Archbishop's insensitivity arises from ignorance

Speaking on the 30th anniversary of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae last Tuesday, the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, warned priests defending the Catholic Church's line on contraception that they would face "ridicule, dissent and betrayal". The prospect of verbal martyrdom is appealing to some believers. But the truth is that Dr Connell's own speech evokes no such responses. It is a cause, not for ridicule or anger, but merely for an immense sadness. To watch the leadership of a once mighty moral authority indulge in the kind of abusiveness to which the head of the country's largest Catholic diocese was reduced on Tuesday night is to feel nothing but pity.

The real problem for the church, and for Irish society as a whole, is not that Dr Connell's speech has provoked dissent or ridicule. If the archbishop were a politician, a journalist or even a county councillor, the kind of insult he indulged in would have created a much graver furore. But relatively few think it worthwhile getting worked up over Dr Connell's slurs on a very substantial proportion - probably a majority - of Irish families. That in itself is a damning mark of the damage that Humanae Vitae has done to the moral authority of the Catholic Church.

Most Irish Catholic married couples of childbearing age use what the church calls "artificial" contraception (as opposed to the "natural" methods of charts, thermometers and calculators). They do so because they imagine that morality requires the ability to make moral decisions and that you can't make a decision if you don't have a choice. They regard the bearing and raising of children as the most responsible and moral thing they will ever do, and they want to approach it as a conscious commitment. They see that decision as an expression of love, of a serious and abiding promise to each other and to the child. For this, the archbishop regards them, not with honest disagreement or understanding, but with scarifying contempt. They are, he told them on Tuesday night, bad spouses and bad parents. More than that, however, he insults their children. Those kids, he implies, are abnormal, emotionally stunted, somehow lacking in essential aspects of human development.

According to Dr Connell, those of us who have planned our children have created, not normal human beings, but "technological produce", not people but products. As husbands, we do not love our wives but dishonour them by seeking "control and domination". As wives we "manipulate and exploit" our sexuality. We do not welcome the births of our children as the most profound, shattering, mysterious and humbling events of our lives but see ourselves as satisfied shoppers "creating a sense of consumer ownership". And we have doomed our children in turn to be unhappy and resentful, with no "properly personal relationship" to their parents.

What would happen if a public figure made similarly sweeping and damning charges against a whole category of people? If, say, a Protestant cleric announced that Catholics are bad and selfish parents and that Catholic children live in distorted families. Or if a politician characterised the family life of Travellers in the same way? There would be two immediate responses. One, the mildest, would be a demand for evidence. How do you know this? What studies can you cite to support the contention that couples who use contraception make worse parents than those who don't? That their relationships are less respectful or loving? That the children of such marriages are more unhappy and less secure?

The second, more extreme response, would be a demand, at the least for an apology or at the most for a prosecution. People would say that the right to free speech does not include the right to insult and degrade a whole category of people in pursuit of an ideological objective. Associates of the speaker would rush to dissociate themselves from his views.

Each of these reactions would be to some degree hostile but each would at least take the speaker seriously. His views would be regarded as obnoxious but significant, dangerous precisely because they carried some weight. The miserable reality for the church is very few people take Dr Connell's remarks seriously enough to be truly offended by them. They simply don't carry enough authority to be as hurtful as they would normally be. Their bleak, joyless distortions of the everyday lives of ordinary people seem to be addressed, not to the outside world, but to some dark interior nightmare. The normal responses to abusive stereotypes just don't arise.

It is pointless to ask Dr Connell for the evidence on which he bases his wholesale contempt for the bulk of contemporary Irish families. It is not just that he patently does not have any but that the whole concept of evidence is utterly alien to his mind-set. Any ordinary family could tell him that planning a child doesn't make the arrival, the nature, or the growth of that child any less of a journey into the unknown. Any parent could tell him that the enormous uncertainties - will we get pregnant? will the child come to term? will it be a boy a boy or a girl? will it be okay? who will it look like? will it be placid or cranky? how will it fare in the world? - make his analogy with a consumer product a grotesque and inhuman distortion. Any parent could tell him that children love the notion that they were planned, chosen and wanted.

But experience is, in Dr Connell's world, entirely beside the point. Humanae Vitae is a cure in search of a disease, a solution in search of a problem. Since Pope Paul, infallibly, provided the answer, there must be a tormenting question. Ordinary decent families must be morally sick because otherwise the medicine would be redundant. It is better, in this terrible mentality, for the majority of Irish Catholics to be selfish liars in the most intimate aspects of their lives than it is for one Catholic, a Pope, to be wrong.

Nor is there real room for outrage. For no one believes that Dr Connell set out to hurt or insult Irish families. His remarks are seen, not as a real statement about real people, but as a sad rhetorical indulgence. He is playing with symbols. He is no more guilty of verbal assault than a child playing with soldiers is guilty of making war. He can be given, not so much a fool's pardon as the general absolution granted to those whose gross insensitivity arises from utter ignorance.

But it is a sad indulgence and one that costs us dearly. We are at a key moment in Irish history when an old set of values has been destroyed and a new one has not yet been developed. All the main institutions - religious, political and administrative - are deeply damaged by scandal and trust has been replaced by corrosive cynicism. Church leaders have a great deal to say about morality, justice and compassion - things that society urgently needs to hear. But how can such messages possibly be heard over the whine of pious insult and the drone of desiccated derision?