The Transmission of Human Life

The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator. It has always been a source of great joy to them, even though it sometimes entails many difficulties and hardships.

The fulfillment of this duty has always posed problems to the conscience of married people, but the recent course of human society and the concomitant changes have provoked new questions. The Church cannot ignore these questions, for they concern matters intimately connected with the life and happiness of human beings. --Humanae Vitae 1

She urges man not to betray his personal responsibilities by putting all his faith in technical expedients. -- HV 18

In a hospital room on the Greek island of Crete with views of a sapphire sea lapping at ancient fortress walls, a Bulgarian woman plans to deliver a baby whose biological mother is an anonymous European egg donor, whose father is Italian, and whose birth is being orchestrated from Los Angeles.

She won't be keeping the child. The parents-to-be—an infertile Italian woman and her husband (who provided the sperm)—will take custody of the baby this summer, on the day of birth.

The Wall Street Journal's article "Assembling the Global Baby" is about the new business of surrogacy. I use the term "business" advisedly: there is a product that can be customized to the demands of the consumer, which is being outsourced because foreign workers will do the job for less than their first-world counterparts. And the excessive inventory is liquidated if the buyer doesn't want to purchase it.

Some of his own clients have faced the abortion decision, Mr. Rupak says. "Sometimes they find the money" to pay for more children than they expected, he says. After all, they went to such lengths. And if they decide otherwise, Mr. Rupak says, "We don't judge."

From this it follows that they are not free to act as they choose in the service of transmitting life, as if it were wholly up to them to decide what is the right course to follow. -- HV 10

PlanetHospital's most affordable package, the "India bundle," buys an egg donor, four embryo transfers into four separate surrogate mothers, room and board for the surrogate, and a car and driver for the parents-to-be when they travel to India to pick up the baby.

...Mr. Rupak says he is vigilant about the risks inherent in a lightly regulated business. He says he stopped using egg donors from Georgia in Eastern Europe, for instance, because a black market for eggs has sprung up in the region. This fall, Greek authorities busted a group of Romanian and Bulgarian men for allegedly forcing poor immigrant women to undergo egg extractions.

No statement of the problem and no solution to it is acceptable which does violence to man's essential dignity; those who propose such solutions base them on an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and his life. The only possible solution to this question is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society, and which respects and promotes true human values. -- HV 23, quoting Mater et Magistra

...The couple planned on having two children. But their two surrogate mothers in India each became pregnant with twins.

At 12 weeks into the pregnancies, Mr. Aki and his husband decided to abort two of the fetuses, one from each woman. It was a very painful call to make, Mr. Aki says. "You start thinking to yourself, 'Oh, my god, am I killing this child?'"

Consequently, unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions... -- HV 17

Why Vatican II, Part 2

A couple weeks ago I wrote a monumentally long post on Vatican II -- indeed so much so that I'll start out by promising this one will be much shorter. A lot of that consisted of chewing over things Frank Sheed had said in his book The Church and I, which (due to the nature of Sheed's work) talked a lot about catechesis. This led a couple people to ask, quite rightly given my tendency for topic drift, "My question is, did dissatisfaction with catechesis influence John XXIII's decision to convene the Council?"

No, I don't really think so.

The poor level of active understanding which lay under the things everyone had memorized in elementary school certainly added to the sudden free-fall after the council, because all too many people had no clear idea of what was and what was not possible in the Church. But why call a council when there was no great heresy to fight?

I think Sheed's take, and one which is quite believable to me, is that in the unbounded optimism which so many in the Church felt in the 20s through the 50s, it seemed like the Church was ready to come out of the defensive posture which it had been in (to one extent or another) since Trent and win over the world.

From the point of view of a publisher, Sheed talks a bit in his book of the instinct which prevailed in much of the Church in the first half of the century of disciplining rather than disputing. Whether dealing with modernism or Feeneyism, Sheed argues that there was a tendency to label, reject, discipline and while perhaps not addressing the questions raised in a compelling fashion. Perhaps in keeping with this, Sheed describes several situations in which Sheed & Ward was asked by the Vatican to remove specific books from circulation -- though in each case it eventually proved that no one at the Vatican had actually read the book, they were simply acting in response to a complaint which had been passed up the ladder from priest or layperson who had objected to the book.

