Did you know that the Catholic Church says it’s OK for a doctor to use a knife?

Seriously, it’s okay. A doctor, as long as he is doing it for health reasons and not intentionally hurting the patient, can use a scalpel and actually cut someone open.

Ridiculous? Yes, but it is revelations of this intellectual caliber that are spicing the news pages right now in response to a Lancet journal article that says the contraceptive pill may help childless women to lower the risk of breast cancer. As a result, they are recommending Catholic nuns use the pill.

Yes, authors Kara Britt, from Monash University, and Roger Short, from the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia, have come out fighting for the women of the cloth in their article: “The plight of nuns: hazards of nulliparity.”

There are two levels of ignorance on display here.

First there is the doctor and the knife scenario. Of course the doctor can use the knife even though the action of cutting someone open is otherwise a terribly bad thing to do. Likewise the Church teaches a woman can take the pill for health reasons as long as the intention is not for it to be used as a contraceptive, despite the possibility of a contraceptive outcome.

(The Church also teaches that if the pill used by a sexually active woman has the effect of being an abortifacient, then it should definitely not be taken, because there’s obviously a risk of far greater damage. There are different types of pills and individuals should do their research.)

But the second level of ignorance reaches higher and further into the realms of absurdity. Here it is from the horse’s mouth. The UK Daily Mail’s Jenny Hope said: “Regardless of their vows of celibacy – researchers in Australia say nuns should take the Pill.”

I wish Ms Hope would explain how taking the pill to avoide breast cancer can affect someone’s commitment to celibacy. She shows as much understanding of logic here as she does of the word “research.” She says: “Research has shown that women using the Pill are at lower risk of getting any kind of cancer,” which is plain wrong and all it shows is shoddy journalism.

But more on the research findings in a minute.

Ms Hope also says that the researchers “claim the Roman Catholic Church’s own teaching does not prevent the Pill being used for health reasons.” Well a brief skim of Humanae Vitae, the landmark birth control encyclical, tells you that. It is no revelation – it was written almost 50 years ago. That makes it established teaching, not a “claim.”

Then: “Although Humanae Vitae never mentions nuns, they should be free to use the contraceptive Pill to protect against the hazards of nulliparity.” Well, there’s a reason the papal document never mentions nuns. Nuns are totally irrelevant to the issue of contraception.

As for the research, I do not criticize it, but it is worth putting it in context rather than drawing out a tiny element to be splashed over the front page. Health reports and studies carry their fair share of bandwagon-jumpers so let’s look at it calmly.

The authors analyze breast, ovarian and uterine cancers across a fairly decent number of American women. For ovarian and uterine cancers there is actually more of a risk among the controls, not the nuns, for all the age groups up until 70 years of age.

For the great majority of ages, it is actually less likely that nuns die of those cancers. In fact for ovarian cancer, it’s not until the 80+ age group that deaths are more probable among nuns than other women. And in that category, the nuns really do take over – death is almost three times as likely.

So, it is only breast cancer that carries the significant disparity for most age-groups, but once again it’s not until the category of 70+ that the probability really jumps.

The authors responsibly qualify their research with the statement that individual nuns need to consult their doctors, as each person’s own medical history and conditions may dictate quite different diagnoses and recommendations.

And that’s a good point at which to come to back to the Church. The picture painted implicitly in the report and explicitly by ignorant journalists is that nuns are locked away from medical treatment and need permission to access medicine. Britt and Short say: “the Catholic Church could make the oral contraceptive pill freely available to all its nuns,” which shows a complete misunderstanding of human freedom and specifically the freedom of nuns. Pope Benedict keeps the keys to the kingdom, not the medicine cabinet.

News24 has Short saying: “It would be expensive for any nunnery to get the pills, and the Catholic Church should be paying for that.” It might be helpful for Short to consider that the Catholic Church and its convents are not akin to a pound or cattery. While claiming his research is favoring nuns, he does not flatter them with his ignorance of their state in life and personal freedom.

Perhaps Julia Medew of the Sydney Morning Herald could help out other health reporters and researchers. She called up the general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Father Brian Lucas, who had this to say: ”The question of whether nuns are prescribed hormonal medication is entirely a matter between the individual nun and her doctor, taking into account her risk factors and personal health needs. It has nothing to do with any church teaching on contraception.”

It’s amazing what sort of common-sense responses you can obtain when you ask for them.

