Category: Moral Theology

A reader writes:

I guess my first question is: Are there situations where consciously swearing is not a sin?

First we need to give a brief taxonomy of what commonly goes by the name of "swearing" or "cussing" or other use of "bad language." Though people lump all this under one heading, there are several distinctions here that are relevant.

The first distinction is between profanity and everything else.

Profanity is treating what is sacred as if it is not. For example, using the name of Jesus Christ as an expletive.

In addition to profanity, there are several other forms of tabooed language, which can be classified several different ways. Among them are:

• Malediction, or wishing someone or some thing ill, such as saying "God damn it" or "Devil take the hindmost" or "Go to hell." (The first of these may also count as profanity but does not necessarily for reasons that will become clear. The latter two are not profanity since the devil and hell are not sacred.)
• Vulgarity, or the kind of language that would be used by "the common people" (Latin, vulgus) but not in polite society. Into this category go tabooed scatalogical, anatomical, and sexual terms.
• Slurs, or derogatory ways of referring to people or things. These may be terms applying to a particular religious or ethnic group (fill in your own examples mentally–not in the combox!) or terms referring to personal dispositions (e.g., "He’s a jerk" or "He’s a nerd").

Now, the question was: Can these forms of language ever be used without it being a sin?

The simple answer is: Yes.

Here are two examples:

1. Suppose that you are an actor in a play or movie and the script calls for you to use such language. As long as the play or movie is not glamorizing or otherwise endorsing the use of such language, it is morally licit for the actors to utter the lines. It is understood (on the above conditions) both by the actors and the audience that the language is not meant in earnest but is a depiction of how certain people (e.g., the vulgar) speak. For example: Many locales have Passion Plays in which the crowd present in front of Pilate cries "Crucify him!" Now, in real life this would be a species of profanity (specifically: it would be blasphemy; CCC 2149). But it is not blasphemous when uttered by actors who are in fact devout Christians and do not mean it and who are depicting the events of Our Lord’s life. Neither, for that matter, is it sinful when a lector reads these words at Mass.
2. Some slurs, such as "jerk" are mild (i.e., weakly tabooed at best) and do not carry a huge emotional load. They also can be useful shorthand. "Jerk," for example is simply shorthand for "an obnoxious person." If it is true that someone is behaving in an obnoxious manner then it is perfectly within bounds to say "He was acting like a jerk."

Having answered the initial question as phrased, let’s go on to the reader’s elaboration of the subject:

I can see where swearing at someone would be a sin because of the anger behind the words but in that case it is a sin of anger, right? Or is the swearing itself sinful as well? What if the anger were just? Obviously it would be a sin if the swearing were somehow taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Obviously. But it seems that two things would be in play here. The first is the anger. Emotions themselves are not sinful. What can be sinful is how we react to our emotions. If we foster anger when we should be trying to cool it, that is a sin. If we undertake an evil action based on our anger (e.g., attacking someone we’re angry with), that also is a sin. But the emotion itself is not sinful.

If one is feeling an emotion–be it anger, frustration, awe, surprise, or what have you–there is nothing wrong in principle with expressing that emotion. One can do this either discursively (e.g., "I am remarkably angry at the moment, old chap") or by the use of an interjection if the interjection is not otherwise problematic.

In the case of using God’s name as an interjection, this gets us to the second element in play. The name of God is not a fitting interjection for use when we are angry. It is sacred and should not  be used simply to communicate what we are feeling at the moment. That is a misuse of the name.

This is not to say that God cannot be brought in to emotional expression. Of course, he can be. If you say "Praise God!" when something good happens, and you really mean that you want someone to praise (or at least attribute mentally credit to) God for the good thing, that’s no problem at all.

In principle, the same could be true of maledictions against evil things. For example, on 9/11 after the Twin Towers fell, many in America could have literally meant the malediction "God damn Osama bin Laden." That’s not automatically sinful since Osama bin Laden committed acts objectively worthy of damnation by God.

Saying "God damn Osama bin Laden" thus represents a wish that Osama would experience the just rewards of his actions. One has to hold out hope, even for bin Laden, that he will repent and not be damned, or that he was too crazy to be accountable for his actions, but so long as those are not the case, it is entirely appropriate to wish to see divine justice accomplished in his case.

God himself is willing to damn those who culpably do things like Osama bin Laden did, and if God is willing to do so (as the Church teaches) then it is not sinful for us to make our own what God is willing to do, as long as we also make our own the other things God is willing to do (like not damn Osama if he repents or if he was too crazy to be culpable for his actions).

In this case, the justified anger experienced by the attack of 9/11 finds expression in an utterance expressing this emotion and corresponding to reality (Osama bin Laden is damnworthy) on the appropriate assumptions (e.g., he is gravely culpable for his actions).

The reader continues:

And what if you were not swearing at someone but just let out an expletive in a situation of surprise or dismay?

