Carlo Maria Martini’s “Day After” (some at Vatican interpreted it as the manifesto of an antipope)

The text of the cardinal published in “L’espresso” greatly irritated the Church’s leadership. Some have interpreted it as the manifesto of an antipope. Here is a summary of the reactions, plus a commentary by Pietro De Marco

ROMA, April 28, 2006 – At a Vatican accustomed to the crystal-clear preaching of pope Joseph Ratzinger, with the truth of heavenly and earthly things carved out neatly each time with a fine chisel, the ten pages of doubts, hypotheses, and “gray areas” of cardinal Carlo Maria Martini in dialogue with bioethicist Ignazio Marino published in last week’s edition of “L’espresso” came like the manifesto of an antipope.

Against the current pope. And also against his predecessor, John Paul II, who pegged his vibrant “Evangelium Vitae” on the topics of bioethics, birth, and death, the subjects of cardinal Martini’s remarks.

There are also those in the Church’s hierarchy who see a prophet in Martini for the same reasons. Luigi Bettazzi, one of the living bishops who participated in Vatican Council II, says: “Martini knows that the right time has come to say the things he has said. Before the Council, the primary end of Christian marriage was procreation. But today, the official doctrine of the Church puts love in the first place. It’s the same for bioethics. Martini has cleared the way, and the change will come. The Christian clergy and people are already on his side. They are learning from him how to connect faith with practical life.”

But meanwhile, under the reign of Benedict XVI, it is the congregation for the doctrine of the faith that watches over the teaching of the worldwide Church. Ratzinger was the prefect there for twenty-five years, and still governs it today. “So now the Trojan horse has been brought into the city,” says one of the top figures of the congregation, with “L’espresso” open on the table. “At first glance, some of cardinal Martini’s expressions of openness seem good and worthy of endorsing. But they conceal devastating effects.”

The congregation is studying a document on condom use. Benedict XVI personally put it on the agenda months ago, after some of the cardinals had admitted the use of condoms in a concrete case: as protection from a spouse sick with AIDS. Statements to this effect were made by the archbishops of Bruxelles, Godfried Danneels, and of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and the curia cardinals Javier Lozano Barragán, president of the pontifical council for the pastoral care of the sick, and Georges Cottier, the official theologian of the pontifical household with John Paul II. Now Martini has joined them.

“The condom is a false solution,” continues the official of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. “In the ABC’s of the battle against AIDS – Abstinence, Be faithful, Condom – the first two of these, chastity and marital fidelity, are valid for the Church. But not the third. The C should not stand for Condom, but for Cure, a cure for the illness. The Church’s public teaching and action should back this point. The concrete cases, understanding, and compassion are for the confessor and the missionary.”

In effect, even cardinal Martini concurred in “L’espresso” that it is not up to the Church authorities to support condom use publicly, because of “the risk of promoting an irresponsible attitude.” But the remarks that irritated the Church’s leadership most are others. “All you have to do is read the Catechism of the Catholic Church to identify the firm points from which Martini departs,” says the official of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith.

One of these first points is complete respect for every human life “from conception,” from its very first moments.

It was to this earliest phase that the Pontifical Academy for Life dedicated a study congress last February 27-28, with scientists from all the continents meeting at the Vatican. The final document said that “the moment that marks the beginning of the existence of a new human being is represented by the penetration of the spermatozoon into the oocyte.” Benedict XVI visited the congress participants, and told them that “the love of God does not distinguish between the newly conceived child still in his mother’s womb and the baby, or the young person, or the mature or elderly person. He does not distinguish, because in each one of them he sees the imprint of his own image and likeness. This boundless and almost incomprehensible love of God for man reveals the extent to which the human person is worthy of being loved for his own sake, regardless of any other consideration: intelligence, beauty, youth, or physical well-being.”

The fact that cardinal Martini ignored all of this in “L’espresso,” and even cleared the way for the use of the oocyte in the first hours after fertilization, maintaining that here “no sign of an individually distinguishable life yet appears,” was seen as an act of surrender to what John Paul II defined as the modern “culture of death.”

So far, very few of the high-level Church officials have responded to Martini publicly. Bishop Elio Sgreccia, president of the Academy for Life and the top Vatican bioethicist, declared that “at the Vatican, we do not consider it necessary make a controversy out of something that does not merit it.” He acknowledged Martini’s “pastoral and evangelical inspiration,” but he also criticized him, apart from his approving the use of the oocyte just after fertilization, for his admitting artificial fertilization as permissible, overlooking the fact that “the gift of self in the conjugal act” is an essential element of the procreative union of the spouses, without which it loses its “anthropological completeness.”

