by David Lodge
This was not, however, quite such a daft development as it seems on first consideration, for the issue of contraception was in fact one which drew in its train a host of more profound questions and implications, especially about the pleasure principle and its place in the Christian scheme of salvation. It may seem bizarre that Catholics should have been solemnly debating whether it was right for married couples to use reliable methods of contraception at a time when society at large was calling into question the value of monogamy itself – when schoolgirls still in gym-slips were being put on the Pill by their mothers, when young couples were living together in what used to be called sin as a matter of course, adultery was being institutionalized as a party game, and the arts and mass media were abandoning all restraints in the depiction and celebration of sexuality. But in fact there was a more than merely ironic connection between these developments inside and outside the Church. The availability of effective contraception was the thin end of a wedge of modern hedonism that had already turned Protestantism into a parody of itself and was now challenging the Roman Catholic ethos. Conservatives in the Church who predicted that approval of contraception for married couples would inevitably lead sooner or later to a general relaxation of traditional moral standards and indirectly encourage promiscuity, marital infidelity, sexual experiment and deviation of every kind, were essentially correct, and it was disingenuous of liberal Catholics to deny it. On the other hand, the conservatives had unknowingly conceded defeat long before by approving, however grudgingly, the use of the Rhythm or Safe Method. Let me explain. (Patience, the story will resume shortly.)
It has always been recognized that the sexual act has two aspects or functions: I, procreation and II, the reciprocal giving and receiving of sensual pleasure. In traditional Catholic theology, Sex II was only legitimate as an incentive to, or spin-off from, Sex I – which of course was restricted to married couples; and some of the early Fathers thought that even for married couples, Sex II was probably a venial sin. With the development of a more humane theology of marriage, Sex II was dignified as the expression of mutual love between spouses, but it was still forbidden to separate this from Sex I, until the twentieth century, when, at first cautiously, and then more and more explicitly, the Church began to teach that married couples might deliberately confine their sexual intercourse to the infertile period of the woman’s monthly cycle in order to regulate their families. This permission was still hedged about with qualifications – the method was only to be used with “serious reasons” – but the vital principle had been conceded: Sex II was a Good Thing In Itself. Catholic pastoral and theological literature on the subject of marriage took up the topic with enthusiasm; the bad old days of repression, of shame and fear about human sexuality, were denounced – it was all the fault of St Paul, or Augustine, or Plato – anyway, it was all a regrettable mistake; and married couples were joyfully urged to make love with, metaphorically speaking (and literally too if they liked), the lights on.
This was all very well, but certain consequences followed. If Sex II is recognized as a Good Thing In Itself, it is difficult to set limits, other than the general humanistic rule that nobody should be hurt, on how it may be enjoyed. For example, the traditional Christian disapproval of extramarital sex had an obvious social justification as a means of ensuring responsible parenthood and avoiding inbreeding, but with the development of efficient contraception these arguments lost most of their force, as secular society had already discovered by the mid-twentieth century. Why, therefore, should responsible adults have to be married to share with each other something Good In Itself? Or to take a more extreme example, anal intercourse, whether homosexual or heterosexual, had always been condemned in terms of the deepest loathing by traditional Christian moralists, sodomy being listed in the Penny Catechism as one of the Four Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance (the others, you may be curious to know, being Wilful Murder, Oppression of the Poor, and Defrauding Labourers of Their Wages). But if the sharing of sexual pleasure is a Good Thing In Itself, irrespective of the procreative function, it is difficult to see any objections, other than hygienic and aesthetic ones, to anal intercourse between consenting adults, for who is harmed by it? The same applies to masturbation, whether solitary or mutual, and oral-genital sex. As long as non-procreative orgasms are permitted, what does it matter how they are achieved?
