Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Mutterschaft - Abtreibung, Verhütung, Kultur des Todes;

Kurzinhalt: The only way ... to subvert a culture of death is to embrace freely and joyfully the hierarchy or sacred order of the sacrament of marriage by which man is able to become the living image of God and thus sustain within this world the trinitarian ...

Textausschnitt: A CULTURE OF LIFE OR DEATH?

164b The watershed issue of our society today is abortion, for whether or not we accept it tells us whether or not we are prepared to accept death itself as a tool of social policy and as a means of solving social problems. Accused of being obsessed by the issue of abortion, Pope John Paul II recently responded:

... I categorically reject every accusation or suspicion concerning the Pope's alleged 'obsession' with this issue. We are dealing with a problem of tremendous importance, in which all of us must show the utmost responsibility and vigilance. We cannot afford forms of permissiveness that would lead directly to the trampling of human rights, and also to the complete destruction of values which are fundamental not only for the lives of individuals and families but for society itself. Isn't there a sad truth in the powerful expression culture of death?1

165a When the freedom of some human beings is upheld by bringing about the deliberate death of other, innocent human beings, freedom itself becomes simply another form of tyranny. (Fs)

Abortion gives the lie to the notion that freedom can be the right to do anything we wish as long as we don't hurt anybody else. The lie resides and always has resided in the fact that those who claim the right to do as they wish also reserve for themselves the right to define what hurts others. Those who claim the freedom to abort also claim the right to define out of existence those whom they abort and thus deny that anyone has been hurt. (Fs) (notabene)

165b In the movie Gettysburg, one of the soldiers fighting for the South asks a northern officer why those in the North cannot just live and let live. A lot of fuss would be avoided, he says, if only the two sides could simply agree to disagree. The problem, of course, is that to let live those Southerners who own slaves is to allow those Southerners to live and to exercise their freedom at the expense of those slaves. One simply cannot live and let live when it involves letting some live at the expense of the freedom and lives of others. (Fs)

165c For Catholics, however, the roots of a culture of death strike deeper than abortion. The watershed issue for Catholics is not abortion but contraception. For contraception places before us the central issue of our age—who has dominion over man? Man himself or God? In Genesis, God gave man dominion over nature (Gen 1:28), but he reserved dominion over man to himself, as exemplified in his one command to Adam and Eve. Is the human body a part of that realm over which God gave man dominion, or is the human body indissociable from the human being over whom God reserved dominion for himself? That is the unavoidable question raised by contraception. To divorce sex from procreation is to divorce man from his role as co-creator with God in order to set man up as the sole lord of even his own existence. It is to reduce sex to the level of a simple biological function which, as such, belongs to the nature over which man has dominion. In doing this, man gives himself the warrant to define for himself what is good and what is evil in all matters pertaining to sex—and thus to life and death. To the man, and even more the woman, who claims contraceptive control over his or her own body, abortion is but the logical and even necessary corollary to such a notion of control. (Fs) (notabene)

166a Because contraception involves us in a false assertion of freedom vis-a-vis God, by claiming a prerogative which rightly belongs to God, and because abortion involves us in a false assertion of freedom vis-a-vis both God and other human beings, by taking a life which God has given to another person, women, who are the primary target of those advocating contraception and abortion, must take the lead in renouncing the culture of death which such techniques produce. Women must recognize within themselves that unique capacity for giving life which defined Eve as "mother of all living" and Mary as Mother of God. A culture of death can prevail only at the expense of motherhood itself, and women must work to see that the female capacity to conceive and bear children is not treated as somehow disordered or flawed. (Fs)

166b This means two things above all else. It means, first, that women must actively resist that contraceptive mentality which supposes that the chemical suppression of the capacity of a normally-functioning female body to conceive a child or the physical disruption by barrier methods of the marital act itself are good things. It means, second, that women must actively combat that attitude which suggests that the woman who does actually conceive a child might be regarded as having contracted a disease. Thinking of the female body and the marital act as flawed and therefore in need of a contraceptive "fix" and viewing pregnancy as a disease in need of the "cure" of abortion are two of the most vicious aspects of a culture of death. Without these mistaken concepts, no such culture could ever flourish. (Fs)

166c If women must take the lead here, this does not mean that men have no role to play. Indeed, a culture centered on contraception and abortion works in the final analysis as much against fatherhood as against motherhood, for it strikes at marriage and the family precisely because it divorces freedom from love and that responsibility which is intrinsic to love. As the Pope points out, "Responsible parenthood is the necessary condition for human love, and it is also the necessary condition for authentic conjugal love, because love cannot be irresponsible. Its beauty is the fruit of responsibility. When love is truly responsible, it is also truly free."2

167a The only way, in short, to subvert a culture of death is to embrace freely and joyfully the hierarchy or sacred order of the sacrament of marriage by which man is able to become the living image of God and thus sustain within this world the trinitarian order with which God has invested it and without which there can be only a world of tyranny and a culture of death. But this means something else of which both Vatican II and the current Pope have been most insistent. This means the laity must assume a much greater responsibility for the mission of the Church in this world. (Fs)