It sounds like, to some extent, a motivation for the council was that a combination of the optimism of Catholics about the overall strength of the Church, and an optimism about their standing in the world, led people to believe that the Church could afford to "loosen up a bit" and start discussing things more openly. Perhaps the Church could bring exciting new insights to the questions represented by modernism. Perhaps the Orthodox and even some Protestants could be won back into the fold. Liturgy and catechesis could be revitalized so that the laity (already just about the most educated and involved in the last thousand years) could become even more active in their faiths.

There were already encouraging signs. Gilson was bringing Thomism out of it's turn-of-the-century moribund state. The liturgical movement was seeing success in getting the laity to pray the mass, rather than pray their rosaries during the mass. There was a renewal of interest in the Church Fathers, the Eastern churches, scriptural analysis, etc.

So I think part of what John XXIII must have been thinking of in calling the council was: why not harness all this energy through a council? Why not really let it loose, rather than having small, dedicated groups of theologians, priests and laity struggling to bring about new things while at the same time occasionally suffering from stiff opposition from those who were suspicious of change on principle's sake. This had, after all, been a real problem in the last hundred years. Cardinal Newman was viewed with great suspicion by a great many in Rome. And more recently the liturgical movement, writers on religious freedom, non-Thomistic theology, etc. had often been under some level of suspicion.

To an extent, this has worked. We have seen a lot of good study of the early Church, the Eastern churches and great doctors of the Church other than Aquinas. We've seen John Paul II's Theology of the Body, which it's a bit hard to picture gaining wide attention in the pre-conciliar Church.

And yet, it's clear that there was over-optimism in the idea that the Church could open up discussion on everything without opening up confusion on everything. We were not nearly as strong as we thought we were. We were not nearly as well catechized as we thought we were. And we tried to make too many changes too fast, with the result that all too many people (bishops, priests, religious and laity) began to think that the "spirit" of the council was simply to change whatever one wanted whenever one wanted.

The result was chaos, and I think things are only starting to calm down now, as people find themselves bouncing off the increasingly clearly defined walls that holy men like our current pope have spent the last twenty years trying to build up and enforce. People are I think much more conscious that there are limits which aren't changing now than they were in 1977, and one may certainly hope and pray that in 2037, they will be more so than they are now.

Certainly, there are many results of the post-conciliar chaos that I would rather not have grown up with. However, it is hardly unique to experience periods of deep confusion in the Church's history. I thank God I wasn't born in 1378, at which point one would be 39 by the time that the Council of Constance ended the period of dueling claimants to the papacy.

Perhaps some day an article on Church history will say, "The period from 1968 through around 2020 saw much confusion at all levels within the Church, as the liturgical and theological implications of the Second Vatican Council were sorted out. A short but catastrophic drop in vocations caused some contemporary writers to speculate that the priesthood and religious life might undergo a fundamental change or be abolished all together, and liturgical life was often disrupted as a result of clumsy and excessive implementations of the council's allowance of some use of the vernacular in the liturgy. However, theological chaos gradually died down as it became clear that the Church's devotion to the deposit of faith was unshaken, and many of the liturgical disputes which at the time had rent the faithful were resolved when Pius XIV's new Roman Missal of 2023 clearly codified the rubrics of the 'new mass' and required the use of sung or chanted Latin propers on Sundays and Holy Days, while still allowing a fully vernacular, spoken 'low mass' on weekdays. It was perhaps in response to seeing Rome's increasing focus on the dignity of the liturgy the pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople formally declared their Churches to be in union in 2037, though formal union with the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches would not follow for many more years."

Why Vatican II and What Happened After?

Catholic Cave Man asks in a recent post, what exactly was the point of Vatican II?

The Council of Nicea fought the heresy of Arianism.
The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon fought the heresy of Nestorianism.
The Council of Trent fought the heresy of Protestantism.
The First Vatican Council fought the heresy of Rationalism.