Furthermore, Sgreccia reminded Martini that “his theory” on the fertilized oocyte “is not shared by many embryologists.” And in effect, when the National Committee on Bioethics in Italy examined this issue in July of 2005, it was split 26 against 12. With the majority were Sgreccia and other Catholic and secular scholars, all in favor of the inviolability of the fertilized egg from the very first moment. With the minority was Carlo Flamigni, who wanted to add to the final document his own very polemical comments on the Church. The position of this minority is the one that both cardinal Martini and professor Marino expressed in their dialogue in “L’espresso.”

The Italian bishops’ conference, CEI, at which Martini, though absent for two years, has been the guest of stone in opposition to cardinal president Camillo Ruini, has opted for silence. Ruini, caught at close quarters on Friday, April 21, when “L’espresso” had been on the newsstands for a few hours, brusquely pushed the microphone aside. “Avvenire,” the newspaper of the CEI, restricted its coverage of the news to a small inside article, purged of all of the controversial topics. The only official of the CEI who has expressed himself publicly is bishop Dante Lafranconi, whose interview is reproduced below.

But the sparks are flying in private. And to retrace the criticisms that cardinals and bishops are directing against Martini, but do not want to propose personally and out loud, one must follow a somewhat tortuous path.

There is an editorialist for “Avvenire,” for example, Lucetta Scaraffia, an historian and feminist who has followed bioethics for years: she charges Martini with addressing problems of life and death that are central in our time “with the reductionist and casuist mode of reasoning that has represented the negative stereotype of the Jesuits since Pascal’s time.”

Another editorialist for “Avvenire” is Pietro De Marco, a professor at the university of Florence and at the theological faculty of central Italy: he charges the cardinal with “softening the reality” instead of placing it under criticism, with “the effect of having every division on the basis of values judged as unfounded because it is needless, and needless because it is unfounded.”

But neither Lucetta Scaraffia nor Pietro De Marco will ever write these lines in the newspaper of the CEI. They will publish them elsewhere – De Marco on this same web page, down below – although they know that they reflect opinions that are firmly established at the high levels of the Church.

In the body of the organized Church, the area that has felt most wounded by the dialogue between Martini and Marino is that of the Movement for Life. It stings that the cardinal passed in silence over the work that the Movement carries out in order to bring to birth, by helping their mothers, children otherwise destined for abortion, eight thousand of them in Italy in 2005.

Paolo Sorbi, a sociologist, former activist in the social upheavals of 1968, former militant member of the communist party, and today president of the Movement for Life in Milan, Martini’s former archdiocese, sees in the text published in “L’espresso” the sign of “a surrender to modernity, as if it had already won.”

And he issues this invitation to the cardinal: “Come and spend two days in a Help Center for Life. You will be amazed at seeing how many women, most of them immigrants, find a happy maternity and life, supported by the generosity of so many volunteers. But how does the cardinal think that the June 12, 2005 referendum on artificial fertilization was defeated in Italy? With an enormous popular consensus for life, built up over twenty years and finally brought to light. The Italian model of the new evangelization also lies here.”

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The complete text of the “Dialogue on Life” between cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and professor Ignazio Marino, published in number 16, 2006 of “L’espresso”:

> When Does Life Begin? Cardinal Martini Replies

The Yeas and Nays of Bishop Lafranconi

Dante Lafranconi, bishop of Cremona, has presided over the commission for the family and life of the Italian bishops’ conference, and is a member of the commission for the doctrine of the faith. Last Easter, he authorized his priests to absolve from excommunication – an act normally reserved to the bishop – those who confessed to having an abortion.

“I appreciate,” he says, “cardinal Carlo Maria Martini’s willingness for dialogue and humility in judging the ‘gray areas’ in which it is not known what is good and evil. I agree with him on almost everything, except for two points.”

Q: What is the first?

A: “It is when Martini admits that the oocyte could be used at the stage of two pronuclei. In reality, this is a question of an already fertilized egg. And fertilization is the beginning of a continual vital process in which it is difficult to identify substantial qualitative leaps. So in case of doubt, one must play it safe and avoid utilizing or manipulating the new being. The majority of the Italian Committee for Bioethics also arrived at this conclusion, which is the closest to the Church’s positions.”

Q: And the second point of disagreement?

A: “It is where Martini places on the same level heterologous fertilization, with sperm or an egg from outside of the couple, and the various forms of adoption. The fact that a child is entrusted to parents who are not his own and establishes a good affective relationship with them leads the cardinal not to exclude a priori the admissibility of heterologous fertilization. But this is an unwarranted step.”

Q: Why?

A: “Because adoption involves a child who already exists and whom one wants to welcome, while heterologous fertilization brings about a new life already planned, from the beginning, to have an extraneous parent.”

