Greg Daly
Pope John Paul II in 1979. 50 Years of Humanae Vitae
Sr Helena Burns tells Greg Daly about how St John Paul II opened up Humanae Vitae for the world
A celibate nun might seem an unlikely champion of Humanae Vitae and the ‘Theology of the Body’ taught by St John Paul II, but Sr Helena Burns is someone who believes that the Church’s teaching around sex and identity is extraordinarily empowering for women.
Boston-born and Toronto-based, Sr Helena is a member of the Daughters of St Paul, an international congregation founded to evangelise and communicate God’s word through the media, and someone who would previously have been deeply antipathetic to the Church’s approach to sexual identity.
“I come from a radical feminist background,” she says. “Feminism at its most basic level is the protection and promotion of women, and we are always for some form of that, so feminism is not a dirty word, but after that it breaks down into different forms depending on what you think a woman is, and what you think the protection and promotion of women should consist of.”
Radical feminism, she continues, effectively holds that there are no significant differences between the sexes – “there are just a few reproductive body parts and that’s it”.
This defies basic science, not to mention the discoveries of recent years which show numerous differences between men and women even around such things as muscles and bone structure, with men and women having heart attacks and strokes differently from one another, and even recovering from concussion differently.
“It’s actually funny – here in Toronto, in the Toronto Star, a big paper, the Heart and Stroke Association is putting these huge full page ads about the need for more research for women because basically a woman will go to the ER and because her symptoms are not male symptoms for various things they’ll send her home – and she’ll have her heart attack at home,” she says.
Having come from a radical feminist background, she entered religious life with a mental framework largely defined by seeing differences between men and women as almost cosmetic.
“I entered the convent believing but not understanding – I was searching for years and years and years within the convent keeping my mouth shut because I didn’t want the other nuns to know that I didn’t understand anything,” she says.
“I believed it but I didn’t get it, so all I had to work with was a radical feminist framework for my thoughts, my mental framework. I had nothing else – nothing else was ever given to me, so that’s all I knew,” she continues.
“You can imagine the cognitive dissonance that was going on inside of me until Theology of the Body when wow! – everything made sense!”
Laid out over 129 addresses between 1979 and 1984, the Theology of the Body saw St John Paul II teaching how our physical bodies are intrinsic to who we are, with us made in God’s image not just in our capacity to think and choose but to live in communion with others, making a gift of ourselves to them and transforming sexual desire into loving self-giving with marriage being an icon of God’s creation and redemption of the world, and his love for the Church.
“The way I like to describe Theology of the Body is that John Paul II took the jigsaw puzzle of our Faith that was in a box in a big mumble jumble, and he poured it out on the table and put the puzzle together to show us how everything fits together,” she says. “Everything is connected to everything else and on top of it all he has a beautiful vision of the human person male and female.”
Her discovery of Theology of the Body came towards the end of her philosophical journey and began her theological one in earnest, she explains. “Theology of the Body really married philosophy and theology,” she says, adding that it gave her, as she puts it “permission to be a woman”, and even clarified her role and identity as a nun.
“It clarified everything, even things like Humanae Vitae,” she says. “It helped me to bite the bullet. I knew the Church taught it so it had to be correct but I didn’t know why and I couldn’t explain it to anyone else – it made no sense.”
In a sense, Theology of the Body is intended to do this, she continues.
“If you read Humanae Vitae, which is a very small document, Paul VI actually says in there: you guys aren’t going to understand this because we need an explication of marriage and family and sexuality and we need something richer and deeper – we need to mine our own teachings and our 2,000 years of History, but not just in the Church it goes back even further,” she says, pointing to both natural reason and the Old Testament roots of Christianity.
“And it’s not us – it’s God,” she adds. “Either we believe that the Bible is God’s word and that Jesus is God and Jesus founded the Catholic Church, or we don’t. It’s not that we’re so great and we believe this; no, we would never come to this stuff on our own.”
A call
In composing his Theology of the Body, St John Paul II was answering Blessed Paul VI’s call.
“Humanae Vitae came out in 1968, and John Paul II started writing Theology of the Body in 1974,” she says, adding “he was a busy guy”.
“He starts in ‘74, and he says at the end of Theology of the Body, I wrote this so you can understand Humanae Vitae,” she says. “People don’t quite realise that that Humanae Vitae is the purpose of ToB and yes, we take a lot of stops along the way, and he’s going to talk about a lot of things, because he’s also setting out to do what he calls an ‘adequate anthropology’.
“He says we’ve been working off an inadequate anthropology, in many cases not just about sexuality – John Paul II was not just answering the sexual revolution with Theology of the Body, he was answering all the false philosophies. He was answering rationalism, Decartes, Kant, all the philosophers that didn’t quite get it right – he was answering communism, atheism all the ‘isms’ that he lived under and saw the incredible trashing of human dignity and human life.
