IN asserting that "no man knows the value of another human being," Joe Armstrong, in his recent Manalive column on these pages entitled What the Pope Could Learn in a Delivery Ward, dismisses all men, including celibates, and women who haven't given birth, as being incapable of loving.
It's an appallingly poor vision of the ability of human beings to empathise with each other, if they haven't shared in each other's suffering or pain. With such a vision in charge we would have no social justice, no Maximilian Kolbes, no Gandhis, no Jean Vaniers. Thankfully this diminished view of human sensibility doesn't reflect our real experience.
The article surprised me because, while our views of the church are now poles apart, we come from very similar backgrounds. Joe and I are the same age. We attended the same school, were educated under the same ethos and by the same teachers.
We then chose to follow the same path into priesthood. Seventeen years later, I am a priest while he is "no longer a Catholic".
While I can't say how we have arrived at such opposite views of the world, I believe that much of Joe's argument, as he outlined it in his recent piece, is bogus. Why, for example, does he feel the need to decry a preVatican II model of the Catholic church, which has no bearing on the church of today? What bearing does "churching have on the very different church in which we both grew up? For proof that it has none, Joe could read Pope John Paul II's encyclical On The Dignity Of Women, or the Pope's Letter To Women, published last year.
But harping back to the past is a popular device for some, because the past is a very comfortable place in which to reside. The absence of any real people living there means nobody can stop you from taking the moral high ground. If you're particularly intolerant, you can use somebody's past to prevent them from having any say in the future.
The church acknowledges the faults in its past, and sees there some events and ideas which it wouldn't stand over today. As far as possible, we try to make amends for the sins of the past. But journalists shouldn't use the past as an instrument to browbeat the church into silence or passivity today. We live in the present world, and there are times when we should challenge our present world. The wrongs committed by some of our number must not deprive us of that prophetic role.
For Joe, the idea that the church might express its views on sexuality is intolerable. "How dare a celibate bishop decry the snip of a tube in the male genitalia?", he demands. But how dare anyone, least of all journalists, in pluralist Ireland decry the right of any church to express its moral teachings? It is every citizen's right to disagree with the teachings of any creed or religion, but the use of the words "how dare" implies a desire to have the views of a particular church censored from the public.
In his column Joe portrays the church teaching on vasectomy as indicative of a twisted plan to oppress women and of an obsession with sex. But from his extensive study of theology, he knows well that this teaching is rooted in the church's view of sanctity of life, something he must surely empathise with as he cradles his newborn daughter.
Again, the briefest look at the writings of John Paul II shows that the dignity of the human person, justice, peace and the fair distribution of resources feature a lot more prominently than sexuality. While the church has a strong teaching on sexual mores, it is the reaction of those who focus only on the church's sexual teaching that shows where the true obsession lies.
The claim that the church is preoccupied with sexuality is an untruth, as anyone who has attended a premarriage course, or who has listened to the contents of their priests' sermons, will tell you. But it is an untruth perpetuated by those who cannot cope with the existence of a contradiction to their own chosen ethics on sexuality. If I am secure in my convictions then I have no need to support them by insulting the contrasting teachings that might exist in Islam, Judaism or Protestantism. By contrast, if an ethical view or attitude to moral teaching is unable to stand on its own merits, without the constant need to belittle and decry the opposite position, then it is on very shaky ground indeed.
