"Why The Catholic Church Must Change: A Necessary Conversation"
Is "Contraception" The New "Usury?"
Melinda Selmys, Patheos
If you happen to be neck-deep in the controversy over whether artificial birth control is ever morally permissible, you may be familiar with the argument that the Church has changed her teaching in the past – specifically in the matter of usury.
Basically, if you go back to older encyclicals, like
Vix Pervenit, you find that usury is condemned in no equivocal terms as a grave sin. Charging interest of any kind has been categorically condemned by multiple Popes and several Church councils. There are well developed natural law arguments which show that charging interest is unnatural, essentially because it causes money, which is innately sterile, to reproduce itself.
Yet, after affirming that Vix Pervenit applied to whole Church in 1836, Rome slowly fell silent on the subject of usury. Eventually regulations were quietly passed allowing religious congregations and the Vatican’s own bank to levy interest charges. The teaching was never actually struck down on the books, but in practice it fell into abeyance.
Those who advocate for a change in the Church’s teaching on birth control see a potential parallel. They see Humanae Vitae as the Vix Pervenit of the 20th Century, and of course have noted with some relief that Amoris Laetitia mostly glosses over the birth control question entirely. They see this silence as similar to the Vatican’s silence on usury, and read into it a kind of sheepish, tacit admission that the former teaching was wrong.
I think there actually is a good parallel, and I do think it’s very likely that in the coming centuries the Vatican will allow the teaching on artificial birth control to slide into obscurity. But I also think that it’s problematic to see that as an admission that the teaching is wrong.
Let’s start with usury. Vix Pervenit was published in 1745 during the midst of a somewhat different Culture War than the one we are fighting now. Traditionally, in the Catholic world, usury was legally prohibited – for Christians. However, this posed a problem: a charitable individual might be willing to lend money without interest to a neighbour who was down and out, but nobody was going to lend vast sums of money to powerful Christian leaders unless they stood to make a substantial profit.
You couldn’t fund major international conflicts with a begging bowl, and taxation could only get you so far. So Catholic leaders invited wealthy Jewish investors into their kingdoms and provided them with various forms of legal protection so that they could take advantage of the loophole in the law that allowed Jews to loan money at interest. After all, it wasn’t a sin to be a victim of usury.
The uneasy relationship between Christian leadership and Jewish moneylenders allowed powerful Catholics to observe the letter of the law while still benefiting from the availability of large loans secured on interest. But Protestantism destabilized that arrangement. Protestant leaders had the ability to regulate money-lending however they liked. They didn’t have to get permission from Rome. After the Reformation, Christian money-lending slowly came to be tolerated more and more in Protestant countries – which enabled, to a large degree, the development of modern banking and capitalist economies.
This created a social situation where it became increasingly difficult to maintain the traditional prohibition. In modern economies money does not keep its value in the way that Aquinas suggested: it’s not a commodity of fixed value which you can exchange on a one-to-one basis with other commodities of fixed value. Instead, the value of money is constantly in flux and a lender who expects to receive nothing except for the face-value of his original loan will pretty much invariably be lending at a loss because of inflation.
Vix Pervenit did suggest a means of circumventing this problem by allowing for various types of “extrinsic titles.” This meant that you could charge a reasonable administrative fee for any loan, and then try to draw up a loan contract so that you would actually neither make money nor lose money on the loan itself. I imagine that accurately calculating extrinsic titles was probably about as easy, and reliable, as charting irregular cycles using sympto-thermal.
Needless to say, the “extrinsic titles” idea didn’t really solve the problem very effectively for the large majority of Catholic businessmen. There were wide-ranging disputes as to what, exactly, constituted a fair extrinsic title. Banks increasingly paid out a small amount of interest on any moneys deposited, so even someone who wasn’t actively lending might be receiving interest payments. The highly successful Protestant economies of the early industrial era allowed for interest to be charged, and it became more and more impractical for Catholics to participate in international commerce if they were trying to practice the teaching.
So the Church dropped it. Or rather, dropped the insistence that charging interest was a mortal sin.
But She has never reversed the teaching.
Indeed, if you look at modern encyclicals the subject of international loan forgiveness comes up again and again. The Church decries the large-scale effects of usury, especially in international markets, while tolerating the day-to-day participation of the faithful in an economy that is kind of inescapably usurious.
Why this toleration, though? Did the Church give in because of avarice? Did the hierarchy realize that they were wrong but don’t want to admit it? Did they cave to pressure from liberal Catholic businessmen – including, let’s face it, wealthy donors to the Church? What happened?
I’d like to suggest that maybe, although more sordid reasons almost certainly played a role, there’s a sound moral and theological reason for this toleration. Specifically: the need not to burden consciences.
