‘IN THE PRESENT PERIOD, the corruption of morals has increased, and one of the most serious indications of this corruption is the unbridled exaltation of sex. Moreover, through the means of social communication and through public entertainment, this corruption has reached the point of invading the field of education and of infecting the general mentality.’
Cardinal Seper, the then Head of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, made this observation in a document, ‘Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics’, published in December 1975. But the essence of the document has been declared many times by leading members of the Catholic Church. Among the first was St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan from 373 to 397. Ambrose did not approve of sex and he was not overly keen on marriage: ‘Even a good marriage is slavery. What, then, must a bad one be like?’ he asked and added, ‘Every man is persecuted by some woman or another.’ For Ambrose the best course for a woman was virginity, to redeem the sin of her parents in conceiving her.
Ambrose’s teaching had much in common with that of Karol Wojtyla. As Pope, he extended Ambrose’s approach and pronounced on more aspects of sex than any of his predecessors. These include birth control, abortion, sex before marriage, sex during marriage, sex after marriage, sex for the physically handicapped, sex for the infertile, sex after divorce and remarriage, divorce, married priests, women priests, homosexual sex, masturbation and sex in popular music, sex in books, movies and the media, and that list is far from complete. The late Pope’s line has been propagated by his then lieutenant, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctine of the Faith, and a host of other elderly celibate men.
This preoccupation with an activity that is forbidden to priests may in part explain why in the first world so few Roman Catholics go to confession. On sexual matters, the gap between the Catholic laity and the Vatican is unbridgeable. The laity is occupied with sex: the Vatican merely preoccupied. No member of the Church can plead ignorance on any aspect of sexuality. Central to many of its attitudes to sex and sexuality is the Roman Catholic Church’s treatment of women.
Aristotle has much to answer for. He taught that women were inherently inferior in mind, body and moral will. His grasp of human reproduction left much to be desired. He believed that only the ‘superior’ man possessed the ability to procreate and that the only contribution from the ‘inferior’ woman was the raw material that was then fashioned by the male seed within the woman’s womb, the potter working with unformed clay. For Aristotle, if the result was a male, then the potter had achieved perfection; but if the child was a female then something within the creation was flawed. He naturally concluded that such flawed humans cannot govern either themselves or others and must be ruled and controlled by men.
Aristotle was one in a long line of men to expound such views. The thirteenth-century Thomas Aquinas incorporated Aristotelian elements into his own theology, together with many of St Augustine’s third- and fourth-century writings. These included Marriage And Concupiscence, a book that continually influenced the thinking of Karol Wojtyla, as priest, bishop and pope. It includes the following passage:
‘It is one thing not to lie except with the sole will of generating: this has no fault. It is another to seek the pleasure of the flesh in lying, although within the limits of marriage: this has venial fault. I am supposing then that, although you are not lying for the sake of procreating offspring, you are not for the sake of lust obstructing their procreation by an evil prayer or an evil deed. Those who do this, although they are called husband and wife, are not; nor do they retain any reality of marriage, but with a respectable name cover a shame . . . sometimes this lustful cruelty or cruel lust, comes to this, that they even procure poisons of sterility, and, if those do not work, extinguish and destroy the foetus in some way in the womb, preferring that their offspring die before it lives, or if it was already alive in the womb to kill it before it was born.’
This position, as elaborated by Aquinas, and endorsed by Luther, Calvin and other theologians, remained orthodox teaching in all Christian Churches until after the First World War and, in the case of the Catholic Church, until 1951. It was then that Pius XII tore up the hitherto accepted dogma by declaring to a group of Italian Catholic midwives that the use of the so-called ‘safe period’ as a method of birth control was lawful. Augustinian teaching specifically denounced use of the safe period in his The Morals Of The Manichees: the 1951 concession also destroyed Augustine’s whole doctrine of marriage.
Notwithstanding a wave of changes including female suffrage, equal rights legislation and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Vatican Council II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom and the irresistible rise of feminism, current thinking at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church on a wide range of sexual ethics is still an amalgam of Aristotle, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. The three profoundly influenced Karol Wojtyla from his earliest years and those closest to him, such as Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop Dziwisz and the other members of the papal cabal were completely at one with his position on these issues.
On women and women’s issues the Pope yet again presented a paradox. He consistently proclaimed his deep respect, admiration and appreciation for women and simultaneously enraged them across the world. The Pope had explored the significance of the ‘feminine genius’ within the Apostolic Letter, Mulieris Dignitatem – On the Dignity of Women, in 1986. The Pope’s chosen biographer, George Weigel, described this work as ‘John Paul’s most developed effort to address the claim from some feminists that Christianity in general, and Catholicism specifically, is inherently misogynist’. For many of its critics it reads like an attempt to justify via judicious selection from the Bible, from Genesis through to Revelations, the historic chauvinism of the Catholic Church.
At the time of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September 1995, the Pope wrote an open letter to ‘women throughout the world’. This was part of his ‘attempt to promote the cause of women in the Church and in today’s world’. Constantly italicising to underline the importance he attached to certain thoughts, he thanked ‘women who are mothers! You have sheltered human beings within yourselves in a unique experience of joy and travail’. He praised ‘women who are wives! You irrevocably join your future to that of your husbands, in a relationship of mutual giving . . .’
He worked his way through women who are daughters, women who are sisters, women who work, consecrated women, until he got to ‘thank you, every woman, for the simple fact of being women’. He fulsomely acknowledged the contribution of women throughout history and how so little recognition had been given to their collective achievements, often against formidable odds. Without any sense of irony he extolled the virtues of ‘common priesthood based on baptism’. He also ignored the fact that his own bank, the IOR, operated a discriminatory policy towards female employees. Women are obliged to sign an undertaking when taking up employment within the Vatican Bank that they will not get married or have children. If they wish to marry, they are compelled to leave the Bank’s employment.
His letter continued with reference to the ‘genius of women’ and inevitably linked that with Christ’s mother, Mary, ‘the highest expression of the feminine genius’. There was a great deal more on Mary and her example for all women in accepting her vocation as ‘wife and mother in the family of Nazareth. Putting herself at God’s service, she also put herself at the service of others: a service of love.’
Much of the papacy of Pope John Paul II can be better understood by considering his early environment. Born in 1920, the same year that the victorious Polish Marshal Jozef Pilsudski returned to Warsaw with an army that had won a spectacular victory over Lenin’s Soviet republic, Kami’s birth coincided with the only period of Polish democracy that would occur until 1989. After six years, the ‘liberator of Poland’ overthrew the government. The military coup d’état resulted in a dictatorship until Pilsudski’s death in 1935. This was followed until the German invasion in 1939 by a military junta posturing under the label of parliamentary democracy. Wojtyla’s father, also named Karol, by the time of Karol junior’s birth had risen in the newly formed Polish Army to the rank of first lieutenant.
Emilia, the convent-educated mother, was deeply devout. The household reflected that devotion. At the door to the apartment there was a font containing holy water for crossing oneself on the way in or out. On the walls hung holy images and copies of icons. There was a small altar in the parlour where morning prayers were recited. Every evening the Bible was read aloud by one or other of the parents. There were prayers at meal times and at bedtimes. Feast days and fasting days were observed rigorously. This preoccupation with the Roman Catholic faith was not confined to Emilia. The future Pope remembered Karol, his father, as a ‘very religious man’.
Karol senior was born in 1879, the same decade that Pius IX, after years in which he had agitated to be recognised as infallible, finally succeeded in realising his ambition. His critics saw him as a ‘theological monster’ who had become ‘a Papal Louis XIV’ but they were in a minority. The overwhelming majority of the faithful accepted the doctrine of infallibility without question. A few years earlier they had equally accepted the same Pope’s ‘Syllabus of Errors’, an attack on the entire modern world. Among the various views and opinions that the Pope declared ‘no good Catholic should hold’ was a belief in an unrestricted liberty of speech, freedom of the press, equal status for all religions and democratic forms of government. The Holy Father preferred absolute monarchies and condemned pantheism, naturalism, absolute rationalism, socialism, Communism, Bible societies and liberal clerical groups. The final item Pius IX had condemned had been the proposition that ‘the Roman pontiff can and should reconcile and harmonise himself with progress, with liberalism and with recent civilisation’. Just how deeply and lastingly these values would influence the young Wojtyla can be gauged from the fact that in September 2000 John Paul II beatified Pius IX. The act caused very deep offence throughout world Jewry (Pius IX was a rabid anti-Semite) and simultaneously shocked and appalled many devout Catholics.