Thus it can be seen that the ban on artificial birth control, the insistence that every sexual act must remain, at least theoretically, open to the possibility of conception, was the last fragile barrier holding back the Catholic community from joining the great collective pursuit of erotic fulfilment increasingly obsessing the rest of Western society in the sixth decade of the twentieth century; but the case for the ban had been fatally weakened by the admission that marital sex might be confined to the “safe period” with the deliberate intention of avoiding conception. In practice, the Safe Method was so unreliable that many couples wondered if it hadn’t been approved only because it wasn’t safe, thus ensuring that Catholics were restrained by the consciousness that they might after all have to pay the traditional price for their pleasure. Clerical and medical apologists for the method, however, never admitted as much; on the contrary, they encouraged the faithful with assurances that Science would soon make the Safe Method as reliable as artificial contraception. (Father Brierley’s Parish Priest, in the course of a heated argument, assured him that “the Yanks were working on a little gadget like a wristwatch that would make it as simple as telling the time.”) But the greater the efforts made to achieve this goal, the more difficult it became to distinguish between the permitted and forbidden methods. There was nothing, for instance, noticeably “natural” about sticking a thermometer up your rectum every morning compared to slipping a diaphragm into your vagina at night. And if the happy day did ever dawn when the Safe Method was pronounced as reliable as the Pill, what possible reason, apart from medical or economic considerations, could there be for choosing one method rather than the other? And in that case, why wait till then to make up your mind?
Following such a train of thought to its logical conclusion, millions of married Catholics had, like Michael and Miriam, come to a decision to use artificial contraception without dropping out of the Church. Some couples needed the impetus of a special hardship or particular crisis to take this step (Angela went on the Pill immediately after the birth of her mentally handicapped child; and Tessa, though happily her new baby was born sound and healthy, followed suit, with Edward’s full support, neither of them being inclined to take any further risks) but once they had done so it seemed such an obviously sensible step to take that they could hardly understand why they had hesitated so long. It helped, of course – indeed, it was absolutely vital – that, as explained above, they had lost the fear of Hell, since the whole system of religious authority and obedience in which they had been brought up, binding the Church together in a pyramid of which the base was the laity and the apex the Pope, depended on the fear of Hell as its ultimate sanction. If a Catholic couple decided, privately and with a clear conscience, to use contraceptives, there was nothing that priest, bishop or Pope could do to stop them (except, in some countries, making the wherewithal difficult to obtain). Thus contraception was the issue on which many lay Catholics first attained moral autonomy, rid themselves of superstition, and ceased to regard their religion as, in the moral sphere, an encyclopaedic rule-book in which a clear answer was to be found to every possible question of conduct. They were not likely to be persuaded to reverse their decision by the tired arguments of Humanae Vitae, and some previously loyal souls were actually provoked by it into joining the rebels (Adrian, who had been teetering on the contraceptive brink for years, was so exasperated by the first reports of the encyclical that he rushed out of the house and startled the local chemist’s shop by strident demands for “a gross of sheaths prophylactic” – a phrase he dimly remembered from Army invoices, but which smote strangely on the ears of the girl behind
the counter). Of course, there were many Catholics who with more or less resignation continued to believe that the Pope’s word was law, and many who disobeyed it with a residual sense of guilt that they were never able to lose completely, and yet others who finally left the Church in despair or disgust; but on the whole the most remarkable aspect of the whole affair was the newfound moral independence of the laity which it gradually revealed. Indeed, it could be said that those who suffered most from Humanae Vitae were not married lay folk at all, but the liberal and progressive clergy.
Conservative bishops and priests had the satisfaction of seeing their beliefs and pastoral practice endorsed by the Pope, but those who had, in the period of uncertainty immediately preceding the publication of HV, interpreted the rules flexibly, or actually argued the case for their revision, were now awkwardly placed. What was for the laity a question of conduct which they might settle privately according to their own consciences, was for the clergy a question of doctrine and obedience that was necessarily public. The Holy Father had spoken, and bishops and priests, whatever their own opinions about the matter, were required to promulgate and enforce his message from the pulpit and in the confessional. Some were only too pleased to do so; but many were not, and feared massive disillusionment and disaffection among the laity if the Church simply reverted to the old hard-line teaching. Bishops were in a particularly difficult position, because they could not reject Humanae Vitae without the risk of provoking schism. What the more liberal hierarchies did was to make a minimalist interpretation of the encyclical – to say that, while contraception was, as the Pope affirmed, objectively wrong, there might be subjective circumstances which made it so venial a sin as scarcely to be worth worrying about, and certainly not a reason for ceasing to go to mass and Holy Communion. By this casuistry they accepted HV in principle while encouraging a tolerant and flexible approach to its enforcement in pastoral practice. Most of the priests who had been dismayed by the encyclical accepted this compromise, but some were unwilling or unable to do so, and if their bishop or religious superior happened to be conservative and authoritarian, the consequences could be serious.
