It's hard to believe that the Garry Wills formerly known as an
intelligent and elegant writer has sunk to a point so low and
embarrassing that his "arguments" are on par, if just barely, with
elementary school playground spats: insults, name calling, and
falsehoods. His little screed, "Contraception's Con Men" (The New York Review of Books blog, Feb. 15, 2012), is revolting in its sneering vitriol and revealing in its rejection of basic facts.
It
stands as yet one more piece of evidence that if a man dedicates his
life to defending and promoting a sin, he will end up a sad and bitter
shell of his former self. "Sinners are people who hate everything,
because their world is necessarily full of betrayal, full of illusion,
full of deception", wrote Thomas Merton. The hatred in Wills' piece is
directed at "a revolting combination of con men and fanatics"—that is,
all Republicans; all Catholic bishops (who are "stupid"); Popes (Paul VI
is referred to as "crazy"); any Catholic who follows Church teaching
and obeys Church authority; and the "nice smiley fanatic" Rick Santorum,
who is equated with Torquemada. For a man who is so enamored with
"love", he doesn't show much love.
As for illusion, Wills cannot conceive (pun intended) that the HHS
mandate is a direct assault on religious liberty and simple civil
respect for conscience. (Even Douglas Kmiec has recognized the mandate was
an "insult" and a "failing", though he fails to admit that his
perception of Obama was largely incorrect.) Wills harbors the further
illusion that President Obama's "accommodation" was somehow an honorable
admittance of lines crossed and rights crushed rather than the cynical
shell game it really is.
But the real problem is one of deception, for having deceived himself
about the nature of the Church, Church authority, and Church teaching,
Wills now works to deceive his readers about the same. I suspect that in
doing so he is not even being knowingly duplicitous, because there
comes a point in a lifelong mad pursuit of the glittering "My precious"
that reason, judgment, and reflection are burned away, leaving only
naked pride and sterile rage.
Examples abound in Wills' diatribe; I will highlight just a few:
• "The bishops’ opposition to contraception is not an argument for a
'conscience exemption.' It is a way of imposing Catholic requirements on
non-Catholics. This is religious dictatorship, not religious freedom."
This is stunningly upside down and backwards, as if the person who
burglarized your home sued you for locking your valuables in a safe,
allowing him only partial access to your private, personal belongings.
The federal government has passed a law stating that Catholic
institutions such as schools and hospitals must pay insurance coverage
for medical treatments contrary to Catholic moral teaching. The
perversity of this was expressed well in a recent statement by the
Sisters of Life:
Under the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act each of us will be required by law to obtain health
insurance, or face fines. Since this HHS mandate will require every
insurer to include abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and
artificial contraception, we will not be able to obtain any coverage
that is free from those “services,” and we will be forced to pay for
them directly. Since we are neither employers, nor employees, of any
religious institution, we cannot even take advantage of the “religious
exemption” contained in the new regulations or the “compromise.”
That an unprecedented act of federal fiat against the Church is
construed as an imposition of religious requirements by a "religious
dictatorship" can only be explained by a devotion to libertinism that is
as immoral as it is statist, as explained so well by George Weigel in a recent column. Having abandoned the Church, Wills has made an idol of sexual "freedom" and a "church" of Leviathan.
• "Contraception is not even a religious matter. Nowhere in Scripture or the Creed is it forbidden."
Religion, properly understood, as to do with one's relationship with
God. And since God is creator and the author of life, and since both
divine revelation and reason make known the importance of life,
marriage, and procreation, it follows that the purposeful thwarting of
life and procreation is indeed part and parcel of religious belief. And
nowhere in Scripture or the Creed is child pornography or dog fighting
expressly forbidden, yet all reasonable people agree they are,
respectively, gravely evil and very disturbing acts. These are simply
cheap and pathetic appeals to shallow minds and shaded souls.
• "The purpose of eating is to sustain life, but that does not make
all eating that is not necessary to subsistence 'unnatural.' One can
eat, beyond the bare minimum to exist, to express fellowship, as one can
have sex, beyond the begetting of a child with each act, to express
love."
Much could be said here, but suffice to note two facts. First, the
Catholic Church does not teach that sexual union in marriage is only
for procreation, or that having marital relations when a woman cannot
become pregnant—because of her cycle, her age, or infertility—is wrong.