And with all that said, the fruits of those councils are multiple and manifest. The Church always emerged stronger. And I think we all know what the fruits of Vatican II have shown themselves to be.

I don't know that I'd put it so combatively (I couldn't pull it off anyway; I'm not a marine) but the question remains: How did we get from where we seemed to be fifty years ago to where we are today?

This question has bothered me for quite some time, and it was in seeking answers to it that I bought The Church and I by Frank Sheed. Written in 1974, during the height of what Sheed bluntly calls the "chaos" after Vatican II, The Church and I is a history of the Church in the 20th century English-speaking world, as Sheed knew it through his work with the Catholic Evidence Guild (stand-up apologetics in Hyde Park on on street corners) and running the Sheed & Ward publishing house along with his wife and fellow apologist Maisie Ward.

Sheed arrived in London from Australia in 1920, not by his own account a very educated Catholic, but like many of his contemporaries fully convinced of the truth of the Faith and eager to spread it. Working with the Catholic Evidence Guild, he quickly found that the catechism lessons he had so dutifully memorized did not necessarily help him to explain his faith to others, and so he joyfully dug into theology, the Father of the Church, Aquinas, Church History, and much more.

The '20s through the '50s were the period of the Catholic Intellectual Revival in Britain, with characters such as Belloc, Chesterton, Knox and Waugh dominating the landscape. It was an exciting time to be involved in apologetics. The initial outburst of Modernism in the Church seemed to have been quelled (though in retrospect, Sheed says it was simply driven underground and ignored rather than being effectively fought and defeated on the intellectual field) and as mainstream Protestant sects seemed to be finding themselves increasingly without direction in the modern world, Catholicism seemed to soaring to unheard of heights.

It was also a period of rebirth of intellectually robust Catholicism in the English-speaking world. Sheed describes the atmosphere growing up in Irish Catholic circles in Australia as being one in which it was felt that "The Church had the truth, but the Protestants had all the arguments". Catholics had memorized their catechisms and believed firmly in the sacraments, but had found it difficult to explain their beliefs to others, much less perform effective apologetics. Belloc and Chesterton changed this with a vengence, and a small flood of other Catholic writers and intellectuals followed in their wake.


However, through his work doing apologetics in parks and on street corners, Sheed was in a particularly good position to see what the see the intellectual state of the average Catholic, as well as the intellectual. And what he saw, it seems, worried him. Throughout the '30s, '40s and '50s he spoke to bishops about the state of catechesis (which he generally considered to not be at all good -- in part because those doing the catechising were not themselves sufficiently knowledgeable) and addressed numerous groups of seminarians and teaching sisters.

What he found was that all too often even the priests and nuns tasked with teaching the laity were not able to deal well with questions that went beyond the memorized questions and answers in their catechisms. This was not, he said, through any lack of faith (far from it, there was in intensely strong belief in the teachings of the Church and if anything an overly strong belief in infallibility, which attached the stamp of dogma equally to the everything from abstaining from meat on Fridays and women covering their heads in church to the immaculate conception and purgatory) but rather through a defensive posture which the Church had taken in much of Europe since the Reformation, emphasizing memorization over argumentation and discipline over education.

One of the examples of the kind of "beyond the catechism" questions that Sheed would pose is as follows:
Sheed: "Does the pope need to go to confession?"
Other: "Yes, of course. The pope must go to confession regularly to receive forgiveness for his sins."
Sheed: "But if the priest's authority comes from the bishop, and the bishop's authority comes from the pope, who has the authority to forgive the pope?"

The answer, of course, is: Christ. And since our sins are forgiven through the power of Christ by the priest who acts in persona Christi, any priest can grant the pope absolution. People knew this, Sheed says, in their hearts. They understood that the pope needed and received absolution. But far too often questions like this would stump not only Catholic school children, but also the nuns and priests who taught them, because they weren't used to thinking about what they believed meant.