If you just let an expletive slip out without it being a fully deliberate utterance then it affects your personal culpability for the action. Assuming that the use of the expletive was not otherwise morally permissible (e.g., like saying "God damn Osama bin Laden" in the wake of 9/11) then one will be venially accountable for it if it were done with partial deliberation and non-accountable for it is it were done with no deliberation.

Also, does it matter how coarse the word is considered? When I was a kid, I got scolded once the parents of a friend because I used the word "damn". At the time I really thought it to be equivalent to "darn".

It does matter how strong the taboo associated with the word is perceived to be. This is in two respects: how strong the speaker perceives the taboo to be and how strong the language community considers the taboo to be.

For purposes of illustrating this point, though, let’s prescind from talking about profanity and talk about non-profane tabooed words. In this case the issue of profaning the sacred is not involved. What is involved is the question of whether and in what circumstances it is okay to be break a social taboo–a convention of the linguistic community–not whether the sacred is being violated.

F’rinstance: I have a friend whose native language is an east Asian tongue but who came to America to go to college, where she heard a lot of college-age language. Not being a native-speaker of English, she didn’t have a native’s feel for what words were tabooed and how much. She didn’t even necessarily hear correctly what was being said.

Thus one day years ago I was talking to her in a chatroom and she described a particular software application as "a piece of crab."

I just about died laughing.

She obviously had misheard something from her English-speaking college friends. As members of the vulgus, they no doubt used a particular, well-known expression a great deal as a way of describing things of poor quality. My friend, not being a native-speaker, misheard the expression and thought it was customary in English to refer to things of poor quality using a seafood metaphor.

She was, appropriately, horrified when–so that she wouldn’t use this phrase again in polite company–I clarified for her what the actual phrase was and explained that it was tabooed. (Once she understood what the original phrase was, she also understood why it was tabooed.)

My friend didn’t perceive the taboo in the word, and that would have correspondingly negated her culpability for using it–assuming she’d used it correctly.

What if everyone felt that way? What is everybody (or at least the language community as a whole) didn’t perceive the taboo? Then there would be no taboo and it would not be inappropriate to use the word.

It’s important to realize that the taboos associated with words, like the meaning of words themselves, are arbitrary. They are assigned by society and thus not intrinsic to the word. For example: Think through a list of biological words that are tabooed. In each case (assuming that your vocabulary size is normal), you should be able to think of another word that means exactly the same thing but is not tabooed (or that is at least much less strongly tabooed).

The taboo levels of words also change over time. For example, back in the 1950s the word "pregnant" had a form of taboo associated with it that it simply lacks today. When Lucille Ball got pregnant while the series I Love Lucy was on the air, the producers decided not to hide the pregnancy (as some TV shows do) but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t offend audience sensibilities.

To cover themselves, they consulted several religious leaders (the proverbial priest, minister, and rabbi, if I remember correctly) and got several terms that could be used to refer to Lucy’s condition ("expecting" and the French word for "pregnant," as I recall), but the religious figures agree that she should not be referred to on the air as "pregnant." That word was too indelicate.

Today, whatever taboo was affecting the use of "pregnant" in this case is simply gone. As a result, people can and do say "pregnant" on TV with no moral impropriety at all.

Taboo levels thus change over time. They go up and down based on social mores.

But when a word is tabooed by a language community, and to the degree it is tabooed, it should be avoided apart from special circumstances warranting its use. The impulse to put taboos on words corresponds to something very deep in the human psyche. Every language community has them. They are bound up with politeness codes and when one uses them in circumstances where the taboo applies, one is being impolite.

Being impolite, in turn, causes a rupture in social discourse, tends to create feelings of pain and anger and revulsion, and these feelings should not be thoughtlessly or deliberately created without adequate reason. Sometimes, though, there are situations in which being impolite is warranted, and there may be a good to be achieved that allows the breaking of a social taboo.

The general rule, however, is what St. Paul articulates:

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen (Eph. 4:29, NIV).

A reader writes:

I guess my first question is: Are there situations where consciously swearing is not a sin?

First we need to give a brief taxonomy of what commonly goes by the name of "swearing" or "cussing" or other use of "bad language." Though people lump all this under one heading, there are several distinctions here that are relevant.

The first distinction is between profanity and everything else.

Profanity is treating what is sacred as if it is not. For example, using the name of Jesus Christ as an expletive.

In addition to profanity, there are several other forms of tabooed language, which can be classified several different ways. Among them are:

• Malediction, or wishing someone or some thing ill, such as saying "God damn it" or "Devil take the hindmost" or "Go to hell." (The first of these may also count as profanity but does not necessarily for reasons that will become clear. The latter two are not profanity since the devil and hell are not sacred.)
• Vulgarity, or the kind of language that would be used by "the common people" (Latin, vulgus) but not in polite society. Into this category go tabooed scatalogical, anatomical, and sexual terms.
• Slurs, or derogatory ways of referring to people or things. These may be terms applying to a particular religious or ethnic group (fill in your own examples mentally–not in the combox!) or terms referring to personal dispositions (e.g., "He’s a jerk" or "He’s a nerd").

Now, the question was: Can these forms of language ever be used without it being a sin?