It teaches that the marital embrace must always be open to life.
Secondly,
to pick up Wills' analogy, this means that whenever we eat—whether due
to urgent necessity or in a leisurely, festive context—we do not force
ourselves to vomit up the food later. Such purging is rightly seen as
unhealthy, both physically and emotionally, and indicates an improper
understanding of both the nature of food and the act of eating. If I eat
cake at your birthday party, even though not hungry, I am not thwarting
the natural process of digestion and nourishment that follows; but if I
"purge" that cake from my stomach, you might rightly wonder: "Why did
you eat it?" Likewise, a married couple may have relations just once a
month, or twice a week; the regularity is not the issue. But if they
"purge" themselves, so to speak, of the natural and proper process of
conception and reproduction, they are like the person who suffers from
an eating disorder, failing to have a proper and healthy understanding
of the nature of food and eating.
• "Catholics who do not accept the phony argument over contraception
are said to be going against the teachings of their church.' That is
nonsense. They are their church. The Second Vatican Council defines the
church as 'the people of God.' Thinking that the pope is the church is a
relic of the days when a monarch was said to be his realm."
The amount of theological error contained in this short passage is
impressive, albeit in a most negative way. The people of God, stated Lumen Gentium
(pars 9ff), are the people of the new covenant established by the
divine authority of Jesus Christ. "That messianic people has Christ for
its head" (par 9); the Church is, to draw upon Scripture (which Wills
appeals to in other contexts), the body of Christ. The Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church further states, on the matter of authority:
The entire body of the faithful, anointed
as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief. They
manifest this special property by means of the whole peoples'
supernatural discernment in matters of faith when "from the Bishops down
to the last of the lay faithful" they show universal agreement in
matters of faith and morals. That discernment in matters of faith is
aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth. It is exercised under the
guidance of the sacred teaching authority, in faithful and respectful
obedience to which the people of God accepts that which is not just the
word of men but truly the word of God. (par 12)
That sacred teaching authority, of course, is the Magisterium, which
rests upon the authority of Christ, handed on by him to the apostles and
then to the bishops, by virtue of apostolic succession (see pars
18-29). And: "The pope's power of primacy over all, both pastors and
faithful, remains whole and intact. In virtue of his office, that is as
Vicar of Christ and pastor of the whole Church, the Roman Pontiff has
full, supreme and universal power over the Church. And he is always free
to exercise this power" (par 22). Wills says that Pope Paul VI was
"crazy" to condemn contraception in Humanae Vitae, but he fails
to explain why we should accept the magisterium of Gary Wills when it
was Paul VI who oversaw the conclusion of the very Council (appealed to
incorrectly by Wills) that expressly teaches the pope has the power to
teach authoritatively on matters of faith and morals. Wills is either
being sloppy or misleading, or both. Besides, it cannot be overlooked
that Wills is assuming those American Catholics who use contraception
are somehow, against any decent sense of logic, the "people of God" referred to by the Council, which begs the question, to put it mildly.
• "When Paul reaffirmed the ban on birth control in Humanae Vitae
(1968) there was massive rejection of it. Some left the church. Some
just ignored it. Paradoxically, the document formed to convey the idea
that papal teaching is inerrant just convinced most people that it can
be loony."
He is right that many Catholics rejected the teachings in the 1968
encyclical. But it is misleading to say the document was "formed to
convey the idea that papal teaching is inerrant"; that, again, was the
point of the Vatican councils! Rather, Humanae Vitae sought to
explain the truth of the Church's teaching about sex, procreation, and
marriage. Everything that Paul VI warned that would happen if
contraceptives became the norm has come about: the breakdown of
marriage, sexual immorality, increased numbers of abortions, infidelity,
divorce, and on and on. In the words of Archbishop Charles Chaput,
"Contraceptive technology, precisely because of its impact on sexual
intimacy, has subverted our understanding of the purpose of sexuality,
fertility, and marriage itself. It has detached them from the natural,
organic identity of the human person and disrupted the ecology of human
relationships. It has scrambled our vocabulary of love, just as pride
scrambled the vocabulary of Babel."
It has surely scrambled the thinking of one Garry Wills, whose sorry
and embarrasing attempts to slander and smear those who stand up for
life and Church teaching are a reminder that illusion and deception
always follow when sin is presented as virtue and virtue mocked as vice.