The lieutenant devoted the last twelve years of his life to his son Karol, from the time of his wife’s death and his own simultaneous retirement in 1929 to his own death in 1941. Although in later life the Pope was given to bitterness when he talked of his mother’s illness and early death, he also expressed joy and gratitude for the crucial dedication he had enjoyed from his father. The lieutenant had filled the long hours of tedium as a clerical officer by voracious reading and an unquenchable hunger for knowledge. Self-taught, he developed a cultured mind and demeanour. Like his late wife he was deeply religious but he added to his faith an interest in literature, athletics and a concern for the destiny of his country. In the eyes of many in the town of Wadowice he seemed to be an eccentric man who shunned people and made few friends. In truth he enjoyed his own company and the space that solitude brought, but as a man without racial or religious prejudice he was able to draw friends and acquaintances from both sides of the racial line and religious divide – something that only a minority in the town could lay claim to. Perhaps, as Zbigniew Silkowski, the Pope’s friend from that time has recalled: ‘The Wojtyla household was a community of two people.’ But it was for these two a very rewarding time. The father revelled in the opportunity to pass on the knowledge that through his reading he had acquired. Polish history was something they discussed long and often. The lieutenant compiled a Polish-German dictionary and taught his son to speak German. When the son demonstrated to his teachers and to his classmates that he could read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in the original German they were astonished.
Karol Senior paid particular attention to his son’s religious education. Poland had long been regarded as the antemurale christianitatis, the ‘rampart of Christendom’. Immediately after the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870, the Italian crown seized the Papal States and incorporated them into the newly created Italian state. Pius IX refused to accept this situation and declared himself ‘prisoner in the Vatican’. Successive popes took the same unrealistic line, refusing to recognise the Italian regime, its government and parliament. The Papacy had dug in for the long haul and the siege mentality extended far beyond Rome. The crisis remained unresolved until the Vatican and Mussolini’s fascist government signed a treaty in 1929. Against that background the Catholic Church had need of every rampart it could muster. Poland was not the only one. Spain and Ireland were also countries where the village priest’s word was law and all Popes, good, bad and indifferent, were nationally revered. Questioning the local priest was not on the agenda. Disagreeing with any papal utterance, not just an edict on faith or morals, but anything, was unthinkable. This was the Roman Catholicism that the Wojtyla family accepted unhesitatingly.
The Virgin Mary had a constant vital influence upon the Pope from his childhood and the premature death of his mother. His encyclicals, his apostolic letters, his books, his sermons reveal an obsession with the Biblical image of Christ’s mother. Conspicuously absent from the Apostolic Letter are any references to the positive roles played by women such as Mary Magdalene, Junia, Hagar, Rahab, Deborah, Jael, Judith and a great many other women of influence within the Bible. Throughout his career the Pope consistently suggested that the ideal woman is a virgin and a member of a religious order. Failing that, he sought a world where there is no birth control, no abortion, no divorce, no women priests, no married priests, no masturbation, no sexual intercourse outside heterosexual marriage and no homosexuality. It was a world that Karol Wojtyla had been seeking for much of his life.
In 1960, Wojtyla’s play The Jeweller’s Shop was published in a Catholic monthly. The author was identified as ‘A. Jawien’. Among those who knew who was hiding behind the pseudonym were certain members of Wojtyla’s extended family. The play tells the intimate personal story of three marriages. Much of it is not a work of fiction but is lifted verbatim from real life actual incidents and dialogue that came directly from the mouths of some of the members of the group of students who were particularly close to him whom he regarded as his ‘family’. Wojtyla later recalled, perhaps as an attempt to justify what he had done, ‘Only those who had been present at the original time would have recognised themselves.’
It is not unusual for writers to ‘borrow’ from real life, but the writer walks on thinner ice when he is the priest and confessor of his characters. Even more so when he is also a man who lectures on ethics. During the same year of 1960 some further fruits of all those vacations with his ‘family’ were laid before the Polish public. Karol Wojtyla published his personal guidebook on family life and sexual morality, Love and Responsibility. Wojtyla’s book was a driving manual written by a lifelong non-driver, and aimed at a very limited readership. It offered nothing to non-Catholics, co-habiting couples, users of artificial birth control, homosexuals, bisexuals, or anyone who took pleasure from any form of sex which was not directed at the procreation of children within a Catholic marriage.
Karol Wojtyla’s very close friend and collaborator, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, knew Wojtyla more deeply and completely than any other layperson in the world. Highly intelligent with a string of qualifications, her particular speciality was philosophy. She played a very important role in the creation of the English-language edition of his philosophic work The Acting Person, of which she was co-author. Her opinion of her fellow author’s earlier solo effort is less fulsome.
‘To have written (as he has) about love and sex is to know very little about it. I was truly astounded when I read Love and Responsibility. I thought he obviously does not know what he is talking about. How can he write such things?’12
If Wojtyla exploited just six members of his ‘family’ for his play The Jeweller’s Shop, he cast his net much wider for Love and Responsibility. Not only did he freely use many of his one-to-one private conversations, he also mined the group discussions and then handed around draft copies of the manuscript for reaction and comment from the young students. All of this was topped up with information Wojtyla had acquired from within the sacred confines of the confessional. Anticipating a particular reaction, Karol Wojtyla acknowledged in his introduction to the book that what followed was indeed based on ‘second-hand information’. This in his mind did not matter because as a priest he was exposed to a very much wider range of second-hand information than the average person. This might be a valid proposition coming from a priest who had spent a lifetime involved in pastoral work. On this occasion it came from a man who had spent eight months in a rural parish and two and a half years at St Florian’s, the University parish in Cracow. From there on his pastoral work was limited to his contact with his extended family, only a few of whom had been married at the time of initial publication.
Wojtyla’s declared intention was to make moral sense of human sexuality through the conversations he had had with the men and women who had invited him into their lives as ‘their pastor and their confidant’. In attempting to make that ‘moral sense’ and of course simultaneously breach those confidences, Wojtyla ranged from the banal (‘If a woman does not obtain natural gratification from the sexual act there is a danger that her experience of it will be qualitatively inferior, it will not involve her fully as a person.’) to the bizarre (‘Love in its physical aspect is naturally inseparable from shame, but within the relationship between the man and the woman concerned, a characteristic phenomenon occurs which we shall call here “the absorption of shame by love”. Shame is, as it were, swallowed up by love, dissolved in it, so that the man and the woman are no longer ashamed to be sharing their experience of sexual values.’). Later Wojtyla defined this love that occurs at the advent of sexual intercourse. ‘In marital intercourse both shame and the normal process of its absorption by love are connected with the conscious acceptance of the possibility of parenthood. “I may become a father”, “I may become a mother”. If there is a positive decision to preclude this eventuality sexual intercourse becomes shameless.’
Thus, according to Wojtyla, artificial contraception degraded both partners. He later described homosexuality as a ‘perversion’ and ‘a deviation’. He asserted that ‘pain is an evil to be shunned’. It would be interesting to know if he ever told that to the Roman Catholic Church’s own secret society, Opus Dei, with which he was intimately involved for over fifty years who go in for self-inflicted pain with a variety of instruments. These include self-flagellation on the bare back and wearing tightly bound strips of studded metal bands pressed into the upper thigh. Wojtyla evidently excused, perhaps even approved, such activities provided that they were being performed for the greater glory of God and not to create sexual arousal.
In mid-2004 the Pope and Cardinal Ratzinger took to the arena of ‘women’s rights and duties’ again. In a ‘Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World’ published with full Papal approval by Cardinal Ratzinger, they sought to counter the claims of feminism and to emphasise the Christian understanding of ‘women’s dignity’. The letter left a great many women very indignant. Ratzinger got off to an unfortunate start within his introduction when he described the Catholic Church as ‘expert in humanity’. In the eyes of many of his readers from there on it was all downhill. Talking of new approaches to women’s issues in recent years he observed,
‘women in order to be themselves, must make themselves the adversaries of men. Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power. This process leads to opposition between men and women in which the identity and role of one are emphasised to the disadvantage of the other, leading to harmful confusion regarding the human person, which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family.’
Ratzinger then identifies a second strand of feminist ideology. ‘In order to avoid the domination of one sex or the other, their differences tend to be denied . . .’ This ‘calls into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father and makes homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality.’ The solution for the Pope and Cardinal to this situation was for all men and women to seek a deeper understanding of the Scriptures. To assist them the Cardinal then quotes copiously from a large array of sources, including the Bible, commencing with the first three chapters of Genesis leading ultimately and inevitably to the Virgin Mary. All women whether serving within the Church or living secular lives ‘are called to follow her example’.
To judge from the global reaction from women, Dr Mary Condren’s response was kinder than many. Dr Condren lectures in gender and women’s studies at Trinity College, Dublin.
