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At several points during the administration’s ongoing struggle with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over contraception coverage, I’ve found myself thinking: “Wonder what Garry Wills would have to say about this?” For those unfamiliar with Wills (one of my idols, from my first reading of Nixon Agonistes back in the 1970s right on up to the 2009 book What the Gospels Meant) he’s the author of an entire array of remarkable books about Christianity, Catholicism, the Founders and U.S. politics.
Turns out we don’t have to wonder any more, because Wills has at least initially weighed in on the subject at the New York Review of Books’ blog. He certainly doesn’t mince words:
Pusillanimous Catholics—Mark Shields and even, to a degree, the admirable E. J. Dionne—are saying that Catholics understandably resent an attack on “their” doctrine (even though they do not personally believe in it). Omnidirectional bad-faith arguments have clustered around what is falsely presented as a defense of “faith.” The layers of ignorance are equaled only by the willingness of people “of all faiths” to use them for their own purposes.
Wills goes on to describe the whole issue as “phony,” from its framing as a test of religious freedom, to the effort to make it a token of Catholic solidarity, to the very assumption that contraception is a religious matter at all.
I have no idea if Wills is going to write about this more in the immediate future, but I certainly hope so. His blog post has the air of an brief, irritable introduction to a lecture that will leave his opponents scrambling through centuries of texts to salvage their arguments, and their self-confidence.
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Josef K on February 16, 2012 10:29 AM:
His blog post has the air of an brief, irritable introduction to a lecture that will leave his opponents scrambling through centuries of texts to salvage their arguments, and their self-confidence.
That presupposes said opponents actually advance a rational or coherent argument. In this day and age, just saying something - no matter how blinkered or false - is treated as solid as gospel.
More's the pity, because Mr. Wills offers a very clear-eyed take on this silliness.
DAY on February 16, 2012 10:37 AM:
Contraception: The biggest issue of our time- right after the Carter Administration's decision to go metric.
bdop4 on February 16, 2012 10:40 AM:
It will never happen, but I would love to see him on the same show with Shields and Dionne. Those guys deserve a major comeuppance on this issue.
stevio on February 16, 2012 11:01 AM:
I'd like to see this guy on ANY TV cable program.
My guess is that if he were to appear on Wolf's or David Gregory's shows by the time for the first commercial break Gregory would be sitting cross-eyed, sucking his thumb and giving himself a wedgie...
I'd give a lot to see that...
Grumpy on February 16, 2012 11:04 AM:
Given Wills output, he's probably halfway finished with a book about it.
james on February 16, 2012 11:10 AM:
Contraception, for both Catholics and abstinence-only promoters of any religion or none, is a proxy for sex outside of traditional one man / one woman marriage -- premarital or extramarital sex. In their minds, contraception gives permission to have sex to people who they believe shouldn't be allowed to have sex.
It allows unmarried people to have sex, or married people to cheat on their spouses, without the risk of an unwanted pregnancy -- proof sex has happened! How can we possibly punish and shame people for having sex they should not have had if there is no proof? Contraception thwarts punishment and shame for sin and, therefore, must be stopped!
After all, you know, none of those altar boys or priests got pregnant so, you know, there really isn't any proof the sex happened.
T2 on February 16, 2012 11:17 AM:
there are millions of women, and men, in this country just scratching their heads right now, wondering just what in the hell the Republicans and Catholic hierarchy are doing.
Birth control is a done deal. Over. Worldwide. Talk about picking your fights poorly..
nerd on February 16, 2012 11:24 AM:
Hooray! I believe Jefferson had a good way of viewing faith: it is a personal thing. I go to church but am tired of people waiving their faith as a weapon of war.
There are people who use 'faith' as an excuse to promote their own selfish desires. In this case it is to retain their power over other people.
To those with any stature willing to stand up to such people and call them on it I say Thank You.
cmdicely on February 16, 2012 11:32 AM:
Yeah, no. Look, I actually agree that the religious freedom argument is bogus, and further that the present teaching of the Magisterium on contraception is dubious on its face, but Wills piece is lazy garbage. First, he argues that the teaching of the Magisterium on contraception is wrong—without actually addressing the actual teaching, but instead only arguing against some historical statements related to it.
The he argues that the teaching of the Magisterium isn't the teaching of the Church, by selective semantic games (noting that the Church itself defines "the Church" as "the People of God", but failing to note the teaching authority of the Magisterium within the Church.)
