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Moral Dilemmas

II. Anomalies and Grace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Gerald Vann O.P.
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The ‘muddled marriage’ is only one among a great number of cases needing very special pastoral sympathy and care and guidance, in these days especially. The grim fact has to be faced that problems connected with the sexual life, often caused by a clash between the individual Catholic’s instinct or indeed conviction on the one hand and the Church’s teaching as it is so often presented or understood on the other, are responsible not only for great unhappiness in the lives of innumerable Catholics, but also for the fact that an appalling number are led, by their inability to ‘conform’, to leave the Church altogether. The equally grim fact has also to be faced that within the Church the growing conviction among lay people that the clergy either cannot or will not understand or sympathise with their very real difficulties is leading to a wider and wider cleavage between the two.

The case of preventive birth-control is a notorious example. There are married people who for one reason or another just cannot, at least temporarily, have more children: what an insult to tell them, sans façons, that in that case they must just ‘abstain from indulgence in sexual intercourse’. (Ecclesiastical jargon often indicates a lack of real theological thinking.) The whole point is that this is not a question of ‘indulgence’: it is of the very essence of their married, their Catholic married, life. From the layman’s point of view what too often happens is that first they are told how wonderfully God has blessed the mystery of human love and sex and marriage, and then in the next breath they are told to go off and do without it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 34 , Issue 403 , October 1953 , pp. 424 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © 1953 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 New Problems in Medical Ethics, edited in English by Dom Peter Flood, O.S.B. Translated from the French ‘Cahiers Laënnec’ by Malachy Gerard Carroll. (Mercier Press; 21s.)

The book comprises four studies, on the Sexual Problems of the Adolescent, on Intersexuality, on Abortion and on the Lourdes’ Cures. It is a great pity that a better (and more accurate) title was not found for this translation, and that the translation itself is sometimes lacking in clarity; moreover, there are medical terms which should have been explained for the non-medical reader, and some German quotations which should have been translated. Of the matter itself, apart from one or two statements which seem questionable or to call for qualification, it is difficult to speak too highly, though the contributions are not all of equal value. What one would really like to see—and what would be of inestimable practical value—is a much smaller, and cheaper, book made up of the best of the first two studies, so that these might be more readily available to all who have to deal with young people or have the cure of souls. The Mercier Press have already put us in their debt by making available Baron Frederick von Gagern’s excellent Difficulties in Married Life in a six-shilling edition: they would increase the debt immensely if they produced a companion volume made up of some of the essays from this present book.

2 op. cit. pp. 4-5.

3 op. cit. pp. 8, 18.

4 Failures produce anxiety: the anxiety itself produces further failures.

5 op. cit. pp. 14–15.

6 op. cit. p. 41. One would like to quote far more fully this magnificent paper on ‘Masturbation and Grave Sin’ by Père Snoeck, which says with such wisdom and balanced judgment what needs to be said: an invaluable guide for all who have to help young people in these matters. There are excellent things, moreover, in the paper on ‘Medical Aspects’ by Professor J. G. Prick and Dr J. A. Calon, concerning the sort of regulation which is not repressive but liberating, the importance of education towards heterosexuality, and of education (in the wide, cultural sense) generally: ‘In the light of ideas discovered by the child in the domain of religion, morality, aesthetics, social relations, the value of sexuality becomes relative, which causes it to lose gradually its tyrannical power’; ‘one must not consider the fact of onanism in isolation; on the contrary, one must attempt to assist the whole personality to rise to a higher level, using for this purpose all the indications with which nature herself furnishes us’.

7 p. 116.

8 p. 117. In cases where the penitent is suffering from a real obsession, e.g. some form of sexual fetichism of obsessional force, it is useful to help him make a clear distinction in his own mind between acts which are thus plainly determined—in which case he should try not to brood over them afterwards but on the contrary at once turn his mind resolutely to other things—and other similar acts which however are freely chosen: it is these that he must seek to eliminate. And it may well be wisest for him to direct his sense of guilt, not on to these acts, of either kind, so much as on to his sinfulness in general, his lack of love and faith and zeal.

9 p. 18.

10 p. 120.