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Pope Benedict on contraception/abortion December 15, 2010

From another book length interview with Peter Seewald, Salt of the Earth, then Cardinal Ratzinger addresses the issue of contraception.  My question, to all but especially Steve B and WhiteLily, is the “answer” Ratzinger gives on this subject profoundly modernist in its outlook?  Does this answer below provide a “preview,” if you will, of the Pope’s ‘condom comments’?

Your Eminence, many Christians do not understand the Church’s position on contraception. Do you understand that they don’t understand it?

Yes, I can understand that quite well; the question is really complicated. In today’s troubled world, where the number of children cannot be very high given living conditions and so many other factors, it’s very easy to understand. In this matter, we ought to look less at the casuistry of individual cases and more at the major objectives that the Church has in mind.

I think that it’s a question of three major basic options. The first and most fundamental is to insist on the value o£ the child in society. In this area, in fact, there has been a remarkable change. Whereas in the simple societies of the past up to the nineteenth century, the blessing of children was regarded as the blessing, today children are conceived of almost as a threat. People think that they rob us of a place for the future, they threaten their own space, and so forth.  In this matter a primary objective is to

recover the original, true view that the child, the new human being, is a blessing. That by giving life we also receive it ourselves and that going out of ourselves and accepting the blessing of creation are good for man.The second is that today we find ourselves before a separation of sexuality from procreation such as was not known earlier, and this makes it all the more necessary not to lose sight of the inner connection between the two.

Meanwhile, even representatives of the sixties’ generation, who tried it, are making some astonishing statements. Or perhaps that’s just what we should expect. Rainer Langhans, for example, who once explored “orgasmic sexuality” in his communes, now proclaims that “the pill severed sexuality from the soul and led people into a blind alley.” Langhans complains that now there “is no longer any giving, no longer any devoted dedication”. “The highest” aspect of sexuality, he now professes, is `parenthood”, which he calls “collaboration in God’s plan”.

It really is true that increasingly we have the development of two completely separated realities. In Huxley’,s famous futuristic novel Brave New World, we see a vision of a coming world in which sexuality is something completely detached from procreation. He had good reason to expect this, and its human tragedy is fully explored. In this world, children are planned and produced in a laboratory in a regulated fashion. Now, that is clearly an intentional caricature, but, like all caricatures, it does bring something to the fore: that the child is going to be something that tends to be planned and made, that he lies completely under the control of reason, as it were. And that signals the self-destruction of man. Children become products in which we want to express ourselves; they are fully robbed in advance of their own life’s projects. And sexuality once again becomes something replaceable. And, of course, in all this the relationship of man and woman is also lost. The developments are plain to see.

In the question of contraception, precisely such basic options are at stake. The Church wants to keep man human. For the third option in this context is that we cannot resolve great moral problems simply with techniques, with chemistry, but must solve them morally, with a life-style. It is, I think — independently now of contraception — one of our great perils that we want to master even the human condition with technology, that we have forgotten that there are primordial human problems that are not susceptible of technological solutions but that demand a certain life-style and certain life decisions. I would say that in the question of contraception we ought to look more at these basic options in which the Church is leading a struggle for man. The point of the Church’s objections is to underscore this battle. The way these objections are formulated is perhaps not always completely felicitous, but what is at stake are such major cardinal points of human existence.

The question remains whether you can reproach someone, say a couple who already have several children, for not having a positive attitude toward children.

No, of course not, and that shouldn’t happen, either.

But must these people nevertheless have the idea that they are living in some sort of sin if they …

I would say that those are questions that ought to be discussed with one’s spiritual director, with one’s priest, because they can’t be projected into the abstract.

So, when asked clearly, if a couple with several children develops an antipathy towards having more, the subject of contraception is at the discretion of their spiritual director?  Does Pope Benedict undermine his argument by having a modernist hermeneutic, looking at things from a distinctly ‘modern’ point of view?