If Wills had spent the effort that went into that bogus argument on the substantive problems with Humanae Vitae (rather than an overly simplistic assertion about its motives), he might have had an interesting piece, but that would have taken effort. As it is, he has the kind of piece that is very good at impressing people who already agree with its conclusions but are completely ignorant of the substance of the matters addressed.
Mimikatz on February 16, 2012 11:34 AM:
Wills' piece is brilliant and concise. James' points as well. Contraception lets people, especially women, have sex without fear of the "punishment" of pregnancy, a funny position for "pro-life" people, but never mind that. And we can't let women have any choice here, because that takes away men's power--giving it back to the sinful Eve.
This is such retrograde nonsense that it confirms the suspicion that that what Dionne and Shelds and Mathews really resent, as someone said, is the exposure of the absurdity of the Church's teachings on sex. That the hierarchy always cares so much more about sexual issues (not involving the clergy) than about the teachings they revere, on peace and social justice, is also a bitter pill for them.
Meanwhile to the sensible 75% it's just arguments over angels dancing on the heads of pins, or pinheads.
John Robert BEHRMAN on February 16, 2012 11:42 AM:
The Catholic Church has few medical schools and has been exiting the provison of nursing care in hospitals since the mid-1970's.
Call this "Bare Ruined Charity Wards"
The main competitive factor -- generations of nursing sisters imported wholesale from Ireland or recruited and trained here -- disappeared into homes where they could be provided with nursing and medical care by secular nurses and doctors.
This "secularization" has entailed large, complex, and very obscure financial transactions. Thank God. It sure beat the religious warfare, murder, and theft of church property in France or Mexico, not to mention England and Germany.
Good. I helped do some of the financial rescue and watched the rest prtty closely "back in the day".
But, those leveraged buy-out deals, pension fund reorganizations, government indemnities, municipal bonds, and so on, have proven quite lucrative for an array of both financial and political intermediaries, including a few opportunists, not that it takes many of them to do a lot of damage.
The Bishops nurtured confidential relationships, for instance, with the lawyers and others who rushed in to hide or defend sexual abuses some higher clergy managed to not see or take much responsibility for.
The legal-clerical scrum we still seem to have leaves Bishops beholden to financial and political agents than to the lay or religious principals of any church.
And, as I said, the Bishops long ago surrendered medical education and science to Protestants and Jews leaving themselves in a combination intellectual echo chamber and vaccuum, dealing in medical "ethics" spun out of junk science, and with a blind eye to the healing as distinct from legal arts and artiface.
What began as expediency has ended in decrepitude -- the former something sound doctrine should have guided and the latter something the Holy Spirit will inform us as to a way out of, the theologians and philosophers, not to mention the disreputable bankers, in Rome having failed to.
Kathryn on February 16, 2012 11:43 AM:
@bdop4......particularly Shields, at least Dionne is humble and capable of admitting misjudgment, I suspect. When Shields and Brooks are on The News Hour they're hard to tell apart in their pomposity or their views. With liberals like Shields and Harold Ford, no need for conservative views, nothing more useful than criticism from your " so called" own.
Garry Wills article was most informative about the ins and outs of contraceptive politics in the church. His assessment of Rick Santorum right on target, he's a scary man and all the more so for his sincerity(Santorum, that is).
jonas on February 16, 2012 11:59 AM:
@cmdicely
I'm sure Wills could have filled hundreds of more column inches with an in-depth analysis of Humanae Vitae and the history of marriage and sex in the Church, but for the brief space he had here, he's not being glib or inaccurate. Humanae Vitae forbids artificial contraception for the basic reasons Wills states: it violates the moral requirement -- derived from "natural law" -- that that principle "good", or end, of marriage is the creation of new life. While couples are free to take advantage of "natural" periods of infertility, they may not do so by artificial means. Plus it could lead to general sluttiness and increased infidelity (it says that too). That's basically it. It's a medieval natural law argument and one that has no coherence in a modern legal (or theological) context.
If you're able to give a much more nuanced view in the same space, I'd like to see it.
hornblower on February 16, 2012 1:14 PM:
Wills can join the other two in an exclusive club. They are old white males. In another life they could be bishops.
What they think creates not a ripple on the American scene. Time to move on.