It’s similar, in a lot of ways, to the approach that St. Paul took to the eating of meat sacrificed to idols in Corinth. The first Council of Jerusalem was clear that Gentile converts needed to avoid such meat, but the reality was that if you went to a Corinthian market you were going to be hard pressed to find a roast that hadn’t been consecrated to some problematic deity or other. So Paul advises a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Buy your meat. Say grace. Don’t scruple.
This alleviates the practical burdens on Corinthian converts, and prevents the pursuit of food purity from becoming a day-to-day struggle that will alienate people from the Gospel and impede the growth of the Church.
Similarly, the Church’s toleration of usury reflects a realization that the kulturkampf of the 19th Century was largely lost. Contemporary economic reality makes it unduly onerous to avoid interest payments altogether, and really the average person who gets a piddling interest payment on the money they deposited in their bank is getting a lot less than they would get if it were possible to fairly calculate all of the reasonable extrinsic titles that they would be entitled to.
So the focus now is on reforming the unjust international systems that make it functionally impossible for Catholics to avoid participation in usurious practices. It can be assumed that the average parishioner is not in a position to have a) full knowledge that they are actually benefiting from unjust interest payments, or b) real freedom to engage in economic life without risking the sin of usury. Therefore, although this remains grave matter it is, in practice, unlikely to be a mortal sin unless someone is involved in rapacious loan-sharking or other obviously immoral activity.
So how does this relate to the question of birth control? I think arguably there is a similarity. The realities of contemporary life have made it increasingly onerous for Catholics to practice the teaching. Because birth control has been almost universally accepted by secular society, social conditions have become increasingly hostile to large families and most people are not able to access the kind of community support and financial security that is necessary to responsibly care for an ever-growing brood.
Social conditions are also not especially conducive to chastity. Early exposure to pornography and the more or less ubiquitous undercurrent of sexual titillation that runs through advertising and popular culture poses a real obstacle for those who are attempting sexual self-mastery. Other factors, like the increasing isolation of individuals, the loss of functional face-to-face community, the pressures that modern society places on marriages and on parents, the devaluation of human life (especially “non-productive” human lives), and the lack of adequate cultural tools for encouraging affective maturity when it comes to sex, also present considerable difficulties.
Under these circumstances, I won’t be surprised if over the coming decades we see increased toleration for birth control from the Church. The focus is likely to shift, as it has with usury, towards fixing the societal ills that make it so difficult for people to welcome children into their lives.
This will not mean, however, that the teaching has changed, or that the objective evils involved in contraception will magically go away.
Usury is still evil. It still drives economic practices that put poor people in debt, and make it impossible for them to escape. It creates an international situation where entire nations are trapped in debt cycles that fuel starvation and strangle development. It drives massive social inequities and enables avarice on a terrifying scale. And it provides the capital necessary to fund and perpetuate international conflicts.
If contraception becomes tolerated on an individual level, the objective evils associated with it will also remain. The reduction of women to fungible sex-objects will continue apace. Social and economic life will continue to be structured in a way that penalizes motherhood. Families will continue to face pressure to “terminate” children who don’t meet ableist standards for personhood. Mothers will continue to overwhelmingly bear the burdens of “unwanted” pregnancy alone. Childbearing will continue to be seen as an irresponsible choice, a threat to planet. And a utilitarian view of the value of human life will continue to dominate Western culture.
If the Church continues to lose the Culture War against the sexual revolution, the only thing that is likely to change is the assumption that individual Catholics have substantive freedom to overcome these pressures. Without that freedom, contraception, like usury, remains grave matter but becomes increasingly unlikely to constitute mortal sin in individual cases.
The "User Comments" below are enlightening.
See Noevo • 6 hours ago
I skipped the other 1,700 words here and went to the last bunch, and they told me
all I needed to know, and what I expected –
“…contraception... remains grave matter but becomes increasingly unlikely to
constitute mortal sin in individual cases.”
That's our pope Melinda, another Protestant in Catholic clothing.
See Noevo, again trolling as hard as he can. This "I skipped the xxx [insert #] words and ... " blah blah appears from See on other blogs, too.
Wow, I thought I was going to agree with you here, but I could hardly disagree more. Capitalism and birth control have both, in my opinion, brought a great deal of good to the world. I think maybe we fail to recognize this because we haven't deeply experienced what it was like to live in a world completely without them.