“He lived under the Nazis and the communists both,” she adds, as though to stress that the Polish Pope was a man who spoke and wrote from harsh experience.
“This is his life’s work, and he dedicated really the first 15 years of his pontificate to marriage and the family and the human person,” she says, noting how teaching after teaching in the early years of St John Paul’s pontificate seemed focused on human dignity even more than God himself, in some ways.
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Humanity is the way of the Church, she says, and so the question of what a human person is is utterly central to the Church – she’s wary, she says, of attempts to reduce Theology of the Body to marriage preparation or teen chastity talks. It’s much bigger, much more “cosmic” than that, she says.
“And here’s the point that ties to Humanae Vitae: we don’t have bodies, we are bodies. That is a huge turning point,” she says, explaining that whenever she is presenting about Theology of the Body she always begins by teaching about the resurrection of the body and the fact that we are bodies, not people or spirits who have bodies. This tends to shock people, she says.
“First of all, 50% of Christians don’t quite understand we’re getting these very bodies back, because they’re us, and we have to really wrangle with that and people object and say you’re wrong. But this is a basic teaching of our Faith!”
This has huge implications for how we live and how we see ourselves, she says. “That’s Humanae Vitae: I don’t have this body that I can control like a robot and I’m the programmer and I treat it like a technological thing that I can do whatever I want to as long as I have good intentions and I can use any means because the end justifies the means.”
“It’s not for one moment that science or technology are bad – anything but. The danger, rather, is that they can be used in unnatural ways. The point is not technology.
“A priest friend of mine says there is nothing as natural as an artificial arm, meaning yes of course we use medicine, of course we use technology, we have hearing aids and pacemakers but the point is it’s to cure an illness or a defect, and an artificial arm does what an arm does,” she says, pointing out that this is the opposite to using technology to thwart functioning natural bodily systems.
Natural family planning, she stresses, tends to depend on the latest science, and entails using technology and careful observation to help women know and understand their bodies so they can work with it to regulate childbearing in responsible and natural ways.
“If you use the Billings Method, it doesn’t matter if you’re irregular because you’re going day by day and looking at your symptoms day by day,” she says. “It’s not predictive or diagnostic. So that thing that ‘you’re a bunch of luddites’ and ‘Catholics don’t want to use technology’ – we use technology all the time and we want to be in the forefront, but it has to be used well especially in the area of something as precious as the parts of our body where we give and receive love and life at the deepest level.”
“Those body parts are not like other body parts,” she adds, explaining that in North America natural family planning tends nowadays to play a big part in marriage preparation courses, though it varies from place to place.
“They’ll actually teach you how to do it. It’s in a cursory way, but it is more emphasised than elsewhere,” she says, continuing, “not all marriage prep programs do that and there’s a big resistance to it because something like 90% of our young people who want to get married in Church now are already living together”.
Pointing out that this has been the way for some time, and that such couples are usually contracepting already, she thinks it’s crucial to teach teen boys and teen girls about their bodies in this way – “how amazing their bodies are and helping girls how to chart and learn the symptoms of their fertility, because it takes a little bit to master that, and there’s always health benefits”.
Empowering
Describing it as “empowering”, she says it can be difficult to start with and that it’s important to have a coach or an instructor when starting off with the Billings Method or other types of natural family planning.
In the meantime, though, she recommends that people interested in this google the Billings Method, and also consult Simcha Fisher’s book The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning, which, she says, spells out the reality of natural family planning while refusing to mask how, like so much else, it is difficult.
At the core of all this, she says, is our body. “It always comes back to the body. If you don’t believe you’re your body, I guess that doesn’t apply, but if you are your body, a woman’s body and soul are completely acknowledged,” she says, adding that women are so out of touch with their bodies that even women’s groups can be mystified when she says that the lion’s share of sexuality lies with women. “‘What are you talking about?’” she says they ask, with sighs of understanding coming when she replies “Ladies, do I really have to explain this? We have monthly cycles, men don’t; we get pregnant for nine months, men don’t; we have the pain of childbirth, men don’t; we breastfeed, men don’t…”
Maintaining that St John Paul gave her “permission to be a woman” by enabling her to recognise her full dignity, she stresses that acknowledging our bodily nature is utterly essential to this.
“So, full dignity would mean the whole person, not just part of the person,” she says. “We’re not slaves to our reproduction – it’s not like we don’t have choices, of course we have choices. But if you’re going to respect your body in its full dignity, then you need to understand your body and accept it.
“It is full dignity and your fertility is not a disease that has to be suppressed. If you think that then you think being a woman is inferior, and you think being born a woman is being born wrong and so you have to have operations and pills and devices to correct how you were born wrong: that’s what you’re saying, really,” she says.