The simple answer is: Yes.

Here are two examples:

1. Suppose that you are an actor in a play or movie and the script calls for you to use such language. As long as the play or movie is not glamorizing or otherwise endorsing the use of such language, it is morally licit for the actors to utter the lines. It is understood (on the above conditions) both by the actors and the audience that the language is not meant in earnest but is a depiction of how certain people (e.g., the vulgar) speak. For example: Many locales have Passion Plays in which the crowd present in front of Pilate cries "Crucify him!" Now, in real life this would be a species of profanity (specifically: it would be blasphemy; CCC 2149). But it is not blasphemous when uttered by actors who are in fact devout Christians and do not mean it and who are depicting the events of Our Lord’s life. Neither, for that matter, is it sinful when a lector reads these words at Mass.
2. Some slurs, such as "jerk" are mild (i.e., weakly tabooed at best) and do not carry a huge emotional load. They also can be useful shorthand. "Jerk," for example is simply shorthand for "an obnoxious person." If it is true that someone is behaving in an obnoxious manner then it is perfectly within bounds to say "He was acting like a jerk."

Having answered the initial question as phrased, let’s go on to the reader’s elaboration of the subject:

I can see where swearing at someone would be a sin because of the anger behind the words but in that case it is a sin of anger, right? Or is the swearing itself sinful as well? What if the anger were just? Obviously it would be a sin if the swearing were somehow taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Obviously. But it seems that two things would be in play here. The first is the anger. Emotions themselves are not sinful. What can be sinful is how we react to our emotions. If we foster anger when we should be trying to cool it, that is a sin. If we undertake an evil action based on our anger (e.g., attacking someone we’re angry with), that also is a sin. But the emotion itself is not sinful.

If one is feeling an emotion–be it anger, frustration, awe, surprise, or what have you–there is nothing wrong in principle with expressing that emotion. One can do this either discursively (e.g., "I am remarkably angry at the moment, old chap") or by the use of an interjection if the interjection is not otherwise problematic.

In the case of using God’s name as an interjection, this gets us to the second element in play. The name of God is not a fitting interjection for use when we are angry. It is sacred and should not  be used simply to communicate what we are feeling at the moment. That is a misuse of the name.

This is not to say that God cannot be brought in to emotional expression. Of course, he can be. If you say "Praise God!" when something good happens, and you really mean that you want someone to praise (or at least attribute mentally credit to) God for the good thing, that’s no problem at all.

In principle, the same could be true of maledictions against evil things. For example, on 9/11 after the Twin Towers fell, many in America could have literally meant the malediction "God damn Osama bin Laden." That’s not automatically sinful since Osama bin Laden committed acts objectively worthy of damnation by God.

Saying "God damn Osama bin Laden" thus represents a wish that Osama would experience the just rewards of his actions. One has to hold out hope, even for bin Laden, that he will repent and not be damned, or that he was too crazy to be accountable for his actions, but so long as those are not the case, it is entirely appropriate to wish to see divine justice accomplished in his case.

God himself is willing to damn those who culpably do things like Osama bin Laden did, and if God is willing to do so (as the Church teaches) then it is not sinful for us to make our own what God is willing to do, as long as we also make our own the other things God is willing to do (like not damn Osama if he repents or if he was too crazy to be culpable for his actions).

In this case, the justified anger experienced by the attack of 9/11 finds expression in an utterance expressing this emotion and corresponding to reality (Osama bin Laden is damnworthy) on the appropriate assumptions (e.g., he is gravely culpable for his actions).

The reader continues:

And what if you were not swearing at someone but just let out an expletive in a situation of surprise or dismay?

If you just let an expletive slip out without it being a fully deliberate utterance then it affects your personal culpability for the action. Assuming that the use of the expletive was not otherwise morally permissible (e.g., like saying "God damn Osama bin Laden" in the wake of 9/11) then one will be venially accountable for it if it were done with partial deliberation and non-accountable for it is it were done with no deliberation.

Also, does it matter how coarse the word is considered? When I was a kid, I got scolded once the parents of a friend because I used the word "damn". At the time I really thought it to be equivalent to "darn".

It does matter how strong the taboo associated with the word is perceived to be. This is in two respects: how strong the speaker perceives the taboo to be and how strong the language community considers the taboo to be.

For purposes of illustrating this point, though, let’s prescind from talking about profanity and talk about non-profane tabooed words. In this case the issue of profaning the sacred is not involved. What is involved is the question of whether and in what circumstances it is okay to be break a social taboo–a convention of the linguistic community–not whether the sacred is being violated.

F’rinstance: I have a friend whose native language is an east Asian tongue but who came to America to go to college, where she heard a lot of college-age language. Not being a native-speaker of English, she didn’t have a native’s feel for what words were tabooed and how much. She didn’t even necessarily hear correctly what was being said.

Thus one day years ago I was talking to her in a chatroom and she described a particular software application as "a piece of crab."

I just about died laughing.