Before capitalism, without loans at interest, capital was almost impossible to come by. Either you already had it, or you would forever be without it. Peasants did not own their farms, they rented them, and there was no way to become an owner. These days if you want to own your home, you go down to the bank and get a loan, but then it was impossible. Meanwhile those who did own land -- nobles, for instance, or kings -- had no way to become any wealthier other than by getting more land, by means of warfare. It's one of the reasons Europe was in a near-constant state of war. And development was slow, in part because a genius who had a great idea for a better process or a better tool could rarely raise the capital to produce it. The ability to obtain a loan is what allows people without capital to get enough that their labor can be used to their own benefit instead of a lord or master's. Today, capitalism lifts millions out of poverty. It has its flaws, but those flaws are mostly unrelated to usury as such -- more to the unwillingness of governments to limit the power of the wealthy.
Likewise, birth control has raised women's lifespan and allowed for our full participation in a variety of activities rather than childbearing only. You think it's hard for you *now* to live without birth control? It was even harder for a woman of, say, 1200. She didn't have the legal or religious right to decline sex if her husband wanted it, so NFP and abstinence were both out. And she had no medical care, so if she had a complication like a hemorrhage, she would die. If she wasn't married, she had no welfare check to apply for, no food stamps. Often both infant and mother would starve.
Things are better now, not worse. And they are better in part because of contraception and usury -- also known as birth control and capitalism. I think these aren't things the church needs to grudgingly accept as an unavoidable evil. They should be embraced as a way we can make life better for ourselves, which we didn't have the understanding to do a good job at before. When usury and contraception were forbidden, they weren't fully understood. The multiplicative power of wealth wasn't something the Church Fathers knew about. And contraception was banned at a time when it was believed that each sperm cell contained an entire miniature man, so that contraception was the same as abortion. We know better now. I'm not going to blame the church of the past for not knowing better, but holding us to a past understanding would be wrong.
Thanks for the historical background on usury.
I'm unclear on why usury was a sin, particularly because when the prohibition was enforced it was necessarily anti-Semitic. We got Jews to do the dirty work (providing needed funding) and in the process we stuffed them further and further into Hell.
I'm also unclear on why contraception is wrong. The teaching is "incomprehensible" (to quote more than one bishop) and in fact a laughingstock. It can't survive 5 minutes of Q & A.
In both cases, though, Melissa is correct. The teaching is overwhelmed by the realities of life and will fade. With usury, it's long been a dead letter. With contraception, not even most priests believe it anymore and it's hardly ever preached.
Usury was considered a sin because, in the pre-modern economy where loans were overwhelmingly made to finance consumption rather than to finance capital investments, it was genuinely seen by everyone as inherently exploitative. Even Judaism strictly condemned lending money at interest to a fellow Jew—it’s precisely from the Old Testament that Christianity derived its own prohibition.
OK, but the encyclical Melissa cites that continued the prohibition on usury was in 1745, several hundred years after people started investing.
When something has been considered a sin for a couple of millennia, attitudes toward it aren’t going to change overnight (where ‘overnight’ here means a couple of centuries).
Jesus seemed to be OK with charging interest.
“Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should
have received what was my own with interest.”
[Matthew 25:27]
I wasn’t aware you were a believer in sola scriptura!
Another well written article with a great set up, but another disappointment in logic lately. I really like the economic and theological turn you have been making, because you have a great mind and the sexual issues have been argued to their full extent.
In this article, you are correct that contraception might be similarly tolerated. The real two questions you don't quite answer are, (1) should usury and/or contraception be tolerated, and (2) are people reasonably capable of avoiding usury and/or contraception (free choice) assuming they are taught Church teaching (knowledge). The problem here is that usury cannot be avoided if one participates in the economy in its direct form, but one ABSOLUTELY can avoid contraception if one participates in sex in its direct form. To compare these two in this light is not apples and oranges, but it is GMO apples and caramel apples. Contraception is like the caramel, a popular add on that is nevertheless a choice. GMO apples are the available choice for those that cannot afford organic (my example is incomplete, as organic apples are fairly available in North America, but sound nevertheless). Contraception is NOT an automatic attribute of sex and it is literally a free choice EVERY time by the partner using it. We have more autonomy than that.
It's actually quite possible to avoid usury. Close your bank account and put the money under your bed. Cash out your retirement account and stick it in your pillowcase. Cut up your credit card. Get a job that isn't in finance. True, your money will slowly be devalued due to inflation, but you won't die. An NFP-using couple is poor too.
In agreement with Sheila C., @Michael Reardon:
Yes, one can obey the Church. Live off the grid if necessary, if you think that is the duty imposed by/on your conscience.
While possibly true, I don't think what you suggest addresses Ms. Selmys' concerns, and I believe it is the weaker argument for our shared position. But you may be right as I said.
