The Family: Sanctuary of Life

THREE TO GET MARRIED was the name of a popular book written by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Marriage involves more than two parties: Man, woman, and the third party, often forgotten in what Bishop Sheen called the "dis-God-ed" generation, is God. The institution of marriage, one must not forget, is not one designed by the will of the parties. The parties enter into the institution by an act of self-donation which certainly requires free will; but they do not define the institution. The institution of marriage, like all of what is, is entirely dependent on God, the God who is the "author of marriage" and who "endowed it with various benefits and purposes."

One of the benefits of marriage is conjugal love. Here, too, God is its author and endowed it with various benefits and purposes. The benefits do not come without responsibilities. Perhaps the most apparent and perhaps the most abused modernly: "Conjugal love is by its nature open to the acceptance of life." (Compendium, No. 230)

Not only have severed the tie between sex and marriage, we have severed the tie between sex and procreation. Modern man has a penchant for separating things that ought to be together and putting things together that ought to be separate.

Holy Family by El Greco

Though sex and procreation are things human persons share with other animals, we must not be fooled that these acts are the same. Biological similarity is not ontological similarity. Whatever humans do involves persons, and this changes the entire matter. Sex involving persons is something entirely different from sex involving brute animals. One cannot forget that the procreative privilege given man is unique in that it leads to creation, together with God, of persons, that is, those with the image and likeness of God.

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church speaks of the "social subjectivity of the family." By its very nature, the family is subjected to society and is therefore subject to the laws of social life. Uniquely, the family is the fundamental cell where human life is transferred from generation to generation, almost in a manner that a baton is passed from runner to runner in a relay race.

This notion of marriage and family as the social vehicles for the "handing down" or tradendere of life itself has been largely lost. "It is necessary to rediscover the social value of that portion of the common good inherent in each new human being." (Compendium, No. 230)

Every human life generated within the family which travels through time is a boon to life in common. Human life continues to burn within families from generation to generation in a "communion of generations" much like the sacred fire of Vesta burned for generations in the beautiful circular Temple of Vesta in Rome attended by its vestal virgins. (Compendium, No. 237)

In this manner every child born to a family is a benefit not only his or her mother, father, brothers or sisters, but also to the entire community into which he or she is born. The family is the temple where the flame of life is transmitted. It is a temple dedicated to the Lord of Life. The family is naturally ordered to serve what John Paul II has called the Gospel of life, evangelium vitae. Every birth ought to declare: Life is good news!

The family is therefore an intensely spiritual society, and the conjugal act that is at the heart of the marriage which is its fire has a spiritual dimension which is forgotten. "Fatherhood and motherhood represent a responsibility which is not simply physical but spiritual in nature." Through motherhood and fatherhood "there passes the genealogy of the person, which has its beginning in God and which must lead back to him." (Compendium, No. 237) (quoting JP II, Gratissimam sane, 10)

"The family contributes to the social good in an eminent fashion through responsible motherhood and fatherhood, the spouses' special participation in God's work of creation." (Compendium, No. 232) For this reason, civil society--including the State--is obliged to assure that its customs and laws support it. Most fundamentally, neither the State nor civil society may impinge or in any manner "violate the right to life, from conception to natural death." Rather, the civil society and the State are obliged to "protect and promote it." (Compendium, No. 231)

Motherhood and fatherhood must be exercised responsibly, with full consideration of a proper hierarchy of values. This means that that married couples must be open to life. Granted, motherhood and fatherhood are not exercised in a vacuum. Couples are entitled to consider the "physical, economic, psychological, and social conditions" which they confront. These present the setting in which responsible parenthood is practiced. Within these constraints or opportunities, couples confront the gamut of possibility from the "duly pondered and generous decision to have a large family" to the "decision, made for serious reasons and in respect of the moral law, to avoid for a time or even indeterminately a new birth." (Compendium, No. 232)

The practice of responsible procreation, however, must be "in respect of the moral law." Some methods of responsible parenthood are to be rejected outright.

