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The Human Body: The Formation of a Correct Conscience

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

This is the eighth installment of my commentary on The Human Body: a sign of dignity and a gift by Fr. Richard M. Hogan. For publication details, see the blog for September 9, 2007.

On page 27 of his 38-page booklet, The Human Body, Fr. Richard Hogan begins a section titled “Formation of Conscience.” In the five pages of this section, Fr. Hogan weaves together ten quotations from Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of the Truth), an encyclical of Pope John Paul II. This section with its heavy use of the words of John Paul II has the drawback of being somewhat difficult to read—a characteristic of the late Pope’s style of writing. The substance requires several readings but it is sound.

After the last quotation, Fr. Hogan takes up the issue of acting in good faith but with an erroneous conscience. That is, the person thought that an objectively evil action was a good action and did it. He puts it this way: “In other words, if we honestly judged an act morally acceptable and did it, and then later discovered it was morally unacceptable, the goodness of the act we did does not change.” That’s not a good choice of words. The action was objectively an evil action. The evil of the action remains. The issue here is personal culpability. The person who does an evil action but thought it was a good action does not incur the personal culpability of sin at the time of the action. Nor does he incur it when he later learns that the action was evil.

That raises the question, “How can a person think that an evil action is a good action?” That, in turn, introduces the issues of vincible ignorance and invincible ignorance, and Fr. Hogan did not address those issues; after all, he wrote a booklet, not a book. “Vincible” is a Latin derivative meaning “conquerable,” so invincible ignorance is the sort of ignorance you can overcome in your circumstances and therefore you should overcome it. Invincible ignorance is the sort of ignorance that you cannot overcome in your circumstances at that time.

In my Sex and the Marriage Covenant, Chapter 6 deals with “Fundamentals about Conscience” and gets into these matters in some detail. Chapter 7, “Forming a Correct Conscience” explores this more fully and then applies the principles to the issue of forming a correct conscience on birth control. In it you will find significant documentation showing that Pope John Paul II amply fulfilled the requirements of Vatican II for teaching in such a way as to require “religious submission of will and of mind . . . to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra” (Lumen Gentium, The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, n. 25 ).

The last section of The Human Body is titled “Marriage as a Sacrament.” Here Fr. Hogan uses the fivefold description of love used previously in the booklet. “As we have seen, love always is 1) a choice 2) based on knowledge. This choice is 3) a self-gift and this self-gift is 4) permanent and 5) life-giving.” It’s easy to see how that applies to marriage itself; it is not so clear how that applies to other individual acts of love such as serving in a soup kitchen. That sentence led me to search the booklet, and in my hasty review of underlined passages, I couldn’t find any sentence in which Fr. Hogan clearly teaches what the individual marriage act ought to be. That’s a great advantage of the covenant theology of human sexuality. It has no problem in teaching that each and every marriage act ought to be a true marriage act, at least implicitly a renewal of the marriage covenant.

In this section, Fr. Hogan does a nice job of weaving together eight quotations from the Catechism of the Catholic Church and two from the Catholic Church’s Rite of Marriage. He concludes with a teaching that needs to be repeated over and over again, namely, that marriage is the normal way in which spouses are called to help each other on the way to heaven.

Overall evaluation. While this booklet has its good points, I think its negatives are sufficiently strong that it should be withdrawn from circulation. It would benefit by a careful review by an ecclesiastical reader in an official, canonical procedure to secure a diocesan “Permission to publish.” In addition, I think the author would do well to read these commentaries. I am sure that Fr. Hogan meant well in writing this booklet, just as I hope that he would grant that I have meant well in writing these commentaries. Still, good intentions do not guarantee excellence, and I realize that applies to my comments as well as to his writing. I am happy to state that these commentaries are now completed.

