Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on contraception and abortion

From Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, an Interview with Peter Seewald (Ignatius Press, 1997):

Contraception

Your Eminence, many Christians do not understand the Church's position on contraception. Do you understand that they don't understand it?

Yes, I can understand that quite well; the question is really complicated. In today's troubled world, where the number of children cannot be very high given living conditions and so many other factors, it's very easy to understand. In this matter, we ought to look less at the casuistry of individual cases and more at the major objectives that the Church has in mind.

I think that it's a question of three major basic options. The first and most fundamental is to insist on the value o£ the child in society. In this area, in fact, there has been a remarkable change. Whereas in the simple societies of the past up to the nineteenth century, the blessing of children was regarded as the blessing, today children are conceived of almost as a threat. People think that they rob us of a place for the future, they threaten our own space, and so forth. In this matter a primary objective is to recover the original, true view that the child, the new human being, is a blessing. That by giving life we also receive it ourselves and that going out of ourselves and accepting the blessing of creation are good for man.

The second is that today we find ourselves before a separation of sexuality from procreation such as was not known earlier, and this makes it all the more necessary not to lose sight of the inner connection between the two.

Meanwhile, even representatives of the sixties' generation, who tried it, are making some astonishing statements. Or perhaps that's just what we should expect. Rainer Langhans, for example, who once explored "orgasmic sexuality" in his communes, now proclaims that "the pill severed sexuality from the soul and led people into a blind alley." Langhans complains that now there "is no longer any giving, no longer any devoted dedication". "The highest" aspect of sexuality, he now professes, is `parenthood", which he calls "collaboration in God's plan".

It really is true that increasingly we have the development of two completely separated realities. In Huxley',s famous futuristic novel Brave New World, we see a vision of a coming world in which sexuality is something completely detached from procreation. He had good reason to expect this, and its human tragedy is fully explored. In this world, children are planned and produced in a laboratory in a regulated fashion. Now, that is clearly an intentional caricature, but, like all caricatures, it does bring something to the fore: that the child is going to be something that tends to be planned and made, that he lies completely under the control of reason, as it were. And that signals the self-destruction of man. Children become products in which we want to express ourselves; they are fully robbed in advance of their own life's projects. And sexuality once again becomes something replaceable. And, of course, in all this the relationship of man and woman is also lost. The developments are plain to see.

In the question of contraception, precisely such basic options are at stake. The Church wants to keep man human. For the third option in this context is that we cannot resolve great moral problems simply with techniques, with chemistry, but must solve them morally, with a life-style. It is, I think — independently now of contraception — one of our great perils that we want to master even the human condition with technology, that we have forgotten that there are primordial human problems that are not susceptible of technological solutions but that demand a certain life-style and certain life decisions. I would say that in the question of contraception we ought to look more at these basic options in which the Church is leading a struggle for man. The point of the Church's objections is to underscore this battle. The way these objections are formulated is perhaps not always completely felicitous, but what is at stake are such major cardinal points of human existence.

The question remains whether you can reproach someone, say a couple who already have several children, for not having a positive attitude toward children.

No, of course not, and that shouldn't happen, either.

But must these people nevertheless have the idea that they are living in some sort of sin if they ...

I would say that those are questions that ought to be discussed with one's spiritual director, with one's priest, because they can't be projected into the abstract.

Abortion

The Church, says the Pope, will continue her vehement opposition to all measures that "in any way promote abortion, sterilization, and contraception". Such measures wound, he says, the dignity of man as an image of God and thereby undermine the basis of society. The fundamental issue is the protection of life. On the other hand, why is the death penalty, as the Catechism says, "not excluded as a right of the state"?

In the death penalty, when it is legitimately applied, someone is punished who has been proved guilty of the most serious crimes and who also represents a threat to the peace of society. In other words, a guilty person is punished. In the case of abortion, on the other hand, the death penalty is inflicted on someone who is absolutely innocent. And those are two completely different things that you cannot compare with one another.

It is true that the unborn child is regarded by not a few people as an unjust aggressor who narrows the scope of my life, who forces his way into my life, and whom I must kill as an unjust attacker. But that is nothing less than the vision we spoke of earlier in which the child is no longer considered a distinct creature of God, created in the image of God with his own right to life, but, at least as long as he is yet unborn, suddenly appears as a foe or as an inconvenience I can do with as I please. I think that the point is to clarify the awareness that a conceived child is a human being, an individual.

That the child, though needing the protection of the mother's bodily communion, is still a distinct person in his own right, and that he must be treated as a human being because he is a human being. I think that if we give up the principle that every man as man is under God's protection, that as a man he is beyond the reach of our arbitrary will, we really do forsake the foundation of human rights.

But can one then say that someone who finds herself in a great moral dilemma and decides to terminate pregnancy is a conspirator against life?

How guilt is assigned to individual persons is always a question that cannot be decided abstractly. But let's say that the act itself — whoever has brought about the situation; it can also be due to pressure from men — remains by its nature an attempt to resolve a conflict situation by killing a human being. We also know from psychology how deeply something like this can stick in the mother's psyche, because she knows at some level that there was a human being in her, that it would have been her child, and that it might have turned out to be someone she would have been proud of. Needless to say, society must also help to ensure the availability of other possibilities for dealing with difficult situations and to end pressure on expectant mothers and to reawaken a new love for children.

Comments

[Sharon]

As a Faithful Catholic I have some trouble with parts of the cardinal's replies.

Cardinal Ratzinger: In today's troubled world, where the number of children cannot be very high given living conditions and so many other factors.

Interviewer: The question remains whether you can reproach someone, say a couple who already have several children, for not having a positive attitude toward children.

Cardinal Ratzinger: No, of course not, and that shouldn't happen, either.

Is the cardinal giving the ok here to a couple having two children and virtually using NFP as contraception?

Cardinal Ratzinger: we ought to look less at the casuistry of individual cases

It’s all very well for the scholar and theologian to look at these matters from a lofty height but for the Faithful Catholic in the pew having or spacing children and what method to use is where they have to live every day.

Interviewer: But must these people nevertheless have the idea that they are living in some sort of sin if they ...[did the question break off here?]

Cardinal Ratzinger: I would say that those are questions that ought to be discussed with one's spiritual director, with one's priest, because they can't be projected into the abstract.

When Peter Seewald asked the pope "Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?" instead of saying a plain yes or no we have a reply so nuanced that he seemed to be saying that “in the intention of reducing the risk of infection” it it may be ok to use condoms. Once again in the section above a direct answer is avoided. We all know that most priests will give the ok to using any sort of contraception and Cardinal Ratzinger who must know this seems ok with that.

Pope Benedict has said that he proposes but doesn't impose. This Faithful Catholic feels that she is standing on shifting sand when she would like clear direction from the Church.

[Dan Deeny]

I am sympathetic to Sharon's problems with Benedict XVI's very, very carefully nuanced replies. I am also interested in Sharon's statement that "We all know that most priests will give th ok to using any sort of contraception...". Is this so? I'd like some feedback on this.

[Sharon]

Dan I was speaking of the priests of my and my friend's acquaintance in Australia who, out of either an all consuming desire to be pastoral or a disbelief in the teachings of the Church are reluctant to gainsay any activity or to acknowledge that any activity might be a sin.