Q: Another controversial point is the condom as a “lesser evil.”

A: “Cardinal Martini describes a specific case, that of a married couple in which one of the spouses is sick with AIDS. It is a case in which using a condom as protection from contagion is generally admitted in pastoral practice. But the cardinal remarks, quite opportunely, that the Church does well to insist publicly upon conjugal fidelity and chastity.”

Q: Private vices and public virtues?

A: “In examining concrete cases, cardinal Martini has the ability to apply universal norms and make them more understandable for the general public, when they are not always understood on their own. But there is also the opposite danger.”

Q: What is it?

A: “That of thinking, for example, that now the Church would always permit the use of condoms. Or of misunderstanding when the cardinal says that ‘human dignity’ is worth more than physical life. Martini is very clear in stressing the rejection of abortion and euthanasia. But ‘dignity’ is also a buzzword for those who want to legitimize the so-called ‘good death’.”

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“Such Is Life.” On the Marino-Martini Dialogue

by Pietro De Marco

The culture – or civilization – of death, as John Paul II called it, plays against the backdrop of the dialogue between Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and professor Ignazio Marino, of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. But the two eminent interlocutors converse as if this pervasive backdrop were an innocuous theater of shadow puppets.

Both discuss life and death expressing a hope for an end to clashes “on the basis of abstract and general principles.” On more than one occasion, the cardinal refers to “gray areas” – for example, that relating to the destiny of frozen extra embryos – that prevent one from making clear-cut judgments and decisions, and he calls upon the Church to form consciences for “the discernment of the best choice in every situation.”

But the culture of death has no difficulty deciding in the gray areas. Actually, it doesn’t even have any gray areas. The harmonization of will and technology, an increasingly realizable correspondence between reality and individual desire, is what it finds satisfying and rewarding.

In this context, what is the precise meaning of the hope that the cardinal expresses for “a dialogue that does not begin from preconceptions or prejudicial positions”? A premise of this sort seems almost to reprove the premises of Christian anthropology for being what they are, principles to which one must refer, objective foundations for discernment and judgment. Who benefits from such a reproof? What did not benefit from it, above all, was the dialogue between our two interlocutors.

Ignazio Marino anticipated the cardinal by proposing to “identify points of commonality, instead of division [against] simplistic contrasts and self-serving logic that bring no advantages, but only create fractures in society”: in Italy, this is not an unusual way for the “enlightened” circles to think about the discussion of bioethics. Declaring himself “fully in agreement on the premises,” the cardinal immediately shows himself as too conciliatory toward his interlocutor.

For example, the professor proclaims his certainty that “scientific progress” has “revolutionized the human person’s relationship to life.” Taken in its strict meaning, such an assertion seems to be groundless. Technology has indeed revolutionized man’s chances, but not his fundamental vision of life and death, illness and health, rooted in Western-Christian anthropology and the condition of our very capacity for evaluating biological technology; indeed, the condition “sine qua non” for the possibility of the Marino-Martini dialogue, and for its reasoned nature.

The pleasant conversation between the two is lacking in this self-critical awareness. The cardinal seems too tempted by a mitigated interpretation of things – a perfect example of this is the euphemistic formulas on abortion – in keeping with an incorrigible propensity on the part of the “pro-dialogue” Catholic circles, of which he has always been a point of reference.

The cardinal admits, naturally, the existence of a conflict of values, for example when he emphasizes the incompatibility between freedom in the means of procreation and the impossibility of putting embryos at the disposal of any person whatsoever. But it is to be feared that the proclamation according to which what matters is “not to create needless divisions” could produce the effect of having every division on the basis of values judged as unfounded because it is needless, and needless because it is unfounded.

* * *

From the Rorate Caeli Blog...great insight.

At first sight, the intervention of Cardinal Martini weighing in on the wrong side of some of the most important moral discussions of this age would seem irrelevant. It is true that he was the President (Rettore) of the most prestigious Pontifical University, the Gregoriana; and archbishop of the largest Italian diocese, Milan - from which the world received Popes Ratti and Montini in the 20th century - for more than 20 years. But he has been retired since 2002, and, according to most rumors, he was in an extremely weak position in the last conclave.

Therefore, to understand the relevance of the interview Martini gave to the most important Italian newsweekly, L'Espresso, one needs to consider the current political and religious circumstances in Italy.

First, though formatted to look like a "discussion" between a "man of science" (Doctor Ignazio Marino) and a "man of faith" (Cardinal Martini), it is actually an interview: Marino presents his philosophy and questions Martini, who virtually always agrees with him. It is all about Martini's answers, not about Marino's "parallel ideas".

