There's a saying that if you're conservative when you're twenty you have no heart, and if you're liberal when you're sixty you have no brain. But even though I grew up in a conservative household and still in most ways consider myself to be one, I find that my own journey is taking the opposite route. As I grow older my heart is speaking to me more loudly than my brain.
When I was young and naive, I assumed the world operated under certain, definable circumstances. Children were raised in economically stable, two-parent households. Families were mentally and physically healthy and intact. When I was young, I didn't realize that such a state of affairs was a privilege. I assumed, as all children do, that my reality was the norm, and within this reality certain moral rules were expected to be obeyed. And, indeed, the privileged reality in which I lived made it possible for those rules to be obeyed.
Then I grew up. I met people whose mental and physical health was shattered, who had grown up in broken homes, who had faced severe material deprivation. Seeing them in person, hearing their stories in person, meant more than simply reading about them in abstraction in the newspaper. For my own part, I got married, became pregnant unexpectedly, and suffered severe postpartum depression in the aftermath. I was lucky enough to have a supportive spouse and excellent medical care, but I knew that many women in my situation didn't have those blessings.
I am older now and, though I am probably still very naive and definitely still very privileged, I recognize more and more that the places where personal sin - an individual's decision to violate those moral rules I thought were so inviolable when I was young - and structural injustices overlap are incredibly difficult to disentangle. And it seems more and more unjust to me for the fortunate among us - those of us who exist above and outside of those structural injustices - to condemn the least fortunate for not having the moral heroism to do what for us is no heroism at all.
But just as I was coming to this realization, there emerged in the political sphere a cohort of conservative Catholics (a group of which I considered myself a member!) who, in the wake of statements by Pope Francis indicating a desire to think more deeply about the Church's moral positions on things like contraception and divorce, rose up with the objection that negotiating about, compromising on, or even discussing the Church's position on these matters amounted to a slap in the face - a betrayal of the loyal children of the Church who have tried to uphold these moral teachings. I don't mean for a moment to cast doubt on the faithfulness of these people, or to imply that it's been easy for them to abide by the moral ideal the Church has held up for them. Whether they're using NFP or choosing celibacy after a divorce or even refraining from receiving the Eucharist because they've remarried after divorce, these sons and daughters of the Church are laudably upholding the faith.
But then again, no one could doubt that the elder brother of the Prodigal Son was similarly hardworking, faithful, and loyal. And he too felt betrayed by his father's empathy for his wayward brother. People will object, no doubt: "Well, but the Prodigal Son repented. He returned to his father's house." True enough. But I think we must honestly ask ourselves: are we doing enough to keep the path to repentance open? Are we running out, like the father, to meet these returning sinners halfway? Or have we shut the gates against them with a goodbye and good riddance? How many have we driven into the arms of the devil by our own lack of mercy?
It's become painfully obvious to me that we conservative Catholics have a strong tendency towards pharisaism, so focused on upholding the letter of the law that we have forgotten its purpose and meaning. But we must follow Christ and recognize that morality - living a moral life - is not about obeying a set of rules but about becoming a certain kind of people - people of virtue and charity, and, dare I say, of mercy and compassion.
This is not to say that rules aren't important. At their best, rules are an expression of the spirit, just as the Pharisaic rule not to pick grain on the Sabbath was an expression of the praiseworthy spirit of honoring God on His holy day. But Christ recognized that rules, if followed too rigidly, too unquestioningly, and too legalistically, can become divorced from their spirit and can, paradoxically, contradict the spirit they were meant to embody.
This does not mean we should feel free to change the rules willy-nilly, at the whim of cultural shifts and popular opinion. In our own time, it is important to recognize that abortion, for instance, is an evil and that acquiring one is a grave matter. It is important to know that contraception is not part of God's plan for married sexuality and is therefore a serious affair. It is important to understand that divorce is not God's intention for human marriage and should never be undertaken lightly.
