Second Sight

The human race is sitting on a time bomb. It is not the sort of time bomb which might or might not explode: it most certainly will explode - disastrously, and it is doubtful whether we can do more than mitigate some of its effects.
I am not speaking of global warming, I am speaking of population. And, if we cannot predict the future with certainty, we can at least predict the number and shape of populations over appropriate time scales with reasonable confidence. The prospect makes me shudder.
The Church teaches that marriage is centred on the procreation of children, and exhorts us to be generous in the size of our families - only limiting them for serious reason. And the Church is absolutely right. The explosion we face is not too many hungry mouths and too few resources. On the contrary, the problem is that we do not have enough children.
Am I barmy? After all, the world’s population has doubled since the 1950s, and is expected to reach over nine billion by 2050. And it’s true that in the shorter term, and in the light of climate change, we will have to make more efficient use of resources, including artificial means, to feed the world. We shall succeed, but that will not solve the real problem. That lies in the fact that, on a worldwide basis, fertility is dropping, and people are living longer. The result has to be that the average age will rise, and there will be fewer and fewer active people to support those who are too old to work.
Let me dip my toes into statistical water. In 1950 around 200 million people were 60 or over; today it is 700 million, by 2050 it will be two billion. The rate of growth in the number of old people is more than twice that of the world population as a whole. Now think of the possible consequences. The ratio of working people to retired people, which was 12 to one in 1950, will be four to one in 2050. (It will be two to one in Europe by that date.)This will create a huge tax burden to meet social security costs when, as is usually the case, they are paid from current taxation and not out of a long-term fund.
The current financial downturn will not help the situation. Not only have many pension schemes been obliged to change benefits from a percentage of earnings at retirement to an investment fund whose results depend on investment success and volatile annuity rates, but individual pension “pots” have been reduced. Intergenerational financial assistance will be much reduced since working children will be relatively fewer and taxed more heavily. And older people living alone (predominantly women) will be vulnerable to much greater isolation.
Developed and developing countries are on a different time-scale. Already developed countries have a much lower ratio of employed to retired, but the developing countries are catching up and, since the changes will occur more quickly, there will be less time to adjust. I leave the effects of political unrest and international security to your imagination.
If you would like to check my summary and look into further detail, try Googling the UN World Population Ageing Report 2009. I promise you that the executive summary will make “each particular hair stand an end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine”.
But the worst is yet to come. Do you recognise the following figures: 2.1, 1.96, 1.37, 1.82? The first is the number of children each woman must have on average to replace the population in a developed country. The remaining figures are the median ones achieved between 2005 and 2010 in Ireland, Malta and Britain. I have included two “Catholic” countries, but I could have chosen almost any developed country.
We are simply not reproducing ourselves. And this is why the world population will begin to fall after 2050 - when the effects of population ageing have worked their way through. A good thing, too, you may say, looking at the birth rate of developing countries. But the birth rate of developing countries is a function of high, early, mortality rates; it will fall to European levels as standards of living rise and economic contraception is widely available. Always has, always will.
A problem lies in the fact that the fertility rate of a country is a decision of personal convenience not a decision of government. Even China, with its draconian legal curbs, achieves 1.73 children per woman, virtually the same as Britain. But our prosperity is, rightly or wrongly, founded on modified market forces. A falling population means falling consumption, and that means economic depression on an unprecedented scale and unprecedented length.
Do the maths. I calculate, assuming a rate of 1.5 children per average woman, that a given population of 100 per cent will reduce to one per cent in 15 generations. Eventually the human race will get all the way back to Adam and Eve - and we can wrap it up and all go home.
You can see this illustrated informatively and amusingly here. But look at the information rather than the entertainment. It’s serious. I have seen it suggested that every married woman, who is in a position to do so, should aim at a family of three children. That looks about right because it allows for the unmarried, the infertile and those who have grave reason for restricting their families. It won’t solve the problems I have described in this column but it will be a step or two towards reducing them. A quick check tells me that my wife and daughters have a fertility rate of 3.2. So we pass, but many of you will have done much better.

You will no doubt have heard that the Charities Commission, which effectively prevented Catholic adoption societies from continuing to operate under a Catholic banner, has been instructed by the Court to review its decision. It seems very likely that our adoption societies will be able to meet the remaining criteria without difficulty.

The key Regulation in the Equality Act reads like this:
18.—(1) Nothing in these Regulations shall make it unlawful for a person to provide benefits only to persons of a particular sexual orientation, if—
(a) he acts in pursuance of a charitable instrument, and
(b) the restriction of benefits to persons of that sexual orientation is imposed by reason of or on the grounds of the provisions of the charitable instrument.

There is an irony here, Apparently the regulation was inserted at the behest of the homosexual lobby to prevent their charities being sued for discrimination by heterosexuals.

