only be disclosed or revealed. Lived experience essentially defies reduction. This does not mean, however, that it eludes our knowledge; it only means that we must arrive at the knowledge of it differently, namely, by a method or means of analysis that merely reveals and discloses its essence. The method of phenomenological analysis allows us to pause at lived ex­perience as the irreducible. This method is not just a descriptive cataloging of individual phenomena (in the Kantian sense, i.e., phenomena as sense-perceptible contents). When we pause at the lived experience of the ir­reducible, we attempt to permeate cognitively the whole essence of this experience. We thus apprehend both the essentially subjective structure of lived experience and its structural relation to the subjectivity of the human being. Phenomenological analysis thus contributes to trans-phenomenal understanding; it also contributes to a disclosure of the rich­ness proper to human existence in the whole complex compositum humanum.

Such a disclosure—the deepest possible disclosure—would seem to be an indispensable means for coming to know the human being as a personal subject. At the same time, this personal human subjectivity is a deter­minate reality: it is a reality when we strive to understand it within the objective totality that goes by the name human being. The same applies to the whole character of this method of understanding. After all, lived experience is also—and above all—a reality. A legitimate method of dis­closing this reality can only enrich and deepen the whole realism of the conception of the human being. The personal profile of the human being then enters the sphere of cognitive vision, and the composition of human nature, far from being blurred, is even more distinctly accentuated. The thinker seeking the ultimate philosophical truth about the human being no longer moves in a "purely metaphysical terrain," but finds elements in abundance testifying to both the materiality and the spirituality of the human being, elements that bring both of these aspects into sharper relief. These elements then form the building blocks for further philosophical construction.

But certain questions always remain: Are these two types of understanding the human being—the cosmological and the personalitic—ultimately mutually exclusive? Where, if at all, do reduction and the disclosure of the irreducible in the human being converge? How is the philosophy of the subject to disclose the objectivity of the human being in the personal subjectivity of this being? These seem to be the questions that today determine the perspective for thinking about the human being, the perspective for con­temporary anthropology and ethics. They are essential and burning ques­tions. Anthropology and ethics must be pursued today within this challenging but promising perspective.

NOTES

1.   One such effort is my book Osoba i czyn [Person and Action] (Krakow: Polskie Tow. Teologiczne, 1969; rev. ed. 1985). [English edition: The Acting Per­son, trans. Andrzej Potocki, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Boston: Reidel, 1979).] Another even more relevant work in this regard is my essay "The Person: Subject and Community" 219-261 below.

2.   See the section entitled "Subjectivity and Subjectivism" in The Acting Person 56-59.

3.   My work The Acting Person is in large measure constructed upon this basis.

4.   One can observe this by comparing my book The Acting Person with Mieczyslaw A. Krapiec's book I—Man: An Outline of Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Marie Lescoe, Andrew Woznicki, Theresa Sandok et al. (New Britain: Mariel, 1983).

Karol WoJtyla, "Podmiotowosci I 'to, co nieredukowalne' w eflowieku," Ethos 1.2-3 (1988): 21-28. A paper sent to an international conference in Paris (13-14 June 1975).

The Demise of American Catholicism [as we know it] and the Election of 2012

I recall Fr. Francis Martin saying that all the federal government has to do is wise up to its own ideological contradiction with the Catholic Church and remove its tax-exempt status to finish it off financially in the United States. George Rutler says the same but only better.

* * * * * * *

Post-Comfortable Christianity and the Election of 2012

by Rev. George W. Rutler

Shortly before he died in Oxford in 1988, the Jesuit retreat master and raconteur, Bernard Bassett, in good spirits after a double leg amputation, told me that the great lights of his theological formation had been Ignatius Loyola and John Henry Newman, but if he “had to do it all over,” he’d only read Paul.  “Everything is there.”  There is a temptation to think that God gave us the Apostle to the Gentiles in order to have second readings at Sunday Mass, usually unrelated to the first reading and the Gospel.  But everything truly is there.  Paul was one of the most important figures in human history, and a great character to boot.  That is, a character in the happiest sense of the word.  “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain” (1 Cor 15:10).

