The question of what can be done, individually, to reverse the watering-down of Christianity in Western societies can be asked with a positive attitude or with an apathetic, fatalistic one. The natural disposition of seemingly-typical Catholics in many places is the latter, and to ‘settle’ for a comparatively-more-‘comfortable’ life of merely stating a religious opinion (if occasion arises and cannot be evaded) rather than trying to get it adopted in practice.
Take the example of abortion, representing a chasm which exists between Catholic teaching and world-wide practice. In so far as the subject is still discussed, many people who agree with the teaching but who are well aware of prevailing practice will say that they disagree with abortion but that they cannot (true, but is it ‘code’ for ‘will not try to’?) prevent its being available to someone who wants it. Even those who are more interested than that and have been willing to put up more of an argument have seen that decades of discussion have (except in America) done nothing to give the pro-life campaign political influence. Faced with such sustained inability to make headway, the only alternatives are to accept defeat or to provide people with practical help intended to remove or reduce reasons to arrange abortion.
The U. K. charity called ‘LIFE’ chose the second of those alternatives long before experience had shown that the intellectual battle was over. LIFE’s Chairman (now retired from that position), told an interviewer that in most cases women do not want an abortion but cannot see any alternative to it (a situation which LIFE’s experience shows still to exist), and that LIFE always aimed to offer such an alternative by means of counselling (and practical help such as residential facilities).[1] LIFE receives many enquiries and has had successes in saving babies’ lives, but there continue to be hundreds of thousands of killings each year which are excused by law. At a time when the ‘success’-rate of the opposing services was in the news, some providers of abortions claimed that 15 to 20 per cent of customers who consulted them decided to continue with their pregnancies; the figure claimed by other such providers was between 21 and 23 per cent. Some National Health authorities reported figures of between 8 and 10 per cent. The indications were, therefore, that a large majority chose abortion. It appeared that between 33 and 50 per cent of people who consulted LIFE decided against abortion. [2] At that time, therefore, the pro-life case prevailed in (at best) only half of the relevant cases. Even if – since then – the number of people who keep their babies has increased, so has the number of abortions. Therefore, if the title of this article is applied to abortion, not only in the U. K. but also in very many other countries, some people will answer (or at least think) that arguing against abortion is really not worth the bother because ‘it makes no difference’. What would YOU say? Consider the following, of multiple applicability.
“If you fight, you may lose. If you don’t fight, you have lost.” [3] Pro-life fighters lose consistently anyway (except for recent successes in Malta and, after fifty years, in the United States), so “Is It Worth The Bother?”
If restrictions and prohibitions do not stop what they are intended to stop, should they be scrapped? ‘Yes’ is equivalent to saying (for example) that criminal law should be abolished. St. Augustine said that the law tolerates many things, but “because it does not do everything the something it does do should not be disapproved of.” [4]
Two people were walking on a beach and saw an enormous number of stranded starfish. One walker began to throw them into the sea. The other suggested that because there were so many the thrower’s effort would make no difference. The thrower replied that it would make a difference to those which he threw. Whether that is a true story or a fictional one, its message is clear.
The same message was conveyed by the work of Mother Teresa. In 1968 she was interviewed for television by Malcolm Muggeridge, whose resultant book [5] makes some memorable points by means of his wonderful, characteristic ‘way with words’. He wrote that, unlike the controversies which were the substance of interviews for television, her answers to his questions were so perfectly simple that he wondered whether the interview could last for the required half-hour. “Controversy …does not arise in the case of those who, like Mother Teresa, are blessed with certainties.” [6] He mentioned that in his experience “the most extreme example…of this propensity of the pure in heart to answer laconically was P. G. Wodehouse, who, when I asked him if he had ever been interested in religion, simply answered, No.” Mother Teresa was “almost as laconic” when he suggested to her that the destitution which she was trying to counteract required governmental action backed by vastly greater resources than hers. She replied that the more which government agencies did, the better, but that she and her Sisters offered something else – Christian love. [7]
Then, in terms which evoke the above ‘starfish’ story, he wrote that criticism of Mother Teresa’s work is often based on its insignificant scale, by comparison with the need; that it is suggested even that by seeming to achieve more than she does, or can, she may lull the authorities into unjustified complacency or give them an excuse for inaction, and that her usefulness is retarded by her limited medical resources and the old-fashioned methods allegedly used. His response was that although her achievements are statistically small or even negligible, “Christianity is not a statistical view of life. That there should be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over all the hosts of the just is an anti-statistical proposition. Likewise,…Mother Teresa is fond of saying that welfare is for a purpose – an admirable and necessary one – whereas Christian love is for a person. The one is about numbers, the other about a man who was also God.” That, he added, is the essential difference between providing welfare and serving Christ. [8]
He mentioned also to her that “the commonly held opinion that there are too many people in India” raised the question of whether “it was really worth while trying to salvage a few abandoned children who might otherwise be expected to die of neglect, malnutrition, or some related illness.” He added that subsequently he discovered that that idea was “so remote from her whole way of looking at life that she had difficulty in grasping it. The notion that there could in any circumstances be too many children was, to her, as inconceivable as suggesting that there were too many bluebells in the woods or stars in the sky.” [9]
‘Over-population’ is much lower in the news now than a few decades ago, but the bureaucracy and contraception/abortion industries which were set up as ‘solutions’ to it remain sustained by it, despite occasional publicity of problems caused by insufficient workers to support welfare-payments. Malcolm Muggeridge wondered what “posterity” will make of this neo-Malthusian “panic fear.” He pointed out that it “contain[s] its own corrective. In seeking to avert an imagined calamity, the promoters and practitioners of birth-control automatically abolish themselves, leaving the future to the procreative.” [10]
The extent to which that interestingly-logical theory is being vindicated in practice is a question for investigation by appropriate specialists, but the self-abolitionists are still too numerous to enable the procreative to ‘catch up’ and be in a position to change the policy (if they wished to do so). This is one example (and surely there is no stronger one) of a context which raises, for the minority, the question of whether opposition to the dominant policy is “Worth The Bother.” If assessed according to the likelihood of progress within a foreseeable time, the answer may be ‘No,’ but it may be ‘Yes’ if assessed according to whether opposition to the dominant policy is what God wants. When on Earth, He taught what should be done, but did not link it to prospects of success; so when the time for our individual Judgment arrives, He may consider not whether we succeeded but whether we tried.
[1] “The Universe,” 20th January 2017, p.32.
[2] All figures as reported in “The Catholic Herald,” 9th September 2011, p.3.
[3] Danish Professor; BBC 2 television, 29th August 2011.
[4] St. Thomas Aquinas thought the same (“Summa Theologiae, Volume 28 – Law and Political Theory,” edited and translated by Thomas Gilbey, O.P.; Blackfriars, Cambridge, in conjunction with Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, and McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York; 1966, p.125.).
[5] “Something Beautiful for God,” William Collins Sons, Ltd., London, 1971.
[6] Ibid., p.25.
[7] Ibid., p.25-28.
[8] Ibid., p.28.
[9] Ibid., p.29.
[10] Ibid., p.30.
Leave a Reply