18
Maureen Breslin after
Humanae Vitae, 1968
After Paul VI’s encyclical, I went to Father Docherty’s confessional again. I had a foredoomed sense he could do something for me. My situation was that I could see no way to disobey the encyclical and remain a Catholic, and if I did not remain a Catholic, I would be spitting on my ancestors’ Mass stones of Donegal.
When I told Frank I was there to talk about the encyclical, he said, ‘A lot are. Others have been driven away by it, too.’
‘Is there anything I can do but obey?’ I asked him.
There was a silence. I had a fancy that he had vacated the confessional, gone off to consult further authorities. Then he said, ‘It throws a different light on everything, doesn’t it?’
I said nothing.
‘I’m still asking for enlightenment on this business,’ he said. ‘There is no doubt that an encyclical is authoritative. You’re quite right – the way the Church has developed for good and ill, the Church we live in, makes us acknowledge that.’
Still, I had nothing to say.
He launched into an almost annoying disquisition, in which he appeared to think history had reached an interesting point rather than an impasse for the flesh and spirit, mine and Damian’s.
‘The idea of basing the moral law on the natural order is something I haven’t thought about a lot, and that hasn’t been emphasised in my experience. It’s a little like politicians who speak of “the will of the people” − they’re often the least worthy to invoke it. But let’s look at the natural order of things. There have been plenty of changes in the natural order – interventions – which have been considered lawful but have changed the essential nature of things. The creation, for example, of hybrid plants by the biologist monk Mendel. Why wouldn’t the Vatican see that as an interference with the natural law? I don’t know the answer. I admit I can’t come to a confident conclusion either way.’
He sighed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You don’t need a lecture, you need relief. Look, I think we have to wait for the dust to settle, as it will. In the meantime, my counsel is to take account of the encyclical, but also of your conscience. Nothing you have said seems indulgent or malicious to me. I will absolve you without penance.’
‘But no one else except you has ever told me to follow my conscience,’ I said. ‘I still feel that relying on it is a crime.’
He laughed sympathetically. ‘In any system of rule there’s a tendency to emphasise certain matters and de-emphasise others, and the Vatican is a system of rule, as well as a spiritual realm. But if you look at doctrine, you’ll find the Vatican doesn’t quite agree with you that your individual conscience is no good for anything. It’s just that at the moment they’re trying to regain authority – they feel things have gone too far, with home liturgies and liberation theology and the rest. Still, the fact they want to reassert their authority doesn’t mean that what you decide in good faith is invalid. If our conscience is not to be believed, why are we given such a faculty? By the way, forgive my asking, but did you have any problems with the births of your children?’
‘I was weak, I’m afraid. I ended up in hospital with post-partum blues after the last one.’
Frank breathed out audibly. ‘That’s an important factor in your decision. A factor the Pope doesn’t take account of in the encyclical, as far as I’ve read.’
I began to weep. Because I did not believe in the concept he was pushing. On one level, it frightened me.
There was a silence, which he must have thought impolite to break. He said at last, ‘The week before the final vote on papal infallibility on 18 July 1870, the Church was still the Church. Had the doctrine been voted down, by American bishops and others, the Church would still have been the Church. A fortnight ago, the Church was still the Church, and your conscience told you it was acceptable for you to take the extraordinary medical advance represented by the Pill. And in a fortnight’s time, the Church will still be the Church it ever was, and your conscience will be the same, as well. You believed only a little time ago, before the Pope spoke, in your individual conscience. And now you’re telling me you don’t. If your conscience was right then, it’s right now. So was it right then?’
I wasn’t used to having genuine conversations in that cold, salutary place, the confessional. I was certainly not used to arguing for the sinfulness of this and that – the priest in the confessional had been all too willing to do that for me in childhood and through my adolescence. Frank Docherty, the most modern priest, assumed the faithful had something to say for themselves.
‘Might the Pope think you a heretic?’ I asked.
I heard him laugh lowly. ‘Maybe. No. I hope not.’
But it remained very hard for me to resist the idea that my conscience was in Rome, that it resided at the Vatican and was mediated to me by bishops.
In his brave preaching at Longueville, Docherty introduced us to the living standards and work hours of the weavers of Bengal. In one of his sermons, he praised Dr Fatima Deriaya’s work and called her a just Muslim. The normal doctrine, he said, was that people outside the Church were saved because their invincible ignorance was forgiven by God. But surely they might earn redemption not by forgivable ignorance but by merit, and because the same spirit breathed on them, too.
This was but one of the sermons that would turn out to be reported as heterodox to the cardinal archbishop. It was a mixed electorate we lived in and some of the old conservatives clung to their fear of rampant Asiatic communism if we did not ‘stop them’ in Vietnam. So we knew not everyone liked Father Docherty’s eloquent sermons. Now the question was, would he preach on the encyclical?
On the Sunday eight days after my confession, Father Docherty committed the ultimate bravery of doing that. He was wary, he told the congregation, of laying down the law on marriage. He knew that he understood nothing practical about marriage. Even many married people understood little enough, he said, to laughter. Laughter was not a common reaction to sermons in Catholic churches in those days. I look back once more with astonishment at how cowed we were and how every small relaxation of the spiritual regime refreshed us, just as Father Docherty’s home liturgy had.
He went on to read passages from Humanae Vitae, and its exhortation that the natural phases of fertility were the only lawful means of contraception.