Tragedy and comedy intertwine, ultimately issuing in glory, whenever he is on trial.  He longs to live and to die in the same breath: ”For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:210).  Whenever he is on trial for his life, he invokes a forensic brilliance to save the very life he is willing to sacrifice.  Just as Jesus who had come into the world to die, slipped through the mob in Nazareth because his hour had not yet come, so does Paul become his own defense when on trial, ready to die by God’s calendar and not man’s.  In Caesarea, he confounds Antonius Felix, the Roman governor of Judaea and Samaria, and a little later he does the same  to the successor of Felix, Procius Festus.   The best court scene is Paul before Marcus Annaeus Novatus, who had taken the name of his adoptive father Junius Gallio, the rhetorician and friend of his father Seneca Sr. whose son Seneca, Jr. was the noble Stoic.  Nero forced Seneca’s suicide, but before that, in Achaia where Gallio was proconsul, Paul was bit of a Rumpole of the Bailey, in how he played the jury like a piano to the frustration of the judge.  The point is this:  Paul, both innocent and shrewd, was willing to suffer and did so regularly, as he was not loathe to recount at length, and he was also ready to die, but as death comes but once, he wanted it to be at the right moment.

There is in Paul a model for Catholics at the start of the Third Millennium which began with fireworks and Ferris wheels but is now entering a sinister stage.  Like Paul, it is not possible to be a Christian without living for Christ by suffering for him, nor is it possible to be a Christian without willing to die for him when he wants.   The Christian veneer of  American culture has cracked and underneath is the inverse of the blithe Christianity that took shape in the various enthusiasms of the nineteenth century and ended when voters were under the impression that they finally had a Catholic president.

This new period is not “Post-Christian” because nothing comes after Christ.   We can, however, call it “Post-Comfortable Christian.”  Niebuhr, looking out from New York’s Neo-Athens on Morningside Heights with its Modernist Christian seminaries and highly endowed preaching palaces and office towers of denominational bureaucracies, caricatured the Messiah of mainline religiosity: ”A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”  The virtual collapse of  those institutions on Morningside Heights, is mute testimony to the truth of his irony.

The bishops of the United States have asked the faithful to pray for religious liberty, now facing unprecedented assault. The national election in November, 2012 will either give Christians one last chance to rally, or it will be the last free election in our nation.  This can only sound like hyperbole to those who are unaware of what happened to the Slavic lands after World War I and to Western Europe in the 1930’s.   St. Paul  was writing to us when he wrote to the Galatians and Corinthians and Washingtonians – or rather, Romans – in his lifetime.

Unless there is a dramatic reversal in the present course of our nation, those who measured their Catholicism by the Catholic schools they attended, will soon find most of those institutions officially pinching incense to the ephemeral genius of their secular leaders, and universities once called Catholic will be no more Catholic than Brown is Baptist or Princeton is Presbyterian. The surrender will not come by a sudden loss of faith in Transubstantiation or doubts about Papal Infallibility.   It will happen smoothly and quietly, as the raptures of the Netherworld always hum victims into somnolence, by the cost factor of buying out of government health insurance.  Catholic businessmen with more than fifty employees will be in the same bind.  Catholic institutions and small businesses owned by those with religious and moral reservations about government-imposed policies, will wither within a very short time, unable to bear the burden of confiscatory tax penalties. As analysts have figured, an employer offering a health plan that does not comply with the preventive services package and other requirements under the federal health plan could be subject to a confiscatory penalty. The fine, imposed through a civil penalty or excise tax on a non-exempted religious employer could be as much as $100 a day for each employee insured under a plan at variance with federal law.  The burden would amount then to $36,500 for each employee.

Add to that the approaching discrimination against Catholics seeking positions in commerce and public life.  Catholics will not be suitable for public charities, medicine, education, journalism, or in the legal profession, especially judgeships and law enforcement.  As the bishops, by the acknowledgement of many of their own number, failed to articulate the cogency of doctrines on contraception and other moral issues,  so will they now, despite the best intentions, not be able to stem the radical attrition among native Catholics whose eyes are on mammon, and among recent immigrants whose privileges are guaranteed only if they vote for opponents of the Church.  The general election of 2012 may rally the fraction of conscientious Catholics among the sixty million or so sympathetic Catholics. If their influence is not decisive, and the present course of federal legislation accelerates, encouraged by a self-destructive appetite for welfare statism on the part of ecclesiastical bureaucrats, the majority of Catholics with tenuous commitments to the Faith will evaporate, as did the lapsed baptized in North Africa during the oppression of the emperor Diocletian.