‘Presented by a first-year undergraduate, this essay would barely merit a pass. So why bother to respond? The continued assault on lesbian and homosexual relationships fuels homophobia. Faulty logic, backed by the veto power of the Vatican and aligned with right-wing fundamentalisms will, at forthcoming UN meetings, have serious consequences for non-western women struggling for self-determination. If Jesus were here today he would be crying out, “Not in my name.” ’
In 1968 as the Prague Spring promised liberation for the country’s fourteen million inhabitants, there were also hopes that a Papal encyclical on birth control offered potential liberation for a fifth of the planet, nearly one billion people, by ending an untenable and oppressive Church ruling on birth control. It turned instead into a Vatican winter. Without the need for a single tank, precious freedoms and the right of choice would be denied. Wojtyla played an important role in this result. He helped to shape the document known as Humanae Vitae, ‘On Human Life’. The views of the author of Love and Responsibility, who believed that sex was shameful unless it admitted the possibility of procreation within marriage, carried particular weight with Pope Paul VI as he very characteristically agonised over the problem of whether or not to approve for Roman Catholics the use of artificial birth control.
In 1966 Wojtyla had created within Cracow his own commission to study the issues that were being examined by a Papal Commission in Rome appointed by not one Pope but two, John and his successor Paul. Those issues were of course the problems of Family, Population and the Birth Rate. Quite why Wojtyla thought he should appoint his own commission is not known. It is clear that Wojtyla went to great lengths not only to get into this debate but to control it and stay well ahead of the other players. His local group, largely if not totally comprised of celibate men, also gained access to two drafts of the proposed encyclical. These were leaked to the Poles by priests on the commission who were hostile to any change in the Church’s position. The men in Cracow considered one draft that had been prepared by the Holy Office, the Vatican’s doctrinal experts, to be ‘stupid conservatism’. The other reflected the Majority Report of the Commission which argued that there should be a change of the Church’s position and declared that to ban artificial birth control would mean the Church losing all credibility with married couples and with the modern world.
The men of Cracow considered this to be seriously flawed in its approach to moral theology. They further contended that this very large group of learned people who had been studying the subject for several years had misread what God had written into the nature of human sexuality. The Poles had the answer to all this. What was needed was to tear a large chunk out of Love and Responsibility, dress it up slightly, and post it to the Pope. Thus for the Cracow commission artificial birth control was rejected in favour of ‘living in marital chastity’. They acknowledged that this would involve a ‘great ascetic effort and mastery of self’.
When Humanae Vitae was published, forbidding Roman Catholics the use of artificial contraception, the men of Cracow were delighted and thrilled. One of their number, papal theologian Father Bardecki, is on record as boasting, ‘About sixty per cent of our draft is contained in the encyclical.’ Whatever the actual percentage of the Cracow input to Humanae Vitae, Wojtyla was praising the document from the pulpit within days. ‘If it poses great demands on a person in the moral realm these demands must be met.’
Wojtyla put great store on the element of continuity with regard to the teachings of the Church. He had argued very forcibly for the ban on artificial birth control on the grounds that to do otherwise would ‘contradict and invalidate all previous Papal pronouncements’. The previous statement on the issue had been made by Pius XII in 1951 during a speech to a gathering of midwives and not as an encyclical for which infallibility was claimed. Since it had been made before the oral contraception pill had been invented, it can hardly be claimed to be definitive. Significantly the Humanae Vitae encyclical is also free of imprimatur. Pope Paul made no claim of infallibility for his document. It is undoubtedly an issue that will be revisited when the current Papacy ends and a new man sits on Peter’s throne.
However, Wojtyla saw Humanae Vitae as ‘the expression of the unchanging truth, always proclaimed by the Church’. Only a few years earlier during Vatican Council II he had helped to secure a profound change of the Roman Catholic position on a range of issues. Presumably some truths remain more ‘unchanging’ than others. He founded ‘Humanae Vitae Marriage Groups’, an institution with severe rules. Their purpose was to ensure that married couples made the commitment to obey all of the requirements of the encyclical, particularly the ruling on artificial contraception. Only then, according to Wojtyla, could the ‘shame’ of sexual intercourse be overcome. His rules left the couple the freedom to choose between unprotected sex or joining their Cardinal in a completely celibate life.
Wojtyla had from his earliest years believed that the role of conscience lay at the very heart of Christian ethics and decision making by Christians in their everyday lives. However, there was an unspoken catch. The informed Christian conscience must base all of those decisions upon Christian ‘Natural Law’ which within the Church is defined ultimately by the Pope. Freedom of choice is therefore for the Catholic faithful an illusion. For non-Catholics the moral rulings of the Pope and the Catholic Church are matters for the Church alone. However, this particular papacy did not confine itself to regulating Catholics. It sought, often with great success, to undermine the democratic process of government. It intervened repeatedly in the affairs of nations and without any mandate from the people it brought about profound changes, not just for the Catholics of a country but for every citizen. Evaluating the papacy of Pope John Paul II very much depends on where the individual stands on a wide range of moral issues. It also depends critically on whether the individual is a man or a woman.
On the issue of abortion, Karol Wojtyla throughout his life held to the Church’s historic position. For him, it was the greatest crime and he was adamant that there are no exceptions, no justifications. As for the frequently raised argument that if there were fewer unwanted pregnancies there would be fewer abortions Wojtyla wrote nearly fifty years ago in Love And Responsibility, ‘There are no grounds for discussing abortion in conjunction with birth control. To do so would be quite improper.’ In a document entitled ‘The Problem of Threats to Human Life’, a report to the Consistory of Cardinals in April 1991, the head of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger, developed the line of defence for the Church’s position on both abortion and birth control:
‘it is precisely by developing an anthropology which presents man in his personal and relational wholeness that we can respond to the widespread argument that the best way to fight abortion would be to promote contraception. Each of us has already heard this rebuke levelled against the Church: It is absurd that you want to prevent both contraception and abortion. Blocking access to the former means making the latter inevitable. Such an assertion, which at first sight seems totally plausible, is, however, contradicted by experience: the fact is that generally an increase in the rate of contraception is paralleled by an increase in the rate of abortion.’
Ratzinger offered no sources or statistics for that remarkable statement. In May 2003 the Pope had a meeting with 500 Italian pro-life activists to ‘commemorate’ the twenty-fifth anniversary of the legalisation of abortion in Italy. He commended the group for ‘never ceasing to work in defence of human life’. Then he recalled the warning of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the woman whom in October 2003 he beatified in St Peter’s Square: ‘Abortion endangers the peace of the world.’
Cardinals in a variety of Latin American countries have reminded their congregations that the penalty of excommunication Latae Sententiae – automatically imposed – still applies to all those involved in an abortion ‘including the assistant doctors, the nurse, whoever provides the money . . . etc, etc.’
The Pope’s frequent stern injunctions to his bishops and priests to stay out of politics do not apply to abortion, birth control or homosexuality. The American bishops had been into politics long before Karol Wojtyla became Pope, and he knew it. But so long as their views coincided with his there was no attempt to silence them. In 1974 an American report ordered by President Nixon was presented to his immediate successor Gerald Ford. Nixon had specifically commissioned a study of the ‘implications of worldwide population growth for US security and overseas interests’. The report – National Security Study Memorandum 200 – addressed a range of problems directly arising from the predicted increase in world population in the foreseeable future. Underpinning many of the report’s recommendations was the implicit need for urgent action to improve family planning worldwide. What occurred subsequently has been the subject of exhaustive documentation by Doctor Stephen Mumford in a series of works listed within the bibliography. They are required reading for anyone with concerns on world population growth. They detail a constant and unremitting battle by the Vatican, in particular, to outlaw abortion and artificial birth control methods globally.
One of many successes of the Papacy in changing legislation enacted by a duly elected government occurred in the Reagan years. At the time Reagan took office in January 1981, the United States foreign aid funding included programmes that promoted both birth control and greater availability to procure a legal abortion. In the United States two historic Supreme Court rulings in 1973, Roe vs Wade and Doe vs Bolton, had established respectively that there was a constitutional right to abortion and that abortions were permissible through the entire term of pregnancy. Within twenty-four hours of the Roe vs Wade decision, a consensus of America’s Catholic bishops had begun to plan a sustained campaign to overturn the Supreme Court decisions by forcing government to introduce a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion. They did not seek to limit abortion to certain categories or situations; they wanted a total ban.
On 20 November 1975 the Roman Catholic bishops of America issued their Pastoral Plan For Pro-Life Activities. Dr Mumford has described this detailed blueprint as ‘the bishops’ strategy for infiltrating and manipulating the American democratic process at the national, state and local levels’. Timothy A. Byrnes, Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York, saw it is as ‘the most focused and aggressive political leadership’ ever exerted by the American bishops.