Of course schadenfreude is unknown on this blog, but I have to admit that I greeted the news with a cheery smile. Any group of people, which seeks to restrict basic Catholic rights, while enhancing its own, is always likely to slip on its own  banana skin.

O     O     O
It was announced last week that Ed Balls, whom we have discussed much in connection with sex education, has been invited to appear on Any Questions (Radio 4. Friday evening and Saturday lunchtime). If he appears and is asked to speak on such matters it may well be that some of you will have a comment or two to make on this blog. I hope so.

What do you want from this column? One of the advantages of Second Sight Blog is that I get enough feedback to make a judgment. And one topic which is popular is apologetics. This is perhaps because the media is so full of anti-Catholic propaganda that readers need information to explain matters to their friends. And others would just like the facts for their own peace of mind. A good example of this is provided by the Pope’s statement, when he visited  Cameroon, that condoms are not the answer to HIV. Although he said this last March, the clamour gets louder as the Pope’s visit approaches.

That does not surprise me. If condoms are effective in preventing HIV/Aids, it must follow that an increased use of condoms will leads to a reduction in infection. Only someone as doctrinaire as the Pope or as brain-washed as a Catholic could believe otherwise. So let’s have a quiz.

1) Are condoms really effective in checking the transmission of the Aids virus in sexual congress?

2) Does the Church forbid the use of barrier contraceptives in all circumstances?

3) Is the Pope correct in saying that condoms are not the solution to the Aids epidemic in Africa?

Just pause and think about your answers before reading on.

The answer to Question 1 is yes. Several studies considered by the World Health Organisation of “always” condom users showed a transmission rate of one for every 100 person years, compared with seven for non-condom users. That is a very high level of protection.

This may raise an eyebrow. Did not Cardinal Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, say that condoms were a very unreliable protection against transmission?

Indeed he did. He simply declined to accept the established scientific evidence. That was a matter for his conscience. In addition, it is important to remember that condoms must be used correctly and invariably. They must also be of good quality and in good condition.

The answer to the second question is no. The Church’s teaching on artificial contraception is based on the total giving of oneself, and one’s faculties, in the physical expression of marriage. She makes no statement about the use of contraceptives outside marriage; and that would equally apply to homosexual acts.

This puts us into the position of having to make up our own minds. It seems clear to me that to fornicate while choosing to risk an unwanted pregnancy or the transmission of serious disease multiplies the sin as an offence against love. I am aware that some people hold that because two sins would be involved, the offence is doubled. Fortunately God is not an accountant : his criterion is not mathematics but love.

The answer to the third question is yes. The Pope’s statement was entirely in accord with the latest scientific evidence. It would have saved an enormous amount of newsprint, and - sadly - scandal, had he made this clear at the time.

The confusion arises because in Sub-Saharan Africa HIV/Aids is a pandemic. It is not confined to discrete groups where a well-motivated and dedicated campaign of condom use might have good results. It is too widespread for that.

There are some endemic difficulties in several African countries which interfere with the effectiveness of condoms. One of these is that there is a macho anti-condom culture, but more importantly there is a habit of multiple sexual partners. Edward C Green (a social anthropologist from the Harvard School of Public Health with no objection to condoms in principle) says: “These ongoing multiple concurrent sex partnerships resemble a giant, invisible web of relationships through which HIV/Aids spreads. A study in Malawi showed that even though the average number of sexual partners was only slightly over two, fully two-thirds of this population was interconnected through such networks of overlapping, ongoing relationships.” In Cameroon, where the Pope made his statement, the incidence of HIV is four times as high for women with three or more partners, compared to those with one partner. Green also notes that the enormous efforts at condom distribution over long periods of time have had no limiting effect on the spread of infection.

In fact, the only campaigns which have shown any success are those focused on the chaste sexual habits which happen to have been championed by the Catholic Church. This does not mean that condoms have no value; they have been useful in reducing infection stemming from the sex industry. But it should be noted here that the Church has had no reason to make a ruling on this - see Question 2. For the sake of completeness here I should mention that male circumcision also has a significant effect on the reduction of transmission.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) does, however, have a duty to make a ruling on the lawfulness of infected married couples using condoms, since doubts on the issue have been raised at the most senior clerical levels. It’s awkward, of course. Either it doesn’t know (and uncertain laws don’t bind); or it is not prepared to admit that the principle of deriving unconditional imperatives from the structure of human acts is faulty; or it is terrified of stating publicly that its rules are more important than human lives.

The failure to give an answer after so many years (see Vatican Notebook, February 12) raises once again the question of the use or misuse of authority. Since human life and the stability of marriage are the issues at stake here the failure to respond is a serious cause of scandal.

But you may be able to explain better than I why the CDF has neglected this question. I look forward to hearing your views on www.secondsightblog.com.

