A Convert's Confession

By LANCE MORROW

I was converted to the Roman Catholic Church in my adolescence. But I never had a convert's zeal. I never acquired that instinctive deep structure, that internal universe, that is installed in the cradle Catholic from the start -- the spiritual DNA. Half in the church, half out, a kid who read too much Graham Greene and Thomas Merton, I embraced, it may be, the surface things: the brocaded rituals, the Latin Mass of those days, the rich atmospheres.

Nor did I acquire the true deep structure of the church's doctrinal rationales, its ideals and distastes. The strictures involving family and divorce were fine print that I was too young to care about. The view of sex, which I cared about a lot, seemed punitive and refracted: at the margin of every sunny adolescent day there hung a black Jesuit thundercloud of reproval.

Growing older, I have realized that the fine print is more important, more powerful than ritual or atmospherics. Still half in, half out of the church, wistfully faithful, I find myself puzzling over those contractual details. The church's ideals of family, for example, strike me as, by turns, heroic, profound or quaint.

Or as profoundly self-destructive. Despite my respect for the church and my contempt for some of the overstimulated moral idiocy of the secular world, I think that in two areas -- 1) contraception and 2) ordination and the role of women -- the church has gone needlessly, dangerously astray. John Paul II, who should be one of the greatest Popes, has settled for a curiously stolid "Here I stand." Strangely unevolved, he seems thus diminished in what should be a triumphant time.

Any institution in business for 2,000 years is bound to be condescending ( about passing fads. Rome's attitude alternates between suggesting that concern about these issues (birth control, women's rights) is an ephemeral ideological trend and implying that such concern represents the vanguard of forces infinitely darker. Both reactions are wrong, I think.

American Catholics -- and millions elsewhere -- understand that the church is simply out to lunch on the subject of birth control. If abortion is clearly wrong -- and it is -- the way to begin preventing abortions is to encourage contraception. Contraception sinlessly heads off the unwelcome pregnancy that might occasion the sin of abortion, that is, the destruction of rudimentary life. Only abstracted celibates and moral neurotics (I think) insist that a pill or condom contravenes the divine design for sex. On the contrary, contraception is an act of moral responsibility perfectly consistent with marital virtue and family cohesion.

One can embrace the principle of contraceptive discretion without entering into the Cairo debate -- Thomas Malthus vs. the More the Merrier School. Many conservatives, and such resolutely unalarmed observers of the world environment as the economist Julian Simon, see more people as the planet's greatest asset, economic and otherwise, and argue that in a free-market economy, sperm, ovaries and Adam Smith conspire to produce the best of all possible worlds. Let a billion flowers bloom. I consider this also to be a form of argumentative neurosis.

I have puzzled for years over the church's dark, astigmatic view of sex. But sex is merely the narrow focus. The broader perspective -- and failure -- involves the church's view of women and their role in the world. It seems clear to me that a full, welcoming embrace of women as ordained equals in the priesthood, the hierarchy and the work of the church would refresh the institution, infuse it with new life, energy, hope and purpose.

Strange that the church's leaders, with their intellectual tools and 20 centuries' experience, would fall into what might be called the Fallacy of Incidentals. Women are not ordained priests because Christ, in human form, was a man and chose male apostles. But surely maleness was incidental to the essence of Christ's teaching and importance. Those who build cathedrals of principle, unassailable traditions, around an unimportant or incidental distinction -- one that is rooted in custom of distant time and, interminably preserved, becomes essentially inhuman -- are doomed.

- The continuing damage done to the Catholic Church by the exclusion of women from the priesthood is hard to estimate. What is lost by keeping women out of the full priestly life amounts to a tragedy for the church. In that policy, a world of opportunity has been closed; life that might have flourished, women's souls sharing in the heart of the church, has been shut down.

I hate the doctrinaire reductionism that coarsens all relationships between men and women into trench warfare. As the late Allan Bloom wrote, "The worst distortion of all is to turn love, a relation that is founded in natural sweetness, mutual caring, and the contemplation of eternity in shared children, into a power struggle." Some similar distortion of religion's natural sweetness and profound reciprocity has been too long accepted as part of the Catholic Church's design (male authority, female submission). I suspect that John Paul II feels that if the design is altered now, the whole structure will collapse.

It is not so. The danger lies in the continuing distortion, the airless stasis of a bad tradition. All of this is one reason that I do not go to Mass much anymore.