Women, Birth Control and the Catholic Church

Popes are chosen by men.

I mean male human beings.

I went to a Catholic mass this morning because some people I know were celebrating a silver wedding jubilee, and they are my friends. I have said here before that the rite and ritual of religion are of little interest to me. As I grow older and think more about it, I find myself even more at odds with the organised religion I was brought up to follow.

It is not for me. I am a woman, you see.

I am also the kind who likes to have some say in the things that govern her life. I cannot really subscribe to a belief system that preaches one thing and does another. Why, if we are all equal in the sight of God and I have been baptized and freed of original sin, should I not have a shot at being pope?

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I went to a school run by Irish nuns. They were nice women, but every so often, the cantankerous old school chaplain would refuse to let them touch the communion because, he said, they were not pure. I never could tell what it is that he meant.

Of course there was speculation. Some girls said it was because some of the nuns were dating other priests. An interesting, and at the time, a titillating possibility, but not very plausible from where I stand now. Priests where I come from have been known to date women and occasionally father children. No one has told them not to officiate at mass for that reason.

I have wondered whether it had anything to do with nuns having their periods. But how could the chaplain know that? In any case, a woman cannot be said to be impure on that account, because what we all basically are is nine or ten missed periods and one microscopic tadpole.  You might as well say that that one is impure from producing saliva.

It canot be because they confessed some heinous deed to him. The sacrament of Confession wipes it all away.

During my churchgoing days, I also observed that in some  parishes the priests did not wash their vestments. The nuns washed them. And much of that nicely embroidered altar linen is made by nuns.

In many Christian communities, women do the flowers in church, take the collection, and generally keep the place clean. They also take the children to church while their husbands are recovering from their hangovers. They are more likely to attend church than men. They contribute to church coffers. Many a vicar has found it expedient to befriend a wealthy elderly widow in expectation of filling the church coffers with her legacy.

In short, the women are essential to the churches, although they are not recognised  as equal to the men.

This is why, for all the uncomplimentary things I will certainly say on this site about evangelical churches, I must say that many of them at least consider women to be on a par with men.

Let us return to the Church of Rome, which shaped my belief system. I was pleased to see a girl serving mass today. When I was growing up, only boys were allowed to do this. Of course I wanted to wear the red and white robes too, carry the chalice and ciborium to the altar, wave the thurible about and spread the sweet smell of incense over the faithful and walk in front of the priest, head bowed and hands together. But I was a girl, you see, and not allowed. What is the explanation the Church has offered for this, and why has it changed its mind now?

I think you can be a deaconess these days. But this role is clearly circumscribed:

“The Apostolic Constitutions expressly attribute to them the duty of guarding the doors and maintaining order amongst those of their own sex in the church, and they also (II, c. 26) assign to them the office of acting as intermediaries between the clergy and the women of the congregation; but on the other hand, it is laid down (Const. Apost., VIII, 27) that "the deaconess gives no blessing, she fulfills no function of priest or deacon".

The entire article is available here.

You can, of course, be a nun, but I think that nuns who do not have training of some kind become glorified housekeepers and seamstresses for the male clergy. As far as I am concerned, the nuns who save lives in bush hospitals do a damn sight more than the priests who go around ministering to souls, and have sometimes, as is now becoming obvious, “ministered” to bodies of particularly vulnerable young people.

When it suits the Church, women are pressed into service. In the early 1970s Bishop Felix M. Davidek ordained Roman Catholic married and women priests in Czechoslovakia to work in the underground church. So women can be priests, eh?

Consider this: Galatians 3:28, Paul says: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." An analysis of this verse is available here.

So who are they to tell you that you are different or inferior? Who are they to decide for you in what way you will serve your God?

Now, I suspect some of you knew I was coming to this, so let’s do it.

I am referring to the Church’s insistence on regulating sexual matters.

The first point against this is that as they are themselves celibate, priests have no idea at all of what it means to be sexually active. If they have some idea, they shouldn’t. No one told them to stop having sex or children. They decided to do so themselves. All was well until the fourth century, when the madness started. In 306, the Council of Elvira, in Spain, decreed that a priest who sleeps with his wife the night before Mass will lose his job. It went downhill from there. A summarized history of celibacy in the Catholic Church is available here. You cannot issue edicts about something that you have not experienced. It goes against all human reason.

The second point is that they cannot issue edicts on the lives of women, because women have little or no say in the decision-making organs of the church, and cannot therefore change these decisoons when they turn out to be ill-advised. I’m not talking about parish councils, which have female members. Parish councils cannot change a church edict on, say, condoms.

It is simple decency to allow people to at least choose the rope by which they shall be hanged.

The Catholic Church advocates the rhythm method of birth control. I think that involves a lot of mucking about with your used underclothing and peering at calendars and that sort of thing. We should have better things to do with our time. Since the human body is treacherous, this method also fails fairly frequently.

The same applies to what is called the withdrawal method. People who have tried it will tell you that by the time it becomes necessary to withdraw, at least one of the partners is markedly reluctant to allow this to happen.

So why not just use a condom? No, it is not good, says the Church. Because it uses technology? Does the church not use computers? Why do they not just pray for help in computing data, and wait for God to send rolls and rolls of closely written paper scrolling down from the sky? Because sperm will die? Well, of the two million or so released each time where the woman gets pregnant, at least one million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine do die. And if the woman does not get pregnant at all, they all die.

Shall we mourn them?

