Censoring the Church’s view of sex and marriage

The Government seems determined to bar religion from public life, writes David Quinn

We live in truly extraordinary times. A conference on Humanae Vitae is addressed by a bishop and there is an immediate negative response on social media from no less a figure than our Health Minister, Simon Harris, who tweets, “Please just make it stop”!

The conference was organised by the Nazareth Family Institute to mark the 50th anniversary of the famous encyclical issued by Pope Paul VI to an international outcry because it confirmed the Church’s position that artificial means of preventing conception should not be used.

The event, which drew a good-sized crowd, especially given that it was the last Bank Holiday weekend of the summer, was opened by the Bishop of Elphin, Kevin Doran, and addressed by a number of international experts. Bishop Denis Nulty of Kildare and Leighlin was also in attendance.

It’s telling that no official events to mark the anniversary are being held in Ireland and so a small lay group had to do it instead. Nor for that matter is the Pontifical Academy for Life in Rome holding any events to mark it, and neither is the World Meeting of Families.

The attitude calls to mind the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana Jones has gone to great lengths to find the Ark of the Covenant and in the end, after all his efforts, we see the US Government putting it in a crate and leaving in a huge warehouse with thousands of other crates where it will gather dust and be forgotten about again. That appears to be the attitude of the official Church towards Humanae Vitae; its teaching is hard and unpopular and it’s best we pretend it does not exist.

This is why Bishops Doran and Nulty deserve all credit for attending the event.

So, why did Minister Harris take such umbrage at? He obviously wasn’t at the conference, nor can he have read Bishop Doran’s address which hadn’t been released at that point. Instead he was reacting to a report of the event that appeared in The Irish Times. The article was headlined: “Principles of contraceptive ban ‘ignored for too long’, says bishop”.

Minister Harris responded on Twitter: “Please just make it stop! Increasing access to & availability of contraception is and will remain public health policy. Religion plays an important role for many on an individual basis – but it will not determine health and social policy in our country any more. Please get that.”

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This statement takes a bit of unpacking. First, note the kneejerk character of it. Minister Harris would object if someone of note reacted in this way to a headline writer’s summary of a longer address he had given.

Second, it is vanishingly unlikely that Minister Harris has ever read Humanae Vitae (which is very short, by the way), let alone contemplated its underlying philosophy or read any sympathetic commentary about it.

Third, Bishop Doran never suggested we ought to ban contraception or make it hard to obtain. So, what was the Minister objecting to? On the surface it looks like he was objecting to the simple reiteration of the Catholic teaching on sex, marriage and birth control.

Fourth, his Tweet reduces religion to an individual thing. It must have no societal expression that gets in the way of Government policy. But lots of groups oppose Government policy on lots of things. Why shouldn’t Catholics and Christians and religious believers more generally have that same right? (But to repeat, Bishop Doran was not, in fact, calling for a ban on contraception.)

In a later Tweet responding to Senator Ronan Mullen, the Minister said he was objecting to Bishop Doran saying contraception had made it harder for women to refuse “unwanted sex”, but this was completely unclear from his first Tweet.

What we are seeing in this small incident is more evidence of a growing intolerance towards any Catholic (or Christian) teaching that clashes in any way with the secular, liberal view of untrammelled sexual freedom. That view has only one rule of conduct: consent.

The Christian view is that God created sex for a purpose and the purpose is unitative and procreative, that is to say, sex is a physical expression of the couple’s unity and must be open to the possibility of children.

The secular view is that sex has no intrinsic purpose and need not be attached to marriage, or love, or even any kind of emotional intimacy at all. It also holds that the possibility of children can be prevented by any means, including abortion, that is, through the deliberate killing of the unborn child. It is not obvious why the secular, liberal view of sex is so radically and manifestly superior to the Christian view.

The Government, allied to our media, is now trying to make it almost impossible to teach the Christian view, except in private and almost in secret. It wants the way completely cleared for its own view to be taught and promoted with no opposition at all.

The Christian view is not to be taught in schools, not even in Catholic ones. Nor, it seems, is a bishop to express it at a small, privately organised conference.

This is incredible stuff. It has nothing whatsoever to do with pluralism and smacks very strongly of the authoritarianism the Church was once accused of promoting. Indeed, it even smacks of totalitarianism because the aim of totalitarianism is to ensure we are only ever exposed to the official, approved view of any given subject.

As Christians we need to have the courage to withstand this. But we also need to understand what it is that we believe about sex and marriage and their intrinsic purposes. Ultimately this is what Bishop Doran was trying to say in his address. Unfortunately, we have a long way to go to arrive at this understanding, even in our own churches and that is partly because there is such a reluctance to preach or teach about it.