The Politics of Sex and Religion
Hoyt, Robert G.
them so that he could discuss his research on Christian experience. Neither a formal religious believer nor a trained theologian, this former student of the Jesuits appeared totally at ease...
...Describing the peace & the patience I I I I 10ZEF MiX Jozef Clger.Hronsk~ Translated by Andrew CJncura Slavica Pabiishers (P.O...
...I I I I IIII I I I Books: FROM BEHIND CLOSED DOORS II I IIIIII [ I I I In Till POLITICS OF S ew ~ RELIGIOii A CASE HISTORY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE, 1962-1984 Robert Blair Kaiser Leaven Press, $10.95, 263 pp...
...That came home with special force to most members of the birth control commission, as it will to readers of this book...
...Interspersed throughout the text are footnotes that direct the reader to the back of the book, and further explanations of Slovak history and customs...
...Ever so I III I II II S OME years ago, during a brief visit to my home, a then-famous politician scanned the bookshelves'in our living room, pulled out a paperback, checked the index, and pronounced it a bad book: only a couple of page references appeared after his own name...
...Robes't aJ...
...Neither a formal religious believer nor a trained theologian, this former student of the Jesuits appeared totally at ease discussing Augustine and Cassian, sin and conII IIII Ill fession...
...Box 14388, Columbus, OH 43214), $12.95, 232 pp...
...It was the barons, not King John, who took the initiative leading to the Magna Carta...
...It will also discourage it...
...The same thing happened more publicly in the Second Vatican Council, but on a scale too grand for this kind of close examination...
...For anyone brought up in the rationalist stream within the Catholic tradition, that was indeed a shocker:, a kind of corruption at the core...
...A difference between my guest and me is that I waited for privacy before flipping through my copy of the book under review -- a reporter's retelling of the Catholic birth control debate over the past two decades -in search of references to myself...
...Included in the Slavica publication are four black-andwhite renderings by Alexander Rud17 January 1986:21...
...There is, then, some tedium to be endured...
...Though I haven't read all the other accounts, I suspect that this one contains more information about the inner workings of the papal birth control commission, the book's principal focus, than any other...
...Thus, the implication in Kaiser's Introduction that the story has a happy ending seems to me doubly wrong: The story is more sad than happy, and it hasn't ended...
...There are some...
...Because poor Jozef Mak has "no one waiting for him except his mother's fright," and therefore no presents, the figure gives him its hands, saying "'Take them, but don't expect a mouth to match them, not even when you grow up and understand people, and they try to persuade you that you should also get a voice somewhere...
...Because his account is meticulously chronological, Kaiser has to rehash arguments everyone interested in the topic has heard many times before, about the biological, medical, demographic, sociological, psychological, spiritual, and ethical aspects of birth control...
...Here villains abound, Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office and the' American Jesuit John Ford chief among them...
...Thankfully, the reader need not initially pursue such references in order to enjoy this lyrical vision of village life, into which one is immersed from the very first page...
...But then, reading the Introduction, I thought for a while I would not be able to recommend the book...
...I hope that many others will, particularly the bishops who went to Rome for the synod...
...the obstacles placed in the way of ethical reappraisal by the centralization of teaching authority...
...To be sure, the scandal was mitigated somewhat by the forthright responses of some Catholics, including those national hierarchies that "accepted" the encyclical but by their interpretation deprived it of binding force for individual couples...
...On their appointment most commission members thought they had been assigned a public relations task: not to question the ban on contraception but to repackage it...
...Further, the new enlightenment of some educated Catholics in the developed world contributes little to an easing of the problem of overpopulation, nothI ing to the progress of ecufiaenism...
...On those parts of the story of which I have independent knowledge, I found his reporting essentially accurate...
...They include some flattering remarks about the work of the National Catholic Reporter at a time when I was its editor...
...I appreciate now II IIIII IIII II why his ease with those theologians was so memorable for me...
...they are used to explain thoughts and events to the reader, that the inarticulate, "ordinary" (as common as mak, the poppyseed) Jozef cannot speak of...
...Symbols are interwoven with the lives of realistically drawn characters, revealing the villagers' unconscious integration of both the spiritual and the sensual...
...As the author suggests, scholars specializing in the history of ideas, even those not much interested in religion, will profit from studying this skillful record, reflecting as it does the interplay of personality, character, vested interests, accidents of timing and physical circumstance, all mixed in with the influence of learning, logic, force of language, and intellectual gamesmanship...
...One of the sadder aspects is that Karol Wojtyla, then bishop of Cracow, now John Paul II, bishop of Rome, took no part in the work of the birth control commission, though he was appointed to it...
...Among them: papal infallibililty and the uses of papal authority (or, more broadly, the distribution of power in the church and the modes by which it is wielded...
...The neglect of this writer's work -- considered by scholars to be some of the finest Slovak lyrical prose of this century -was consciously exercised, until its "rehabilitation" in the 1960s, when it was again published in Czechoslovakia...
...Through an amorphous green dawn a white figure appears at the wooden cottage where the illegitimate Jozef Mak has just been born...