She obviously had misheard something from her English-speaking college friends. As members of the vulgus, they no doubt used a particular, well-known expression a great deal as a way of describing things of poor quality. My friend, not being a native-speaker, misheard the expression and thought it was customary in English to refer to things of poor quality using a seafood metaphor.

She was, appropriately, horrified when–so that she wouldn’t use this phrase again in polite company–I clarified for her what the actual phrase was and explained that it was tabooed. (Once she understood what the original phrase was, she also understood why it was tabooed.)

My friend didn’t perceive the taboo in the word, and that would have correspondingly negated her culpability for using it–assuming she’d used it correctly.

What if everyone felt that way? What is everybody (or at least the language community as a whole) didn’t perceive the taboo? Then there would be no taboo and it would not be inappropriate to use the word.

It’s important to realize that the taboos associated with words, like the meaning of words themselves, are arbitrary. They are assigned by society and thus not intrinsic to the word. For example: Think through a list of biological words that are tabooed. In each case (assuming that your vocabulary size is normal), you should be able to think of another word that means exactly the same thing but is not tabooed (or that is at least much less strongly tabooed).

The taboo levels of words also change over time. For example, back in the 1950s the word "pregnant" had a form of taboo associated with it that it simply lacks today. When Lucille Ball got pregnant while the series I Love Lucy was on the air, the producers decided not to hide the pregnancy (as some TV shows do) but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t offend audience sensibilities.

To cover themselves, they consulted several religious leaders (the proverbial priest, minister, and rabbi, if I remember correctly) and got several terms that could be used to refer to Lucy’s condition ("expecting" and the French word for "pregnant," as I recall), but the religious figures agree that she should not be referred to on the air as "pregnant." That word was too indelicate.

Today, whatever taboo was affecting the use of "pregnant" in this case is simply gone. As a result, people can and do say "pregnant" on TV with no moral impropriety at all.

Taboo levels thus change over time. They go up and down based on social mores.

But when a word is tabooed by a language community, and to the degree it is tabooed, it should be avoided apart from special circumstances warranting its use. The impulse to put taboos on words corresponds to something very deep in the human psyche. Every language community has them. They are bound up with politeness codes and when one uses them in circumstances where the taboo applies, one is being impolite.

Being impolite, in turn, causes a rupture in social discourse, tends to create feelings of pain and anger and revulsion, and these feelings should not be thoughtlessly or deliberately created without adequate reason. Sometimes, though, there are situations in which being impolite is warranted, and there may be a good to be achieved that allows the breaking of a social taboo.

The general rule, however, is what St. Paul articulates:

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen (Eph. 4:29, NIV).

Unlike Michael Schiavo, who actively sought to kill his disabled wife, Dr. Yacov Tabak fought for his wife’s life:

"Dr. Tabak couldn’t bear the term ‘vegetable’ when it was first presented to him, and since the Terry [sic] Schiavo ruling, says that some in the medical community have shown an ulterior, ugly side regarding this appellation. ‘There is a medical agenda with this term,’ Dr. Tabak contends. ‘It’s very difficult to get emotionally involved with a vegetable. To have a relationship with a carrot goes against human nature. But there is an underlying subtext here. If a person is a vegetable, he can be sliced up like a vegetable for a higher purpose. Perhaps for research, or for organ appropriation. His guardian can decide if he has the right to live or die. If value of life is now being determined by a subjective definition of quality of life, who’s to stop hospitals from having a mandatory tissue-type registry for ‘vegetables’ in case a person with a defined "better" quality of life needs an organ? This is a steep, slippery slope.’

[…]

"All the proof he needed came two days after Marsi [Tabak] opened her eyes for the first time. Shani Tabak, then 24, was at her mother’s side, speaking to her heart. ‘Mom,’ she said, ‘you have to get better. I can’t get married and stand under the chuppah without you.’

"And then Marsi began to cry.

"’Then I knew she was with us,’ says Yacov. ‘Her hearing was intact — the auditory nerves were apparently not injured. Her memory was intact, she knew who was speaking to her, and her emotions were intact. That was a pretty good inventory to start with. But our joy was limited by the sudden realization of the great danger Marsi was now in. The doctors could destroy her will to live. I went to her and said "Marsi, we know you can hear us, we are with you, we’re going to help you get well. Now, the doctors are going to say some pretty terrible things that you will hear, things like, ‘This patient is a vegetable and has no hope for recovery, we are going to suggest to the family that she be put away in a facility, she’ll be a vegetable for the rest of her life….’" Imagine if a person hears this and his cognition is intact. It’s like a person waking up and realizing he’s in a coffin and the lid is being nailed shut. He wants to shout, "I’m not dead yet!" but no sound comes out. Marsi was in such a state. For the first four months she suffered from cortical blindness, so she not only couldn’t move but couldn’t even see, and the outside world couldn’t hear her silent scream.’"

GET THE STORY.

(Nod to Ut Unum Sint for the link.)

