Fr. McNabb Contra Nancy Pelosi

A few weeks back Congresswoman Pelosi made televised remarks that an important part of the "stimulus bill" was the inclusion of monies earmarked for providing more birth control and/or contraceptives in a feigned effort to ease the budgetary deficits facing our Cities and States. But due to the public outcry of many in the laity (and an equally silent response from the USCCB) President Obama nixed this from the stimulus package to avoid a political challenge he didn't want to take on at this point. This doesn't mean that their ideology has changed just the timing of when. It was necessary to placate his rabid pro-death supporters which he did by suggesting that this belonged in a normal budget bill rather than the "supra" budget bill this stimulus package has become.

Now other than simply leaving this at the fact that the Catholic Church does not allow artificial birth control and never has, even pre-Humanae Vitae, it is important to examine Ms. Pelosi's statement further in light of an essay of Fr. McNabb, titled ACTION STATIONS.

He begins with a passage from the Encyclical of Pius XII to the American Hierarchy, "The Holiness of the Family and Social Justice" issued in November , 1939.

"If, instead, the Commandments of God are spurned, not only is it impossible to attain that happiness which has place beyond the brief span of time which is allotted to earthly existence, but the very basis upon which rests true civilization is shaken and naught is to be expected but ruins over which belated tears must be shed. How, in fact, can public weal and the glory of civilised life have any guarantee of stability when right is subverted and virtue despised and derided? Is not God the source and giver of law? Is not He the inspiration and reward of virtue, with none like Him among lawgivers?"

"This, according to the admission of all reasonable men, is everywhere the bitter root of evils: refusal to recognise the Divine Majesty, neglect of moral law whose origin is from Heaven, or that regrettable inconstancy which makes its victims waver between the lawful and forbidden, between justice and inequity."

"Thence arrived the modern and blind egotism and thirst for pleasure, vice, drunkenness, immodest and costly styles of dress, prevalence of crime, even among minors, lust for power, neglect of the poor, base craving for ill-gotten wealth, flight from the land, levity in entering marriage, divorce, the break-up of the family, the cooling of mutual affections between parents and children, birth control, enfeeblement of race, weakening of respect for authority, or the rebellion against or neglect of duty towards one's country and towards mankind"

Fr. McNabb then continues. . .

The simple phrase agrorum desertion (flight from the lands) marks, if it does not make, history. The fundamental evil which it uncovers now finds its place for the first time in a Papal Encyclical.

More historic is the joining together almost in one phrase---the flight from the land, and decay of marriage. As man must eat and therefore work to eat, God made the farm, like the family, a divine institution. Home and homestead being God's foundations for mankind, "flight from the land" into the town and especially the big town, will mean flight from undertaking marriage as God has wished it to be undertaken.

It can never be sufficiently trumpeted to moderns that our modern town, and especially our modern big town, is the proximate occasion of the anti-social sin of race suicide. So many are the overhead charges for rent, rates and taxes that the town cannot pay the majority of its hand-workers and brain-workers an economic wage sufficient to pay an economic rent.

Under these town conditions birth restriction presents itself as an economic necessity. Now birth restriction by marital abstinence is heroic virtue. But as the average person cannot be expected to have more than average self-sacrifice this heroic marital abstinence will tend to give place to birth restriction which is birth frustration.

No wonder that the average town youth of today, faced by circumstances which we elders have left to them, can have no higher idea of marriage than that of a temporary relation between a man and a woman principally for pleasure.

So how do our "Catholic" politicians respond to the moral challenges facing these proximate occasions of sin? By tolerating immoral behavior and compounding it by providing an evil remedy like artificial contraception. The solution is not economic. We cannot simply raise the minimum wage or artificially create jobs because these are ultimately only short term remedies.
Even those from whom we should expect moral guidance are not leading us. Fr., continues. . .

Understand my anguish when I realized that even we priests of the moral code were beginning, as it were, to advocate adjustment to the proximate occasions of sin, as if some expedient would allow the majority of young men and women to live in brothels. I found professional attempts to adjust the moral code to circumstances, to surroundings. If that was an ethical policy, then the great Chosen People did very wrong by coming out of Egypt, for their glorious attempt--which we Christians have not yet imitated--was that they refused to adjust their moral code to their surroundings. They adjusted their surroundings to their moral code.