Gretchen on February 16, 2012 1:20 PM:
I'm still scratching my head over the idea that, while Catholics (like me) use birth control and don't disapprove of others using birth control, they'll turn against Obama for making birth control more affordable. What? We've chosen our behavior, we think we're fine, but policies acknowledging that fact are going to harm Obama's chances? Who are these Catholics who use birth control but would vote against Obama for making birth control more affordable? I know lots of Catholics, but I have never met this person.
rb6 on February 16, 2012 1:47 PM:
The point is that it should not matter whether HV was incorrect as a theological matter or whether Wills or the bishops have the better argument. This is the United States and not only is it not the job of the president to defer to a religious doctrine, fairly stated, it is his job to make sure that religious doctrine is not the touchstone for defining a person's legal obligations or burdens. That's what it means to say that there shall be no "establishment" of religion.
At least Garry Wills has the integrity to stand up to the bishops, and is not a weak-kneed enabler who is more worried about the overall status of the tribe in society than the virtue or integrity of so-called tribal values.
cmdicely on February 16, 2012 2:27 PM:
The only reason he had brief space to discuss Humanae Vitae is because of the glib and accurate discussion he filled the preceding part of his piece with.
And, even given the brief space left for discussion of Humanae Vitae, what he did describe about it was both glib and, if not strictly inaccurate, badly misleading, and again focussed on ascription of motives and tangential (and misleading) recounting of history rather than anything at all about the substance.
Particularly, having ascribed the motive of avoiding the appearance of changing teachings that were supposed to be eternal to the formulation of Humanae Vitae, he mocks this concern by claiming that Casti Connubii "had not been declared infallible, by the papacy’s own standards". This is untrue or misleading on several levels; first, the dogma of papal infallibility requires no declaration, merely the existence of certain objective criteria, for a teaching to be infallible, therefore, whether a teaching had been declared to be infallible is not critical to the concern Wills attempts to dismiss; second, there is (and was at the time) no such thing as "the papacy's own standards" for a declaration of infallibility—there are different formulas that have been used in the two undisputed cases in which the extraordinary magisterium of the papacy was invoked (one of which predates the dogma of papal infallibility, which is itself held to be infallible through another form of the extraordinary magisterium), but this formula is not a standard (nor is infallibility limited to doctrines proclaimed ex cathedra); and third, Casti Connubii, does, in the part taken as a prohibition on contraception, use a formula which appears to assert each of the elements required for an ex cathedra proclamation invoking the extraordinary magisterium, though the formula is not the same as in either of the undisputed invocations.
So, enough for what Wills says. What does he miss that he could have said in the space he wastes with glib inaccuracies and misdirections? For the short version, skip to the last paragraph...
The doctrine Humanae Vitae proposes is that sex which deliberately undertakes to avoid procreation is in general a sin because it frustrates the natural purpose of intercourse. It then proceeds to argue that, nonetheless, one may use artificial means which produce frustrate that natural purpose when the effect is indirect (that is, there is some therapeutic intent and prevention of procreation, while an effect of the treatment, is not the means by which the therapeutic effect is acheived.)
It finally argues that it is permissible to deliberately frustrate the procreative purpose of marriage, for proportional reasons, but asserst that the only acceptable means that may be used is periodic abstinence.
This produces a fundamental contradiction, as we know that artificial measures which have the effect of preventing contraception are not illicit as means independent of ends (because they may be used for other purposes.) Therefore, if the ends is legitimate (as Humanae Vitae asserts that prevention of procreation may be for proportional reasons), they cannot be said to be prohibited a priori, because they are proclaimed not be illicit as means independent of the ends.
They may, therefore, only validly be improper in that use because of disproportional harm. While Humanae Vitae does enumerate harms that are purported to result from the use of artificial birth control (which might themselves be disputed), it also implicitly notes harms to the institution of marriage from birth contr
cmdicely on February 16, 2012 2:47 PM:
That got oddly truncated...if only preview worked.
Short version: Of these three (all proposed in HV), any two, but not all three can be held without contradiction: (1) artificial methods which have the effect of preventing procreation are not illicit on their own and may be for legitimate ends, (2) temporarily preventing procreation from marital sex for proportional cause is a legitimate end, (3) artificial methods which have the effect of preventing procreation may not be used to prevent procreation from marital sex.
johio on February 16, 2012 3:04 PM:
I recommend Wills' book Papal Sin. I read it some time ago, but think that it deals with both questions of abortion and contraception. Also eviscerates doctrine of Papal infallibility, as I recall.