A reader writes:

I’ve heard a number of times (most notably from my pastor!) that Pope Paul VI convened a panel of ‘experts’ to help him in deciding whether contraception should be morally acceptable. These experts allegedly unanimously reported that contraceptions should be allowed among the faithful. Then Paul VI unilaterally rejected this opinion and published his encyclical "Humanae Vitae" prohibiting the use of contraception. I’ve also heard that then-Cardinal Karol Woltyla was instrumental in convincing Paul not to allow contraception.

This story seems awfully suspicious to me, and I figured that since it’s a nasty little rumor that’s out there, I’d appreciate it if you could clear this up on your blog.

The story as you report it is not true, but it is based on something that really did happen. There was a Papal Commission on Birth Control, and it’s mentioned in the text of Humanae Vitae. It was first set up by John XXIII in 1962 and then expanded by Paul VI, who explains:

The consciousness of the same responsibility induced Us to confirm and expand the commission set up by Our predecessor Pope John XXIII, of happy memory, in March, 1963. This commission included married couples as well as many experts in the various fields pertinent to these questions. Its task was to examine views and opinions concerning married life, and especially on the correct regulation of births; and it was also to provide the teaching authority of the Church with such evidence as would enable it to give an apt reply in this matter, which not only the faithful but also the rest of the world were waiting for [HV 5].

This was a really dumb thing.

Establishing "expert commissions" is what large entities do before they announce a policy change, and the creation and later expansion of this commission started generating expectations of a policy change on contraception just as the Pill was taking off in popular consciousness and the early phase of the swinging Sixties was underway (even though the Free Love movement hadn’t yet arrived).

The better way to do things is not to publicly announce commissions but to have somebody you trust privately conduct a consultation with experts so that there isn’t a big, out-of-control commission making headlines.

The existence of the commission also cramped Vatican II, because when Gaudiam et spes was written, nobody knew what the commission would report or what the pope would do in response. As a result, we get the following tepid statement on birth control:

[S]ons of the Church may not undertake methods of birth control which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law [GS 51].

And the even more ambiguifying statement in the footnotes:

Certain questions which need further and more careful investigation have been handed over, at the command of the Supreme Pontiff, to a commission for the study of population, family, and births, in order that, after it fulfills its function, the Supreme Pontiff may pass judgment. With the doctrine of the magisterium in this state, this holy synod does not intend to propose immediately concrete solutions [n. 14].

So then the commission turns in its final reports in 1966, after the Council, and guess what: They’re split! 30 of the commission members apparently were in favor of a more open position on contraception (or certain forms of contraception) while 5 were not. (So it warn’t unanimous.)

This became public in 1967 and got everybody expecting that the pope would accept the recommendation of the majority report. This was, incidentally, the year of the Summer of Love.

And then . . .

. . . a year goes by.

What happens in that year? Back to Humanae Vitae:

When the evidence of the experts had been received, as well as the opinions and advice of a considerable number of Our brethren in the episcopate—some of whom sent their views spontaneously, while others were requested by Us to do so—We were in a position to weigh with more precision all the aspects of this complex subject. Hence We are deeply grateful to all those concerned [HV 5].

Yeah, and while Paul VI was weighing all this, the delay allowed public expectations of an approval of the Pill ("After all, it just stops ovulation. It doesn’t introduce something foreign into the sex act, like a condom or a shield or a coil or anything," people were saying).

So Paul VI decides that

the conclusions arrived at by the commission could not be considered by Us as definitive and absolutely certain, dispensing Us from the duty of examining personally this serious question. This was all the more necessary because, within the commission itself, there was not complete agreement concerning the moral norms to be proposed, and especially because certain approaches and criteria for a solution to this question had emerged which were at variance with the moral doctrine on marriage constantly taught by the magisterium of the Church.

Consequently, now that We have sifted carefully the evidence sent to Us and intently studied the whole matter, as well as prayed constantly to God, We, by virtue of the mandate entrusted to Us by Christ, intend to give Our reply to this series of grave questions [HV 6]

Bang! Humanae Vitae comes out in 1968 and everybody’s shell shocked. After six years of having the expectation fostered that some form of contraception would get permitted, while the Church is still reeling from Vatican II, and while the sexual revolution is exploding around the world, Paul VI comes out with a big, loud, and long-overdue "No!"

So a buncha theologians including the infamous Charlie Curran get together and discuss and issue press statements.

The public reaction to Humanae Vitae is so negative that Paul VI goes into shock and becomes didactically paralyzed. After having issued seven encyclicals in his first five years in office, Humanae Vitae is the end of the line for his encyclical writing days. After it comes out in 1968 he writes no more encyclicals for the next and final ten years of his reign. After HV, he’s done.

It was a shattering experience for him. Having had the chutzpah to tell the world "No!" on contraception, he then lost his nerve to tell it anything ever again in the form of an encyclical, the principal form of papal teaching document. (Though, to be sure, he did issue other documents, including ones of a doctrinal nature.)

Meanwhile, the fallout of the raised and then dashed expectations around this issue and the networking that occurred among opponents of Humanae Vitae result in the first seriously organized dissident movement in the wake of the Council, and so we have a mess on our hands that we’re still cleaning up to this day.