‘I know just enough, however,’ he said, ‘having taken excellent medical advice, to say that this method cannot suit all parties, and that unchosen conception can be a threat to a woman’s psychiatric and physical health. The Church surely can’t mean that it expects women to immolate themselves. No God of mercy could want that.’
Then he read a passage from, of all people least designed to impress the conservatives of the parish, Gandhi. A Hindu! Gandhi exhorted those who were going to their deaths to accept it with dignity, a dignity killers did not have. It was a noble thought and Gandhi was by definition a great soul. But did that moral position really work if, for example, you were under the heel of the SS? If you were able to reject death and bring about an escape, had you violated Gandhi’s principles? Was, in fact, he exaggerating for dramatic effect? Of course he was. He was exaggerating in the tradition of the prophetic parable. And might not the Pope thus similarly exhort his people in absolute terms − since that suited the nature of an encyclical letter − while being aware that, appropriately, married people would have recourse to their own consciences and circumstances. Was the Pope, indeed, giving us a counsel of perfection rather than an iron rule?
Those in the congregation who were not stunned were, after Mass, gathered in the churchyard gossiping or discussing. Docherty had gone one step further than he had gone in his reasoning to me in the confessional. He had brought up the idea that the Pope might exaggerate.
A strange and surprising change began to take place in me after Father Docherty’s sermon. For me the encyclical had shown the absurdity of the rhythm method as it sought to consecrate it, and since personally this was such an important issue, I found that the more I pursued what was clearly a commonsense, if rebellious, option, the more my conscience supported it.
At the time I was reading some of those groundbreaking feminist authors who took our world by storm, including the furious young Melbourne woman Germaine Greer. The Female Eunuch, two years after Humanae Vitae, changed the perception we had of ourselves. Warts and all, fury and all, it changed the argument; it created a space in which we could speak. Like all revolutionaries, these women tended to speak with fury. The Female Eunuch was the anti-encyclical. Pope Germaine put a secular spin on our opposition to Humanae Vitae.
That we should see our bodies as beyond the control of the celibate Church still did not come as easily as we wanted. But once the idea had been argued by Greer, it became obvious. I wasn’t rancorous immediately. The alternative proposition I embraced was not in my case accompanied by an angry loss of faith. Considering myself lucky to have got so far, I was at ease with my story, my three children.
Damian was making a similar journey, but he continued to voice a touchy if curiously faithful anger at the Vatican. One mealtime, when we were eating alone after sending the children to bed, he said, ‘I think we should send the kids to a public school so they don’t grow up as neurotic as us.’
More than I would admit to myself, if I was anything in those years, I was a Docherty-ite. Not so much a dissenter from Humanae Vitae as someone who felt validated in standing aside from it. Frank had no desire to be a religious leader, a seer or a swami (in line with his Indian experience), but had he been a man of conceit he would not have found it hard to play any of those roles. For we are persuaded into our position by both reason and the force of personality, and his unassertive personality was forceful in its own way.
He initiated, without trying to, a benign sort of cult. Damian and I were influenced by him: I was profoundly so, of course – more, as it turned out, than I would have foretold; Damian at a remove. Still, despite his anger, Damian did choose to exercise our contemporary politics within a Catholic framework, joining the Docherty-marshalled groups of parishioners who attended Vietnam moratorium marches and engaged in other forays of conscience. Many of us were paid-up members of the South African Aid and Defence Fund, contributing money to the legal defence of South Africans, white and black, who had been accused of treason. In 1971 we held a vigil to protest apartheid outside the Sydney Cricket Ground on the evening before a South African Springbok rugby tour. Passing drivers honked at us. Some shouted profanities; some encouragement. Father Docherty maintained his Gandhian composure, and so did we.
We continued to be disturbed in conscience about Australia’s Indigenous people, who were subject to apartheid themselves in terms not only of where they could bathe and sit in cinemas, but also with housing and travel − they even needed documents to move about: they complained of them as ‘dog licenses’. Members of our group had enthusiastically voted ‘yes’ in the Aboriginal civil rights referendum, even though, because of the realities of urban settlement, most of them had never met an Aboriginal.
Around this time my friend Liz Cosgrove, who also attended Frank’s services at Longueville, took up the cause of child sex slaves in Calcutta. She volunteered to run a sub-committee that Frank had set up, which raised money to be remitted to Dr Deriaya. Dr Deriaya had remained an efficient activist, working on her liberations of child prostitutes, writing a newsletter, calling around the troops – by now she had recruited women from all over the world.
It was Liz and I who came up with the idea of a weekly meeting with Frank. We asked him if, amidst his studies, he could spare a night a week for a discussion group involving members of the parish.
‘You don’t need a priest to preside over that,’ Frank told us. ‘You don’t need a priest to validate your opinions.’
I understood his point exactly.
‘We don’t necessarily need a priest, but we need you. Consider yourself a catalyst.’
The first evening meeting was held at our place. It was made up of couples for whom theology and politics were two faces of the one entity. These people were repelled by religion attempting to establish absolutes of conscience, the one strict gate to the vision of God. One middle-aged man complained that in Australia, pious observance and obedience to the law’s letter were considered the measure of the soul. They, like me, were in rebellion against that, against the priestly authoritarianism that had ruled their childhoods. And yet … we had invited a priest! What was obvious to Frank, I think, was our love of the Church as a community. We were not theological serfs who accepted the word, any word, of Rome as truth; we were anxious for a new, sophisticated and transforming theology.