Editorial: What would a cleric know?

The Australian internet religious news e-letter CathNews recently re-ran an article by Record journalist Anthony Barich on Perth Auxiliary Bishop Donald Sproxton’s frank but enlightening comments on the difficulties faced by many priests when raising with couples planning to marry the subjects of natural family planning  and the Church’s insight on marriage and fertility.
Bishop Sproxton pointed out, quite correctly, that there is a profound ignorance among contemporary Catholics about the true dynamic and relationship between fertility and marriage.
Without seeking to put words into the Bishop’s mouth, part of the problem he was referring to is the culture of hostility to family life, marriage and, indeed, the concept of having children which pervades modern life. This modern anti-culture is everywhere and communicated powerfully by the means of social communication, the media. Baptised Catholics, the vast majority of whom do not see anything more significant in their membership of the Church than a tribal affiliation – much like an issue of preference as to whether one barracks for Collingwood or St Kilda, for example – have accepted the media’s constant assertion that men need not bother about responsibilities or commitment in sexual relationships and that childbearing is a form of slavery for women. This is what is usually referred to as progress.
It was therefore no real surprise to see in the email responses that followed at the end of the article.
There were plenty of criticisms of Bishop Sproxton for daring to speak on a subject he could not possibly know anything about.
Nor was it any surprise to see that many such responses came, apparently, from Catholics. This is Australia, after all. The criticism, ridicule and often hostility directed at the Church’s inspirational insight and teaching on fertility and marriage has been a constant feature of contemporary life since the day Pope Paul VI heroically issued Humanae Vitae in 1968, and much of this has come from those who are members of the Church, lay and clerical. This is because huge numbers of the baptised, including not a few clergy, have been shaped less by the Church and more by the explosion in the influence of the media in modern life. Watching too much television really is bad for you.
As this editorial pointed out a fortnight ago, the media are nothing more than companies who sell information and entertainment, usually multi-national corporations, but always driven by the need for profit. In the eyes of consumers the media may have huge legitimacy – but it has almost no accountability to anyone for anything. And however persuasive the media and entertainmment business may seem to have been in glamourising promiscuity and moral relativism (and ridiculing the Catholic insight on marriage and fertility) one need only to look at what embracing the culture of contraception, abortion and divorce have really brought the modern world. Destroyed marriages littering the landscape of our society, fatherless children by the millions, generations of young cut loose from any sustaining vision of life, all too often knowing no other way to live than the brutal, ephemeral and sterile pleasures of the moment which in the end lead, most likely, to loneliness for life. Those who think that priests and Bishops cannot possibly speak about love and marriage should look again. In fact, they are among the only ones who really know anything about it.
However, Bishop Sproxton was touching glancingly on a number of issues of vital concern to Catholics for whom it is important daily to follow Christ as faithfully as they possibly can.
These included the absolute and vital importance of the state of Catholic marriage to the future of the Church and to society. Of even greater importance was the fact that the welfare of children and individual lives depends always on the degree to which true love is present or absent from any marriage or relationship. Bishop Sproxton’s words were timely, welcome and highly relevant, not least of all because he was right. However, Catholics who commonly encounter the kinds of arguments about clergy described above should take heart.
One argument nobody should accept for even a moment is the tired old furphy that because a priest is not married he should not presume to speak about such delicate matters that he cannot possibly know about. Men, of course, are usually much more reticent to talk about sensitive matters to do with sexual intimacy, because men have a natural reserve to do with something which they sense is like fire. But for an anonymous respondee on CathNews to say that a priest cannot talk about sex, marriage and fertility is like saying a psychiatrist cannot speak about schizophrenia. Or, to put it another way, if a priest can only teach and advise on matters of marriage on the basis of his own experience of marriage then it must follow that only a psychiatrist who is bipolar should be allowed to treat the mentally ill. There is something about this kind of logic that doesn’t quite gel.
The profound ignorance that exists among Catholics about almost everything to do with marriage is the key to the future of the Church in this country. This is why it is true to say that marriage has become a key battleground in the clash between the Gospel and a world that wants no restrictions on any of its pleasure-seeking. If we cannot, as a Church, save marriage and family life from the brutal assault of our culture, then we will likely (in a human sense) lose the battle for our society’s very soul. Bishop Sproxton was perfectly correct in his description of the existence of great ignorance among Catholics of the beauty of the Church’s insight on marriage and fertility. It will be our common work as a Church, without being insensitive or inappropriate, to change all that.