Now, the Papal Commission on Birth Control and the way Humanae Vitae was delayed were the sole cause of the current mess. The Sixties and the invention of new contraception methods have a lot to do with it as well. But the actions of John XXIII and Paul VI in handling the matter were contributing causes.

It’s only now that folks are getting the sense that the cafeteria really is closed on this issue.

Now . . . it sounds as if the story as you put it had quite a bit of anti-Humanae Vitae spin layered on it. For example, about Paul VI acting "unilaterally" in regard to the Commission. Well, duh! It was always up to the pope to accept or reject the advice of the Commission. That’s advisory commissions do: Give advice. When an individual has created such a commission and then gets its advice, it’s up to him to either accept or reject that advice, and since that decision is made by an individual, it is in that sense "unilateral."

But the term "unilateral" is meant as prejudicial language to make Paul VI appear isolated and therefore wrong. In regard to this, two points may be made:

First, he wasn’t isolated. Many, many, many people–including, for example, the bishops he consulted–supported the Church’s historic teaching and were immensely relieved when HV came out. That’s not the decisive consideration, though, because the Church is not a democracy and you can’t establish doctrine by doing a poll. So . . .

Second, this is a matter of faith. God has either guides the Church and its Magisterium or he doesn’t. If he does–this being the fundamental supposition of Catholic doctrinal epistemology–then you have to trust that he guided them on this matter. God promised to guide the Church and the Successor of Peter in a way he didn’t promise to guide papal commissions. If you’ve got to go with one or the other (and in this case you do) then you go with the former and chalk the commission’s results up to erroneous thinking in an unsettled age of social and moral upheaval.

Finally, regarding Karol Wojtyla’s involvement in this, I’ve heard rumors of his involvement as well, and I think it likely that he did have some involvement, though what specifically that was is too difficult for me to tell at present. I think it is probably too much to say that Wojtyla was instrumental in "convincing" Paul VI to reject the Commission’s majority’s advice.

A reader and fellow blogger writes:

Given your expertise in responding to the nitty-gritty ethics questions on your blog, I was hoping you’d address the following for me, as I could use some assistance in thinking about this matter — some readers have raised the issue of late of my use of Amazon.com’s affiliate program, given the fact that 1) anti-Catholic material may be found on their website and 2) pornographic material may also be freely purchased on their website as well (DVD’s, videos, etc.).

Noticing that I am not the only blogger to make use of this, or that Catholic companies like Ignatius Press, Our Sunday Visitor and Tan Books employ the use of Amazon.com as a seller of their books and publications, I wonder if you’ve addressed this question in the past, or can do so now? — from an ethics standpoint, how does one navigate this issue?

Q: Can business involvement in Amazon.com, or Barnes and Noble, or another virtual or real book distributor be considered condonement of their use of other ethically questionable materials? Should I best severe ties from them altogether? I wanted to know your thoughts before making a practical decision.

The answer to the question as phrased is: It depends. It depends on what kind of business involvement you’re having with such a bookseller. If you’re putting links to pornographic items on your blog for folks to buy, then no, that’s obviously no licit business involvement.

I’m sure that’s not the kind of involvement you mean, though. I assume that it’s providing links to purely innocent (even positive) items that they have for sale and possibly getting a tiny, tiny revenue share if the person buys it.

That kind of involvement is going to be morally licit.

To see why, let’s first step back and note a few points:

1. These booksellers sell a whole lot more than the problematic items you mention. They carry many items that are not anti-Catholic and not pornographic. In fact, they carry many items that are pro-Catholic (e.g., Benedict XVI’s previous books) and pro-chastity (e.g., John Paul II’s Love & Responsibility).
2. These booksellers are really just online versions of the major book chains. Barnes & Noble is a major book chain, and Amazon carries the same books, CDs, & DVDs that you’d find in a typical Borders bookstore (which is, in fact, affiliated with Amazon.Com).
3. The kind of business involvement you are talking about is going to be in the same category as the kind of involvement that an author has with these booksellers. When an author writes a book, he gives it to a publisher who tries to get it in all the bookstores it can, and (if it’s a large publisher) it gets it in the major chain bookstores, on Amazon and B&N, and people buy it and a royalty goes back to the author. If you’re providing a link to the book and the company gives you a revenue share (much smaller than an author’s royalty, as small as those usually are) then it’s essentially like a royalty going back to you. If it’s wrong for you to do this, it’s going to be wrong for an author to do it as well.
4. Since the sending back of those royalties to you and the author depends on a person buying the product, that gets the purchaser into the moral equation. If it’s going to be wrong for you and the author to receive money though your business relationship with the bookseller then it’s going to be wrong for the puracher to give money to the bookseller, who is really just a middleman between the author and the audience. If the middleman is so morally tainted that the author (and you) can’t do business with him, then the audience won’t be able to do business with him either. They will be morally obliged to boycott him.