The "first to be rejected as morally illicit are sterilization and abortion." Abortion in particular "is a horrendous crime and constitutes a particularly serious moral disorder." Abortion, being an intrinsic evil, is far from being something of right. (Compendium, No. 233)

Any form of artificial contraception is likewise to be rejected. Anyone sensitive to "a correct and integral understanding of the person and of human sexuality" will recognize at once why and how seriously artificial contraception offends against the conjugal act and the natural moral law. "Rejecting contraception and using natural methods for regulating births means choosing to base interpersonal relations between the spouses on mutual respect and total acceptances, with positive consequences also for bring about a more human order in society." (Compendium, No. 233)

The choice to use contraception is not a moral option for the couple. A fortiori, the promotion of contraception by social institutions or States is immoral. "All programs of economic assistance aimed at financing campaigns of sterilization and contraception, as well as the subordination of economic assistance to such campaigns, are to be morally condemned as affronts to the dignity of the person and the family." (Compendium, No. 234) In this matter, both the U.N. and the U.S. may be the greatest offenders.

Responsible parenthood demands the exercise not of all options, but only of moral options, and the moral decisions do not only involve the decision to prevent conception. They also involve the decision to promote conception. There is no absolute "right to children," and no desire to be a mother or a father justifies immoral means to conceive them.

Modern technology has invaded the temple of the family in a sort of abomination of desolation which separates the procreative act from the unitive act and seeks to replace or substitute for the conjugal act. The upshot is that "the child comes about more as the result of an act of technology than as the natural fruit of a human act in which there is a full and total giving of the couple." (Compendium, No. 235) The immoral techniques that are immoral are legion: the donation of sperm or ova, surrogate motherhood, homologous and heterologous artificial fertilization, and so on. While there are some techniques that "end assistance to the conjugal act or to the attainment of its effects" which are legitimate, there are a whole host of illicit and immoral techniques that ought to be rejected. The ends do not justify the means.

One must also not forget that the child has certain rights to be born or raised within the confines of a natural family. "The unborn child must be guaranteed the best possible conditions of existence through the stability of a family founded on marriage, through the complementarities of the the two persons, father and mother." (Compendium, No. 235) Efforts to provide children to persons involved in some sort of civil union other than a family founded on the marriage of one man and one woman are to be shunned.

Finally, human cloning--defined as "the reproduction of a biological entity that is genetically identical to the originating organism"--is something to be abjured. Whether for reproductive or therapeutic purposes, human cloning is "contrary to the dignity of human procreation because it takes place in total absence of an act of personal love between spouses." It is an "agamic and asexual reproduction" unworthy of man. It represents, moreover, "a form of total domination of the reproduced individual on the part of the one reproducing it." It is a form of technological tyranny. (Compendium, No. 236)

Warning: Who's Got the Power? C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION HAS USHERED IN WONDERS of scientific knowledge and technical prowess and the seeming unceasing "conquest" of nature has eased the condition of mankind in so many ways. To be ungrateful as to the physical good which science has given us seems obscurantist. To be unappreciative of the sacrifices made, and the contributions to our well-being by the likes of Isaac Newton, Carl Linnaeus, Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk, or Albert Einstein . . . the list could go on, and on, is to be an ingrate. But there is another side to science, there is a cost, both moral and physical, to it, and there is a very danger that we may be enslaved, even abolished, as science begins its seeming ineluctable effort to control--not just physical nature--but our physical nature. There is a difference between man's conquest of nature, and man's conquest of man's nature.

Before Lewis goes into this in his last chapter of the Abolition of Man, he backtracks. He asks a question which at first seems so silly that we wonder why he asks it. What does it mean that man has conquered nature, that man has power over nature. It means, C. S. Lewis cautions, that man has power, and an ever increasing power, over man. C. S. Lewis makes his point by selecting three examples: the airplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive, all modern devices.*

What Power Does Contraception Give Us Over Future Generations?