The plan included a brilliantly conceived campaign with an attention to detail worthy of a major political party. It also sought to justify the campaign by utilising the classic Vatican technique of doublethink:
‘We do not seek to impose our moral teaching on American society, but as citizens of this nation we find it entirely appropriate to ask that the government and the law be faithful to its own principle that the right to life is an inalienable right given to everyone by the Creator.’
The Pastoral Plan has had a long list of successes since its inception. Although it has yet to achieve the total abolition of abortion within the United States it has chalked up an impressive array of victories in the continuing fight. One of the most stunning achievements directly attributable to the Catholic lobby was to persuade the Reagan administration to alter the foreign aid programmes so that they accorded with the Roman Catholic Church’s position on both birth control and abortion. In 1984 at the world conference on population in Mexico City, the United States withdrew funding from two of the world’s largest family planning organisations, the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.
The first US Ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson, has confirmed that
‘American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican not agreeing with our policy. American aid programmes around the world did not meet the criteria the Vatican had for family planning. AID (the Agency for International Development) sent various people from the Department of State to Rome and I’d accompany them to meet the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, and in long discussions they (the Reagan administration) finally got the message. But it was a struggle. They finally selected different programmes and abandoned others as a result of this intervention.’
In Spain, Chile, the Philippines and Poland, as well as a raft of countries where the Catholic vote can significantly affect the outcome of a general election, the Catholic Church has infiltrated into the democratic process. At world conferences, in the United Nations, in the Council of Europe, at Strasbourg, the Church has fought a no-holds-barred campaign in its efforts to have abortion and artificial birth control banned globally.
In the United Kingdom during the last week of March 2004, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced a series of faith-based initiatives with the release of a document entitled ‘Working Together: Cooperation between Government and Faith Communities’. ‘Faith-based initiatives’ is an idea ‘borrowed’ from the Bush administration. It has provided back-door access to the democratic process whereby unelected pressure groups such as the Roman Catholic Church can influence the administration on many issues, headed predictably by abortion, birth control and homosexuality. President George W. Bush was highly susceptible to the Catholic position on these issues.
In the United States, Catholic bishops have regularly acted against Catholic candidates running for political office who believe it wrong to impose their moral position on others. Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Texan candidates Tony Sanchez and John Sharp were banned from speaking at any Church-controlled event. In 2004 Presidential candidate John Kerry was hounded, slandered and repeatedly subjected to character assassination. Their collective experiences give the lie to the Roman Catholic Church’s assurance in 1974 that it did not want to impose its moral teachings on American society.
Ironically the Pope complained that many ‘religious believers are excluded from public discussions’. He then claimed to ‘recognise the legitimate demand for a distinction between religious and political affairs’ but ‘distinction does not mean ignorance’. He called for ‘a healthy dialogue between the State and the Churches, which are not competitors but partners’. He concluded these comments in mid-December 2003 to all the ambassadors accredited to the Holy See by yet again returning to his frequently repeated request for recognition that religion should continue to play an important influencing role within the European Union. He said that ‘Europe is having difficulty in accepting religion in the public square.’
Both the late Pope and the majority of his bishops never accepted the separation of church and state, whatever they said to the contrary and whatever Concordats they signed. In the United States the Conference of Catholic Bishops have frequently represented themselves to be acting on behalf of the entire community of the Catholic Church in the United States. They have created over the decades policies and procedures that aspired to impact not only on Catholics but upon every American. Examples of their attempts to manipulate the democratic process include policy on nuclear deterrence, policy relating to immigration and illegal aliens, health care issues and practices in both Catholic-funded and non-Catholic hospitals, the Right to Life Movement and legislation related to abortion, the Hispanic and Black Ministry Movements, the Family Life ministry, the Youth ministry and legislation involving education, minorities, immigrants and rights of children.
In September 1994 the UN population conference convened in Cairo. Attending were representatives from 185 nations and the Holy See. The agenda was a 113-page plan calling on governments to commit $17 billion annually by the year 2000 to curb population growth. Some ninety per cent of the plan had been approved in advance, but the Pope was determined to destroy some of the remainder. He was convinced that one proposal in particular was aimed at controlling global population through abortion. The offending clause owed its inclusion at least in part to a Clinton administration directive to all US embassies that had been sent on 16 March 1994: ‘the United States believes access to safe, legal and voluntary abortion is a fundamental right of all women.’
President Clinton and his administration had been adamant that the Cairo conference should endorse this policy. The Pope was equally adamant that they should not. For nine days, various Vatican delegations gave a powerful demonstration of how to wreck an international conference. Under the Pope’s personal long-range direction they lobbied, filibustered and formed unholy alliances with Islamic nations who were traditionally opposed to abortion. They kept a vice-like grip on their Latin American bloc. The Pope prevailed over the governments of 185 nations. A statement was inserted: ‘In no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning.’ In return the Vatican gave ‘partial consent’ to the document. The Pope received a largely hostile press. One Spanish critic observed that he had ‘become a travelling salesman of demographic irrationality’.
Anti-abortion pressure groups have gone to extraordinary lengths to impose their point of view. In December 1988 Nancy Klein was the victim of a near-fatal car accident on Long Island, New York. Badly injured, she lay in a coma as doctors in the North Shore University Hospital fought to save her life. They advised her husband and her family that there was little hope and that if she should survive she would be in a vegetative condition. There was a complication: the thirty-two-year-old woman was ten weeks pregnant. Doctors concluded that an abortion might well save her life. When her husband Martin applied for court permission for the abortion to be carried out on his unconscious wife, a group of anti-abortion activists entered legal submissions. They wanted the court to grant them control over Nancy by appointing them guardians of her unborn foetus. This would give them the power to force her to continue her pregnancy. Although the unconscious Nancy would almost certainly die long before her body could carry the child to full term, this was a minor consideration for the ‘pro-life’ activists.
As the case began to proceed through three State courts on its way to the US Supreme Court, other anti-abortionists appeared and threatened to chain themselves to Nancy’s hospital bed. Three months after the accident the Supreme Court described the anti-abortion activists who had brought the case to court as ‘absolute strangers’ to Nancy who as such had no right to determine her fate. The Court ordered that the abortion could take place. Shortly after the abortion Nancy regained consciousness. The enforced three extra months of pregnancy plus the injuries sustained at the time of the accident caused severe neurological damage; she can no longer use her limbs properly or speak with total fluency but her brain is ‘as sharp as ever’. So sharp, in fact, that she subsequently lectured and spoke in favour of abortion rights and stem cell research.
The separation of church and state and the Pope’s blurred ‘distinction’ between them were a significant election issue in the 2004 presidential race. A controversy, instigated by the Vatican and fuelled by the US bishops and Roman Catholic pressure groups, built up a good head of steam during the Democratic primaries, centred on the party’s standard-bearer, Senator John Kerry. As shown above the Roman Catholic Senator was targeted by the anti-abortionists from the outset of the race. A group called the American Life League (ALL) published in early January a list of its ‘Deadly Dozen’. All were Roman Catholic Democrat politicians who believed that it was a woman’s right to choose whether or not she has an abortion. ALL is a front organisation for the Vatican. Its President, Judie Brown, is a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life. She was described by the Daily Catholic as one of the top 100 Catholics of the twentieth century. Another board member of ALL is Dr Philippe Schepens, also a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life. A number of leading Republican politicians are also pro-choice, but have yet to be targeted by ALL.
The pressure group claims to have 375,000 members. Part of its campaign to put the greatest possible pressure on Catholic politicians to bring ‘the moral teachings of the Church to their decision-making while in public office’ is to encourage bishops to take disciplinary action against dissenting politicians. They did not have to wait too long. In April the Vatican had adopted as policy a global ban on giving the Eucharist to any politician who held a pro-abortion position. A number of the American bishops did not want to limit the issue to abortion. They sought to confront Senator Kerry and other politicians for their supposed failure to carry out their religious duties on the death penalty, the role of marriage and family, war and peace, the rights of parents, the priority for the poor, the correct way to respond to immigrants, and many other issues.
The Catholic activists are determined to rewrite history. As recorded earlier, while campaigning for the Presidency in September 1960, John F. Kennedy had sought to settle for ever the issue of the relationship between a Catholic politician and his faith. In the Vatican, some applaud the American Church’s new activism, but most regard it as a high-risk strategy. Others are more cynical. A senior member of the Curia remarked, ‘If it distracts attention from the child abuse scandal it will have served a useful purpose.’ He then made an alarming prediction. ‘There’s a lobby in the Vatican that wants the Holy Father to go public and instruct the Catholic Americans to either vote Bush or Nader or abstain.’ In the event the Vatican obtained the result it desired without resorting to that tactic.
