Church wants you to be fruitful, but don’t be bananas

By Frank Bruni

Sunday, Feb. 1, 2015 | 2:02 a.m.

My mother always believed that when you signed up for a regimen, you owed it your best shot.

She was that way with diets. With aerobics.

And with religion. For my father she converted, Methodist to Catholic, and she tried to follow the script.

But in one way she couldn’t, and it became a staple of her confessions.

“Forgive me, Father,” she’d say time and again, in church after church, to confessor after confessor. “I use contraception.”

She never met a priest who didn’t respond with some version of the following, and I’m paraphrasing with abandon:

“Of course you do. You’re sane. Ignore Rome. Forget about the pope. There’s La-La Land, and then there’s the real world, in which you are clearly living. Say three Hail Marys because it can never hurt, and be on your way.”

I’m being cheeky. I’m also being honest. There is perhaps no church teaching more widely derided and disobeyed than the hoary prohibition against any birth control other than strategic abstinence, known more euphemistically (and musically!) as the rhythm method.

And there’s none that more squarely places the Catholic hierarchy in opposition to modernity, practicality and prudence, none that gives Catholics more reason to regard some of the church’s edicts as quaint anachronisms and to follow their consciences in lieu of any commands. It’s the gateway estrangement.

So when Pope Francis broached the topic recently, he was bound to whip up a storm of attention, even without a choice of words that “set a new standard for the papal vernacular,” as The Times’ Elisabetta Povoledo observed.

He was on the papal plane, en route from the Philippines back to Italy, and he was reflecting on the relationship between third-world poverty and extra-large families. He told reporters that Catholics needn’t feel compelled to breed “like rabbits,” a zoological simile that’s sure to have legs.

Was he signaling an imminent change in church teaching, or was he merely getting carried away with comparisons and colloquialisms, as he tends to do? Just the previous week, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he likened besmirching a person’s religion to talking trash about someone’s mother, an insult that he said was sure to provoke a punch.

He immediately had to clean up and clarify all of that, and he revisited the “rabbits” remark, as well, dispelling any notion of new doctrine. So where does that leave things?

Some history first: The church came close to lifting its condemnation of contraception back in the 1960s, when a significant majority of theologians, bishops and cardinals who were asked to take a formal look at that teaching recommended such a swerve. Pope Paul VI overruled them — partly, it’s believed, out of fear that an admission of error on the birth-control front might prompt assaults on other teachings and open the fallibility floodgates.

But given the church’s chauvinism, was something additional in play? Patricia Miller, a former Catholic who has written extensively about the church and sexuality, advanced that perspective in a book, “Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church,” which was published last year.

“Maintaining the traditional family, in which men were leaders in the world outside the home and women were confined to the domestic realm by the demands of young children and repeated pregnancies, was a key concern of the Catholic Church,” she asserted, noting that in the 1950s, Catholic bishops had gone so far as to excoriate working mothers for giving child care short shrift.

Whatever the case, the church’s voice on matters sexual became only less and less relevant to many Catholics.

At my request, Gallup did a special breakdown of its “Values and Beliefs” survey from last May and looked at how the principles of people who identified themselves as Catholics diverged (or didn’t) from those of Americans on the whole. Catholics were only slightly less open to birth control, with 86 percent of them saying it was “morally acceptable” in comparison with 90 percent of all respondents. But Catholics were more permissive than all respondents when it came to sex outside marriage (acceptable to 72 percent of Catholics versus 66 percent of Americans overall) and gay and lesbian relationships (70 percent versus 58).

They’re well aware of the Vatican’s pronouncements. They just prefer to plug their ears.

And more so than his predecessors, Pope Francis acknowledges the discrepancy and seeks to move past it. That’s the leitmotif that runs through many of his most attention-getting remarks and gestures, whether they apply to gays or to couples living together outside of wedlock or to Catholics juggling a dozen kids. He’s not refashioning doctrine; he’s reassessing the frequency and stridency with which it needs to be flung at people, especially when it contradicts their experience of the world and undercuts their connection to the faith and the church.

“He’s wildly practical,” said the Rev. James Keenan, a moral theologian at Boston College.

Keenan told me that while he didn’t hear, in the pope’s reference to rabbits, any clear challenge to traditional teaching, he heard a change in emphasis, from reminders that artificial birth control is verboten to a recognition that people have good reasons, and sometimes even a duty, to manage the size of their families somehow.

“I don’t remember, ever, a pope saying to Catholics that they should be mindful of how many children they’re having,” he told me, adding that Francis’ statement was significant for that reason. “Did he intend it to be? I have no idea. When he says things, you don’t know if they’re off the cuff or not, because he’s so out there. He’s exciting that way.”

Unpredictable, too. The same trip to the Philippines that bred “rabbits” also sired a lamentation, during a Mass in Manila, that was wholly conservative and traditional. Francis said that attempts to “redefine the very institution of marriage” and a “lack of openness to life” threatened the family.

He sounded then like any old pope.

But what he sounds like at other times is the parish priests encountered by my mother, who felt that four children were fruitfulness enough and was trying to make sense of a creed that sometimes defies it. There are musty traditions and there is messy reality; a true pastor gives the latter the respect it deserves. When he brought up bunnies, Francis was doing precisely that.

Frank Bruni is a columnist for The New York Times.