We are rightly concerned about secular attempts to lay down how we should teach our beliefs about the proper use of sexuality. The threatened Bill on children, schools and families would, on first reading, appear to do just that.

But we will be relieved to read that we will remain entirely free to teach full Catholic doctrine. And if you think that to be of no significance, take a look at the steam rising out of the ears of the secularists at what they see as a flagrant betrayal of the principle of non-discrimination.

No, the difficulty lies with the obligation to give children a fair and balanced view of the issue being discussed and to recognise that there are alternative views which others hold, and are entitled to hold, even though we may believe them to be mistaken. That is no more than straightforward Catholic teaching on the sovereignty of conscience.

But I want to go beyond that and argue that a new educational approach will bring its own advantage. Not that it is a big challenge to get better results than the traditional spoon-feeding approach. Spoon-feeding has not worked because young people on the verge of adulthood are unwilling to accept authority blindly. They may profess to do so in the classroom, but they are aware that real life is different and, when temptation looms, defences fall. It is true of them, as it is true of us, that “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”.

There is no formula guaranteed to send our young out into the world as perfect models of Christian chastity and virtue. But it is possible to help many to understand for themselves and live out their understanding. If some of these then make mistakes, at least they have a solid background to which they can return.

The principle is straightforward. The school is rightly obliged to give the teaching of the Church. It is a Catholic school and that’s what it says on the tin. In doing so it must give the full reasons why it holds a doctrine. But it must also evaluate, with scrupulous fairness, the opposing arguments. It is only then that the pupils are truly free to accept and internalise the Church’s teaching.

What has been lost? Those who do not accept would not have accepted the spoonfeeding approach at any useful level. What has been gained? Those who accept are able to make a free, internalised commitment. All whose previous knowledge of the debate was scanty or misinformed are now fully briefed, and ready to defend their beliefs against all comers. Let me illustrate this approach with some examples.

The Church teaches that sexual congress is such an invaluable gift of oneself that it belongs only within the unconditional commitment of marriage. We all know the general arguments for this, and the competent teacher will be able to display the strong sociological evidence in support. Everyone will be aware of the powerful temptations which draw many into a betrayal of this gift. The only reward for pretending otherwise is loss of credibility. It would be more useful to ask pupils to compare Catholic teaching with the proposition that sex is appropriate in casual relationships, or as a form of entertainment. Do we really put such little trust in our ability to present the Church’s good or in our young’s ability to recognise it? And, if so, what have we been doing as parents?

Contraception involves the problem that if teachers, clerical or lay, follow the pattern of surveys then the majority will not, in practice, accept the Church’s blanket condemnation of artificial forms. But here the orthodox teaching must also be given, accompanied by the best evidence, both theological and sociological. The choice here is simple: either leave the children with their half-baked erroneous ideas or teach them the facts on contraception - from which methods are abortifacient to the level of safety they give against conception and disease. This is general knowledge, not advocacy of a way of life. But every parent must face the question: What would I do if I knew that my child was involved sexually, against my wishes, and I didn’t know whether they were protected? Bear in mind that the Church’s teaching on contraception applies only to marriage.

I hardly dare enter the subject of homosexuality for the thunder of red rags and bulls charging over the horizon. So I will confine myself to saying that bullying a gay person on the grounds of orientation or lifestyle is a sin against love far greater than any which might be imputed against homosexual acts.

For me, strength of feeling makes the question of abortion the test case. Unsurprisingly, our pupils are aware that abortions take place, and that we condemn this as the taking of innocent life. What the pupils need is a proper understanding of the wonderful work of God in how the baby grows and flowers from the foetus to their newborn brother or sister. The duty of balance requires that ultrasound scans should be used, since the emotional factor is normally inhibited by the invisibility of the baby. And full information on the practical provision available for the prospective mother is necessary information.

But pupils should also understand how fear, family pressure or plain ignorance leads some women to have abortions. We must be clear about the objective wrong of abortion but we are in no position to judge the mother. Rather, she should be the object of our prayers, and our practical help - particularly if she chooses abortion. Needless to say, our practical help does not include colluding with the abortion.

I am sure that some readers will think that I have sold the pass. I would say to them: take consolation from the fact that the credibility among the young towards the Church’s sexual teachings could scarcely be lower than it is today. There is nothing to lose. And bear in mind that secular schools must provide similar objective information about our views. I don’t think this is what the champions of the Bill had in mind - but, if they provided the noose, they too must be prepared to hang in it.

Quentin de la Bedoyere was a marriage counsellor under Catholic auspices for 20 years, working with schools, with engaged couples and in remedial counselling. His major work on counselling, Managing People and Problems, was published by Gower Press in 1988, later in paperback. It has appeared in several European languages. He has five children and 14 grandchildren