Even if one agrees with the Pope’s description of abortion as ‘the culture of death’, one may still disagree with his declaration that a woman who uses the contraceptive pill is ‘already on the road to abortion’. To any rational person, one motive for a woman to use a contraceptive device is precisely to avoid the risk of an abortion – and the risk of death.
Abortion can certainly be wrong, even obscene, in certain settings. In Russia, for example, sixty per cent of pregnancies now end in abortion and one in ten of these abortions involve girls under eighteen. In the United States girls as young as fourteen use abortion as a method of contraception because they reportedly ‘don’t believe in birth control pills because they mess up your body and condoms, diaphragms and other methods make you feel like you are planning sex. It isn’t the romantic way.’ In women’s athletics, pregnancy followed by abortion is used deliberately to boost performance. The Roman Catholic Church is right to condemn such contempt for life just as it is wrong for the Church to dogmatically insist that abortion is always morally wrong.
Every year more than half a million women die from complications during pregnancy, under the World Health Organisation (WHO) definition of ‘maternal mortality’ – the death of a woman during pregnancy or within forty-two days after pregnancy. WHO has established that every minute, somewhere in the world
‘a woman dies as a consequence of complications of pregnancy. One hundred women suffer from pregnancy-related complications. Three hundred women conceive an unwanted or unplanned child. Two hundred women acquire a sexually transmitted disease.’
Clearly if a full range of family planning methods was freely and readily available to all men and women throughout the world that appalling toll would be dramatically reduced. If even a limited, stringently-controlled abortion service was available, many of these deaths that are directly caused by women resorting to illegal and dubiously induced abortions would be prevented, but the real key is contraception, a key denied to all women by the Roman Catholic Church.
In the first months of 1993 thousands of women were raped in Bosnia by Serb forces. UN relief workers distributed what is frequently called a ‘morning after pill’ that acts as an abortifacient. The Vatican promptly denounced this action and Pope John Paul II sent a message to the raped victims urging them to ‘transform an act of violence into an act of love and welcome’ by ‘accepting’ the enemy into them and making him ‘flesh of their own flesh’ by carrying their pregnancies to term.
During April 1999 it was revealed that an increasing number of Albanian women were being separated from refugee columns and removed to a Serb camp near the Albanian border where they were repeatedly raped. Many of the raped victims were in their early teens. When it became known that the UN Population Fund was providing 350,000 emergency reproductive health kits to be distributed to the Kosovo refugees, and that the kits contained ‘morning after’ contraceptives, the Vatican was again quick to condemn that action. Calling the pill an ‘abortion technique’, Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, Vice-President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said it was important to distinguish between ‘the act of violence and the reality of new human beings who have begun their life’.
In 2003 an even younger victim, a nine-year-old girl, Rosa, became the unwitting centre of controversy in Nicaragua. While on holiday with her parents in late 2002 in Costa Rica, she was raped by a twenty-year-old man, and there was also a suspicion that her uncle had sexually assaulted her. Back in Nicaragua when it became apparent that Rosa was pregnant, her parents attempted to obtain an abortion for the child. In Nicaragua abortion is allowed only when the health of the ‘woman’ is at risk. A Government board concluded that Rosa faced the same health risk whether she carried the pregnancy to term or had an abortion. The Nicaraguan Family Ministry stated that it would prosecute anyone who helped the girl obtain an abortion. A key figure in this story is Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo. Having succeeded in preventing an abortion, the Catholic Church as an inducement to Rosa’s parents to abandon their search for a doctor who would terminate the pregnancy offered Rosa food and shelter in an orphanage where they proposed the nine-year-old girl would be able to have her baby and then raise the child.
The case was by now attracting attention far beyond the shores of Rosa’s homeland. When a medical team carried out the abortion, the Cardinal publicly announced that the child, her parents, the medical team, doctors, consultants, nurses and any individual who had helped in any way were all excommunicated. The Cardinal’s action merely succeeded in throwing petrol on the bonfire. Women’s groups in a number of countries erupted. A petition signed by 25,000 in Spain was delivered to the Vatican, with the promise that a million-signature petition would soon follow. The signatories, predominantly women, demanded that they too should be excommunicated. With churches rapidly emptying in a number of countries, the Vatican reversed the Cardinal’s decision on the excommunications.
In January 2005 yet another nine-year-old girl was the centre of an abortion controversy. The country on this occasion was Chile. The girl had been raped and by the time the case had become a national issue, she was seven months pregnant. Consequently, the demands from the pro-abortion groups were denied by Health Minister Pedro Garcia who called on Chileans to denounce the sexual assault of young children. The controversy demonstrated that the Church does not have a monopoly on irrationality when it comes to the issue of abortion.
In the Pope’s home country, relentless Church pressure over a number of years brought about in 1993 an end to abortion virtually on demand. Now with very few considered eligible under the latest stringent legislation, the wealthy resort to a private abortion, the poor resign themselves to a greater poverty. An estimated 200,000 illegal abortions are carried out each year at the cost on average of £125, the equivalent of one month’s salary. Prime Minister Leszek’s Democratic Left Alliance, SLD, has pledged to legalise abortion on the pre-1993 basis. It has further incensed the Catholic Church in Poland with plans to grant legal recognition to homosexual relationships.
In Ireland, a country split down the middle on the abortion issue where access to termination is as difficult as in Poland, thousands of women every year cross the Irish Sea to have abortions in private clinics in England. In Northern Ireland the situation has for decades bordered on the surreal. The six counties are part of the United Kingdom in every respect other than the abortion law. Abortions are strictly limited to criteria that do not apply in mainland England. The anomaly is maintained through a group of Catholic bishops resisting the will of Parliament.
Catholic Church officialdom is capable of going to extraordinary lengths to enforce absurd or cruel sexual rulings. In 1982 a Munich priest’s actions were upheld and defended by his archbishop after he refused to marry a young couple because he claimed that the bridegroom, crippled by muscular dystrophy, would be unable to consummate the union. The archbishop’s office declared, ‘Sexual impotence is a natural barrier to the contract of marriage.’ The priest told the young man who was confined to a wheelchair that he would have to prove the marriage could be consummated by subjecting himself to a medical examination. He refused. A local Protestant Church agreed ‘without hesitation’ to marry the couple.
On 19 May 1991, in a letter on combating abortion and euthanasia to all bishops throughout the world, the Pope wrote,
‘All of us, as pastors of the Lord’s flock, have a grave responsibility to promote respect for human life in our dioceses. In addition to making public declarations at every opportunity, we must exercise particular vigilance with regard to the teaching being given in our seminaries and in Catholic schools and universities. As pastors we must be watchful in ensuring that practices followed in Catholic hospitals are fully consonant with the nature of such institutions.’
In August 1994 Cardinal Ratzinger’s Vatican Congregation declared that any woman whose damaged uterus could pose a threat to her health in a future pregnancy is not permitted to have a hysterectomy or a tubal ligation. They had been asked for a ruling by American bishops on behalf of Catholic hospitals throughout the United States and had declared that surgical intervention was not ‘morally acceptable’. Previously in March 1987 the Church ruled that in vitro fertilisation (IVF) was also morally unacceptable even for a woman suffering from endometriosis who was therefore unable to conceive naturally. The issue of contraception and the Church’s teaching of the past fifty years that approved ‘the rhythm method’ descended into a black farce with the announcement in July 2003 that the method does not work for all women. Canadian scientists have established that some women can ovulate up to three times a month. Since any of these eggs can be fertilised, ‘natural family planning is pointless’.
The Church has made it very clear that its teaching puts an absolute ban on abortion, to the extent of allowing a woman to die rather than sacrifice the life of the unborn child. To underline that particular teaching, in May 2004 the canonisation of an Italian laywoman, Gianna Beretta Molla, took place in St Peter’s Square. Gianna, thirty-nine years of age at the time of her death in 1962, is the first married saint for centuries. Present at the ceremony were her ninety-two-year-old widower, Pietro, and her four children. Gianna was a far remove from the usual candidate for canonisation. Happily married, devoted to her young children, an active woman who enjoyed skiing and going to La Scala, nothing was exceptional in her life except the manner of its ending.
Gianna was carrying her fourth child when she was diagnosed with a tumour in her womb. The options were limited. She would have to have a hysterectomy so that the surgeons could remove the tumour. The only alternative was to terminate the pregnancy. Gianna elected for a third course of action; she would carry the baby the full term and then undergo delicate surgery to remove the tumour. She was fully aware that there was a high probability of severe possibly fatal complications at the time of the birth. ‘If you have to choose between me and the baby, save it, I insist,’ she told her husband as the birth date approached. In April 1962 a healthy baby girl was born; a week later Gianna died from septic peritonitis. The Vatican objects to descriptions of Gianna as ‘the first anti-abortion saint’ but that in the opinion of many is precisely what the Pope had created.
