SILENT DISSENTER : Jacques Maritain on contraception - twentieth-century French Catholic theologian

Commonweal, May 18, 2001 by Bernard Doering

What would Maritain think today of the church's attempts to block international efforts to disseminate information on and methods of birth control among the people of the third world? No one knows yet how he reacted to the silencing of John Courtney Murray on questions of religious freedom. Or how would he have reacted to the dismissal of Charles Curran from The Catholic University of America, precisely for his views on contraception, or to the wholesale repression of liberation theology? It would be helpful today to have his reactions to the promulgation of Ex corde ecclesiae with its promise of more of the same at Catholic universities, particularly in their theology faculties. Maritain saw firsthand in France the effect on Catholic intellectuals, particularly young Thomists, of such clerical interference in politics. In 1946 when he found out that in support of the attacks on him from South America, Garrigou-Lagrange had implied that Maritain might be guilty of doctrinal "deviations," he wrote to his former mentor: "If there is at the present moment a crisis of Thomism in France, if many young minds seek their nourishment in new theologies, you can be sure that one of the causes of this disaffection is the fact that since the quarrels of the Ralliment...we have seen defenders of sacred doctrine let themselves be taken in completely by outrageous illusions in the domain of national politics. Not everyone makes the distinction between substance and accident" [The Yves Simon Papers].

We know what Maritain thought of the inflation of infallibility and its extension to "infra-dogmatic" questions, whether of politics or human sexuality. Couldn't we say again what Maritain said in a letter quoted above (III, 985) that the church's position on birth control and human sexuality is "another of those tragic examples where the church defends a truth by blockading it with ways of thinking that simple human experience has left way behind (a l'aveuglette)," which may also be translated "like a mule wearing blinders to avoid seeing what is really going on around it"? His conscientious dissent from church teaching on birth control and his decision not to publicly challenge that teaching for fear of jeopardizing his groundbreaking philosophical work on democracy should give pause to those now ardently demanding strict conformity from Catholic theologians.

Bernard Doering is professor emeritus, University of Notre Dame, and author of The Philosopher and the Provocateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky, as well as numerous articles and books on Maritain.