Natural Law
By John M Swomley
[Dr. John Swomley is professor emeritus of social ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City. He is a frequent contributor to Christian Ethics Today.]
The Roman Catholic popes have for many decades relied on "natural law" as the basis for their decisions on sexual issues as well as on some other matters. Sometimes popes speak of this as moral law. Pope John Paul II in speaking to some American bishops in their ad Zimina visit [to the highest authority] June 27, 1998, said, "There exists a moral law ascribed in our humanity, which we can come to know by reflecting on our own nature and our actions, and which lays certain obligations upon us because we recognize them as universally true and binding."
In that pope`s encyclical, "Evangelium Vitae", requiring the obedience of American Catholics in opposing abortion and euthanasia, he wrote, "No circumstances, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the church."
Earlier popes have also referred to natural law. Pius XI in his 1930 Encyclical on Christian marriage, "Casti Connubi", wrote:
"Any use whatsoever of matrimony, exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life, is an offense against the law of God and of nature… Those who prevent birth violate the law of nature… Therefore, the sin of those married couples who by medicine either hinder-conception or prevent birth, is very grave; for this should be considered an unholy conspiracy of homicide."
This idea of natural law raises certain historical and ethical questions. It is not in origin Jewish, or rooted in Jesus` life and teaching. It came into the Apostle Paul`s writing as a result of Stoic philosophy. Paul lived in the Greek world and his native language was Greek.
A New Testament scholar, Lindsey Pherigo, wrote, "Language carries with it certain thought forms and these help us to understand the new ideas of Paul . . . In every culture the people have inherited from their culture certain basic life-questions. It is not known how these arise. No religion can succeed in a particular culture unless it provides an answer to that culture`s life-questions." (Lindsey Pherigo, "Six Lectures on Paul". Educational Opportunities, Lakeland, FL, pp 14,15)
After discussing such questions, Pherigo notes "the significant Stoic influence on Paul in the field of ethics. The Stoics believed that what was in accord with nature was good, and what was not in accord with nature was not. Everything natural was good." Although Paul continued to make basic ethical decisions from his Jewish heritage; he demonstrated the Stoic influence in some of his letters.
In Romans 1:26-27 he comments on the homosexual activity of the gentiles or Greeks: ….. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another." This was not Paul`s only use of the Stoic philosophy of the natural as good and the unnatural as evil.
In First Corinthians 11:14-15 he wrote, "Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair it is her glory?
Pherigo uses another illustration of Paul`s Stoic ethics: "The Stoics held that all the virtues are from God. If a human has a virtue it is really God`s virtue in the human. Paul indicates that we cannot have any righteousness of our own striving and choosing." However, traditional Jewish thought presupposes human free will and the need for repentance to prepare for the coming Kingdom. (See Romans 5:1-3; 10:1-4; 1 Cot. 12:4-11; Phil. 4:8h-9).
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) is largely responsible for the current Catholic interpretation of natural law. He believed that there is an eternal law of God which is imprinted on humans who as rational creatures participate in the eternal through what is called "natural law."
There are many critics of this concept of natural law, or at least of its current interpretation by recent popes. One criticism is that the popes contradict their own version of natural law as applied to sex. Presumably sexual intercourse is natural if other human beings are to be born and continue the human species. Yet these same popes decree celibacy for priests and nuns and therefore make it morally wrong for them to practice natural law.
One priest who has left the Roman church, wrote that "There is no such thing" as natural law. "If there is any law in nature, humans have been interfering with it since they reached consciousness and awareness. . . . The sexual organs have diverse purposes, only one of them reproductive. The sexual organs are a seat of immense pleasure and also an instrument for showing affection and love. To say that they have only the function of reproduction seems to contradict nature." (John Sheehy, The ChurchThfistory of Injustice and Why This Priest Left, University Press of America, Lanham, MD. 1999, pp. 60-6 1)
He continues, "Declaring it wrong to interfere with the normal flow of semen trying to reach the ovum would make it wrong to fly, dam rivers, send water to homes . . . take medicine, wear glasses, wear clothes," etc. Is a condom that much different from a dam?" Jacques Maritain, a Catholic exponent of natural law, says it is derived "from the simple act that man is man, nothing else being taken into account." It is an unwritten law "Man`s knowledge of it has increased little by little as man`s moral conscience has developed." (Jacques Maritain, The Rtghts of Man and Natural Law, The University Press, Glasgow, l958,pp 36, 39)
Paul Ramsey, a Protestant ethicist, wrote, "No one can actually draw up a statement of the precepts of natural law for the workaday world. Social policy has to be formulated in any case in realistic adjustment to the concrete factors in any given situation; it cannot be derived through step by step deduction from a revealed or intuitively grasped absolute natural law `Relative natural law` may therefore be defined as intuition in search of a social policy." (Paul Ramsey, Basic Christian Ethics, New York, Scribners, 1950, p. 342)
John C. Bennett in his book Christians and the State acknowledges the value of the ancient Greek concept of the "naturals": "It is the conviction that there is a real unity in the human race and that all men have a right to equal consideration as human beings regardless of their race or class or nation. It was one of the great contributions of Stoicism to bring this insight to the ancient world..~." He indicates that "there is a much clearer understanding than formerly of the actual biological and psychological similarity of men with individual differences having more importance than racial or ethnic differences . . . . There is another fact about humanity. … all men are bound together by a common fate in this world." (John C. Bennett, Christians and the State, New York, Scribners, 1958, pp. 17, 18)
Bennett, however, is critical of Catholic natural law. "Protestants," he wrote, "have been troubled by the conception of the natural law for two reasons…. The first is that they do not have the rationalistic confidence that the natural law is universally known without such knowledge being seriously distorted by human sin and finiteness."