In March 2004 the Catholic Church brought US-style politics into the impending United Kingdom general election. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor and his bishops set about disrupting the Labour Party’s bid for a third successive term of office. Prompted by comments from the then Conservative leader, Michael Howard, that he favoured a reduction in the abortion time-limit from the present twenty-four weeks to twenty weeks, the English Primate took to the hustings. He praised the Tory leader and declared that abortion was ‘a very key issue in the election’. In fact, there had not been one single mention of abortion until that moment. Warming to the attack, the cardinal cast out on the traditional view that the Catholics of the United Kingdom were largely Labour voters. The cardinal’s own constituency consists of a notional four million Catholics of which only 20 per cent are practising. The week after the cardinal’s entry into the election, he returned again to the fray, this time to raise the issues of stem-cell research and euthanasia.
The Roman Catholic Church moves regularly into the political arena in her efforts to obtain a global ban on stem-cell research and to severely limit the use of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) to married heterosexual couples, and then to the creation of no more than three embryos. Italy has some of the most restrictive laws concerning IVF. In June 2005, a referendum on the issue offered the Italians an opportunity to vote for more liberal laws. The Church swung into action and, from Pope Benedict XVI down, Italy was urged to ignore the referendum. The population obliged and the turnout was less than twenty per cent, thus ensuring the laws remained unchanged.
In Spain the conflict between the Church and the Socialist government elected in March 2004 has been at crisis level since the new government came to power. Legislation passed since the election that has liberalised divorce rules, ended mandatory religious education in public schools, promoted stem-cell research, allowed same-sex marriage, and future legislation that will ease legal access to abortion has resulted in a Spanish Church in a constant state of apoplexy.
In October the Synod of Bishops meeting in Rome passed a number of propositions that include the reiteration of certain current Church doctrines. These included a continuing ban on married priests, a continuing ban on divorcees who have remarried ‘being admitted to Holy Communion’. The Synod also ‘exhorted’ such couples to refrain from sexual intercourse. The Synod declared a continuing ban on non-Catholics taking Communion and told all Roman Catholic politicians throughout the world that they should not receive Communion ‘if they support policies that are contrary to justice and natural law’, i.e. Catholic doctrine.
The battle to hold the Catholic line on these various issues is global. The fact that the Spanish government had an election mandate to make reforms was regarded by the Church as an irritating irrelevance. In the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and a great many other countries, the late Pope’s contempt for democracy still deeply influences the minds of the bishops and cardinals that Karol Wojtyla created. The Vatican’s latest assault on Italy’s abortion laws is to join forces with politicians from the right and the left who are anxiously courting the Catholic vote for the general election due in April 2006. The Catholic Church is backing a proposal that women should be paid not to have abortions. Under the scheme, women in straitened economic circumstances would get between 250 and 350 euros a month for up to six months before the birth of the child. Quite how the child would be kept after birth has not been addressed.
The scourge of HIV-AIDS is yet another area where Catholic teaching and treatment are in direct conflict with the practices of non-Catholic health care. More than 26.7 per cent of HIV-AIDS treatment centres throughout the world are Roman Catholic facilities. The range of treatment available at these centres does not include the distribution of condoms and instructions on ‘safe sex’ practices. The Catholic alternative, one they share with the Bush administration, is to advocate total abstinence from sex. Neither does the Church approve of HIV-AIDS prevention campaigns that feature the use of condoms. In the words of Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragan, the Holy See’s top official on health-care issues, it sees such campaigns as ‘contributing to the spread of the culture of sexual licence’. Since many priests and nuns are known to break their vows of celibacy, one wonders how lay people are expected to keep such vows without the benefit of a vocational calling and the constant support and supervision of the Church. It would be instructive to compare the success of the condom-free clinics against the non-Catholic centres, but, predictably, no accurate figures are available.
In repeated pronouncements, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church have demonstrated total ignorance on the value of condoms in preventing unwanted pregnancies and checking the spread of AIDS. For example, the then Cardinal Ratzinger declared
‘to seek a solution to the problem of infection by promoting the use of prophylactics would be to embark on a way not only insufficiently reliable from the technical point of view, but also and above all, unacceptable from the moral aspect. Such a proposal for “safe” or at least “safer” sex – as they say – ignores the real cause of the problem, namely the permissiveness which in the area of sex as well as that related to other abuses, corrodes the moral fibre of the people.’
Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo has said, ‘The AIDS virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the “net” that is formed by the condom.’ Writing in the British-based Guardian newspaper, columnist Polly Toynbee responded specifically to Cardinal Trujillo.
‘No one can compute how many people have died of AIDS as a result of Wojtyla’s power, how many women have died in childbirth needlessly, how many children starve in families too large and poor to feed them. But it is reasonable to suppose the silent, unseen, uncounted deaths at his hand would match that of any tyrant or dictator. It may be through delusion rather than wickedness, but it hardly matters to the dead.’
In September 2004, Ann Smith, HIV corporate strategist for Cafod, the development agency for the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, revealed that the agency, contrary to the Vatican line, distributes condoms as part of its three-layered approach to fighting the HIV virus. Writing in the Tablet she said:
‘The data is clear that condoms, when used correctly and consistently, reduce but do not remove the risk of HIV infection. This fact cannot be excluded from or misrepresented in any information on risk reduction strategies, regardless of the political or moral position of those promoting them.’
This enlightened approach has incensed the recently formed Catholic Action Group (CAG) who in early 2005 mounted a City of London-backed campaign calling for a financial boycott of Cafod.
HIV-AIDS was first indentified in 1981. Over the ensuing twenty-five years nearly sixty-five million people were infected with HIV and an estimated twenty-five million have died of AIDS-related illnesses. It is estimated that close to forty million live with HIV. The vast majority of that number are unaware of their health status. During 2005 an estimated 2.8 million AIDS victims died.
That the late Pope John Paul II, his successor Pope Benedict XVI and men such as Cardinal Trujillo should have remained so obdurate regarding the use of condoms is particularly ironic when one considers the report created by Sister Maura O’Donohue which was mentioned earlier. I refer to the report again as it is of great importance.
Sister Maura’s report was submitted confidentially in February 1994 to Cardinal Eduardo Martinez, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Religious Life and her ultimate superior. A source within the Congregation kindly made a copy available to me. Sister Maura, a physician in the Order of Medical Missionaries of Mary, had entitled her report ‘Urgent Concerns for the Church in the Context of HIV/AIDS’.
During the previous six years she had travelled extensively through Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. The visits were part of her work as AIDS Coordinator for the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (CAFOD) that serves as lead agency for HIV/AIDS programmes for Caritas Internationalists (CI). The main purpose of her work was to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS among Church personnel.
Sister Maura’s report began by laying out the reality of the AIDS pandemic. Her data showed one particular country with an infection rate of thirteen per cent among the diocesan clergy, and in another sixteen members of one religious order who had already died of AIDS. Sister Maura recorded that as the disease spread, there was a culture of secrecy among the Church hierarchy.
Many of the bishops and religious superiors began to institute compulsory HIV tests for all candidates for seminaries and religious life, but failed to address those serving priests or religious who were already infected or who might contract HIV in the future.
As noted earlier, Sister Maura’s report established a shocking catalogue of sexual abuse. Such abuse was not restricted to any single country or even continent. It spread throughout the globe. Sister Maura discovered examples of sexual abuse over a six-year period in some twenty-two countries in five continents: Botswana, Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, India, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Tonga, Uganda, United States of America, Zambia, Zaire, Zimbabwe.
Sister Maura had hoped that the report would motivate the appropriate action, particularly by those in positions of authority in the Church.
However, a year after she had submitted the report, the only action to have been taken was an invitation for her and her colleagues to meet with Martinez and three members of his staff. That meeting did not result in action either. As she wrote in a later memorandum, ‘It was clear that there was no prearranged agenda.’
Other reports from similarly concerned senior women in religious orders were also issued. Again, no action was taken either by Cardinal Martinez or any other senior Vatican figure.
Frustrated by the lack of any progress whatsoever, some of the authors of the reports contacted the National Catholic Reporter in early 2001. This resulted in the newspaper running a cover story on 16 March 2001. Four days later La Repubblica, Italy’s largest daily newspaper, published a long article on the subject.
The newspaper coverage forced the Vatican to respond. However, it was not the Pope or Cardinal Martinez who made a statement to the press. It was Navarro-Valls, who simply stated, ‘The problem is known, and is restricted to a geographically limited area.’
His statement continued and affirmed that the Holy See was dealing with ‘the question in collaboration with the bishops, with the Union of Superiors General (USG) and with the International Union of Superiors General (USIG).’