...What compensates for it is the fascination of observing minds changing, and of seeing new issues emerge out of the process...
...For me, what does not emerge with sufficient force from Kaiser's account is the depth of the intellectual scandal created not only by that astonishing paragraph but by the contorted reasoning of the encyclical as a whole...
...Knowing the personal, social, and demographic costs, knowing that not even the principal authors of Humanae Vitae believed that its argument led to moral certitude, the pope still asked docile acceptance...
...He'snot going to read this book...
...The publication of Jozef Mak by Slavica Publishers should serve to encourage interest in Central European literature...
...But frequently one f'mds that these explanations, with their specificity, confound the reader not familiar with Slovak language, or its traditions...
...One learns all too soon who will figure as the heroes of the story, fighting for democracy, pluralism, openness, and freedom in the church, and who are the villains desperately trying to hang on to their power by manipulating old anathemas...
...And the book is interesting: a considerable feat...
...I~IoTt Kaiser's analysis emerges mostly out of the events he records...
...It has the tone of bland, Time-style advocacy journalism, which achieves its effects through the use of flavorful but low-fiber adjectives instead of chewier nouns and verbs...
...One thinks particularly of the Chicago couple Pat and Patty Crowley: Deeply but conventionally loyal Catholics, they found themselves growing out of their automatic deference to theologians, bishops, and cardinals, able to join the struggle and make themselves heard, to no small effect...
...In the rest of the book, fortunately, I IIIII II slowly, with many false starts, and yet with a certain inevitability (given their brains and their integrity), they redefined their mission...
...All night, the white figure "that has no body but only hands, bleeding from their pierced palms, and wise and good eyes," has been giving presents to the "quiet men and women" of the village...
...There is much new detail about the commission's members and procedures, but most of it corresponds to and merely fleshes out what is already known...
...University of Columbia professor Peter Petro suggests in his helpful afterword that Hronsk~ may have disbelieved in the power of the word...
...The postconciliar answer is: Plenty...
...Mais oui, Monsieur Candide...
...Also, a passage the author quotes from the NCR editorial responding to Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae is the very one I would have chosen...
...For some, of course, the church thus demythologized no longer holds any interest...
...they have opted out of the continuing struggle to understand and shape the Catholic (or any other) institutionalization of the Gospel...
...A brief synopsis of recent Slovak history might bolster the I effectiveness of the footnotes...
...Unlike the contraception debate, other issues that came to the surface are still very much on the current agenda for many Catholics...
...But one must also recognize the cultural chauvinism of English language readers which sustains ignorance...
...Hoi1u Metz I OZEF MAK, the second novel of the early twentieth century Slovak writer Jozef Ciger-Hronsk~, has just now been published in an English translation -more than sixty years after its first printing in the author's homeland...
...And there is no doubt that because of this revelatory episode in the life of the church some Catholics achieved a more mature understanding of moral law and the role of conscience...
...And, of course, the story lacks all suspense...
...the limits, if any, of the magisterium's capacity to discern and legislate morality on the basis of natural law...
...And the Introduction closes with a one-liner that comes too soon and says too little: "This is really a story of how the people of God grew up, and in a very few years...
...and, perhaps most importantly, the relevance of history and culture to ethical reasoning...
...But this personal growth doesn't clear up the institutional mess that has been created, which weakens the church's credibility on abortion and other moral issues and damperl s hope that disciplinary questions such as celibacy and the standing of women in the church can ever be addressed on their merits...
...Kaiser reports what can be learned about how this gentle and intelligent man, who had constantly upheld the freedom of his commissioners to explore new paths, could rob their findings of all weight merely because the vote was not unanimous and because "certain criteria" adopted by the majority "departed from the moral teaching on marriage proposed with constant firmness by the teaching authority of the church" (paragraph 6...
...Two examples of the latter: the influence on traditional views about women, sex, and marriage of the intellectual and social context in which they were formed...
...some redefined their own identities as Catholics, and as human beings acting in history...
...Thus, a generation ago most Catholics would have thought Kaiser's subtitle at war with his Commonweal: 20title -- what has "politics" to do with "development of doctrine...
...Perhaps it only presaged for him a deeper comfort to come, a final homecoming, a surrender of his self not to the silence of death but to the Word of Life...
...There could be no better way to induce bias, which is why I make this disclosure...
...The church is inevitably and intensely a political institution, even or especially in the processes by which its dogmas and disciplines are formed and re-formed...
...Robert Blair Kaiser was a Rome correspondent for Time in the early sixties...
...That meeting remains my most vivid memory of him...
...He was a man for whom no historical epoch, no intellectual language, no human passion could ever become a forbidden territory for his own restless questioning...
...so do his characterizations of the principal players and of what was at stake for them...
...It must be said that Pope Paul's decision to restate and reaffirm the ban on contraception -- or, more accurately, the banality of the encyclical through which he conveyed his decision -- contributed greatly to that result...
Vol. 113 • January 1986 • No. 1