In these commentaries, I have several times referred to Sex and the Marriage Covenant for further reading. If you are interested in the faith and theological issues involved in the birth control question, please read it. Ignatius Press graciously published a second edition in 2005, and you can order it through our home page. Tracy Jamison, Ph.D., has astutely taken issue with one of my conclusions in the book in an article published in Homelitic & Pastoral Review.

Next week: A Special Message from Sheila

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius, 2005)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, readable, and free e-book available for downloading at www.NFPandmore.org .

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The Human Body: The Sterilized Couple and the Theology of the Body

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

This is the seventh installment of my commentary on The Human Body: a sign of dignity and a gift by Fr. Richard M. Hogan. For publication details, see the blog for September 9, 2007.

In his treatment of sexual sterilization and subsequent contraceptively sterilized intercourse, Fr. Richard Hogan makes a four-sentence parenthetical statement that, in my opinion, undermines his entire treatment of contraception and sterilization. In my blog published on October 14, I explained why I think he errs in his treatment of the requirement for the sterilized person to undergo reversal surgery. I showed that there is a long standing theological and common sense tradition requiring reversal surgery under the appropriate conditions.

Father Hogan then continues: “Having confessed the sin and received absolution, a sterilized person can truly love his or her spouse in and through the body because he or she can intend to give himself or herself totally to the spouse.” That raises several questions. First of all, why does he speak of “the sin” and not all the sins of contraceptively sterilized intercourse? There was one sin of mutilation, but there were presumably many sins of contraceptive behavior.

Second, what do confession and absolution have to do with future behavior? In confession, you confess sins you have already committed. You do not get permission to commit the same sins in the future. In the traditional act of contrition, you pledge to “amend my life.” What does that mean except to change the behavior that you are now confessing? So how can a priest “give permission” to continue to engage in contraceptively sterilized intercourse? How can you give yourself such “permission” if you are truly repentant?

What is so terribly disappointing in such a treatment today, no matter how common it has been for the past 30 to 40 years, is that it contradicts one of the basic purposes of the papal Theology of the Body, namely, to take the body seriously. In his General Audience talk of July 11, 1984, Pope John Paul II spoke about the need to respect the “fundamental structure” of the marriage act. In his talk about a month later, August 8, he noted that no matter what the reasons for contraceptive behavior, “this does not change the moral character which is based on the very structure of the conjugal act as such” (italics in original).

In his next two talks (August 22 and the next week), the Pope spoke about the need for self-mastery. “Man is precisely a person because he is master of himself and has self-control. Indeed, insofar as he is master of himself he can give himself to the other” (August 22, emphasis added). Continuing to have contraceptively sterilized intercourse during the fertile time makes a mockery of that idea.

The reality is that when a person sterilizes herself or himself, she or he does not merely tinker with a bodily organ. The whole gist of reality and of the Theology of the Body, as I understand it, is that the person has sterilized her self or his self. Father Hogan attempts to get around that by teaching that after confession the sterilized person’s acts of contraceptively sterilized intercourse during the fertile time are acts of true marital love “because he or she can intend to give himself or herself totally to the spouse” (emphasis added). Not at all, no more than a person using condoms can intend to give himself or herself totally to the spouse. One can imagine similar intentions by those committing adultery, fornication, and other sins. To adapt the old saying, “hell is paved with wishful intentions.” What the Pope said above about the moral character of the act being based on the structure of the conjugal act holds true. The idea of the Theology of the Body is to put a stop to this “mind-over-matter” dualism in moral theology. What counts first of all is the thing that is actually being done.

What should be done? In my opinion, the sterilized person should undergo reversal surgery as well as undergoing a change of heart. Then the couple should practice systematic NFP. The couple should monitor the wife’s fertility, and they should abstain from the marriage act during the fertile time if they believe they should not become pregnant. They may engage in the marriage act during the time of natural infertility.