Now, suppose that it were morally wrong to sell or purchase books through major booksellers like Amazon. What would the consequences of that be? Well . . .

• Per point 4, everybody is morally required to not do business with them. A boycott by all morally informed purchasers is mandated.
• Per point 3, authors and publishers are not going to be able to place their books through these booksellers. They’ll only be able to use untained, morally pure online vendors for their books. Per point 2, the same applies to bookstores. Purchasers and authors can only work with morally pure bookstores that do not carry tainted material.
• Point 1 is therefore neutralized. It doesn’t matter how much good the pro-Catholic and pro-chastity books, CDs, and videos might do. They can no longer be offered through in online or offline booksellers. The producers of these materials have to boycott these venues, and so the vendors become more tilted toward evil due to not having good materials and the public finds it harder to obtain good material, meaning that society as a whole tilts further toward evil since the diet of material it can buy at its local bookstore, etc., is now tilted toward evil.
• Purchasers therefore have to expend extra effort to get morally good material, meaning that they will obtain it less often and thus be less edified. Secular and non-committed Christians won’t undertake those efforts. Even many committed Catholics will simply not make the effort, at least on occasion, and thus not purchase the products. Sales of good products therefore go down.
• Authors thus will find it harder to make a living since there are fewer venues for their products and fewer people buying then. More authors experience economic hardship, and many publishers go out of business, centralizing more market share in the major publishers who are already publishing problematic material and therefore can’t be touched either.

Now, a person might object: "But wait! If we got all the Catholics and Evangelicals in America to boycott with us, they’d change their policies!"

Maybe.

If you really got all the C & Es together and had an iron-clad economic blockade of these institutions, that just might be enough to get a policy change.

But let’s be realistic: We’re not going to get all of the C & Es in America to conduct such a boycott. There is no mechanism in place capable of generating a boycott that big. If someone engineers such a mechanism then we can talk about the prudence of initiating a boycott, but we can’t act as if such a boycott is in the offing until it actually is in the offing. We have to base our actions on what is achievable now and not in a possible future that may never materialize.

Well, what if we had a smaller boycott?

It’d fail.

The thing is: Anti-Catholic stuff and porn has a market. For a start, it’s the Evangelicals who are eating up a lot of the most direct and explicit anti-Catholic stuff. (Secularists won’t read James White’s latest opus.)

And as for porn, it’s apparently an economic juggernaut at the moment. I’m given to understand that it accounts for a frighteningly high amount of the traffic and economics of the Internet. I certainly have to delete an awful lot of porn spam from the comments boxes and trackbacks (though having switched my e-mail to Gmail, I no longer have to delete all the porn ads that were being dumped into my e-mail box every day; Gmail’s filtering system seems quite good).

As long as there’s a market for this stuff and–this is a point often overlooked–as long as there is an indifferentist ideology among booksellers where they say, "We don’t take sides in these debates; we let anybody put their products on our site, and that’s important to who we are" then anything but a massive, iron-clad boycott of millions of people isn’t going to achieve the desired effect.

(NOTE ‘CAUSE I KNOW FOLK’LL ASK: The indifferent ideology of eBay is part of the recent problem with them. I’ll post soon on the issue of boycotting eBay. For now, I’d ask folks not to discuss the eBay situation in the combox of this post as I want to keep the issues separate.)

So: Whadda we do until we have a bookseller boycott in the offing that could be truly effective?

Well, Catholic moral theology will not support the proposition that we are morally obliged to boycott when doing so will be ineffective. (It may not even support the existence of a moral obligation when an effective boycott is in the offing, but it certainly won’t support the existence of a moral obligation when an effective boycott ain’t in the offing.) The kind of formal cooperation or immediate material cooperation required to make a boycott morally obligatory just ain’t there.

We could, of course, impose our own personal boycotts that we know will have no chance of achieving the effect we want. In that case, the bad effects mentioned in the bullet points above will happen to the extent that people are participating in the ineffective boycott.

If I write a pro-Catholic book and say "Sorry Amazon! Y’all don’t get it!" then that makes it (a) makes it harder for folks to find it, meaning fewer will and thus fewer folks will be benefitted and (b) hurt me by making it harder for me to make a living since I’ll have spent all this time writing the book and getting less remuneration for my time investment.

Acting in my capacity as a customer, if I refuse to do business with only vendors that have morally untainted product lines then I’m going to be able to buy only the items available in Catholic bookstores. I’ll never read a non-Catholic book again because the non-Catholic booksellers all have something problematic in them. I therefore will not only (slightly) impoverish the authors who wrote the good but non-Catholic books I would have otherwise bought, I’ll (much more!) impoverish myself by living in a defensive, retreatist manner that fails to engage contemporary culture in the way that the Church has always called us to.

While I greatly sympathize with the impulse of individuals to try to boycott booksellers that sell bad material, and while organizing effective boycotts against them is praiseworthy and worth pursuing, Catholic moral theology will simply not support the proposition that as things stand now people are to have no dealings with them.