Should the present direction of the federal government be endorsed by a reiterative vote in the November elections, more blatant threats to the Church will begin, culminating in a punitive suspension of tax exemptions on church properties, once the Church’s moral precepts are coded as offenses against civil rights. The test case in this instance will be what is known in Orwellian diction as “same sex marriage.”  In the Supreme Court case, McCulloch v. Maryland, argued in 1819, the same year that Daniel Webster reduced Chief Justice Marshall to tears in the Dartmouth College case which vouchsafed private charters,  Webster said: “An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy.”  Chief Justice Marshall, an antecedent of Chief Justice Roberts, said “That the power of taxing (the bank) by the States may be exercised so as to destroy it, is too obvious to be denied, and that the power to tax involves the power to destroy (is) not to be denied.”

St. Paul would have understood this. After all, he lived through its precedents. His self-defense in the secular courts showed his disdain for bravado and theatrical martyrdom.  He enjoyed common sense, reason, and native intelligence in outwitting evil, for he knew as did St. John Vianney, who was not as bright as the student of Gamaliel but whose heart was at least as large, that “the Devil is stupid.”  Because of that, the Devil can only get his way with the help of stupid Catholics.

This year offers the best and possibly last chance to see how many actually obey Christ’s pastoral instruction in a conflicted world:  “Behold, I am sending you out as a sheep among wolves, so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16).

The Teaching Moment on Humanae Vitae - Charles Rice

JULY 25, 2012

The Campaign for Humanae Vitae

by Charles E. Rice

The year 2018 will mark the 50^th, or Golden, anniversary of Humanae Vitae (HV), in which Paul VI restated what had been, until 1930, an unbroken and universalChristian teaching.  Today, on HV’s 44^th anniversary, the Bellarmine Forum is launching The Campaign for Humanae Vitae.  Our goal is to gather a million signatures on our petition conveying to the Holy Father and our bishops our prayerful gratitude, encouragement, and support for their efforts to preach and to defend this vital teaching of the Magisterium.

Why now?  Consider this:  my colleague on the Notre Dame faculty, Professor Gary Gutting, has proclaimed in the New York Times that “it is not for the bishops but for the faithful to decide the nature and extent of episcopal authority,” and that, in matters of sexual morality, “Catholics have decisively rejected it.”  Therefore, Professor Gutting concludes, “The immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church… the issue has been settled by the voice of the Catholic people.”[1]

Professor Gutting really believes that.  But he’s wrong.  Here’s why.

Lambeth

The Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930 was the first time any Christian denomination ever said that contraception could be a morally good choice.  The Lambeth Conference in 1908 had condemned contraception in words that could have been written by John Paul II or Benedict XVI.[2]  Since Lambeth 1930, Pius XI and the succeeding Popes have continued to teach that contraception is wrong, first, because it deliberately separates the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act;second, by so changing the nature of the act, the man and woman make themselves, rather than God, the arbiters of whether and when life shall begin; and third, contraception frustrates the total mutual self-donation that is essential to the conjugal act.   Contraception also implies that there is such a thing as a human life not worth living—the life of the child whose existence the contraceptors choose to prevent.

The Truce of 1968

The advent of the Pill in the 1960s increased the use of contraceptives among Catholics and others. The promulgation of HV in 1968 precipitated a storm of dissent.  In 1968, Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle of Washington, D.C., disciplined nineteen priests who had dissented publicly from HV.  Three years later the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy ordered Cardinal O’Boyle to lift canonical penalties from those priests who told him privately that they agreed that the teaching on “the objective evil of contraception” was “an authentic expression of [the] magisterium.”  The Congregation explicitly refrained from requiring that priests who had dissented publicly must retract their dissent publicly.  George Weigel described the effects of this “Truce of 1968:”

What I [argued] in my 2002 book, The Courage to be Catholic, and what I would still argue today, is that the Truce of 1968 (exemplified by the settlement of the Washington Case) taught various lessons to…the Church in America.

The Truce of 1968 taught theologians, priests and other Church professionals that dissent from authoritative teaching was, essentially, cost-free.

The Truce of 1968 taught bishops inclined to defend authoritative Catholic teaching vigorously that they should think twice about doing so, if controversy were likely to follow; Rome, fearing schism, was nervous about public action against dissent.  The result…was that “a generation of Catholic bishops came to think of themselves less as authoritative teachers than as moderators of an ongoing dialogue whose primary responsibility was to keep everyone in the conversation and in play.”

