Notebook

...It said something necessary about chasteness, modesty, the ends of marriage, and the ability to "die to oneself," all of which bespeak genuine religion and have something to do with how we will come to see the face of God (Matt...

...In the end, it was these personal questions, not Humanae vitae, that led to my leaving the seminary...

...not an inkling as to what constitutes what might be called the "eucharistic" elements of marriage...

...The conservative Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), riding this wave of Hindu resentment and religious nationalism, has moved in a few short years from the political fringe to its present position as the major opposition party to the ruling Congress party...

...The recollection of history, by individuals and by nations, is constantly updated and revised by the everchanging needs of the present...

...others would agree with the Supreme Court that this is a matter best left to the choice of the woman...

...5:8...

...In the issue at hand, these objections are beside the point...

...India's present identity depends heavily on its image of its past...

...In the sixteenth century, or so the story goes, the Islamic ruler Babur destroyed the Hindu temple which had existed at Ayodhya since time immemorial, and erected on its ruins a mosque...

...According to Greenberg, Judaism has been able to do so because it "interprets and reflects reality, not just tradition...

...To insist on its inclusion imposes on the body politic a levy that will further erode the common good, encourage ever greater contempt for government, and inevitably invite a movement for conscientious tax objection...

...The pope and his secretaries didn't have a clue as to what it is actually like to sleep with one's spouse each night...

...We remember what we want to, forget what we no longer find useful, and, often enough, fabricate what we wish had been...

...When we were going through marriage preparations, the priest--who, it turned out, left the priesthood not long afterward to marry--dismissed the encyclical and instructed us that it was entirely up to us and to our consciences to determine the moral weight Humanae vitae would have in our lives...

...It was the BJP and its affiliated organizations who were responsible for stirring up the religious fervor that resulted in last December' s destruction of a sixteenth-century Muslim mosque in Ayodhya by a crowd of Hindu fanatics...

...But we soon found that his nonchalance didn't really fit our own questions...

...Nations, like individuals, are defined by what they think they once were...

...It was not that we lived on a diet of papal bulls...

...Still, if a prophet, he was a Cassandra whose warnings only helped make the final state of matters worse than they had been before...

...And as long as it stands, it brings with it a compelling argument against tax-supported subsidies for abortions which would force everyone to pay for them through the government's taxing power...

...Critics say secularism has served as a sham for minority appeasement and fostered craven pandering by politicians to "vote banks" of grateful Muslims...

...It has done so, in part, by offering a new interpretation of India's past...

...I am inclined to agree with the rabbinic concept that "restrictions imposed upon the populace that the majority cannot endure are not to be levied...

...And then there is still the almost embarrassing but inescapable conclusion that those who had formalized the encyclical were hardly rabbis with wives...

...still others would continue to call abortion a fundamental right...

...The pope had made a telling point in writing that "the pastors of the church enjoy a special light of the Holy Spirit in teaching the truth...

...The evidence--including pillars from the ancient Hindu temple which had, astonishingly, been left wholly intact and a perfectly preserved large buff sandstone slab bearing inscriptions in Sanskrit-confirmed all the main points of the BJP's version of Ayodhya's past...

...It spelled out something of the costliness of a certain form of discipleship, and pointed out correctly the Catholic understanding that all sexual acts, whether in private and between whomever, have an effect on the whole community...

...At the time, I had just completed my tenth year in the seminary and had three more to go before ordination...

...In striking down state laws against abortion, Roe v. Wade drew the "right" to abortion from the penumbra of privacy and argued that the state had no interest in fetal life before viability...

...Over the last several years, India's past has become a contested battleground in an ideological war which has produced very corporeal casualties...

...We should emphasize it and go on...

...To place burdens too heavy on the shoulders of others, after all, has merited divine censure...

...The BJP has historians and archaeologists who provide official validation of its claims...

...For my part, I think the teaching of Vatican II (see, Gaudium et spes, nos...

...But the past, it may also be noted, is never what it used to be...

...To reinvent the present, it helps to reinterpret the past...

...It wasn't as if ordination were a foregone conclusion, however...

...India, insists the BJP, is a "Hindu nation" and always has been...

...I wasn't entirely clear on either the best way to try to live the gospel, or whether I was a fit candidate for a life of celibacy...

...ndia is simultaneously among the oldest and youngest of places...

...It was only later, as a husband, that the real wrestling began...

...But even though we felt the encyclical's logic was faulty, we came to sense a trust for its teachings rather than those of our peripatetic priest...

...I wish it weren't so...

...For while my wife, Kathleen, and I didn't and don't subscribe to the encyclical' s reasoning on the immorality of artificial birth control, over the last twenty years we have tried, in faith, to abide by the papal teaching...

...Looking back--and forward-we still hope that one day the church's pastors will learn some of the modesty and the flexibility of their rabbinic counterparts...