The idea that as individuals we must, in the here and now, cease having anything to do with secular booksellers (online and off) and only buy things from Catholic vendors with totally pure inventories (no problematic theology or apparition stuff in them) is Jansenistic and fostering of scrupulosity.

I suggest that we take as our model in these matters our current, wonderful holy father, Pope Benedict XVI.

Benedict XVI has a string of book contracts with Ignatius Press and other publishers and these publishers get his books carried by non-religious booksellers. Revenue flows back to them from these booksellers, and every now and then they cut a royalty check and send it to Benedict XVI (or whoever he may have designated as the recipient of his royalties–maybe a religious order or charity or relative), and he’s totally jake with that.

He may or may not know that his books are on Amazon, but he certainly knows that his books are being sold through non-religious booksellers who also carry problematic materials. He knows how the publishing industry works, and while he no doubt deplores the bad material the vendors carry, he wants the vendors to sell his stuff so it can get out there and do good.

If he can allow his books to be sold through such venues then it seems to me that it’s okay for us to buy them from such sellers or to provide links to them.

LIKE THIS ONE. GO GETCHA SOME GREAT BENEDICT XVI BOOKS! YEE-HAW!

Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, shares his eyewitness testimony of the final hours in the life of Terri Schindler-Schiavo.

GET THE (HEARTBREAKING) STORY.

Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, shares his eyewitness testimony of the final hours in the life of Terri Schindler-Schiavo.

GET THE (HEARTBREAKING) STORY.

A reader writes:

I came accross your web site when I was looking to see the catholic churches stance on vasectomies. I have a question, my wife was diagnosed with diabetes and we were informed that if we concieve a child there is a large risk of still birth or deformities. We were told that it is a higher rick than an average couple.

First, I am very sorry to hear about your wife’s condition. Diabetes is a cross that many have to carry, but there is hope for a cure soon.

I am extremely suspicious, however, of the advice you have been given regarding having children. While there may be a higher risk of stillbirth or deformities, there is a significant likelihood that this risk has been exaggerated by your physician. Many doctors in America today have a hypersensitivity to risk and an anti-child mentality that leads them to tell people they should’t have children for totally inadequate reasons.

I strongly suggest that you contact a pro-life doctor and ask him to give you a realistic assessment of the impact that your wife’s diabetes may have on the situation.

For example, even the March of Dimes (a very anti-child organization that wants to end birth defects by killing the children who have them) says the following about diabetes and pregnancy:

Today, most of these women [i.e., women who have diabetes] can look forward to having a healthy baby. While diabetes poses some risks in pregnancy, advances in care have greatly improved the outlook for these pregnancies [SOURCE].

It goes on to say that:

Women with poorly controlled preexisting diabetes in the early weeks of pregnancy are three to four times more likely than nondiabetic women to have a baby with a serious birth defect

but it elsewhere notes that the chance of a birth defect is 1 in 28. That means that for a woman with poorly controlled diabetes the chance of a birth defect would be 12.5% (assuming that the "serious birth defect" mentioned in the diabetes article is the same as the "birth defect" mentioned in the second article; the risk would be less than 12.5% if "serious birth defect" meant to be is a subset of the category "birth defect," meaning that there is less than a 1 in 28 chance of a serious birth defect.)

It does not seem to me that a 12.5% risk of a birth defect creates an automatic "don’t have children" situation. There is an 87.5% chance per kid that the child will be totally fine.

And that is for women with "poorly controlled preexisting diabetes." I assume that your wife, now that she has been diagnosed, will be properly controlling her diabetes through diet, exercise, and (if needed) medication, in which case the chances of having a normal baby will be greater than 87.5%.

I therefore strongly recommend that you talk to a pro-life doctor or contact the Couple to Couple League for additional perspective on this as I think you’re being misled by a hyper-cautious doctor.

The reader continues:

We are currently thinking about my getting a vasectomy. I am almost sure I will get one, my question is will this stop my ability to get the eucarist, or recieve other graces (i.e. ability to get into heaven)?

I strongly recommend that you do not pursue this course of action. Having a vasectomy is intrinsically wrong and a grave sin. To have one knowingly and deliberately is a mortal sin. Those in a state of mortal sin cannot receive Communion and those who die in mortal sin do not go to heaven because they have turned their back on God and extinguished the life of grace in their souls by rejecting his will in a fundamental matter. (Documentation on all this available on request.)

If, after seeking appropriate pro-life counsel, you conclude that you need to avoid having children then this needs to be accomplished in a morally licit way, such as Natural Family Planning. The Couple to Couple League can help you get trained on how to do that.

Finally, I’d add a caution of a prudential nature: Many men who have vasectomies later repent and conclude that they shouldn’t have had them. Some, along with their wives, conclude that they really want children after all. Consequently, they undertake corrective surgery. However, the way corrective surgery for a vasectomy works, it is not always successful (leading to further heartbreak and anguished regret for the couple) and it often causes the man ongoing physical pain.

I therefore strongly urge you not to undertake an action that could so dramatically affect you life, both spiritually and physically.

Hope this helps, and God bless!

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