And Catholic lay people learned… “that virtually everything in the Church was questionable: doctrine, morals, the priesthood, the episcopate, the lot.”  Thus the impulse toward Cafeteria Catholicism got a decisive boost from the Truce of 1968: if the bishops and the Holy See were not going to defend seriously the Church’s teaching on this matter, then picking-and-choosing in a supermarket of doctrinal and moral possibilities seemed, not simply all right, but actually admirable—an exercise in maturity, as was often suggested at the time.[3]

The Failure of the Bishops

The American bishops, with exceptions, have miserably failed to educate Catholics and others on HV and the similar teachings of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  The bishops on the national level have made some commendable efforts to correct the situation. But generations of parishioners—and students whose religion classes focus on collages, banners and political correctness—are still paying the price.  The result is an appalling ignorance among Catholics of HV and other Catholic doctrines and principles. A Gallup poll released in May 2012 found that 82% of Catholics in America believe contraception is “morally acceptable.”[4]  “If you love me,” said Jesus Christ, “keep my commandments.”[5]  But if someone had kept a log of homilies delivered in the United States over the past fifty years, what would be the ratio between generalized exhortations to “love” and specific explanations of the Commandments?  No contest.  But this cannot be blamed simply on parish priests.  As Dean Emeritus Jude Dougherty, of the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, put it: “From the pulpit, when have you ever heard a sermon on any one of the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the virtues?  It takes a genius, and few have the talent, to make sense of the disparate biblical readings, which lend themselves to storybook repetition, rather than to the preaching of doctrine.  And then there are those petitions, often self-contradictory, often the reflection of someone’s political and social agenda, as if the petitions in the canon of the Mass were not enough.” [6]

In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), acknowledged both the failure of the bishops and the hunger, especially among young adults, for more authoritative teaching on sexuality:

Doesn’t the church have a problem conveying its moral principles to its own flock?  “Do we ever!” the archbishop replies with a hearty laugh.  “I’m not afraid to admit that we have an internal catechetical challenge—a towering one—in convincing our own people of the moral beauty and coherence of what we teach.  That’s a biggie.”

For this he faults the church leadership.  “We have gotten gun-shy…in speaking…on chastity and sexual morality.”  He dates this diffidence to “the…60’s, when the whole world seemed to be caving in, and where Catholics…got the impression that what the Second Vatican Council taught…is that we should be chums with the world, and that the best thing the church can do is become more and more like everyone else.”

The “flash point,” the archbishop says, was “Humanae Vitae,” Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical….  It “brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the church, that I think most of us—and I’m using the first person plural intentionally, including myself—kind of subconsciously said, ‘Whoa, we’d better never talk about that, because it’s just too hot to handle.’  We forfeited the chance to be a coherent moral voice when it comes to one of the more burning issues of the day.”

Without my having raised the subject, he adds that the church’s sex-abuse scandal “intensified our laryngitis over speaking about issues of chastity and sexual morality, because we almost thought, ‘I’ll blush if I do….  After what some priests and some bishops, albeit a tiny minority, have done, how will I have any credibility in speaking on that?’”

Yet the archbishop says he sees a hunger, especially among young adults, for a more authoritative church voice on sexuality.  “They will be quick to say, ‘By the way, we want you to know that we might not be able to obey it…. But we want to hear it.  And in justice, you as our pastors need to tell us, and you need to challenge us.”[7]

In a recent address to American bishops, Benedict XVI understated the point:  “Certainly we must acknowledge deficiencies in the catechesis of recent decades, which failed at times to communicate the rich heritage of Catholic teaching on marriage as a natural institution elevated by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament, the vocation of Christian spouses in society and in the Church, and the practice of marital chastity.” [8]

The Church Goes to Court

Pursuant to the Law of Unintended Consequences, Obama’s Health Care Mandate has opened for the bishops a clear field to advance the truth of HV.

The Mandate requires almost all religious organizations and other employers, or the employer’s insurer, to provide insurance coverage for their employees for contraception, abortifacient “contraceptives” and sterilization. Lawsuits challenging the Mandate were filed last May by Catholic dioceses, hospitals, schools, church agencies and universities. The lawsuits claim that the Mandate violates the Constitution and federal laws, including the religious freedom protected by the First Amendment. As the bishops correctly insist, the suits do not themselves involve the legal status of contraception or the merits of the Church’s teaching on contraception.  Those suits are not resolved by the Supreme Court’s recent upholding of Obamacare’s Individual Mandate requiring individuals to buy health care insurance for themselves.

A Teaching Moment

In violating the fundamental right of religious freedom, Obama has given to the Church a teaching moment on two issues:  1. Conscience, and 2. Contraception.  The bishops have preserved their ability to use that teaching moment.  A letter they ordered read in every parish in the land said: “We cannot—we will not– comply with this unjust law.”[9]  But why is that law unjust?  Because it compels, contrary to conscience, immoral cooperation with an intrinsic evil—contraception.