...As a civilization, it can claim a past that stretches back thousands of years...

...NOTEBOOK WRESTLING STILL TWENTY-FIVE YEARS & COUNTING 'ithout doubt, the papal encyclical that has had the most effect on my life is Paul VI's Humanae vitae...

...It was this structure that was pulled down in six hours, by hand, by thousands of Hindu nationalists on December 6, 1992...

...Though we have never been persuaded by the constitutional reasoning that located this decision in a right to privacy, that line of reasoning currently stands as the law of the land...

...In commenting on the Orthodox Jewish observance of niddah-the traditional laws of family purity, which include a significant period each month of sexual abstinence on the part of married couples--Blu Greenberg (On Women and Judaism) writes that among Orthodox Jews the practice ofniddah remains relatively intact today...

...One of these is secularism, a legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964...

...L. K. Advani, one of the principal leaders of the BJP, has suggested that Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs living in India be referred to as "Mohammadi Hindus," "Christian Hindus," and "Sikh Hindus" in order to emphasize the ancient and persisting Hindu character of the Indian nation-state...

...With a current population of 850 million people comprised of a bewildering variety of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups, modern India has been proud of its status as the largest pluralistic and secular democracy in the world...

...Still, Humanae vitae is not without a degree of beauty and substance, and not without some power to challenge and move con4:16 July 1993 Commonwealsciences...

...Hindus, many complain, have become disadvantaged in their own country...

...We were not unfamiliar with civil disobedience, questioned the pope's explanations of biology, were aware of pressing demographic and feminist concerns, and both had some measure of theological schooling...

...And this, rather than the arguments they put forward, is why you are bound to such obedience" (italics added...

...For our part, Kathleen and I are still wrestling with the "angel" Humanae vitae thrust into our lives...

...But traditional Jewish observance has endured--at least among a minority of Jews--becanse it has been able to adapt...

...Nonetheless, it was on first reading the encyclical that I knew t probably could not continue on to ordination because I could not officially represent such a teaching...

...That the other "pastors" of the church--not to mention a legion of conscientious moral theologians--were divided (and still are) on the morality of artificial birth control is, for me, a convincing argument that a less rigorous interpretation of the encyclical's moral prohibitions is entirely legitimate...

...The miraculous nature of these finds was immediately Commonweal 16 July 1993:5...

...If the decision rests with the individual, so should the cost...

...Leaving the seminary a year later proved to be the easy part...

...But as a modern nationstate, it is not even half-a-century old--a mere infant among the members of the world community--and still very much in search of its own sense of self...

...Competing and clashing visions of history have played a crucial role in a sometimes deadly dispute about the present and future of the world's second most populous nation...

...And although we cannot understand it by means of logic, it [the discipline imposed by niddah] obviously serves a deep human need...

...47-52) is not only useful but superior to that of Humanae vitae...

...It was a hot July day in New York, and as I read the Times account and then excerpts from the encyclical itself, I felt as if I were being caught hold of by something akin to Jacob's angel...

...This proposition has not gone over well with India's 100 million Muslims, who are also now blamed for the supposed antiHindu acts of Mughal emperors who ruled north India some four or five hundred years ago...

...Mainstreaming" abortion by mandating it as part of a national health-care package would mean that none of us would be free of moral complicity in a matter over which none of us has a right to intervene or intercede...

...Some Hindu activists have been hard at work doing just that...

...For me--and this has a lot more to do with intuition than with logic--Paul VI got the explanations and the details wrong, but he got the heart of the matter--about the sacredness, responsibility for, and beauty of sexuality--right...

...I remember, with atypical clarity, the day the encyclical was published in 1968...

...He has proven to be prophetic, and tragically so, concerning respect for life and the desacralization of sex...

...PATRICK JORDAN REPORT ON INDIA RECONCEIVING A NATION WHO CONTROLS THE PAST...

...And so it has been...

...Since gaining its independence in 1947, India has constitutionally defined itself as a "sovereign, democratic, and secular republic...

...I knew instinctively that I had come up against something mysterious, something that was going to prove as intrusive, unrelenting, and, I feared rightly, ultimately maiming as Jacob's nemesis...

...Ayodhya, it is claimed, is the actual nativity site of the Hindu god Rama, born, according to BJP historians, some time during or before the third millennium B.C...

...A certain Sudha Malaiya, described in a press release as a "young and bright art historian," told the nation about the remarkable archaeological finds she personally uncovered in the rubble on the day the Ayodhya mosque was destroyed...

...I say "in faith" because I don't think there is any other logic for explaining why we try to live by a teaching we cannot otherwise adequately explain or defend...

...But over the last decade a growing and militant faction within the Hindu majority has challenged some of the basic assumptions of India' s self-identity...