In reality, however, no positive action was taken by the Church throughout the seven years since the Vatican had first been made fully aware of the problems with sexual abuse and HIV-AIDS by Sister Maura O’Donohue and the other experts.
During the past twenty-five years it must have frequently seemed to the Catholic faithful that no matter which way they turned there was the man from Poland saying ‘no’, particularly when it came to matters that involved sex or the female gender. It was not as if Karol Wojtyla frequently created additional activities to add to the existing list that were banned. It was the constant repetition of what was already proscribed, the total absence of compassion, the obvious relish in the Niagara of angry abominations that cascaded unceasingly from the Pope or his soulmate Cardinal Ratzinger.
Vatican Council II was invariably put to one side and forgotten as the Pope mentally moved back through the nineteenth century, only pausing to pick up the worst legacy of Vatican Council I, the declaration of Papal infallibility. He also embraced Pius IX’s Syllabus Of Errors and the accompanying encyclical Quanta Cura.
John Paul II had much in common with Pius IX, a man who showed an intense dislike for democratic government and a preference for absolute monarchies. Pius also denounced ‘the proponents of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion’ as well as ‘all of those who assert that the Church may not use force’. Spiritually, Wojtyla seemed to have been living some time after the onset of the sixteenth-century Counter Reformation and before the Papal States were finally lost in the mid-nineteenth century.
Apart from Mother Teresa and the Virgin Mary, his understanding of women was severely limited. The issue of women priests is a further example, not of a failure of communication so much as an inability to comprehend.
Sister Kane’s courageous confrontation of the Pope in October 1979 on the issue of women priests has been recorded within an earlier chapter, as has his comment back in Rome when he dismissed the nun and her supporters as women who were ‘irritated and embittered for nothing’.
The Pope’s inflexibility was not confined to doctrinal matters. His bigotry was equally set in concrete. He brooked no argument, no discussion and no exchange of views. On the issue of women priests, the Pope declared: ‘It will never happen and it is not to be discussed.’
With the Church suffering a continually growing shortage of priests during the late Pope’s entire papacy, with devout, highly intelligent, multi-talented women begging for the opportunity to join the priesthood, every available opinion poll suggests that the solution of women priests would be welcome throughout the entire Catholic world – except for the Holy See.
There are no scriptural objections that the Pope, Ratzinger and the rest of the reactionaries could produce; instead they were reduced to declaring that Christ did not choose any women for Apostles. He did not choose any Gentiles either.
When the Anglican Church began to ordain women priests in 1982, apoplectic reaction was not confined to the ranks of the Protestant traditionalists. It was very evident within the congregation buildings in Rome.
Prior to that, notwithstanding all the fanciful talk of reconciliation, it would have taken a number of miracles before Rome and Canterbury might close the gap.
Full reconciliation between the two main branches of Christianity is at least three Popes away. By that time there will be a minority of university-educated women left in the Church.
It is invariably the mother rather than the father who ensures the faith continues down the line. Alienate the mother and you will alienate the family. The Vatican with its normal long view of history believes firstly that feminism is ‘something’ confined to the United States and, secondly, ‘It is a passing fashion.’ Every day that view is maintained is another day of damage for a Church that has been haemorrhaging its lifeblood since artificial birth control was banned in 1968.
The Pope’s lack of practical compassion was further demonstrated in his response to requests from priests who had asked to be released from their vows in order to return to a lay status. Paul VI had granted nearly 33,000 such requests. Soon after his election, John Paul II stopped the automatic granting of what he described as ‘decrees of laicisation’. For him priesthood was a vocation for life. He could not accept that vocations may be lost. Direct pressure alone made him change course. According to one Vatican source,
‘It was only when the Pope was preparing for his first trip to Brazil in 1980 that he moved on the question on laicisation. The Brazilian bishops told him that if he had not officially indicated before the trip that steps were in hand to create legislation that would enable men to leave the priesthood he would be facing public demonstrations during his Brazilian tour from large numbers of priests. That got it moving and the new deal was made public in the autumn.’
To judge from what the Vatican source told me, the new deal that Pope John Paul II created brought great anguish over the ensuing years. A man can leave the priesthood only if one of three conditions applies.
First, a long period has passed since he had lived as a priest and his current situation was not one he could walk away from, the unspoken assumption being that he had a wife and family.
Second, the applicant had been partly or totally coerced into the priesthood.
Third, his superiors had failed to notice early enough that he was not suited for the celibate life.
Thus two of the three criteria have a sexual orientation.
The idea that a priest, like a nurse, a teacher, a doctor or a member of dozens of vocational professions could lose his vocation for a myriad of reasons ranging from disenchantment or loneliness to spiritual burnout apparently never occurred to the Pope and his advisors. Without papal dispensation many are condemned to live in a half world, neither priest nor layman.
So we have a Church where women cannot enter the priesthood and men find it nearly impossible to leave.
Chief among Karol Wojtyla’s many advisors was the man who in December 1981 was appointed Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Holy Office. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has earned over the years a number of other titles including Vatican Enforcer. The neutering of the German theologian Hans Küng was orchestrated by Ratzinger even before he ascended to such high Vatican office. The list of some of the Catholic Church’s finest scholars and thinkers silenced by Ratzinger over the past 24 years is lengthy.
Small surprise then that according to Clifford Longley, editorial consultant for the Tablet and long time internationally respected religious affairs author and journalist, Cardinal Ratzinger is ‘disliked and feared throughout the Catholic world’.
And not only the Catholic world. In 1986 the cardinal, with the full support of the Pope, issued his letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons. It began by reminding the reader of the contents of the document quoted at the start of this chapter, the 1975 document on sexual ethics issued by one of Ratzinger’s predecessors, Cardinal Seper, which had talked of the current period of moral corruption as ‘the unbridled exaltation of sex’.
Cardinal Ratzinger was concerned that after the 1975 document
‘an overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral or even good. Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed towards those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not.’
Ratzinger has condemned homosexual activity because ‘It is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so thwarts the call to life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living.’ But this is precisely the same situation which every celibate priest and virgin religious vows to uphold. Ratzinger has asserted that in denying either passive or active homosexuals their freedom of thought and action the Church ‘does not limit but rather defends personal freedom and dignity realistically and authentically understood’. He regards the abandonment of homosexual activity as a ‘conversion from evil’. For a letter that claims to be concerned with the pastoral care of the homosexual, its tone is one of singular hostility not least in the final injunction,
‘All support should be withdrawn from any organisations which seek to undermine the teaching of the Church, which are ambiguous about it, or which neglect it entirely. Special attention should be given to the practice of scheduling religious services and to the use of Church buildings by these groups, including the facilities of Catholic schools and colleges.’
The Pope not only wholeheartedly approved of this position during his regular Friday meetings with Cardinal Ratzinger, but greatly assisted in the creation of such documents. Another example occurred when the Vatican’s Enforcer issued a further proclamation in 1992, entitled ‘Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons’. It was one part of the Vatican’s attempt to mobilise Roman Catholic opinion against equal rights legislation for homosexual men and women currently imminent to a number of countries. After restating many of the views and directives contained in his 1986 letter, Cardinal Ratzinger defined who should and who should not be granted the right to be protected from discrimination. ‘Sexual orientation does not constitute a quality comparable to race, ethnic background etc. in respect to non-discrimination. Unlike these, homosexual orientation is an objective disorder and evokes moral concern.’ After a series of attempted justifications for this position the Cardinal observed,
‘In addition, there is a danger that legislation which would make homosexuality a basis for entitlements could actually encourage a person with a homosexual orientation to declare his homosexuality or even to seek a partner in order to exploit the provisions of the law.’
Ratzinger did not confine himself to specific areas such as the potential of adoption or foster care by a homosexual couple: he clearly wished to keep homosexuals confined as second-class citizens because in his mind they were obviously second-class human beings. During the summer of 2003 the Pope and Ratzinger grew increasingly concerned, in the light of actual or prospective legislation in many countries, that they were losing the argument. They took to the barricades once more and yet another document emerged from Ratzinger’s congregation that showed a nut-like resistance to a rising wave of tolerance and understanding of homosexuals across many societies.
‘Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimisation of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval of legalisation of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.’
Ratzinger then told the reader:
‘In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognised or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty . . . One must refrain from any kind of formal co-operation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.’
One can only wonder precisely how many international criminal lawyers Ratzinger had consulted and taken opinion from before issuing such a foolish and dangerous doctrine. In Ratzinger’s view no law was valid that granted any legal rights ‘analogous to those granted to marriage, to unions between person of the same sex’. Writing on homosexual marriage, Ratzinger in 2003 used the same argument:
‘Homosexual unions are totally lacking in the biological and anthropological elements of marriage and family which would be the basis, on the level of reason, for granting them legal recognition. Such unions are not able to contribute in a proper way to the procreation and survival of the human race.’