Melinda elides the real reasons why birth control is such a staple of modern society. Low birth control rates are what happen when a society becomes prosperous and urban. Subsistence level farming demands warm bodies. Children therefore are an economic gain. Every baby means hands which in a few years can be trusted to carry buckets, later churn butter, later push a plow. In urban areas in contrast, children are economic burdens. They are mouths which require feeding and education before they can start providing for themselves, let alone bring benefit back to the parents who raised them. So while Homo Economicus was always a myth, people do slowly and jerkily respond to incentives. All the way back in the 1800s the birth rate in the US was beginning its slow and almost uninhibited decline.
So unless Melinda proposes we all go to the farming practices of our 18th century ancestors, birth control is here to stay.
Also, once again, for fucks sake: What objective evils, and how is that ANY use of birth control promotes them? Playboy magazine was founded before hormonal birth control even existed. There are European cultures with both control and generous parental leave policies. Fetuses with Down syndrome might have not been aborted in the 1800s and early 1900s, sure. They were just stuck in homes for the "feeble minded" and left to rot alongside the developmentally disabled, autistic and others. My psych classes showed photos of the sort of living conditions those people were subject to. I even briefly worked with one of them, an old man with roughly the mental capacity of a three-year old. He still had behaviors which were necessary for his survival in those far too crowded conditions.
So much for the wonderful, disability respecting paradise pre-birth control.
As for her next example, Melinda should know better. She herself has written of how her life choices and family would not be possible with the support of the Canadian government. Birth control is prevalent in Canada as it is in the US, and it supports her family. Clearly society can have both birth control and social support for large families then.
Are you suggesting that pregnancies are never actually unwanted? Cause those air quotes are baffling to me otherwise.
Our planet does indeed have a carrying capacity Melinda. As members of Western countries, suffice to say both me and Melinda live lifestyles which probably couldn't be done with 7.6 billion people. Having less children isn't going to solve that problem, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
As for that last crack about utilitarian value, allow me to say this: The word "barren" doesn't really get used much in our modern language much anymore. At least when it comes to referring to people. Specifically women. Women who couldn't bear children for whatever reason were "barren." If their reproductive organs weren't up to snuff, they were as useless as an unfarmable field. So perhaps objectifying women and "useless people" dated a wee bit before the advent of "objectively evil" birth control.
Nathaniel,
Do you consider yourself a homosexual or a transsexual?
A primary reason for the prevalence of large families in pre-industrial societies wasn’t even the need for labor—it was the need to ensure that at least some children would survive to adulthood in the face of horrifically high infant and childhood mortality rates. At least in England, the rapid decline in birthrates in the late 19th c. almost perfectly tracks the rapid decline in childhood mortality due to improved hygiene and vaccination. (This explains why the decline started among the upper classes, who were the first to have access to these improvements.) Interestingly, improved access to birth control doesn’t seem to have been a big factor in the Western demographic transition—the technological breakthroughs all came later. People were just newly incentivized to *use* the methods that were already around. While the transition came earlier in 19th-c. France, we know that the method used to effectively reduce fertility was simple coitus interruptus (which the Church kept denouncing in vain).
That's interesting info about France. Thanks for enlightening me.
Another factor which would be hard to study, but likely played a role: Oral sex was hardly invented by dirty hippies at Woodstock. Human beings have known how to have fun without making babies for awhile.
It’s definitely the case that heterosexual anal intercourse seems to have been widely practiced as a contraceptive method in classical Greece. In more recent history, however, it actually seems to be the case that non-vaginal intercourse by spouses wasn’t at all common before the last few decades. There seems to have been a very deep-rooted antipathy to it—even prostitutes in the 1900s charged *more* for oral sex than for vaginal sex, despite the lack of reliable contraception.
Interesting. While I won't gainsay the info you provided, I'm reminded of an article lost to the mists of memory which detailed how common it was for Medieval era priests to solicit sex from women during confession, namely very common. It got into some detail about how these naughty priests got what they wanted, and apparently oral sex was a common feature. So its probably safe to say attitudes towards oral sex specifically in the West have wandered a bit over centuries and different countries.
Huh! That article kind of sounds like that Decameron story “Putting the Devil Back in Hell”, although I recall ‘hell’ being the standard orifice there. I’m not surprised to hear that men have been using the “but it’s not *technically* sex” excuse since forever! (That thing about early-20th-c. prices for sex came from a vaguely-remembered source too, so please don’t take it as gospel truth!) It does seem in general that many more acts were tolerated in intercourse outside of marriage—which would of course be illicit anyway—than in intercourse between husband and wife. Augustine actually preached a sermon saying that it would be better for husbands to have anal sex with prostitutes rather than with their own wives.