Second, Ignazio Marino is not just any physician: he is a member of the Democratici di Sinistra-DS (the "Leftist Democrats"), the post-Cold War name of the largest Communist Party in the West, the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI). The Communists are the main leftist components of the "center-left" coalition, the Unione, led by Romano Prodi which has recently won the Italian parliamentary elections. Marino has just been elected to one of the Communist seats in the Senate for the Latium region (Lazio).

So this interview by Marino, who presents himself as a "Catholic" (in the style of the Dossettian "Bologna School" of "Progressive Catholicism"), has the following meaning: the left asks the Church for its opinion, and Martini is chosen as the official spokesman by the Italian "progressive elite", represented by L'Espresso magazine and by the Unione.

It is clear that if Marino were to interview Cardinal Ruini, the Cardinal Vicar of Rome and President of the Italian Episcopal Conference, or Pope Benedict, he would not receive the answers he wants. So the progressive manipulation technique involves picking a specific person who will provide the desired answers; the second step is to wait for an official response by the Church, which will probably not come. Then, the preposterous answers provided by the favored churchman become, if not official opinions, at least acceptable positions in the "rainbow of opinions" which shape the Church.

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Now, why is this "semi-official Church position" by a man like Martini so important at this moment? It is far from a coincidence that this interview has been released right after the official results of the elections were announced. Despite the great deterioration in its position in the post-Conciliar age, the Church is still an important player in Italian politics.

A center-left coalition which has barely won its majority in Parliament will force its leader, Romano Prodi, willingly or not, to give in to the most extremist forces inside his coalition if he wishes to remain in power. Ironically, Marino's DS (the "former" Communists) are among the most moderate forces in the Prodi coalition. However, among Italian leftwing politicians, the rage against the Church, against public funds given to the Church, against crucifixes in classrooms and courtrooms, against the Church's opposition to abortion, embryonic manipulation, "fast-track divorce" laws, homosexual civil unions is considerable -- especially as an angry response to a wrong perception of the Church (embodied in its most visible face in Italian politics, Ruini) as the "conservative anchor" of the leaving prime-minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

As prime-minister Rodríguez Zapatero in Spain, Prodi (though in many ways a much more moderate man than the Spaniard) will probably have to feed anti-clericalism to the extremists of his coalition. And this is where Martini's opinions are relevant, and it is why this ecclesiastical has-been is in the cover of this week's L'Espresso.

If the Italian public opinion may be persuaded, by Martini's words and by the official silence from the Vatican and from Ruini regarding those words, that opposition to the Magisterium is an acceptable position for Catholics, then the probable extreme measures which the center-left governing coalition will defend in moral matters will become more palatable to the population at large. And this is why this apparently unimportant intervention may mark a turning point in the Ratzinger pontificate.

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See the first post on the supernatural aspects of the "Martini intervention" here.
-Sunday Update.
-Monday: S. Magister has published a translation of the full intervention here; readers will notice that the "prophylactic" discussion was not the main topic of Martini's remarks, which were an attack on the edifice of Catholic Moral Doctrine on issues of life and death; and, as Magister notes, and as we had noticed in this analysis, they are "the first great act of opposition to this pontificate from the upper levels of the Church".

The infected spouse who wears a condom, and then goes about a "normal" sex life might as well take a shotgun to their "beloved's" head.

Condoms have efficacy rates of about 95% in preventing pregnancy, but much lower in preventing HIV. And studies suggest only 50% of those who use condoms do so faithfully and correctly. Still, suppose the efficacy rate for preventing HIV transmission was 99%, including 100% "success rate" in properly wearing the condom. What would that mean?

Well, for someone having several one-night stands and very-short-term relationships, that'd probably work. The condom would allow a person to have 100 times more sex partners with the same chance of catching AIDS as someone who didn't. Again, of course, condoms are not nearly this effective, but we're just being hypothetical.

Now, suppose someone has a perfectly monogamous relationship with an HIV-infected spouse. Maybe they have intercourse maybe four times a month... hardly an excessive sex life! But here's the problem: Every instance of intercourse is another chance to become infected. So in just one year, there is a FORTY PERCENT CHANCE (.99^100) that the HIV+ person will expose their spouse to AIDS. Over 20 And that's with 99% effectiveness for the condom, there is a 99.99% chance that the spouse will become exposed to AIDS.

And it's really worse than that. Not only are condoms WAAAAAAYYYYY less than 99% effective, but, believe it or not, monogamous sex with an HIV+ person is WORSE than promiscuous sex with many HIV+ people:

The truth is that exposure does not mean that a person contracts the AIDS virus. But repeated sex with the same person means that the same regions experience repeated wear and tear. OK, it's an ugly choice of words, but it's the truth. And, well, it's the places that experience wear and tear that are where AIDS transmissions occur.

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