Francis Philips got it dead right in her last blog; the pope’s
gripping, highly readable and indispensable book The Light of the World
(and if you haven’t read it yet you really should) is about a great deal
more than just sex.
The extraordinary distortion by the secular
Press of his passing remarks about condoms is now generally seen for
what it was: a sign of the fact that papers have to have splash
headlines; that’s the way they’re designed: hence the Sunday Telegraph’s
declaration of a “historic U-turn by [the] Catholic church”.
So the
secular response is understandable: journalists need stories; it’s not
so much that they don’t care about the truth, but that they really
aren’t necessarily equipped, in a story about the Church, to recognise
it when it’s staring them in the face.
But parallel to this kind
of understandable secular distortion, there was a jumping on this
particular bandwagon by some Catholics who really didn’t have that kind
of excuse.
Perhaps the most informative example of the “historic U-turn
by Catholic Church” syndrome among Catholic journalists was the Today
programme’s “Thought for the Day” on the morning after the Sunday
Telegraph splash headline, uttered from on high by Clifford Longley, the
BBC’s token “authoritative” Catholic and the elder statesman of the
Tabletistas.
What a difference a week or two makes.
Longley may
already be hoping that his remarks will have been forgotten: but they
haven’t, not by me, nor should they be.
“The interview [the pope] gave
to a German journalist”, he glibly pronounced, “has transformed the
terms of the internal Roman Catholic debate about the use of condoms in
the fight against Aids HIV”.
(Already, very evidently, just wrong).
“But”, he went on, astonishingly, “I think he has actually changed much
more than that. From today the entire polar icecap of Catholic sexual
morality has started to melt”.
We have now reached a level of
implausibility which is more than simply jaw-dropping. We need some kind
of provisional explanation before going any further, of why Longley
should say such a thing, even in the slightly hysterical atmosphere then
prevailing.
I can only suppose that this total dissolution of Catholic
sexual morality is so much what he wants to happen that it clouded his
judgement; it wouldn’t be the first time that wishful thinking has
caused a radical distortion of Catholic teaching: “the Spirit of Vatican
II” is riddled with it.
“Henceforth”, he went on, “the emphasis
changes from natural law, which is where the ban on contraception comes
from, to what the pope calls ‘the humanising of sexuality’.”
But how is
that a change of emphasis away from the natural law?
The natural law is
a body of unchanging moral principles known not from revelation (though
parallel to it) but by reason, principles regarded as a basis for all
human conduct: for the pope to speak in this way of “the humanisation of
sexuality” is simply the understanding of the natural law in particular
human circumstances: there is no movement away from natural law—say, to
revelation or ecclesial authority; we are still within its ambit.
Longley’s “analysis”, in short, is utterly meaningless.
Longley’s
explanation of his melting polar icecap is an excellent example of the
kind of—to a layman—impressively intellectual sounding but actually
totally bogus pronouncement that does nothing to elucidate an argument
but which if you’re not attentive allows it to be accepted by default in
the mental fog which has descended by the time it has been uttered.
There is a real refusal here to acknowledge the difference between juridical and pastoral discourse.
The pope is a teacher of doctrine and
the moral law; he is also a pastor: a pastor above all, and perhaps
overwhelmingly most importantly, when he speaks directly to his people,
as he is clearly doing in this interview—that’s why it’s with a
journalist, not a theologian.
What was Longley’s real agenda here?
That is the question we need to ask.
Why did he try to transmute
pastoral remarks about particular human circumstances into
quasi-juridical pronouncements universally applicable?
Could it be that,
thus transformed, such remarks could then be lobbed into the complex
web of objective moral teachings which the Church over the centuries has
defended, in the hope of causing maximum damage?
Who knows?
But it
looks suspiciously like it to me.
SIC: CHO/INT'L