But also not part of God's plan are abusive or adulterous spouses, anencephalic babies, postpartum depression, or even, for that matter, the Zika virus. And we do need to reflect every now and then on whether the rules, as they are practiced and applied, still adequately reflect the spirit they were meant to embody. To think that the Church's moral rules provide us with a script from which we can in no circumstance deviate without imperiling our immortal souls seems to me not only unjust, but a violation of human freedom and an insult to God's mercy. Try to tell me that there is no moral difference between the woman seeking an abortion because her child is anencephalic and a woman seeking an abortion simply because a baby may interfere with her career. The suggestion that the situations are equivalent is prima facie ludicrous, but conservative Catholic moral discourse seems to have no way to make a distinction.
This is a serious problem. If our moral thinking depends upon the world being the "best of all possible worlds" then we will have to face up to the consequence that we are consigning the vast majority of the human race to despair. But we seem so afraid that if we loosen our grip even a little on the moral laws we hold so dear, moral anarchy will reign. We can't imagine a situation in which it might be possible, for example, to acknowledge that contraception, though an evil, may be permissible in some extreme circumstances, without our minds leaping down the slippery slope to the idea that contraception would then be permissible always and everywhere. But there is a world of moral difference between an impoverished woman with little access to health care using contraception to prevent pregnancy during a serious outbreak of disease and a middle-class Western woman using contraception because "now's not a good time." Can we find a way to talk about this difference? Because if we can't, we've only demonstrated the hardness of our own hearts.
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Though I've talked mostly about the Church's teachings on sexual ethics here, the real impetus for my writing down these thoughts came from an essay regarding breastfeeding, of all things. A Catholic psychologist with a wide public audience has written an article praising the work of a moral developmental psychologist who has written that breastfeeding is essentially a moral imperative if you want your children to thrive. After what must have been powerful backlash to his article, he updated his piece to add: "People are free to parent however they want. They don't need my permission." But the dismissiveness even of this comment belies his arrogance: he's already stated that it's God's will that you breastfeed, and if you don't your denying your child's birthright.
As I mentioned before, I suffered severe postpartum depression after the birth of my first child - so severe that I was hospitalized twice. Also, in my early twenties I had breast surgery to reduce severe back pain - a medically necessary intervention to improve the quality of my life. At the time I didn't know if I would ever be married or have children, let alone breastfeed them, but I did know that the surgery would very likely make it impossible to breastfeed without supplementation. When I eventually did have children, my low milk supply combined with the depression made breastfeeding an insurmountable feat.
Did I do everything I could to breastfeed? No, I didn't. I could have pumped, taken drugs, bought fancy devices that would provide supplementation while supporting breastfeeding. I also didn't "preserve my children's inheritance" by keeping my breasts intact even though they were causing me extreme pain. And though I tried to breastfeed my first (until I ended up in the hospital a week later), I didn't even really consider it with my second. My priority was to keep my mental health stable enough so that I could care for my baby.
According to Dr. Popcak, I suppose I should feel devastated by the fact that I didn't go to morally heroic lengths to ensure that my children received breastmilk. I know that breast is best for baby, medically and probably morally too. But I wasn't willing to suffer physically disabling back pain or extreme psychological distress. Does this make me selfish? I don't know. I only know that not having back pain means I can now pick up heavy objects (i.e., children) without distress, and not having PPD means I can actually take care of my kids because I'm not in the hospital.
I'm tempted to make a laundry list of the things I have sacrificed for my family's sake in order to "prove" that I'm not selfish, or at least that I've made up for the selfishness of choosing not to breastfeed. But that's besides the point. What is the point is that a life of virtue is not defined by a single choice made in a very hard circumstance, even if that choice is regrettable. We can't do all the good that's out there to do, nor can we avoid all the evil that's out there in our fallen world. We try to avoid doing the bad as much as we possibly can, and we're grateful that we have the Church's guidance on what is bad. But if we're in an impossibly difficult situation, where it's hard to see how to pursue the good without doing bad, or where our only choices are between bad things - well, it seems to me that we have to do the best we can, and rely on the mercy of God and the righteousness of Christ to save us.
If this is true of breastfeeding it must also be true of other things as well, whether it's lying or stealing, or using contraception or even killing another person. I can't make exceptions for myself in my own situation and refuse to extend that courtesy to others. And if we, as followers and emulators of Christ, can't extend compassion to people in horrifying circumstances who are forced to make tremendously difficult moral decisions, simply because we're afraid of implying that we condone those who treat those same decisions with facile indifference - well, then, I fear that our own souls are the ones in peril.
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