Editorials
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
EDITORIALS Anniversary waltz Paul VI issued Humanae vitae twenty years ago: on July 25, 1968. The anniversary is being celebrated, in some quarters, as the great dividing line between those who...
...Responsible human sexuality means drawing lines...
...But none of these conscientious decisions resolved the dilemma in which the whole church now finds itself...
...Where previous generations of Catholics agonized over questions of conscience, sex, contraception, and child-bearing, many younger Catholics, along with their non-Catholic peers, following the culture's lead have adopted a contraceptive mentality and the casual sexual relations that go with it...
...In introducing the book last month, Mrs...
...The nation as a whole has a stake in the solvency of insurers, a stake which must be carefully balanced with the issues of AIDS testing and confidentiality...
...From listening to her and to her husband that day, there is little doubt what they would have done...
...cummings once told an audience that despite half a century's search, he had not located "a single peripherally situated ego...
...Indeed, in a letter that extolled the values of married love, recognized the need for responsible parenthood, and accepted "recourse to infertile periods" (the rhythm method) as lawful, we find that the prohibition against artificial contraception, especially the pill, seems more arbitrary and ungrounded today than it did in 1968...
...It is also an example of how scientific inquiry can become a treasured part of the moral enterprise...
...Oliner told a press conference that she didn't know what she would have done in a similar situation...
...To Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton, the sentences were "disproportionate and excessive.' ' Perhaps extenuating circumstances were not mentioned in the news story (New York Times, May 26,1988), but in the face of many such incidents and the university's failure, so far, to take disciplinary action against any students, the judge is right to signal the high cost of frolicsome drinking...
...And it was wrong...
...The continuing and unhappy consequences of Paul's decision are painfully apparent in John Paul II's recent encyclical, Sollicitudo rei socialis, in which there is, and can be, no serious attention to unchecked population growth as one tragic factor in underde-velopment...
...If, for example, the growing number of local restrictions on testing skews the predictions of actuaries, companies may raise premiums significantly beyond some persons' ability to pay...
...THE HIGHER EDUCATION Last February 6, forty-five Princeton students suffered alcohol-induced medical problems as a result of drinking large quantities of alcohol at an eating club sign-in...
...Faithfulness to the church-to the Gospel proclaimed and witnessed by Jesus' disciples, and guided and enlivened by the Spirit-is essential...
...The pope wouldn't turn...
...Furthermore, for all of the pope's insistence on natural law and the constant teaching of the church, he seems more concerned, at points, with what he saw as the dire consequences of contraception-marital infidelity, a lowering of moral standards, and the lack of incentive for the young to observe the moral law (read: fear of pregnancy...
...A careful rereading of the encyclical, twenty years later, suggests that Paul VI, in speaking with a pastoral voice and with close attention to consequentialist arguments, may have foreseen the furor that was to come and tried to ease it...
...AIDS-with its sudden onset, rapid spread, long latency period, near 100 percent death rate, and lack of a vaccine or cure-is an actuary's nightmare...
...In the face of more recent developments, particularly surrogate motherhood and in vitro fertilization, a perplexed world is genuinely searching for moral yardsticks, and yet the church's loss of credibility once again injures its efforts to speak a sane word to a potentially receptive public...
...The point is well taken, but, in this case, misapplied...
...Their predictions-along with invested funds-are what keep insurance companies in (or out) of the game...
...Actuaries are turning to each other...
...The profile was written by Paul Wilkes who has written for Commonweal...
...Some Catholics, finding the ban on artificial contraception outlandish, proceeded to question the church's whole teaching on sexual and reproductive morality...
...Then, in May 1988, the Society held a conference in Chicago to discuss AIDS as it relates to health care, insurance, and legislation...
...The failure to develop a fuller understanding of marriage and sexual morality has been especially detrimental to young Catholics...
...some with a serenity that grew from careful and conscientious thought and reflection...
...a memory of the best and of the worst...
...Those who insisted upon the "doctrine" that the temporal power of the pope and his sovereignty over the papal states was required to assure his independence-or those who questioned it...
...Part and parcel of that good is the ability of married couples, and especially of women, to control the number of children they have and the spacing of births...
...With their calculations and projections about how many persons of this or that age will have which kind of accident, disease, or death, actuaries help to determine premiums, payments, and reserves...
...But that void will continue to run as deep and as near as our own hearts...
...Projections show that by the year 2000, there could be hundreds of billions of dollars in payouts on insurance, accounting for 20 percent of all life claims...
...Twenty years ago, determination to be faithful to the church led many Catholics to conclude, and to say, that Humanae vitae was one of those tragic errors into which the church of Christ has fallen over the centuries, sometimes with the best of intentions but always with long-run damage to its mission...
...Rather than enhancing the church's teaching on sexuality, the encyclical unwittingly undermined it...
...The president and the social chairman of the Princeton club where the incident took place have been found guilty of serving liquor to minors, fined $500, and sentenced to thirty days in jail...
...some with bitter and angry hearts...
...On the other hand, as the foreword to this remarkable study notes-quoting Camus-we have to keep faithful "a double memory...