The first thing that C. S. Lewis notes is that these "powers" over nature are not owned by men in common. They are obtained only by payment, which means that title to them is owned by someone other than men in general. "Any or all," of modern technological gadgets, or conveniences, or medicines or inventions, "can be withheld from some men by other men--by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production." Abolition, 54. Some men hold the power, some men sell that power, other men have to buy that power.

The second thing that C. S. Lewis notes is that men are both beneficiaries and maleficiaries of these powers. We can be "patient or subject" as much as "possessor." Man is as much a passenger on a plane as he is the target of aerial bombing. Man can be informed by television, and he can be propagandized by television. By means of its unique target, however, contraception makes living men its subject, but it also has a particular deleterious effect on future generations. As a result of using contraceptive methods we control the future generations. And we do this without their choice, without their informed consent, without what such future generations may have chosen to prefer.

It is apparent, then, that man's power over nature can be viewed, and ought to be viewed more accurately, as "a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument." Abolition, 55. This observation has nothing to do whether the possession of that power, much less its use or abuse, is moral or immoral. Wherever we place this power--in private hands, in corporate hands, in national government's hands, in world organizations' hands--it will be controlled by some and suffered by others. This means that the power is exercised, and "all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding, must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones." Abolition, 56.

Sociologists have tended to forget or at least to neglect time in their analysis of the effect of certain phenomena. They have also tended to forget the fact that our present choices affect the future options of generations as yet unborn.

Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.

Abolition, 56. What may therefore appear to be a "progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power," may in fact be something vastly different if the dimension of time, and the effect on future generations, is considered. We neglect those that come after us, though what we do now affects them, often by limiting their options, their existence, or even how and who they may be. This is particularly true in the area of the manipulation of birth: of contraception, of eugenics, of genetic engineering. We have power over future generations, which means, of course, that future generations will have less power over themselves, and in fact there will less of the future generations than would otherwise have been. As we march forward, then, the "last me, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future."** Abolition, 57-58.

In short, if both the title to power over nature and the time element are considered, there "neither is nor cannot be any simple increase of power on Man's side." We have to come to realize that "[e]ach new power won by man is a power over man as well." This means that every advance makes him stronger in one sense, but weaker in another. This forebodes particularly ominous in birth technology and in genetic engineering:

The final stage [of Man's conquest of nature] is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have 'taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho' and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be.

Abolition, 59.

The warning seems prescient, if ignored: "For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please." Abolition, 59. The warning seems positively ominous when we realize that modern man, to whom some power has been given (or who has seized this power) does not recognize the moral bounds of the Tao. This power, then, is unconstrained by any objective law. Can man resist this Ring of Gyges? If he thinks himself invisible to the Tao, to the natural law, what sorts of temptations will he succumb to?

Those with their hands on the reins of power--Lewis calls them the "Conditioners"--will chose "what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race." Abolition, 61-62. They will say among themselves (most of us will not be included in their intimate conversation): "Nice customs curtsy to great kings . . [and] you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion. We are the makers of manners . . . and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults." (Shakespeare, Henry V, v.2.)

By what shall they be motivated? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes if it be neither God nor Tao?

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*This is not entirely true for contraception, as contraceptive methods and devices have been available to men and women since ancient Egypt. The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus (also Kahun Papyrus, Kahun Medical Papyrus, or UC 32057), found El-Lahun by Flinders Petrie in 1889, dated about 1800 B.C., deals with a variety of women's health—gynaecological issues, including contraception, etc. But the efficacy of such methods under the hands of science has been, without question, improved.
**One can think also in terms of debt. To the extent current generations live beyond their means so as to incur trade imbalances or government debt as a result of deficit spending, future generations will have to pay for it. Even if defaulted upon by the debtor, the holder of the debt will then have to pay for it.