Such priests were apt to become acutely conscious of internal contradictions in their own vocations. For the more deeply they were driven, by the pressure of debate and the threats of ecclesiastical discipline, to analyse the grounds of their dissent from HV, the further they were carried towards an endorsement of sexual pleasure as a Good Thing In Itself. And the further they were carried in that direction, the more problematical their own vows of celibacy appeared. As long as sexual pleasure had been viewed with suspicion by Christian divines, as something hostile to spirituality, lawful only as part of man’s procreative function in God’s scheme, the vow of celibacy had obvious point. Unmarried and chaste, the priest was materially free to serve his flock, and spiritually free from the distractions of fleshly indulgence. But when the new theology of marriage began to emerge, in which sexual love was redeemed from the repression and reticence of the past, and celebrated as (in the words of the Catholic Theological Society of America) “self-liberating, other-enriching, honest, faithful, socially responsible, life-giving and joyous,” the value of celibacy no longer seemed self-evident, and a progressive priest might find himself in the paradoxical position of defending the right of the laity to enjoy pleasures he himself had renounced long ago, on grounds he no longer believed in. A similar collapse of confidence in the value of vowed virginity affected nuns.
Of course, it could still be argued that, without families of their own to care for, priests and nuns were free to dedicate themselves to the service of others; but this argument, too, only holds good as long as reliable contraception is forbidden. Otherwise, why should not priests and nuns marry each other, and take vows of sterility rather than chastity, forgoing the satisfactions of having offspring in order to serve the community at large, but still enjoying the consolations of that interpersonal genital communion which, the orthodox wisdom of the modern age insists, is essential to mental and physical health? For that matter, why, given new control over their own biology, should not women themselves be priests? For the prejudice against the ordination of women is demonstrably rooted in traditional sexual attitudes rather than in theology or logic.
The crisis in the Church over birth control was not, therefore, the absurd diversion from more important matters that it first appeared to many observers, for it compelled thoughtful Catholics to re-examine and redefine their views on fundamental issues: the relationship between authority and conscience, between the religious and lay vocations, between flesh and spirit. The process of questioning and revision it triggered off continues, although Humanae Vitae itself is a dead letter to most of the laity and merely an embarrassing nuisance to most of the clergy. It is clear that the liberal, hedonistic spirit has achieved irresistible momentum within the Church as without, that young Catholics now reaching adulthood have much the same views about the importance of sexual fulfilment and the control of fertility as their non-Catholic peers, and that it is only a matter of time before priests are allowed to marry and women are ordained. There is, however, no cause for progressives to gloat or for conservatives to sulk. Let copulation thrive, by all means; but man cannot live by orgasms alone, and he certainly cannot die by them, except, very occasionally, in the clinical sense. The good news about sexual satisfaction has little to offer those who are crippled, chronically sick, mad, ugly, impotent – or old, which all of us will be in due course, unless we are dead already. Death, after all, is the overwhelming question to which sex provides no answer, only an occasional brief respite from thinking about it. But enough of this philosophizing.