What if reversal surgery constitutes a truly extraordinary burden for health or financial reasons? Are such couples morally required to abstain from the marriage act until they are naturally infertile by reason of menopause? In my opinion, no. I believe that the couple should do just as they would if they had undergone the reversal—practice systematic NFP. They should monitor the wife’s fertility and abstain from the marriage act during the fertile time just as they would if they were seeking to avoid pregnancy, and they should not practice shortcut interpretations of her infertility. On the other hand, in my opinion, the repentant sterilized couple for whom reversal surgery is morally impossible may morally engage in the marriage act during the naturally infertile time of the cycle. My reasoning is that the marriage act of the sterilized couple during the infertile time is not contraceptively sterilized during the infertile time of the cycle because of her natural infertility at such times. It is my opinion that at such times her natural infertility pre-empts or overrides the contraceptive effect of the sterilization.

Requiring such abstinence is not an undue burden. Such abstinence is the normal moral requirement for all couples who seriously seek to avoid pregnancy beyond the normal postpartum infertility of breastfeeding. (This obviously does not include couples who decide not to do anything to avoid pregnancy.) It requires that self-mastery which is part of being truly human. Yes, to quote the Pope again, “Man is precisely a person because he is master of himself and has self-control.” If a person thinks that the papal theology of the body is truly instructive, how can he fail to reaffirm this and apply it to persons who have sexually sterilized themselves? Indeed, is not the overriding reason why couples reject systematic NFP and choose sterilization their desire to avoid not just children but especially to avoid periodic abstinence and the self-mastery that it requires?

I do not understand how there can be any widespread authentic renewal in the Church without a renewed moral theology that totally rejects the idea that good intentions can somehow change the morality of an action that is by its nature intrinsically dishonest, to use the terminology of Humanae Vitae. That’s mind-over-matter dualism. It may be responsible for almost as much harm as the open dissent.

I understand that my position challenges other positions. In Sex and the Marriage Covenant, I devote the entirety of Chapter 12, “The Sterilized Couple,” to these issues and respond to the questions that have been raised. For what it’s worth, the priest who read my text as part of the canonical review process called my opinions as expressed in the book not only “probable” but even “probabilior,” that is, more probable. He did not specifically identify this issue, but it is only in this chapter that I differ significantly from other opinions currently accepted as probable.

Next week: The formation of a correct conscience.

John F. Kippley

Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius, 2005)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, readable, and free e-book available for downloading at www.NFPandmore.org.

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The Human Body: Natural Family Planning and the Sterilized Couple

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

This is the sixth installment of my commentary on The Human Body: a sign of dignity and a gift by Fr. Richard M. Hogan. For publication details, see the blog for September 9, 2007.

The last published data (1995) on the use of sterilization by religious classification indicated that Catholics, with a sterilization rate of 40+ percent, were by a small margin the highest users of sexual sterilization as their method of birth control. That certainly reflects negatively on American Catholics especially in the light of the teaching of Humanae Vitae in which Pope Paul VI condemned sterilization right after his condemnation of abortion. “Equally to be excluded, as the teaching authority of the Church has frequently declared, is direct sterilization, whether perpetual or temporary, whether of the man or of the woman” (n.14).

There are two sins involved with using sterilization for birth control. The first is the sin of mutilation, the destruction of a perfectly healthy bodily organ. In his booklet, The Human Body, Father Richard Hogan rightly says that this violates the dignity of the human body. It has long been classified as a serious sin against the Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” The second sin or series of sins is engaging in sexually sterilized intercourse. This is the sin of contraception.

A problem arises when the spouses repent of these sins. As Father Hogan notes, these sins can be forgiven. The problem is this: What do repentance, sorrow for sin, and a firm purpose of amendment require? Is it sufficient to confess the sin, do the canonical penance, and then go on living as before, enjoying the fruits of their sins every time they engage in a contraceptively sterilized “marriage act.” Or does the sterilized person have to undergo reversal surgery or do something else? Father Hogan says, “the Church does not require such a person to undergo an operation to reverse the sterilization procedure.” That is a misleading statement. True, there is no formal teaching document that spells out what is necessary after sterilization, but it is incorrect to think that formal documents are the only way in which moral teaching is conveyed in the Catholic Church.

