Is there such a thing as a progressive cardinal?

In preparation for the Conclave I have been checking at some of the more progressive papal candidates. Look, I’m not sure the Church will elect them, but I can only hope. I’m at least interested in what the progressive end of the Catholic Church looks like at a cardinal level. 

A name which is often mentioned is Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of the Phillipines (the third largest Catholic country in the world with over 85 million Catholics, just behind Mexico and Brazil), one of the supposed liberal frontrunners with considerable pastoral experience and appeal. I watched an interesting BBC “Hard Talk” interview with Cardinal Tagle (click here to watch too). In truth, I couldn’t get past the first ten minutes. 

The first exchanges on contraception and divorce left me despairing. In response to the serious systemic issues facing the Phillipines (and other countries of the Global South) - poverty, overcrowding, housing shortages, pollution and climate change - Tagle, smiling throughout, and without so much as a second thought, breathlessly defended the Catholic Church’s position on contraception as ‘the unchanging teaching of the church’. What?

Lisa McClain, who specializes in both the history of the Catholic Church and gender studies, notes that the earliest Christians actually practised birth control, 

ranging from the withdrawal method to the use of crocodile dung, dates and honey to block or kill semen. (1)

Wow. I guess that was a long time ago. She goes on:

Indeed, while Judeo-Christian scripture encourages humans to “be fruitful and multiply,” nothing in Scripture explicitly prohibits contraception.

After being largely ignored by churches for centuries, a Papal Bull in 1558 strongly condemned contraception (the mind boggles as to what medieval forms it had in mind). This was widely ignored, both by clergy and laypeople, then repealed by the very next Pope. In modern times, in response to the consequences of urbanization, overcrowding, land shortages, mass poverty, as well as the advent of safe, reliable ‘artificial contraception’, and the recent AIDS epidemics, the issue became intensely urgent, contested, and grave.

By the 20th century, Christians in some of the most heavily Catholic countries in the world, such as France and Brazil, were among the most prodigious users of artificial contraception, leading to dramatic decline in family size [and a substantial decrease in nation-wide poverty]. (2)

In “Casti Connubi” (1930), Pope Pius XI denounced all contraception.

Condoms, diaphragms, the rhythm method and even the withdrawal method were forbidden. Only abstinence was permissible to prevent conception. In 1951 the church modified its stance again. Without overturning “Casti Connubii’s” prohibition of artificial birth control, Pius XI’s successor, Pius XII, deviated from its intent. He approved the rhythm method for couples who had “morally valid reasons for avoiding procreation”, defining such situations quite broadly. (3)

By the time artificial contraception arrived in the 1960s, the Church commissioned a “Pontifical Commission on Birth Control” to investigate the matter more thoroughly. In a “majority report”, 64 out of 69 of the Commission's members concluded that modern (safe, reliable) artificial birth control was not intrinsically evil and that Catholic couples should be allowed to decide for themselves about the methods to be employed. Artificial contraception, the Commission noted, was no different, ethically speaking, from the ‘rhythm’ or ‘withdrawal’ methods (couples were still having sex for pleasure and emotional bonding, rather than for the express purpose of procreation), though, of course, substantially safer and more reliable.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued “Humane Vitae”, which went against the Pontifical Commission “majority report”, and decided in favour of the handful of those who dissented, condemning artificial contraception but endorsing ‘natural’ contraception.

His decision, many argue, was not about contraception per se but the preservation of church authority. An outcry ensued from both priests and laypeople. One lay member of the commission commented, “It was as if they had found some old unpublished encyclical from the 1920s in a drawer somewhere in the Vatican, dusted it off, and handed it out. (4)

Later, the deadly AIDS epidemic, especially in places like Africa and India, made the Catholic Church’s opposition to modern contraception even more scandalous, and, on the ground, ignored.

My father taught “human sexuality” (including modern methods of birth control) to young Catholic students in India in the early 1980s. Although he had left the Roman Catholic priesthood by then, and was now married and with a young family (my mother, brother, and me), he continued to work for a Christian organization (“United Church Board for World Ministries”) and to be welcomed into and to teach in Catholic colleges. His course on Human Sexuality (see images from the study booklet below), taught “the facts” about modern artificial contraception, human anatomy, reproduction, and sexuality, within a philosophy of Christian ethics, love, and personhood.

Does a progressive cardinal actually exist? 

I’m not looking for someone to ride the Pope-mobile in a Pride Parade, just some voicing - or at minimum, serious recognition - of what most moderate Catholics actually believe and practice would be good.

Maybe this is the wrong question. Maybe I'm looking for someone who can listen, who can be still, and who can, from this place, say something different - something more spontaneous, true to the moment, present to the person - or situation - in front of them. Maybe I'm looking for a cardinal who truly can encounter the other. You know, like Jesus in the Gospels. Or, yes, like Francis. 

Maybe I'm not ready for a new pope yet.

Throughout the “Hard Talk” interview, Cardinal Tagle stuck to the Catholic Church's so-called ‘changeless teaching’ on artificial contraception. At one point, he glibly suggested that overcrowding could be solved by moving people into the countryside, and that modern people were very much into “organics” and “going natural”; why not go “natural” on contraception too? While his words were emphatic, his body language seemed much less convincing. He looked like a government minister sticking to “cabinet collective responsibility”, smiling incessantly, trotting out the party line.  

I know this is unfair, but: Francis wasn't like that. On contraception he once said: “Catholics don't have to breed like rabbits!”

Cardinal Tagle gives us an image of one of the great conflicts or dilemmas of being a Christian (especially keen for all church office-holders, of course): faith as being true to one’s convictions or “conscience”, versus faith as affirming the collective consensus (the Pope or cardinals, bishops, your local pastor). 

Pope Francis, though conservative to the end in terms of sexual morality and church teaching, was someone who managed to hold these ‘tensions of opposites’ together, and not succumb to either extreme, perhaps. He could offer something surprising, unexpected, something that addressed the being of the person in front of him. He could receive them and then offer himself, in tradition and in presence. He did this, it seems, without tearing things apart. 

I think there's a lesson for me in here, if I'm honest. 

How did Francis hold together the opposites? Perhaps his encyclical letter, Dilexit Nos (“On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ”), points us in a fruitful direction:

Many people feel safer constructing their systems of thought in the more readily controllable domain of intelligence and will. The failure to make room for the heart, as distinct from our human powers and passions viewed in isolation from one another, has resulted in a stunting of the idea of a personal centre, in which love, in the end, is the one reality that can unify all the others. (5)

References:

(1) Lisa McClain, “How the Catholic Church came to oppose birth control”; The Conversation (2018), retrieved from https://theconversation.com/how-the-catholic-church-came-to-oppose-birth-control-95694.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos (“On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ”); retrieved from https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/20241024-enciclica-dilexit-nos.html.

Images above:

Image of Cardinal Tagle retrieved from https://interaksyon.philstar.com/trends-spotlights/2022/09/21/229082/cardinal-tagle-to-speak-at-manila-conference-on-fabcs-50-years/.

All other images from John Murphy, Human Sexuality (1982), unpublished study booklet “for private circulation only”. Thanks Dad.