Conscience

The bishops have an opening to teach the American people that the “dictatorship of relativism” trivializes conscience by reducing it to an expression of personal taste with no transcendent claim to immunity against oppression by the State.

“Conscience is a judgment of reason by which the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act.”[10]  A properly formed conscience will judge that the Mandate compels immoral cooperation with contraception and abortion.   As Cardinal Raymond Burke said, “It is not only a matter of what we call ‘material cooperation’ in the sense that the employer by giving this insurance benefit is materially providing for the contraception but it is also “formal cooperation” because he isknowingly and deliberately doing this, making this available to people.  There is no way to justify it.  It is simply wrong.”[11]

The Unjust Law

When the bishops said, “We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law,” they were not kidding.  Some laws are unjust as contrary to “human good” because they are beyond the authority of the lawgiver, are oppressive or seriously violate equality.  We may have to obey such laws (think of the income tax) to avoid a greater evil.   But, as St. Thomas Aquinas further said, “laws may be unjust through being opposed to the Divine good; such are the laws of tyrants inducing to … anything … contrary to the Divine law; and laws of this kind must nowise be observed.”[12] If a law compelled a physician to perform an abortion, he would be morally obliged to disobey even on pain of death.   And the same goes for the bishops and others compelled by the Mandate to cooperate immorally in a violation of the divine law.  They must—and they do– refuse to obey.  They deserve our gratitude, vocal support and, especially, prayer.

Contraception as a Denial of God

If the State is above conscience so as to be able to compel one to violate the law of God, then the State is God.  Obama can get away with such an edict only because the American people have lost their recognition of God’s law as a rule of life.  Thirteen days after 9/11, Pope John Paul II warned the leaders of Kazakhstan against a “slavish conformity” to Western culture which is in a “deepening human, spiritual and moral impoverishment” caused by “the fatal attempt to secure the good of humanity by eliminating God, the Supreme Good.”[13]

The practice of contraception leads to loss of faith in God and the displacement of the law of God by the law of the State.  As Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. (1914-2000) said: “[T]he single, principal cause for the breakdown of the Catholic faith in materially overdeveloped countries like ours has been contraception.  St. James tells us that faith without good works is dead.  What good is it to give verbal profession of the Catholic faith, and then behave like a pagan in marital morality?” [14]

When a man and woman change the nature of the conjugal act in order to prevent new life, they put themselves, rather than God, in charge of deciding whether and when human life shall begin and, implicitly, when it shall end.  As Pope John Paul II put it, “When…through contraception, married couples remove from the exercise of their conjugal sexuality its potential procreative capacity, they claim a power which belongs solely to God; the power to decide, in a final analysis, the coming into existence of a human person.” [15]

The Impact of Contraception

 The abandonment of HV by the American Church has practical consequences.  “If a person can violate [by contraception] the natural integrity of the moral act with moral impunity,” said Dean William J. Kenealy, S.J., of Boston College Law School two decades before HV, “then I challenge anyone to show me the essential immorality of any sexual aberration.”[16] “Contraceptive sex is the fundamental social fact of our time.”[17]  Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution has analyzed social science data confirming that the sexual revolution triggered by the Pill is an accelerating disaster, especially for its main victims—women and children.  If you make yourself the arbiter of whether and when life shall begin, you will predictably put yourself in charge of when life shall end, as in abortion, euthanasia and suicide.  The contraceptive society cannot deny legitimacy to homosexual activity without denying itself.  If it is man’s decision as to whether sex will have any relation to procreation, then the only objections to same-sex “marriage,” polygamy, bestiality, etc., are reduced to the aesthetic and arbitrary.  The separation of sex from procreation undercuts any reservation of sex for marriage and any reason for permanence of marriage.  It also encourages the objectification of women by pornography.[18]  Eberstadt correctly says HV “warned of four resulting trends: a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.”[19]  Eberstadt fittingly quotes Archbishop Charles Chaput: “If Paul VI were right about so many of the consequences deriving from contraception, it is because he was right about contraception itself.”

When an objective history of this period is written, the practical abandonment by the American Catholic Church of the theretofore unbroken Christian teaching on contraception will be seen as astonishing, craven and frivolous.