...Insurers turn to their actuaries...
...But faithfulness is not blind assent to assertions of authority...
...Actuaries stand behind insurance company "gamblers," nudging them to place their chips on one square or another as the wheel spins or the dice roll...
...Other couples, far smaller in number, adopted the so-called rhythm method, some from a sense of asceticism, some in obedience to what they saw as a binding teaching...
...Paul VI was right to worry, and the terrible human costs of our culture's disarray in sexual matters is "Exhibit A'' of those who currently defend the encyclical...
...THERE AT THE NEW YORKER There is a touching, illuminating, and absorbing profile of a "Parish Priest," the Reverend Joseph Greer, in the New Yorker (June 13, 1988), worth reading and pondering, even beyond the magazine's usual readers in Dubuque and New York...
...Even the most generous numerical estimate of those who intervened during the Nazi occupation is meager, less than one-half of 1 percent of the total population involved...
...It produced a report offering guidelines and corporate strategies...
...hard sayings are couched in temperate language...
...The $290 million in AIDS-related claims during 1986 is just the beginning...
...The time had come to listen to mature Christians and to formulate a teaching about the truly sacramental nature of marriage and sexual intimacy, including the radical notion that sexual intercourse within marriage is a good in itself, a source of delight and comfort not only to men, but to women as well...
...RISKY BUSINESS Insurance companies and casinos are alike in that both are organized gambling ventures formed to turn a profit...
...Temporal power'' was a teaching repeated no less incessantly and vehemently- but with a good deal more bloodletting-than the ban on artificial contraception today...
...At Rutgers University, a student recently died under similar circumstances...
...The Oliners note this significant, overarching characteristic of rescuers: their sense of personal responsibility for diverse groups of people ("extensivity" as contrasted to the "constricted-ness" of nonrescuers), and their willingness not only to feel for but act in behalf of people outside their own group...
...Actuaries are arming themselves with information to improve accuracy in their forecasts...
...Then the cost of AIDS will have to be met solely by government and philanthropy, already supporting large numbers of the uninsured...
...Perhaps this is clearest in the abortion debate, where so many have succumbed to the notion that abortion is a subset of the contraception debate and judge the church's teaching equally vulnerable...
...The anniversary is being celebrated, in some quarters, as the great dividing line between those who are faithful to the church, and those who are not...
...Or companies may close their operations in high-risk areas...
...It, too, was invested with papal authority and became a standard of loyalty for advancement to important positions of church leadership...
...Too bad e. e. c. did not know of the work of Samuel and Pearl Oliner, whose meticulous social study of those who rescued Jews in Nazi Europe has just been published under the uncum-mings-like title, The Altruistic Personality (The Free Press, $24.95...
...The Oliners' study helps to fill a void...
...The poet might have been able to help them with the title...
...the sorry outcome, as we now see, was that he drew one of them in the wrong place...
...Who was more faithful a century ago...
...They might be reminded of the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo, propter hoc, but their argument is more fundamentally flawed, since the so-called sexual revolution was well under way when Humanae vitae appeared...
...Two decades do not make history, but so far it seems that the encyclical has failed the church...
...In April 1987, the Society of Actuaries of the U.S...
...Clergy, religious, and lay teachers, caught between bishops obedient to the pope and an incredulous laity, became circumspect or fell silent on the subject of sexual morality in pulpits and classrooms...
...formed a task force to study the impact of AIDS on the solvency of insurance companies...
...He went on to offer a comprehensive list of those who "are far from unselfcentered," and concluded that "altruists (above all)" lead the inventory...
...Despite this, the pope's words do not add up to a compelling, or even persuasive, argument...
...For all of his justifiable concern, Paul VI' s conclusions hobbled the church for the cultural struggle at hand...
...ET CETERA MEETING THE RESCUERS The poet e.e...
...In 1968 Commonweal's editors predicted that the encyclical "will fail the test of history...
...In explaining the unprecedented jail sentence, the judge refused to treat the incident "as an undergraduate frolic that got out of hand...
...In 1968, many bishops and theologians understood that the church's teaching had to change, that the press of the demographic revolution in both the developed and developing countries and the availability of the pill represented a turning point in the world and the church...
...So far, however, these worst-case scenarios are not upon us...
...Some insurers-in addition to funding AIDS research and joining in the national education effort about AIDS-are trying a variety of approaches to underwriting, such as selling full-health coverage without AIDS testing-on condition that the insured is symptom-free for one full year after the policy is purchased...
...The value of their study is to tell us not only why, but how others might yet arrive there as well...
...All required medical attention...
...but more important, the Oliners would have been able to introduce him to some of the 406 rescuers they and their study team interviewed...
...Altruists are not easy to find, particularly in the Oliners' sense of those whose activity is not only directed at helping others, but is voluntary, accompanied by no external reward, and (in the setting of Nazi Europe) involved high risk...
...There are too few systematic studies of the best, of goodness in general...
...But most married couples did, some with the support of their pastors and bishops, and some without...
Vol. 115 • July 1988 • No. 13