I had to smile, though, when Short told me that co-author Kara Britt will be going to the Vatican on Sunday next week to present their work at the 10^th World Congress of The International Association of Maternal and Neonatal Health. I’d love to be a fly on the wall to watch her reaction when the Vatican official tells her: “Good points – I am sure many of them are aware of that and are getting sound medical advice from their doctors who read your articles.”

At least she will have some extra time to visit the beautiful sights of Rome. Or maybe she could take some pills and pay relief visits to those poor nuns locked away from medical treatment by the evil Vatican empire.

Alex Perrottet, an Australian journalist, is contributing editor of Pacific Media Watch at AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre in New Zealand.

I don’t see the term “to be hoist with one’s own petard” used much these days, but I used to see it quite a bit a few decades back. It is another of those Shakespearean phrases that have woven themselves into the language. This one comes from the passage when Hamlet speaks of “the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petar,” in reference to how he turned the tables on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the messengers carrying the orders to have him killed. (A petar or petard was a bomb used to blow up an enemy’s defenses.) The expression became part of the vernacular as a way to describe someone who is harmed by his own plan to harm someone else. Well, that is what happened recently to the leftwing blog site The Huffington Post, even though its editors probably don’t realize it yet.

The Huffington Post was founded about ten years ago by Arianna Huffington to provide a leftwing alternative to the right-leaning Drudge Report. (I wonder if someone in her inner circle will someday describe why and how the quirky Arianna flip-flopped in the blink of an eye from conservative talking head to publisher of a left-wing blog site. She appears to be one of those pundits whose political beliefs are chosen in a career move.) Its editors collect articles, columns, and postings on political and cultural issues from a liberal point of view. The Church is a frequent target of their wrath, because of its stand on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and the sexual revolution in general. They like to feature members of the clergy who line up with the trendy leftists on the issues of the day.

That is why on Aug. 26 they published an article about the late Father Mychal Judge. They thought they could use him to bash the Church for its “repressive” views on sex and homosexuality. The Huffington Post headline read “Gay Catholic Icon.” The column was by Daniel Burke of the Religion News Service. It opens with a line about the “well-known image from the 9/11 attacks: five firefighters carrying a body from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. The body belonged to the Rev. Mychal Judge, a Franciscan fire chaplain who rushed to the burning buildings and was killed by falling debris. Later, a half-hidden secret emerged about the gallant priest: he was gay.”

Burke writes of how Fr. Fred Daley, the pastor of All Saints Church in Syrause, N.Y., has installed a statue of Judge “to signal its hospitality to gays and lesbians.” Burke observes that Daley, “came out as gay himself in 2004,” and believes that Judge can serve as a model for “gay young people” struggling “to fit into a church that considers homosexual desires an ‘intrinsic moral evil.’” Daley hopes that Judge’s life will “break so many stereotypes that people have.”

Was Judge gay? Entries from a biography published after Judge’s death make clear that he struggled with same-sex attractions. He wrote of “my gay self and how the people I meet never get to know me fully.” This has led homosexual activists to latch onto him as a symbol of their cause. One group has published a documentary called Saint of 9/11 that focuses on his homosexuality. Homosexual activists hold vigils on the anniversary of his death to energize opposition to the Church’s policies that bar men “with deep-seated homosexual tendencies from the priesthood.” Homosexual activist Andrew Sullivan argues that by the Church’s logic Judge “should never have been ordained.”

Sorry: Judge’s life illustrates no such thing. The Huffington Post entry notes that the NYC firefighters for whom Judge served as chaplain never knew of his same-sex attractions. It quotes Dennis Lynch, a lawyer who worked with Judge on bringing peace to Northern Ireland. Lynch denies that Judge was a homosexual and argues that “activists have hijacked the truth about him to advance a particular cause. I think the last thing Father Mike would want as his legacy would be for people to debate his sexual orientation. How come any time anyone talks about Mychal Judge they only want to talk about that subject?”

Precisely. Judge was not a homosexual activist when he was alive, and it is smarmy to make him one after his death. Who knows what Judge’s biography would have said about his same-sex attractions if it had been published while he was still alive. Whatever the nature of those attractions, there is no one who contends that Judge did not live a fully celibate life, including Fr. James Martin, culture editor of the Jesuit’s America magazine, also quoted in the Huffington Post. “He lived as the Catechism asked him to live and kept his ordination promises.” Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the Catholic bishops mad the same point: “One’s orientation should never dominate one’s ministry as a priest. Clearly, it did not dominate the ministry of Father Judge, who by all reports was held in high esteem by many, especially by the fire department he served so well.”