An Opening for Humanae Vitae

Obama’s Mandate, however, creates an opening for the bishops.  The truth about contraception can have a life-changing impact, and not only on Catholics.  “The effective separation of sex from procreation,” said R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “may be one of the most important defining marks of our age—and one of the most ominous.   This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals and it threatens to set loose a firestorm… [E]vangelicals are rethinking…birth control—and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies.”  [20]

HV is a game-changer because it challenges the core of the secularist, relativist and individualist religion of America’s ruling class.  The nobility of that teaching can have an impressive impact on young people.  With John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the Church has seen a rebirth of faith among the young.  But many of them lack a solid foundation.  “One cannot escape,” said John Paul II, “the fact that more than in any other historical period, there is a breakdown in the process of handing on moral and religious values between generations.”[21]  John Paul and Benedict have called on the bishops to fix that breakdown.

The Campaign for Humanae Vitae

On its 40^th anniversary, Benedict emphasized the centrality of HV:

Forty years after its publication [HV] not only expresses its unchanged truth but also reveals [its] farsightedness….  The Magisterium [must reflect] on the fundamental principles that concern marriage and procreation.  ….The truth expressed in [HV] does not change; on the contrary, precisely in the light of the new scientific discoveries, its teaching becomes more timely and elicits reflection on [its] intrinsic value….  The urgent need for education…primarily concerns the theme of life.  I…hope that young people…will be given very special attention so that they may learn the true meaning of love and prepare for it…without [being] distracted by ephemeral messages that prevent them from reaching the essence of the truth at stake….  The teaching expressed by [HV] conforms with the fundamental structure through which life has always been transmitted since the world’s creation, with respect for nature and…its needs.  Concern for human life and safeguarding the person’s dignity require us not to leave anything untried so that all may be involved in the genuine truth of responsible conjugal love in full adherence to the law engraved on the heart of every person.[22]

Cardinal Dolan frankly admitted that the bishops have doubted that the Catholic people of the United States would accept a forthright teaching of HV.  But, as Benedict XVI noted in his homily on July 15, 2012, the prophet Amos preached “what God says and not what people wanted to hear.”  In our times, Benedict said, “This remains the mandate of the Church: she does not preach what the powerful want to hear.  Her criterion is truth and justice, even if that garners no applause and collides with human power.”[23]

The Campaign for Humanae Vitae will offer to the bishops and to the Holy Father the support of Catholic people who plead for the Church to proclaim and teach the truth of HV.

On the 50^th anniversary of HV in 2018, we aim to present one million signatures to the bishops to make that anniversary a celebration, a Golden occasion to thank God for the Truth affirmed by HV and the Magisterium.

The “nuclear weapon” of the Campaign for Humanae Vitae, however, is prayer—for our country and for our Church, especially through the intercession of Mary, the mother of Life.  As John Paul II wrote in a letter to U.S. bishops in 1993, “America needs much prayer—lest it lose its soul.”[24]

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[1] Gary Gutting, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15.
[2] See Allan Carlson, “Children of the Reformation,” Touchstone, May 2007;www.touchstonemag.com.
[3] George Weigel, “The ‘Truce of 1968,’ once again,” www.dioceseofmarquette.org; May 17, 2006.
[4] LifeSiteNews.com, May 28, 2012.
[5] John 14:15.
[6] Jude P. Dougherty, “The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,” The Wanderer, May 3, 2012, p. 4A.
[7] James Taranto, “When the Archbishop Met the President,” online.wsj.com, March 31, 2012.
[8] Pope Benedict XVI to American bishops, Ad limina, March 14, 2012.
[9] www.theblaze.com, Jan. 30, 2012.
[10] Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1796.
[11] www.lifenews.com/2012/04/10
[12] ST. I, II Q. 96, art. 4.
[13] Pope John Paul II, Address, Sept. 24, 2011.
[14] John A. Hardon, S.J., “Contraception: Fatal to the Faith and to Eternal Life,” Eternal Life, April 19, 1999, 27, 29.
[15] Pope John Paul II, Discourse, September 17, 1983.
[16] 46 Catholic Mind (1948), 11.
[17] Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, (2012), 157.
[18] Eberstadt, op. cit., Chapters 2 and 3.
[19] Ibid., p. 136.
[20] Russell Shorto, “Contra-Contraception,” New York Times Magazine, May 7, 2006, 48, 50.
[21] Pope John Paul II, Address, March 16, 2002.
[22] Pope Benedict XVI, Address, May 10, 2008
[23] LifeSiteNews.com, July 16, 2012.
[24] Pope John Paul II, Letter to the U.S. Bishops, June 11, 1993; 38 The Pope Speaks (1993), 374, 376.