This is the sixth of what will probably be a total of seven blogs dealing with an email conversation with a gentleman who dissents from the teaching reaffirmed by Humanae Vitae.
My correspondent wrote: I support natural birth control, just as I support the use of the pill, which I also consider natural. God created man, and man created technology. That’s natural. The important thing is what works.
Honest, I am not making this up. I am quoting a man who has had at least some graduate education saying, “The important thing is what works.” I replied as follows.
“With regard to your comments about technology and ‘the important thing is what works,’ please note that the ovens at Auschwitz worked. The atomic bomb worked. So does nerve gas. The fact that something was invented by man and works says absolutely nothing about the morality of its use.”
Another version of the same argument seeks to place the blame on God. “God gave us brains. People using their brains figured out how to make the birth control Pill. Therefore the Pill is good and we can use it for birth control.” This sort of reasoning is so stupid that it is difficult to be patient with real live people who utter such things. You don’t want to embarrass them, but you do have to point out that people use their God-given brains every day to figure out how to do evil things. And some of these evildoers have great brainpower. I’m thinking of white collar crime. I’m thinking of how hackers can do what they do. Just this morning I read about some high-tech crooks who got into the computer accounting systems of three big retailers. Brilliant but wrong. The prisons are full of people who used their God-given brains to do evil.
We really do need the Commandments and the Magisterium to interpret them in the light of today to protect us from ourselves and to help keep us from doing harm to each other.
Next week: Humanae Vitae dissent and Cardinal Newman’s development of doctrine
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant