Editorials
Confronting the horror Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them unarmed civilians and many of them women and children, have been killed in Rwanda since that East African state descended into...
...IT STILL DOESN'T SCAN In his article in this issue [pp...
...Both Pauls are right in contending that the most-used methods of birth control make sinning against chastity easier (in a way that NFP does not...
...In the past few weeks several thousand French troops, under the auspices of the UN, have ventured into parts of western Rwanda in an effort to protect civilians...
...More centrally, we reject the absolute moral distinction our author makes between NFP and "artificial" contraception...
...Like those other methods, NFP is meant to be, and is, a means of preventing the transmission of life...
...It also appears to have been well-planned in advance...
...When the rhythm method was the Catholic way to space births, there may have been a reason of sorts for saying that intercourse using the method was "open to the transmission of life"—the same reason the method was called "Roman roulette...
...But even romantics know that sex and suffering are already linked...
...How can that reality be passed over...
...Historically, France has trained and supported the Hutu-led government, and is viewed with understandable skepticism by Tutsi leaders...
...Maybe so, in individual cases...
...Equally important, Rwanda's tragic plight, unlike Bosnia's or North Korea's, is not a threat to American or European security...
...Thus he can write about sex with knowledgeable passion, and that's a large plus...
...Finally, if there is good reason to intervene militarily in Rwanda, then what about the Sudan, Angola, Liberia, Bosnia, Georgia, East Timor, Afghanistan, etc., etc...
...The will to act, not the know-how, is the crucial missing ingredient in Rwanda...
...Intervention seems fraught with uncertainty, and organizing an international consensus takes time...
...Unquestionably, the slaughter has been genocidal...
...famine-relief mission in Somalia demonstrated, the commitment of overwhelming military force to protect and feed civilians can work...
...In addition, the UN's handling of Somalia has made the United States leery of becoming entangled in a humanitarian effort that cannot be easily disentangled from longstanding tribal enmities...
...Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans have fled to neighboring Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda...
...At another level, how can this tenuous philosophical distinction be an intellectually responsible guide for consciences, a litmus test for church appointments, a fixed criterion for setting Vatican policies on population issues...
...It was a gamble—for many, a very serious one— and the odds weren't great...
...Hutu civilian "militias," led by the Rwandan army, have mercilessly hunted down their Tutsi neighbors...
...Rwanda is in the midst of a civil war...
...President Bill Clinton, for one, has studiously avoided any suggestion that the United States has a role to play in bringing this moral catastrophe to an end...
...It should also ask us to say Yes when Yes is the right answer...
...nistically inspired rejection of the deep and truly natural connection between making love and making babies...
...Another is his irenic tone, a welcome contrast to the prosecutorial approach so often in play on this topic...
...As reasonable as these apprehensions are, it is equally clear that swift interven3 tion could have saved tens of thousands of lives without posing any significant danger to a professionally deployed UN force...
...How effective the French will be is not clear...
...This latest episode in tribal warfare began after the suspicious death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, who had been seeking some accommodation with the RPF...
...On other points, we are not persuaded...
...and that widespread unchastity has corrosive effects, spiritual and social...
...He and his wife have lived and taught the regimen, natural family planning, that he proposes as the way to achieve the ideals of married love set forth by Paul VI...
...Such a force, under the authority of the Security Council, could be rushed into action to prevent the mass killings epidemic in an increasingly unstable world...
...On matters of substance, Murray is right that Humanae vitae shows real appreciation for the goodness of marital sexual communion...
...The UN, which had several thousand troops stationed in Rwanda to help monitor a tenuous cease-fire, had to pull them out when the fighting started up again in April...
...President Clinton's timidity is not entirely baseless...
...UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has been trying to build a consensus for international intervention for months...
...The response of the international community has been to avert its gaze...
...First, has the spread of contraception fostered disrespect for women, as Pope Paul said it would...
...Today, proponents of NFP, because of medical and technological advances, claim for it an effectiveness rivaling that of other means...
...He is emphatically not a celibate...
...We don't find answers in Paul Murray's text, but there may be a subtext—if not in his mind, then in long-held Catholic attitudes toward sex...
...Exacting the price of suffering for the joy of sex is an old habit of ours...
...14-18] expounding the strengths of Humanae vitae, Paul Murray writes with a certain authority not available to the author of the encyclical...
...The church teaches restraint: how and why to say No...
...The UN has been trying to negotiate a resolution to the Rwandan civil war for years...
...Meanwhile, the UN has authorized the creation of a 5,000-man "peacekeeping" mission, but this effort has been criminally slow in taking shape...
...The killers, members of Rwanda's majority Hutu tribe, are determined to exterminate the minority Tutsi tribe as well as any Hutus sympathetic to, the idea of peaceful coexistence between the two historic ethnic rivals...
...What the post-cold war world needs, as former UN Undersecretary-General Brian Urquhart has argued (the New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993), is a standing UN military force—one not sporadically and grudgingly drawn from the armies of member nations...
...this wild animal drive brings pain enough without any need to up the ante...
...As the success of the U.S...
...As much as two-thirds of the country is now in the hands of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a guerrilla movement largely made up of Tutsis and which is not innocent of atrocities itself...
...Confronting the horror Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them unarmed civilians and many of them women and children, have been killed in Rwanda since that East African state descended into chaos in early April...
...NFP requires continuing sacrifice...
...And they are right to condemn the "contraceptive ethic," if by that is meant a hedo4...
...Is there any other plausible alternative...
...But, though the cause of women's rights still has a long way to go, not least in the Catholic church, the global reality is that more women today claim the respect due to them, and more men support their claim, than was the case when Paul wrote...
Vol. 121 • July 1994 • No. 13