There is a long-standing tradition in Catholic moral theology that reversal surgery is required if it can be done without being an extraordinary burden on health or finances and has a reasonable chance of success. As I stated in my work, Sex and the Marriage Covenant (SMC), “If reversal surgery were as simple and inexpensive as vasectomies and tubal ligations, then it would be morally required for all as part of their repentance. This is the common teaching of respected moral theologians. However, it is also a principle of moral theology that extraordinary burdens are not normally required as part of repentance” (p. 221). And I went on to name some well known theologians of the 20th century who supported the reversal-requirement position—Arthur Vermeersch, S.J., Hieronymus Noldin, S.J., and Joseph Farraher, S.J. (SMC notes, p.377).

Reversal surgery is common today. On an interstate highway near Cincinnati, there is a full-sized billboard advertising a vasectomy reversal service in Texas. Such surgery isn’t cheap, but it does not constitute an extraordinary burden for many couples today. Many couples seek reversals simply for a practical reason having nothing to do with morality: they want to have more children. Thus, for many couples today, reversal surgery will be a normal moral requirement because it does not constitute any sort of extraordinary burden. Thus it is incorrect to infer that the Catholic moral tradition does not require reversal surgery. After reversal, such couples will observe the wife’s signs of fertility and will abstain from the marriage act during the fertile time if they still intend to avoid pregnancy.

The real question focuses on the couple for whom reversal surgery would constitute truly an extraordinary burden. The question then becomes, what constitutes repentance? Does repentance require me to say in my heart that I wish I had not done the sin and that if the occasion came up again I would not do it over again? I think so. Is a person repentant if he says in this heart that he’s glad he did it and would do it over again if the occasion occurred? How can that attitude be called “repentant”?

Now apply the first notion of repentance to sexual sterilization. If a sterilized person says, “I wish I had not been sterilized and would not do it again,” that means that he or she wishes he or she were still fertile. In turn that means that if the couple were still fertile and did not intend to seek pregnancy, they would abstain during the fertile time. Next, imagine that it would truly be an extraordinary burden for the sterilized person to undergo reversal surgery. The spouses can still live as if they would if they had not been sterilized. That is, they still can monitor the wife’s fertility and abstain during the fertile time. In my opinion, engaging in the marriage act during the naturally infertile time is moot because their sterilization is not acting contraceptively at such times.

Father Hogan offers a different solution. He says that after the sterilized person has “confessed the sin and received absolution” the couple can engage in the marriage act without any further qualifications. “Morally speaking, in this case, the sterilized person is comparable to a naturally infertile person.” I strongly disagree. A better comparison is that the sterilized person is like the person who is living in the state that Jesus calls adultery: a valid marriage, divorce, and then a second civil but invalid marriage. If that person goes to confession, he will not be told by an orthodox priest that after saying his penance, he can morally engage in the marriage act. The requirement for morally living together is marital celibacy.

He then concludes: “Of course, knowing that a sinful act can be forgiven can never justify doing it.” Well, I agree, but throwing in that little warning after such advice is like using a garden hose to try to extinguish the fire engulfing a whole house.

Unfortunately, Fr. Hogan is by no means alone in his thinking. This is probably the most common confessional practice today. In reality, what Catholics “hear” is that they can get sterilized, go to confession, say a few prayers as their canonical penance, and be home free, enjoying the fruits of their sins for the rest of their lives. This makes a sad mockery of the idea of true repentance and a firm purpose of amendment.

Reread the top paragraph again. Maybe this sort of confessional practice explains the sad statistics. I believe that this practice ignores the reality of the body of the sterilized person and will treat that next week.

Next week: Sterilization in the light of the Theology of the Body.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius, 2005)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, readable, and free e-book available for downloading at www.NFPandmore.org .

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