The second reason "is the tendency to rigidity in the way" natural law is applied. It does not make room for the endless variation in human situations, for the dynamic nature of history. In the context of Roman Catholic thought this rigidity is seen in its most extreme form in Catholic teaching about birth control and about medical ethics. But there is also a tendency to absolutize the type of medieval society in which the church was most at home." (Bennett, p. 98) In actuality, the various popes have used the natural law claim to foster control over women, parents, and government. For example, the Vatican claims that natural law gives parents the right to control their children`s education but also assumes parental inability to act effectively. The result is that the church takes over the rights of parents. According to canon law, the church and specifically the bishop of the diocese has "the right.., to decide under what circumstance and with what safe guards to prevent loss of faith it may be tolerated that Catholic children go to such [secular] schools." For many years there weren`t lay school boards in the various dioceses, and after the Vatican Council when some church school boards were elected, those elected had to be approved by the bishop.
Another example of the use or non-use of natural law is the failure of the popes to recognize full human rights for women. A former priest wrote in 1999: "Not only do we have the denial of full human rights to women, itself a heinous crime, but presently all around the globe, women are persecuted, raped, murdered by their spouses and even mutilated. In Africa and elsewhere, females are regularly mutilated by the practice of clitordectomy. The unspeakable tearing, cutting and destroying parts of the female genitalia must stop. Not only does it ruin women`s bodies . . . it ruins their souls and extinguishes the inner spirit and all self esteem. The church has not taken a stand on this. The Pope says nothing." (Sheehy, p. 112)
The former priest also said, "The Catholic Church teaches the inferiority of women by forbidding them to be priests" (Ibid., 113)
The failure of Pope John Paul II to recognize the equality of women as an aspect of natural law is his commitment to patriarchy. Men are the leaders at every level, from priest to pope. John Paul II is quite specific about the role of women in that "a woman is by nature fitted for home work.. not suited for certain occupations." He wrote that paid work outside the home is the abandonment of the role of motherhood, which includes "taldng care of her children: and "is wrong from the point of view of the good of society and of the family when it contradicts or hinders these primary goals of the mission of a mother." ("Laborem Exercens," September 14,1981 at page 91)
The rigidity of Catholic natural law was illustrated by a "Catholic question-and-answer column. Question: `My wife is sterile but wants her "marital rights." I have a contagious venereal disease. May I wear a prophylactic sheath?` Answer: `No. Even -though she could not conceive and you would infect her, contraceptive intercourse is an intrinsically evil act."` None of the facts made any difference. (Quoted in Lawrence Lader, Politics, Power, and the Church, New York, Macmillan, 1987, p, 77)
The conclusions to be drawn from the papal use of natural law are first, that it is the exclusive province of the church or pope to interpret natural law; and second, that the papal interpretation of natural law supercedes individual freedom, conscience and democracy. When John Paul II met with a group of U.S. bishops at the Vatican June 27, 1998, he told them: "The notion of freedom and personal autonomy is superficially attractive; endorsed = by individuals, the media, legislature and the courts… .Yet it ultimately destroys the personal good of individuals and the
common good of society." He then said, "The nobility of men I and women lies not simply in the capacity to choose but in the = capacity to choose wisely," which means "witnessing to the moral -laws inscribed in the human heart."
The pope then said, "As bishops you have to teach that freedom of conscience is never freedom from the truth but always and = only freedom in the truth. . . . the Church is preserved in the truth -and it is her duty to give utterance to and authoritatively to teach that truth. . . and to declare and confirm by her authority those principles of the moral order which have their origin in human nature itself." ("Dignitatus Humanae," 14)
The fallacy in such reasoning is that if natural law is inscribed in every human heart it should not need interpretation by one man who can override the decisions of millions of people who & not recognize his authority.
