Such a Great Witness

Many years ago, I attended the wedding of one of my evangelical college friends. I had tremendous admiration for this young man. He exuded a wild, raw masculinity tethered to a passionate, infectious devotion to Christ. The wedding (to his college sweetheart) exemplified that ethos. While the ceremony was a pious affair filled with prayer and Bible readings, during the reception the groom was gifted a shotgun his groomsmen had pitched in to buy him, which his bride suggestively and jokingly draped her leg around. We all laughed and applauded.

At one point, I observed my friend’s father, then at the helm of an internationally known evangelical organization, approach the groom. The patriarch warmly wrapped his arms around his son in congratulations and then thrust something into his hand. It was a condom. 

Even then something about that scene was deeply disturbing. At the time, I would not have said that contraception was a moral evil nor its use a mortal sin. If someone had asked me if using a condom or going on the pill endangered his or her soul, I would have scratched my head in confusion. Nevertheless, that exchange, especially given the circumstances, seemed decidedly unmanly. It was as if all the excitement, all the thumotic energy of the evening, had immediately evaporated. At least for me. I’m not sure another soul in that reception hall even noticed.

Paul V. Mankowski, S.J., describes the nature of this phenomenon in his excellent Jesuit at Large, a collection of essays and reviews by the now deceased notoriously pugilistic Jesuit writer. Speaking of the pill, Fr. Mankowski writes: “To contracept by this method involved not a surrender to the urgent passions of an instant but an action—better a series of actions—clearly foreseen and assented to in cold blood, passionlessly, with deliberation and resolve.” The same can be said of condoms, or any form of contraception for that matter. All serve to deflate the sexual act, and sexual passion more broadly, of its primitive, unpredictable intensity.

It’s a strange thing. Catholicism, at least per popular perception, is supposed to be the joy-killer. Catholics are opposed to sex, right? Aren’t we the ones who demand our priests and religious abstain from sex? Aren’t we the ones who censure pornography and wag our fingers at film and television programs with nudity and sex scenes? We tell our kids to wait until marriage, much to the chagrin of “you-Catholic-girls-start-much-too-late” Billy Joel, that untalented old scoundrel. 

And yet, it’s our godless world that empties sex of its inherent thrill and danger. The couple who has sex when a child is a possibility is taking a risk that their union might generate new life that will bind them to it, impressing upon them a new responsibility that will bless (or, sadly sometimes) haunt them for the rest of their earthly existence. Perhaps this partly explains why our childless, bloodless, post-religious America seeks to fabricate danger in sex via increasingly more bizarre, kinky, and physically harmful forms of copulation. I don’t need to offer examples. The couple who has sex when a child is a possibility is taking a risk that their union might generate new life that will bind them to it, impressing upon them a new responsibility that will bless them for the rest of their earthly existence.Tweet This

Even for the religious, be they evangelical, Catholic, or anything else, it’s easy to excuse or justify contraception. Why not get settled in marriage, learning to live with your spouse, before welcoming a new life into the world? Why not space out your kids, not only so that they receive sufficient attention but also for the psychological welfare of the parents? And it’s so expensive to raise children these days, who can have more than a few without shortchanging them? “It takes little imagination to devise scenarios in which contraception will result in more pre-moral [utilitarian] bounty than other options,” observes Fr. Mankowski.

“You’re such a great witness!” I can’t tell you how many times I hear this after Mass at our local Spanish-speaking parish in Panama. Once, during a homily, one of the priests started talking about my family, praising us gringos for faithfully coming to Church every Sunday. It was perhaps one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life—hundreds of fellow parishioners suddenly staring at me, my wife, and kids—amplified by the fact that my Spanish is not good enough to understand everything that Father was saying about us. 

It’s not like my family is particularly unique in a Panamanian context for doing the bare minimum of weekly Sunday Mass attendance. The country is about eighty percent Catholic, and Mass attendance hovers around fifty percent, which is a lot better than Mass attendance among American Catholics! But what sets my family apart is simply how large it is: six kids, so far. Though Panama currently has an estimated fertility rate that is slightly above replacement level—and thus better than the United States—younger Panamanians, who have enjoyed a higher standard of living than previous generations, are having fewer children than their parents. That demographic shift is palpable even at our Catholic parish.

Despite a million pundits and researchers commenting on the demographic crisis confronting not only the West but even middle-income countries such as Panama, I still find all of this somewhat incredible. Since when is having more than one or two kids a demonstration of heroic Christian virtue? Since when is having a pack of young children somehow proof of devout Christian faith? Not long ago, large families were the norm, and they were definitely not necessarily representative of holiness. Often it was a matter of financial necessity.

Thus does my family find itself in the bizarre, awkward situation of being a model of Catholic faith simply because in almost thirteen years of marriage my wife and I have had six children. Do the math and you’ll note this is hardly the “voluntary asceticism” Fr. Mankowski praises as indicative of pious Catholic marriage. My third child was conceived the day I returned home from one of my tours in Afghanistan, when my wife and I were well aware of the attendant “risk.” 

Now I experience the sleepless, exhausting consequences of my romantic passions. I’ve been wiping children’s dirty bottoms and changing diapers for more than a decade. I lose my temper and then apologize on a weekly basis. I’m not trying to witness here; I’m just trying to survive. The thought that our fecundity would somehow point people to Christ is risible. 

Frankly, I don’t know if it’s really true. The remark, how often uttered, could simply be the kind of thing older women say out of a mournful regret that their own children haven’t given them grandchildren. But if there is any sense in which simply being open to life with your spouse serves to preach the Gospel, that should give heart to all us contraception- and abortion-abhorring Catholics. I admit, it’s an odd way to preach the Gospel. But perhaps it reflects that God has a sense of humor.