This may seem a pretty harsh judgement, and I wonder if Sheed would have made it so forcefully in a book written in 1964 instead of 1974. Yet it does seem to tie in with some of what I've heard. My paternal grandfather converted in the '30s, as he was marrying my grandmother. My grandmother, who'd grown up Catholic in Iowa, educated for by Irish nuns, mentioned several times that it was perhaps mainly because her husband had received good instruction as a convert that they'd both remained Catholic. He told her so many things she hadn't known before about the faith, that after the war they both enrolled in adult catechesis classes, which she said taught her a great deal about Church teaching that she'd never learned growing up.


On the council, Sheed has several things to say. First, that as an attempt to deal with the issues raised by modernism, religious pluralism, communism, etc., it arguably came fifty years too late. He describes the council as providing a set of blueprints for rebuilding the Church, yet not taking into account the fact that the structure was already falling apart, and there were nearly a billion people living in it during the proposed construction. He applauds some of what the Council had to say on religious liberty, the role of the laity, etc. In other cases he worries that the documents were vague or skirted around the most serious issues.


What happened afterwards, however, seems to have taken even Sheed (with his first hand knowledge of some of the weaknesses of the Church before the council) by surprise. Seemingly overnight, he says, things went from a time where even the slightest questioning of authority went nearly undreamed of, to a situation where nearly any doctrine of the Church could be heard being publicly rejected by some priest or another, with seldom a word of discipline issuing forth.

There had, it seems, been some rumblings of this before the council. Sheed says that there was a known problem in some American diocese of a number of priests quietly leaving the priesthood to get married. In Europe, many of the priests who had entered the "priest worker" movement during the war (taking advantage of being put to work in heavy industry during the war to minister more directly to poor workers) became caught up in communist leaning unions, and a number of the priests had to be disciplined or left the priesthood. A number of European bishops had complained to Sheed as far back as the '30s that half the children who graduated from Catholic schools never entered a church again until they got married.

Somehow this combination of the media story that "the liberal element carried the council: everything is changing"; the cultural revolutions of the 60s; the pill; the sudden slackening in Church discipline; the changing of the liturgy which people had never imagined would change; the changing of practices such as the mandatory Friday abstinence, etc. created the impression that everything was up for grabs. Even Sheed, deeply knowledgeable in his faith and clearly trying very hard to "think with the Church" seems to have been affected by this. Writing in 1974, he mentions in his epilogue questions as to things that may change in the future. Will there to women priests? How will the Humanae Vitae controversy play out?

In an effort not to say "The Church will never..." about things that proceed to happen, Sheed seems to feel the necessity of being much more hesitant than an apologist circa 2007 would be, and I don't think that it was from any lack of orthodoxy.

It's hard to imagine what the Catholic world would be like today had Vatican II not been called. I don't think it would be the rosy view that some, perhaps, imagine. My suspicion is that, rather than the storm of chaos that broke in the late sixties and throughout the seventies, we would have seen a gradual falling away. Catholics would still have started using birth control. The encyclical condemning it would have been more polemical, and the storm of clergy resistance to it might not have happened, but a great many Catholics would have ignored it nonetheless. Vocations would have gradually dried up (rather than falling precipitously) as many Catholic families were smaller, and people fell prey to the sexual revolution. Mass attendance would have fallen gradually, as people left church-going to mothers, grandmothers, children, and "the devout".

The average Catholic parish of today would look more like some of the more affluent Eastern Orthodox parishes, of the variety that is heavy on ethnic members and low on converts.

I suspect that, for all the chaos, we are intellectually richer than we would have been without the council. The culture of discussion has, among orthodox theologians, produced deeper work than the culture of suspicion that landed all too many works (by people ranging from Newman to St. Therese to John Courtney Murray) at least temporarily under suspicion. On the other hand, we would have been spared the embarrassment of the Fr. McBrien's and Sr. Joan Chittisters of the world, and I'm sure that must be worth something.

I, for one, am grateful for the council, for all that its implementation by the human element of the Church has been the usual mixed (and often mixed up) bag. For all that it's pointed to as the anti-thesis of Vatican II, I wonder how much better things looked thirty or forty years after Trent, as the Queen Elizabeth made the Protestantization of England permanent, and the 30 Year War got ready to decimate northern and central Europe, laying the foundation for rationalism as "wars of" became a phrase long to be associated with "religion".