Is it because it is unnatural? Is it natural to wear clothes? Are we born dressed? No. We adapt to our environment by wearing clothes. In our current environment, unbridled procreation is just not an option for people who cannot feed large familes, or for people whose work takes up a lot of time. We have to control it by some means. The condom is more efficient than the means advocated by the Catholics. So why does the Church not let it happen?  Does the Church not see the effect of AIDS?

There are some islands of reason in this sea of wrong-headedness. Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, for instance, has said that using condoms would be justified when one partner is HIV-positive. Anyway, most Catholics quietly ignore the Vatican on the matter of birth control.

Why are the childless “Fathers” of the Church so reactionary?

Because they have no experience of the controversy and danger associated with normal, routine sexual activity (I don't mean playing with children in sacristies). You can have fun, but then you pay for it, sometimes with your life (if you die in childbirth, for instance), with your social status (if you get the wrong person pregnant) or with your future (if a girl is sent away from school because she has a baby). They do not have to make those difficult choices.

Because they do not get pregnant. I have always felt that if men, who run the world, could get pregnant, we would have many more abortions and much more efficient birth control methods. If those old men in the Vatican had to pay school fees and deal with teenaged children, believe me, they would view the matter  differently.

Because of the tortoise-like pace of the church’s adaptability to progress. During the Inquisition, the Catholic Church placed Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) under house arrest for the rest of his life because he contradicted the Bible by saying that the world was round. The reason they did not kill him as a heretic was because he had powerful friends who spoke on his behalf. The Church only admitted that they had been wrong about Galileo in 1992. Now, it would be alright if these people just adapted slowly and quietly. But they are the "fathers of the church", you see; they get god-to-person calls from heaven telling them to tell people not to read books they don't like, and the pope is infallible anyway, so they have to make pronoucements and torture or kill people for the "defence of the faith". Then, four hundred or one thousand years later, they change their minds, usually without actually admitting that they were wrong, and that they have actually passed off their prejudices as the word of their god. But the people are still dead.

All this happens because women let them. Women make up at least half of the church faithful. They should stand up and tell those men what their ignorant meddling is doing to their lives. Or they should form their own church.

Who says they cannot?

In keeping the women out of its decision-making organs, the Church has proven that it is not spiritual at all, but a power-hungry, repressive organization. If God had actually chosen the pope and had written across the sky in words of lightning that he must be male, then God would be a misogynist and I would have nothing to do with him.

But this is not, despite their pious protestations, the world of God. It is the world of man.

Oh, sorry! I mean male human beings.

Further reading:
http://www.cnwe.org/history1.htm
http://www.iol.ie/~duacon/wow2001/wowmem.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/roman-catholic-church
http://www.newadvent.org

Comments

[beepbeepitsme]

RE original sin

Original Sin And God's Plan
http://beepbeepitsme.blogspot.com/

[bambam]

People are avoiding this topic like the plague. They are afraid of eternal damnation in the Catholic hell.

Mami you get balls.

[Achiri]

U r going to hell!!! LOL
Someone just said u got balls...so women have started growing balls huh!!! Well,I guess having balls is easier than having periods.
Nice article though.

[Miss J]

It's nice to read something this refreshing. I find this so refreshing because so many African women are reluctant, no SCARED, to question religious idealogies and beliefs. Instead, they prefer to blindly follow them.
To quote Galileo: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
I grew up Catholic myself but on questioning and realizing how flawed, one-sided, and oppressive,(especially to women) certain beliefs and idealogies are, I abandoned organized religion all-together. I don't think a benevolent God will be proud of all oppression we've created in His name. Good job.

[rebecca]

Bravo! You hit the nail on the head. It is very well written. There is nothing wrong with religion or beliefs, just organized religion. Not only is many organzied religions oppressive to women. They are oppressive to the poor. Taking money from people who don't have it to build big glorious churches. I don't think God cares if you are in a trailer or a cathedral, as long as you love. It was painful to me visiting Montego Bay and seeing people live in squalor and poverty, the schools just three walls of cinder blocks,yet there big shiney churches everywhere.

[Katrina]

Loved your article -- came across it while researching for a paper I'm writing for school (in a U.S. women's Catholic University, no less) on gender politics in religion, specifically Catholicism vs. Judaism. Thank you for your fresh insights.

[Ma Mary]

Let me put in a good word for organized religion, especially the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church does service to the poor like no one else does. Like you, I was raised Catholic, and I have not been to mass for a long time, because I disagree with so many teachings and the whole guilt thing surrounding human sexuality.

But, the Catholic focus on making life more tolerable for the poor is a good thing, with their hospitals and schools and charities. Think about the good Catholic hospitals at home. They were generally started by nuns, village girls and nurses from Europe who came to an enclaved village cut off from the outside world and began to do the best they could on a shoe string, with some backing from the organized religion.

Over time, these institutions grew into credible quality providers of health care and education, operated by local girls who were now the nuns and nurses. I simply love and admire that about the Catholic church, that people can give up on married and family life in order to serve others. They cannot be perfect, after all, they are only flesh and blood people too. They can only try. From time, their cantankerousness and prejudices pop out, but that too is only too human, and I must forgive them as I hope others would forgive my quirks. This giving up in order to serve is only possible because of organized religion that puts a safety net of sorts under these folks with its institutional power.

You and I would not be having this high powered discussion without the excellent Catholic school education we got. Perhaps we could have got it from somewhere else, but I would not trade my Catholic education for another if I had the choice. These catholic schools were also started on a shoe string just like the hospitals.

There is something about the Catholic Church that is appealing to me again as I grow older. I suspect that if I live long enough, I shall start attending mass again, ignore the faults of mother church and bask in its generous essence.

Take care.