Wow. Just another confirmation of why no one should listen to a word Augustine wrote on sex. What a perv.
I can’t figure out how to delete comments on disqus....
If you go to the very upper right of your own comment, a box should appear. One of the choices should be Delete.
Speaking only of the U.S., it seems like the prohibition might be de-emphasized for the simple reason that parishioners aren't paying attention to it anyway. It's not a winning tactic to give commands that one's subordinates won't obey.
To an outsider, forbidding birth control has the obvious motive of making more Catholics, whatever the stated theological rationale might be. For any Catholics who care to reply, does this seem like it is in fact the reason, or part of it? Is it overt, admitted, denied?
Also, to an outsider, it seems that it is not contraception but the lack of it that reduces women to sex objects. How can a heterosexual woman who isn't willing to forgo sex have any role but to care for "an ever-growing brood"? She'd soon have no time to do anything else.
The fact that (unlike such aggressively pro-natal religious groups as ultra-orthodox Jews, Quiverfull Protestants, and Mormons) Catholicism has always glorified celibacy (including, and perhaps especially, female celibacy) as superior to marriage would seem to argue against this. Fundamentally, there are two reasons for condemning non-reproductive sex: a positive view of reproduction, or a negative view of sex. Historic (non-Protestant) Christianity definitely belongs, along with Buddhism (which also theoretically tolerates sex only for reproduction, as I believe the Dalai Lama controversially made clear recently) in the ascetic, anti-married-sexuality tradition.
That is a good point. Obviously it's at least not as simple as I suggested. It's an interesting dichotomy: sex for procreation (or at least "open to the possibility") or none at all. Not even masturbation... which always struck me as kinda nuts. Great way to make sure almost everyone has something to feel guilty about.
I think the real problem with Church teaching on the subject is what Melinda has called sexual legalism. It seems like in virtually all other areas Christian teaching sets up incredibly lofty moral ideals, but leaves individual believers with quite a lot (sometimes, it seems, too much!) freedom to determine how to try to fulfill them in their own lives. Only in sexuality is the ascetic ideal so minutely elaborated and so relentlessly enforced—as though you were told it was a mortal sin to spend a single dollar on your own amusements that you could have given to the poor. I prefer the Eastern Orthodox practice of oikonomia, which seems to recognize that “man was not made for the law, but the law for man” to some degree.
True.
This is surely related to the fact that Eastern Orthodox priests are allowed to have normal sex lives, whereas such people have never been allowed to play a part in promulgating Catholic doctrine.
I’m not so sure you can blame clerical celibacy for this. In the East, the ones who are actually making all the doctrinal decisions are celibate bishops, and celibate monks are a lot more prestigious and influential than married parish priests.
That last question is one which will never be answered by Melinda, sadly.
Yes! Zippy explains the true meaning of usury, which is NOT "interest on loans".
Part of the problem with the teachings against various modern sexual sins is that they assume people to be bad actors. There's the idea that if you are having sex while using birth-control, you MUST be using your partner basically as a sex toy when that is often not the case. Then people who are not using their partner as a sex-toy, despite the birth-control, look at that reasoning and go, yeah, no, that's ridiculous and feel comfortable ignoring it because they are right, it is ridiculous.
That is a bit of a false assumption. First, you should understand WHY contraception is considered a grave sin. While the use of it does tend to lead to viewing someone of the opposite sex primarily as a means of sexual gratification, it does not reach the core of the reason, which is God's purpose for our sexual gifts and the conflict with that purpose.
When you consider NFP that really doesn't hold up either.
Because the only one of God's purposes for sexual gifts that birth control actively avoids is the getting of children part. The point of NFP is to do that same thing.
NFP involves planning sexual activity to avoid pregnancy. Contraception does not involve altering our behaviors at all. Contraception seeks to remove the ability of procreation from sexual activity. Major difference.
It's about your actions lining up with your priorities. If it is more important to not have a child, your actions should reflect that. Contraception is the desire for sexual activity being the higher priority.
Well, your behaviors may not have to alter to prevent pregnancy using contraception, but mine do, NFP does seek to remove the ability to procreate from sexual activity, that's kind of the point of using it. And if the primary argument against contraception is that it's too easy and reliable, that isn't a moral argument. At that point we are, as Winston Churchill once famously said, "Dickering over price."
So NFP doesn't show that a couple feels its important to not have a child?
No, it just that your priorities match your actions. If your priorities is to put off having children, then your actions need to match that.
Okay, so wear a condom. Then priorities will match actions.
Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/catholicauthenticity/2018/03/is-contraception-the-new-usury/#FX7wjYOZeCfKte1v.99
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