Not surprisingly, news from Rome that two Vatican agencies, the Council for Health Pastoral Care and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, are studying whether married couples can use condoms to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS has occasioned no small interest. A statement by Pope Benedict may or may not be forthcoming somewhere down the line.
In trying to understand what this means, set aside the idea that the question of contraception is up for grabs. It is not. This isn't a replay of events preceding the publication of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical reaffirming that artificial birth control is always morally wrong. The AIDS-condoms issue is profoundly different, and it would be not just mistaken but irresponsible to suggest that the teaching on contraception was on the way to being changed.
As to the limited issue that's actually at stake, condom use by married people for the special purpose of HIV/AIDS prevention, I'll leave that to the Vatican and the pope. Here I merely wish to set the record straight on one point of confusion that keeps coming up in discussions of this matter — namely, the suggestion that for a couple in these circumstances condom use would be a “lesser evil” and presumably would be morally right for them.
Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the Catholic moral tradition in no circumstances allows for the choice of evils which are truly evil. The heart of the tradition is that acts that are always and everywhere wrong and may never be chosen on “lesser evil” grounds or any others.
Not everyone agrees. For instance, the late Father Richard McCormick, S.J., a prominent moral theologian, called choosing the lesser evil in conflict situations “the rule of Christian reason.” But not only was Father McCormick a prominent moral theologian, he was a proportionalist — an exponent of the ethical theory called proportionalism, which holds that choices are governed by the proportion of good and evil in the results of alternative courses of action. Choose the greater good or the lesser evil, proportionalism says.
It sounds reasonable, but it's not. As the ethicist and moral theologian Germain Grisez and others have shown at length, there's no way to do the weighing and balancing of goods and bads that proportionalism requires. Thus the proportionalist, who sets out to be rigorously logical, inescapably ends up choosing on the basis of feelings and intuitions.
But what about the pastoral tactic of urging someone bent on doing something very bad — assassination, let's say — to do something not quite so bad — a little knee-capping instead, perhaps? Isn't that a case of choosing the lesser evil?
As a matter of fact, it's not. Rather, as Grisez points out, it's an instance in which the pastoral counselor seeks to cope with the ugly fact that here and now this individual has narrowed down his or her potential choices to a limited set of morally evil alternatives. There are other, morally good alternatives of course, but this person has rendered himself or herself blind to them.
Is that how it is in the condoms-AIDS case? There is another, morally good alternative — abstinence. But what do you say to people unwilling even to consider that solution? Is it possible to discern here the glimmerings of a response that offers sound advice to pastoral counselors facing the obduracy of people with limited moral vision, without extending approval — because none is possible — to “lesser evil” solutions? Let's hope the pope and the Vatican come up with a clear, correct answer — soon.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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