Archbishop: Woman Should Have Used Birth Control
The LA Times reports:
In her relationship with Arturo Uribe, then a seminarian and now a Whittier priest, the child’s mother had engaged “in unprotected intercourse … when [she] should have known that could result in pregnancy,” the church maintained in its answer to the lawsuit.... Now liberal and conservative Catholics around the country are decrying the archdiocese’s legal strategy, saying it was counter to church teaching.
“On the face of it, [the argument] is simply appalling,” said Michael Novak, a conservative Catholic theologian and author based in Washington, D.C. ... William Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights based in New York, said the legal language was “simply code for, ‘What’s wrong with you, honey, aren’t you smart enough to make sure condoms were used?’ “ And that, he notes, is completely counter to the church’s teachings, which hold that using contraceptives is “intrinsically evil.”
It’s unusual for Catholic leaders to do something so incredibly stupid that they manage to unite both liberal and conservative Catholics in outrage and condemnations.
Levada, it must be noted, is not some random and out-of-control cleric — he’s responsible for protecting the orthodoxy of Catholic teachings around the world. He was picked personally by Pope Benedict XVI and it’s implausible that his many writings — especially those relating in any way with the sexual abuse crisis — were not examined beforehand.
Bitch Ph.D. comments:
Lots of Catholics, of course, are pissed off about it (and, in the end, the woman was awarded the increase in child support she was asking for). But the real problem with this argument isn’t that the church is being hypocritical. That’s old news, and hardly worth commenting on. The problem is the argument, of course, that the pregnancy was all the woman’s fault, like the priest who fathered her child (haha, fathered, geddit?) just had nothing to do with it.
As someone quoted in the LA Times article also notes, it appears to be another example of Catholic leaders laying all of the blame for sexual problems at the feet of women. Men aren’t responsible for their actions, but women must be held responsible for all of the consequences of joint behavior.
The best defense that Levada has is that he was unaware of the arguments being used and that the archdiocese’s lawyers were simply offering whatever legal tactics were thought most likely to succeed, regardless of whether they were consistent with Catholic teachings. Even assuming that is true, though, it isn’t much better of a situation. This would require the Catholic Church to admit that when dealing with legal issues, they are willing to ignore their own teachings in order to win a case — it doesn’t matter how unethical, un-Catholic, or un-Christian a tactic is, they will use it.
For outsiders, this is hardly surprising — of course the Catholic Church will act like any other large organization in order to protect its interests. Of course they will use whatever legal tactic that the law allows. Why would they voluntarily refrain from offering valid legal arguments? From a Catholic perspective, though, this should be just as outrageous and horrifying as it would be if Levada personally approved the above legal argument.
It’s bad for an archbishop to argue that a woman should use birth control in order to avoid getting pregnant from a seminarian. It’s just as bad, though, for an archbishop to give his lawyers carte blanche to use whatever legal tactics they can to win a case against the archdiocese, regardless of whether the tactics are allowable under Catholic moral doctrines. The former is hypocritical; the latter, though, is an abdication of moral authority. An organization that doesn’t hold itself to the moral standards it expects members to adopt isn’t one that is worth submitting to.
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