Fr. Martin and Sr. Walsh are underscoring the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. The Church has taught for centuries that a homosexual orientation is not sinful. Temptations are not sinful; it is only when we give in to them that we engage in objectively immoral actions. Judge understood that distinction. He kept his vows. Which means there is no reason to think he would not have been ordained by the Church today. When Rome uses the term “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” it is making the distinction between men like Judge and those who openly and unashamedly engage in the homosexual lifestyle and demand that the Church change its teachings to accommodate them in that choice. Judge did not do that. He did not preach that message. He remained faithful to the Church’s teachings.

We have to give Daniel Burke credit: his column on Judge was honest about how Judge lived his life. In doing so, it demonstrated how an individual with same-sex attractions can live a life of dignity and accomplishment, while remaining a devout and faithful Catholic. The Huffington Post headline writer described Judge as a “gay icon.” Burke’s column, intentionally or not, made a very different point.

Some recent high-profile priest scandals have put celibacy back in the limelight as a topic for the pagan world to rage about, but rarely will you hear what the Catholic Church actually teaches about it. I hope that the following insights will be a short course in the dynamics of a marvelous life of grace: namely, celibate chastity. The world needs to hear “the other side” of the story.

Number One: Celibacy is a gift to the world, not a rule imposed by the Church on a few seemingly-abnormal men. Celibacy initiates men into a life of spiritual fatherhood in a strikingly positive way for others. We are called “father” for a reason: we bring spiritual life to our people through the sacred mysteries which we handle, and they are drawn into a spiritual family thereby. A truly dedicated priest has thousands of spiritual children who sometimes make immense demands on him — I often wish I had only seven children like my father! In an age where men have massively renounced their sacred duty to generate, protect and nurture families, there are myriads of selfless, celibate men sacrificing themselves in a truly manly way for the sake of God’s family and, indeed, even for the sake of many individual families. The fact that some priests fail at it does not make the gift of celibacy anything less than a true blessing; in fact, its failures force us to reflect more deeply on its quiet successes. It’s hypocritical to think that we should throw away the gift of celibacy (i.e., make it “optional”) based upon a minuscule percentage of failures of its practitioners. We don’t say the same thing about the much higher percentage of failures in marriage. Should we allow polygamy just because some married men can’t stick to one woman? This is the time to reaffirm the genuine beauty and value of celibacy, not change this immense gift to us.

Number two: Celibacy is the personal renunciation of the legitimate goods of marriage and family as a fruitful sacrifice for the kingdom of God. The astonishment of this generation that a perfectly normal, red-blooded male could make that particular sacrifice is exactly the point of celibacy. The world needs to know that there are some men walking around who are not bound either by the expectations of society or by the terms of our fleshly human nature. They are bound by only one concern; that of a kingdom that is not of this world, and they are willing to sacrifice everything for it. The presence in society of men who make this sacrifice is profoundly challenging to a culture that wants to reduce everything in life to the pleasure principle. Such a total renunciation is truly counter cultural: it’s like choosing to live with a permanent wound in the heart that never heals but out of which flow “rivers of living water” (Jn 7:38) that heal countless others. Celibacy is not easy for anyone to live, in fact, it is a constant death to self; but it is enormously life-giving to others, and the Church has not lost sight of that for two thousand years.

Number three: vows are vows. Married men make vows and so do priests. A vow is a promise before God of fidelity to a particular person or state in life. From a spiritual point of view a vow in marriage has the same significance as a vow of celibate chastity: it is permanently binding on the individual and requires total fidelity. We all know that vows are broken by weak and fallible men, but we also know and have seen that vows can be repaired, sins repented of, amends made and forgiveness granted to those who have offended others. Who of us does not depend in some way on the Mercy of God and those we have hurt when we have fallen? The return to fidelity breaks our pride and chastens our passions. What we must never do is make excuses or justify our compromises with pop cultural moral relativism. For example, the fact of “falling in love” with someone is no more an excuse to abandon the celibate priesthood than it is to abandon a wife and family for another woman. I have known many married men who have had that experience and then, in a more rational moment, picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and returned to fidelity — sometimes at a great cost. Thankfully God gave us a rational will, in addition to our lower passions, so that we have something other than whimsical feelings to govern our actions. Fidelity is always possible for those who desire to return to their deepest commitments.

Well, although a short article on celibacy is not enough to explain such a beautiful mystery, it is just enough to witness to a very dynamic way of life whose adherents have given life to millions throughout the centuries. In this time of great secular challenge to our faith, let us pray for the celibate men and women who have served us so well in this life and especially for those who are still trying to return to fidelity.