Like much of Cardinal Ratzinger’s work, the sting was reserved for his closing thoughts. These dealt with the position of the Catholic politician when confronted with proposed legislation to recognise homosexual unions. Ratzinger instructed that the Catholic politician had ‘a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral.’ If such a law had already been passed, Ratzinger advised the politician that ‘he should oppose, try to repeal it and do everything he could to limit its harm’. The reader will notice that in Ratzinger’s world all politicians are male.
If at the beginning of Pope John Paul II’s papacy the issue of clerical sexual abuse had been addressed with a fraction of the vigour that the Church has expended on its persecution of homosexuals, the scandal would have been resolved nearly twenty years ago. What the Pope and his cardinal were attempting through this line of attack on homosexuals was not merely to undermine the historic separation between church and state but in doing so to pre-empt the democratic process. Unelected men sitting in the Vatican were demanding that their views and opinions should not merely prevail for the Roman Catholic faithful but for all non-Catholics as well.
The Catholic faith is not the only branch of Christianity currently struggling with the issue of homosexuality. The Anglican Church is on the verge of schism over precisely the same controversy, yet even as it perches on the edge of the precipice its leader Dr Rowan Williams still manages to maintain a calm, reasoned, conciliatory position to both the pro and anti groups within his flock. Instead, when the Pope met the Archbishop of Canterbury in October 2003, he lectured the Archbishop and then attacked him for ‘undermining Christ’s teaching’ and accused him of caving in to secularist pressure. The fact that the Vatican is awash with homosexuals was ignored by the Pope, and the Archbishop diplomatically neglected to point it out to him.
As Christianity and its leaders were confronted in many parts of the world with an increasingly secular society, the Pope and his advisors within the Church chose to revert to a pre-Vatican Council II position. We are back to the reign of the papacy that gave the world the Syllabus Of Errors and the accompanying encyclical Quanta Cura. In these, Pius IX denounced unrestricted liberty of speech and the freedom of press comment. The concept of equal status for all religions was totally rejected. To Pius IX ‘Error has no rights’, a view demonstrably shared by both Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger.
The combination of Karol Wojtyla and his enforcer Ratzinger most certainly spread considerable apprehension among a fair percentage of Catholic theologians. Among those silenced was the Brazilian theologian Father Leonardo Boff, one of many who suffered because of his support of liberation theology. He was ordered to refrain from speaking, teaching and publishing his views and was eventually driven out of the priesthood in the early 1990s. Another theologian who suffered from what critics described as ‘Ratzinger’s excessive zeal’ was Father Jacques Dupuis, a professor at the Gregorian University in Rome who dared to see value in non-Christian religions. In view of the fact that the then Cardinal Ratzinger extends his contempt beyond non-Christians to include non-Roman Catholic branches of Christianity, finding them ‘in a gravely deficient situation’, a hard time from Ratzinger and his underlings was inevitable. It duly arrived. Dupuis, a seriously ill man at the time of his inquisition by Ratzinger in 2000, died in 2004.
The list of those theologians who were either silenced, driven out or damaged by the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is impressive and inevitably includes the father of Liberation Theology, Father Gustavo Gutièrrez, subjected to a witch hunt by the Peruvian bishops on Ratzinger’s orders. It is probably cold comfort to the Catholic laity who have suffered and continue to suffer from a variety of edicts that flowed from the late Pope and his executioner but they certainly have some very illustrious companions.
Today within the higher reaches of the Vatican, the railing at the modern world on occasions reaches the surreal. Ratzinger, who enjoys playing the music of Beethoven for relaxation, has described rock music as
‘an expression of base passions, which, in large musical gatherings, assumes cult characteristics or even becomes a counter cult opposed to Christianity. Rock music seeks to falsely liberate man though a phenomenon of mass, underpinned by rhythm, noise and lighting effects.’
He further believed that pop music is ‘an industrially produced . . . cult of banality’ and concluded opera had ‘eaten away at the sacred’ in the last century.
For both the late John Paul II and his successor, followers of any religion other than Roman Catholicism are in ‘a gravely deficient situation’ – so much for ecumenical and inter-religious advancement. With the release of the document Dominus Iesus in December 2000, the Vatican reaffirmed its doctrine that the Catholic Church is the only ‘true’ Church. Ratzinger has also written, ‘Catholics don’t want to impose Christ on the Jews, but they are waiting for the moment when Israel says yes to Christ.’
During the first week of November 2003, John Paul II declared himself ‘satisfied’ with the ecumenical efforts undertaken during his pontificate. He remarked that ‘the ecumenical progress of the past twenty-five years has been substantial’.
Given the Pope’s comments to the leader of the Anglican Church, the publication of a document that has asserted the followers of all other Churches and faiths are gravely deficient, and the virtual state of war that exists between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church, the Pope’s satisfaction remains a mystery.
The Vatican gave a powerful demonstration on 29 November 2005 that Karol Wojtyla lives on, not only in spirit but in the earthly form of his successor, when it released an Instruction on homosexuals and seminaries. The document, the product of more than a decade of deliberation, was prepared at the request of the late Pope and is the first Instruction to be issued during the pontificate of Benedict XVI. It bans homosexual men from the seminaries. Would-be priests who experience a ‘transitory problem’ could still be ordained, provided they had lived a chaste life for a period of three years. As for the many thousands of active homosexual priests around the world and the active homosexual bishops and cardinals, the Instruction was silent.
The Catholic Church hardly ever recognises a divorce or a second marriage while the original spouse is still alive. The solution for those wishing to remarry and remain good Catholics is to seek an annulment, in which the Church after due process rules that a perfectly valid marriage never existed in the first place. Such an arrangement is inevitably open to abuse. In Italy on 3 July 1974 Claudio Cesareo and Marina Volpato contracted a marriage at a religious ceremony held in the parish Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Near the end of 1980 Claudio left the marital home to continue an adulterous affair. He continued sleeping with his wife and ten months later he returned to Marina shortly before she gave birth to their first child. In 1984 a second child was born. Both children were christened and the father arranged for their first communion and subsequently his elder daughter’s confirmation.
A devout man, Cesareo had attended a pre-marriage course with Marina during which the couple became fully conversant with the various religious obligations they were about to acquire. He also attended a wide variety of religious services including the celebration of various wedding anniversaries and religious funeral services. He also insisted that he and his wife should go to the shrine of Medjugorje in Yugoslavia and kneel in prayer before the Holy Virgin. In 1993 Claudio again left the marital home, this time permanently. He set up home with a Danish girl and this relationship produced a son. Marina, eventually accepting that the marriage was at an end and anxious that her two young daughters should at least be materially provided for by their father, sued for a civil divorce during which she had every expectation that the court would make adequate provision for the children.
In an attempt to avoid alimony payments, Claudio turned to the Vicariate of Vatican City seeking an annulment. Initially his grounds were that though he had gone through a religious ceremony he did not and never had believed in God. Advised by the court officials that in the light of his attention to a wide variety of religious activities the contention that he was an atheist was going to be rather difficult to establish, Claudio changed his position. He ‘acquired’ a witness who stated that before the wedding Cesareo had told him that he did not believe in the indissolubility of the Wedding Sacrament. Cases such as this are helped considerably if money is placed in the right places; Marina’s father Sergio would insist that this case was no different. The Vatican Tribunal found in favour of Claudio and magically his marriage was annulled. Notwithstanding the physical evidence of a wife and two children, his marriage had never existed and as such no alimony was due. The court also ruled that, if she wanted, Marina was free to get married but Claudio was forbidden to ‘remarry without previously consulting the local ordinary’.
A few years before this sad tale reached its conclusion, Cardinal Ratzinger in yet another edict from his office to bishops throughout the world stated that divorced Catholics in unsanctioned second marriages cannot receive Communion unless they renounce sex. Demonstrably, any estranged couple wishing to avoid a life of celibacy should abandon divorce plans, ‘acquire’ a couple of persuasive witnesses and head for the Vatican courts. In January 2002 while addressing members of the Roman Rota the Pope suggested to the lawyers gathered before him that they might invoke their rights of conscience to avoid becoming involved in divorce cases. One eminent Italian lawyer was heard to mutter, ‘What – and lose two thirds of my income?’
By March 2004 only three countries still maintained a complete ban on divorce and one of them, Chile, the only country in the Americas where the total ban applied, had initiated legislation to legalise divorce. It had been a long and bitter fight with a resistance headed by the Catholic Church. Before the end of the year, divorce was legalised, dealing a stunning and humiliating defeat to the Church. Only Malta and the Philippines remain as divorce-free zones.