Early in 1969, nearly everyone who used to attend the Thursday morning masses in the old days at Our Lady and St Jude’s received long-distance phone calls from Adrian. Most of them had been out of touch with him for many years, but he spoke to them as if it was only yesterday that they had breakfasted at Lyons in the Tottenham Court Road. He had traced Michael’s phone number through a Catholic periodical for which Michael occasionally wrote book reviews, and from Michael he got Dennis’s number, and so on. Adrian sat at his desk in the Town Hall where he worked and dialled them all on STD, robbing the ratepayers without qualms because it was in a good cause, and the cause was short of funds. He was chairman of a lay pressure group calling itself Catholics for an Open Church, COC for short, which had recently been formed, in Adrian’s words, “to fight HV and help priests who are in trouble over it”. One of these priests was Father Brierley.
“That meek little man who married Angela and Dennis?” said Miriam. “I’d never have thought he had it in him.”
“Seems he read out his bishop’s pastoral letter about Humanae Vitae, which was pretty hard-line, and then told the congregation it was still a matter of conscience.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, then a reporter on the local paper interviewed him and he said that personally he thought the Pope was up the creek, or words to that effect, and some mean-minded parishioner sent a cutting to the bishop.”
“And what does Adrian Whatsisname want us to do about it?”
“He wants us to join this Catholics for an Open Church thing, and sign an open letter to the Cardinal about Father Brierley and the other suspended priests.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
“The College Governors won’t like it,” said Michael, somewhat sheepishly.
“To hell with them,” said Miriam.
“You know I’ll be up for promotion soon?”
“To hell with that.”
“OK,” said Michael. “I’ll tell Adrian we’ll join.”
As always, he admired Miriam’s moral certitude. Breathing it in as if she had handed him an oxygen mask, he felt suddenly strong and reckless, excited by the possibilities of Catholics for an Open Church. The spirit of protest was abroad, but Michael had not yet been able to find a cause he could plausibly identify with. He was too old for the s
tudent movement, too apolitical for the New Left (Slant had finally bored him), too moral (or too timid) for the Counter Culture of drugs, rock and casual sex. He was finding himself pushed to the margins of the decade, forced into a posture of conservatism and conventionality which made him feel as if his youth were disappearing at an ever-increasing speed, like the earth beneath an astronaut. The idea of challenging ecclesiastical authority in the cause of sexual fulfilment for married couples and freedom of speech for priests seemed an opportunity to hitch his wagon to the Zeitgeist in good faith. Michael did not, of course, analyse his motives as explicitly as this, and did not understand (he accounted for it purely as impulse buying) why, shortly after sending off his subscription to Catholics for an Open Church, he bought a pair of the new-style trousers with flared bottoms and a copy of the Beatles “white” double album, his first non-classical record. He had joined the sixties, in the nick of time.
Michael wore his new trousers to the first annual general meeting of Catholics for an Open Church, held in London that summer, but it proved to be a sadly unfashionable gathering on the whole. Adrian, in the chair, set the sartorial keynote in his business suit, shiny with wear and bulging at the breast pocket with a quiverful of ballpoint pens, flashes of colour against the dark blue serge like the silk markers of his missal in the gloom of Our Lady and St Jude’s. He was going bald but did not seem otherwise noticeably different from those days – still stiff, impatient and dogmatic, though he had moved across the ideological spectrum from Right to Left in the meantime. A cursory glance around the hall, hired for the day from the Quakers, told Michael that he had not joined the equivalent of Californian Flower Power or the Paris student communes. Most of the occupants of the rows of bentwood chairs were ordinary, plain-featured, drably dressed, middle-class couples in their late thirties or early forties, with a sprinkling of older people whose concern about HV must, he assumed, be entirely academic. Indeed, some of the younger members seemed anxious to claim a similar disinterestedness. “We find that the Safe Method works perfectly well for us,” said one man to Michael and Miriam over coffee, his wife, with her mouth full of biscuit, nodding eager agreement, “but we sympathize with others less fortunate.” Another man, with a bushy beard and huge, horny-toed feet in sandals, said, “Have you ever tried coitus reservatus? It’s highly recommended by Eastern mystics. Of course, you have to learn the meditative techniques that go with it.” “A bit risky while you’re learning, isn’t it?” said Michael. Behind him a woman was saying, “I wouldn’t care about the population explosion if only it wasn’t happening in our house.”
