The Missionary Position

because of its attitude toward sex and procreation. Its official dogmas, derived in the main from St Paul but elaborated down the centuries, forbid clergy from being married and prohibit women from being clergy. Homosexual acts are condemned, as in a way are homosexual persons. Heterosexual acts taking place outside the bond of lawful matrimony are condemned, whether premarital or extramarital. The sexual act within marriage is frowned upon unless it has reproduction as its object Solitary sex is taboo. The preaching of such a range of prohibitions, and its enforcement by male and female celibates, has been the fertile soil for innumerable reflections, autobiographies and polemics from the Confessions of St Augustine to Mary McCarthy’s Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood.

Reverence for life, especially in its vulnerable condition in utero, is a sine qua non of Catholic teaching, and one which possesses a great moral strength even in its extreme forms. A woman experiencing danger in childbirth, for example, is supposed to sacrifice her own life for that of the child. (Judaism, which has codes no less ethical, tends to mandate the opposite decision, for the greater good of the family.) When mass rapes occurred in the course of aggressive war in Bangladesh and later in Bosnia, Mother Teresa in the first case and the Pope in the second made strenuous appeals to the victims not to abort the seed of the invader and the violator. Give the child up for adoption, or raise it in a spirit unlike the one in which it was conceived — this was the injunction. While it can be seen as grotesque to lecture women who are in such desperate dilemmas, there is none the less something impressive and noble in the high priority the Church gives to potential life. Humans, it says, blaspheme when they throw away a foetus, because they cannot assume the right to dispose of another’s life and they cannot presume to know the future. Children born with appalling deformities in sordid and overcrowded homes have been known time and again, after all, to defy all material odds and become exemplary, or merely human.

But the nobility of this essential teaching is compromised by the fact that it depends on an unnecessary theological assumption about ‘ensoulment’ — the point at which Thomas Aquinas maintained that a life became human and immortal. Two objections can be made here, the first being that human life can and should be respected whether or not it is constituted by a creator with an immortal soul; to make the one position dependent upon the other is to make the respect in some way contingent Second, if a fertilized egg is fully human, then all terminations of pregnancy at any stage and for any reason are to be regarded as murder. This offends against the natural or instinctive feeling in favour of the pregnant woman and the occupant of her womb, because it blurs the distinction between an embryonic group of cells and a human with a central nervous system. The distinction between abortions in the first and third trimesters, a distinction which speaks both to our ability to avoid casuistry and to our inborn wish to have a say in our own fates, is therefore null and void in Catholic teaching. Some of the coarsening in arguments on the other side of the case — arguments which bluntly and unscientifically define the foetus as a mere appendix to the woman’s body — no doubt result from confrontation with this absolutist edict Then there is the fact that Catholic prohibition on abortion comes indissolubly linked to a prohibition on birth control and contraception. Again, more is involved than the technical and dogmatic finding that certain forms of contraception, such as some versions of the intrauterine device which expels fertilized ova, actually are abortifacient in the fundamentalist definition of the term: the ban extends to all means and methods of avoiding conception, and indeed to the very intention of doing so. It is as ‘natural’ in humans to seek control over their biological fecundity as it is for them to wish to have children in the first place. The Roman Catholic Church stands alone in condemning the desire to remove oneself from the caprices ofnature and evolution, and the Roman Catholic Church has great political power over millions of poor and fertile people.

The Church’s teaching seems to deny any connection at all between the rapid exponential growth in human population and the spread and persistence of disease, famine, squalor, ignorance and environmental calamity. One need not be a follower of the grim Reverend Malthus to deduce that there is indeed such a connection and that, moreover, it works in the other direction as well. In every developing county that has been studied, a clear correlation can be found between the limitation of family size and the life chances of the family members. Where such measures cannot be freely taken, by means of education and example, they have been enforced in desperation by authoritarian regimes. We have before us the forbidding example of the People’s Republic of China, which limits families to one child apiece and is thus, in the name of Communism, preparing a future in which the words ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ will have no literal meaning. And we have the instance of Mother Teresa’s friend and admirer Indira Gandhi, who launched a demagogic and brutal attempt to bring about male sterilization by a combination of bullying and bribery. (Salman Rushdie’s short story ‘The Free Radio’ in East, West brilliantly shows the pathos and emptiness of this effort.) Certainly these are not kind solutions, but they evidence the severity of a problem which the Church has chosen entirely to ignore.

Over the past decades, and particularly since the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church has been faced with nearly every sort of cultural, doctrinal and political dissent. In Latin America, where it faces an unprecedented challenge from evangelical Protestantism and from the populist challenge of so-called ‘liberation theology’, the need to renew the priesthood has led to questioning of the celibacy requirement. In the United States and Western Europe, the congregation appears to conduct its affairs without reference to canonical teaching on birth control. Homosexual groups have petitioned for the right to be considered true Catholics, since if God did not create their condition there seems to be an interesting question as to who did. Even prominent. Catholic writers of the conservative wing, such as William Buckley and Clare Booth Luce, have made the obvious point that an unyielding opposition to contraception, and the ranking of it as a sin more or less equivalent to abortion, is, among other things, a cheapening of the moral position on abortion itself.

In all of these debates, the most consistently reactionary figure has been Mother Teresa. The fundamentalist faction within the Vatican has found her useful in two ways — first as an advertisement for the good works of the Church to non-Catholics; and second as a potent instrument of moral suasion within the ranks of the existing faithful. She has missed no opportunity to restate elementary dogmas (much as she once told an interviewer that, if faced with a choice between Galileo and the authority of the Inquisition, she would have sided with the Church authorities). She has inveighed against abortion, against contraception and against the idea that there should be any limit whatsoever to the growth of world population.[4]

When Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, few people had the poor taste to ask what she had ever done, or even claimed to do, for the cause of peace. Her address to the ceremony of investiture did little to resolve any doubt on this score and much to increase it. She began the speech with a literal-minded account of the myth of Christ’s conception, perhaps in honour of that day’s festal character: the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Then she began her diatribe:

I was amazed when I learned that in the West so many young people are on drugs. I tried to understand the reason for this. Why? The answer is, ‘because in the family there is nobody who cares about them’. Fathers and mothers are so busy they have no time. Young parents work, and the child lives in the street and goes his own way. We speak of peace. These are the things that threaten peace. I think that today peace is threatened by abortion, too, which is a true war, the direct killing of a child by its own mother. In the Bible we read that God clearly said: ‘Even though a mother did forget her infant, I will not forget him.’

Today, abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace. We who are here today were wanted by our parents. We would not be here if our parents had not wanted us.

We want children, and we love them. But what about the other millions? Many are concerned about the children, like those in Africa, who die in great numbers either from hunger or for other reasons. But millions of children die intentionally, by the will of their mothers. Because if a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing ourselves, or one another? Nothing.

There is not much necessity for identifying the fallacies and distortions which are piled upon one another here. Few women who have had abortions, even those who still feel remorse or regret, will recognize themselves as having committed actual infanticide. If there are ‘millions’ of children being slain in this way, so that they compare to the millions of children dying of malnutrition and pestilence, then there is clearly no hope for Mother Teresa’s adoption solution. (She claims to have rescued only three or four dozen orphans from the entire Bangladesh calamity, for example.) Moreover, these impressive figures should be enough at least to impel reconsideration in those who proclaim that all pregnancies are ‘wanted’ by definition and that there can be no excess population.

At a vast open-air mass in Knock, Ireland, in 1992, Mother Teresa made, it plain yet again that there is no