Bioethics essay: “Did the Congo nuns get permission and set precedent?"

Welcome to this week's installment of my ongoing essay series about contemporary bioethics issues. As always, constructive feedback is welcome. Here is a list of the previous topics I've treated so far:

• "The Pope Speaks to Pharmacists ... and Connecticut?" (Oct. 29)
• "Long-Term Complications for Premature Infants" (Oct. 22)
• “The Evil Effects of Legalizing Euthanasia” (Oct. 10)
• “The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs” (Oct. 1)
• “Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives” (Sep. 26)
• “Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response” (Sep. 20)

This week's topic:

“Did the Congo Nuns receive permission, and did that set an irreformable precedent?”

[Prompted by questions in this AmP comment thread.]

A recent debate concerning the use of contraceptives in rape protocols has brought up the often-cited case of the “Congo nuns.” As the story goes, nuns in the Belgian Congo during the 1960s were given permission by the Vatican to take contraceptives in situations were it was clear that guerilla soldiers might sack their convents and force themselves upon the sisters. This story is regularly used as a lower-level support of the now widespread practice (enshrined in the USCCB’s Ethical and Religious Directives #36) of allowing women who have been raped to be treated “with medications that would prevent ovulation, sperm capacitation, or fertilization.”

In 2001, for instance, a Spanish bishop stated that religious women living in places where they were in danger of being raped could legitimacy use oral contraceptives.[2] Fr. Brian Johnstone, a respected moral theologian at the Alphonsiana used the case of the Congo nuns as precedent for the Spanish bishop’s statement, saying that at the time when the permission was given it “was seen as a protection against pregnancy arising from unwanted, unfree sexual intercourse.” [3] Johnstone admited that the case is not well know, “but it’s there” he maintained. [4]

Efforts to objectively prove the existence of a dispensation to the Congo nuns yield frustratingly scant results. Buried deep in the Park Ridge Center’s Media Brief, for example, one finds a citation of an Associated Press article that claims Vatican officials described the Church’s action in the Congo as a “legitimate defense.” If this seems like tenuous third-hand hearsay, it is.

In The Encycical that Never Was: The Story of the Commission on Population, Robert Blair Kaiser makes the claim (in a footnote on p. 72) that the Spanish Jesuit Fr. Marcelino Zalba was “the first theologian to propose that the Vatican allow nuns in war-torn Congo to use the pill … [and] the Holy Office bought his suggestion.”[5] The claim is an interesting one considering that Fr. Zalba was a staunch supporter of Humanae Vitae [6] and a frequent-citer of Casti Cannubi.[7] In other words, he was hardly an individual one would suspect of trying to subvert the doctrinal teaching of the Church.

At the same time, however, Kaiser provides a fascinating account of Fr. Zolba’s reasoning on a related topic (p. 124): “[Fr Marcelino] Zalba believed that Pius XII had condemned the pill but, because he voiced this in a mere allocutio, Zalba did not consider this an irreformable conclusion.”[8] From this quotation it is evident that Fr. Zalba – himself the alleged proponent of the Congo nuns dispensation – did not take lower-level locutions by a pontiff (or one could also postulate, private letters from the Holy Office) as irreformable teaching! In fact the congo nuns exception – if it deed occurred - preceded the publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968. One could reasonably make the argument that Humanae Vitae overrules the low-level precedent set by the Vatican permission to the Congo nuns.

Digging still deeper, one finds that the most prominent figure to regularly bring up the case of the Congo nuns is none other than Vatican-censured theologian Charles Curran. [9] For the sake of completeness, Martin Rhonheimer mentions the Congo nuns case example in a footnote to his Objectivity of Human Action: Some Classic Problems, [10] saying that it was much discussed in the early 1960s, and that several moral theologians at the time had declared in an affidavit that the action of taking contraceptives by nuns in Congo missions was “morally acceptable.”

To conclude, the purpose of this treatment was not to call into question the teaching of the U.S. bishops in their Ethical and Religious Directives, but rather to point out that several reservations should accompany the use of the Congo nuns as a precedent for this teaching. As has been shown, there exists no readily-available documentation of the permission given by the Holy Office to the Congo nuns. Also, the Vatican has not referred back to it as a precedent when treating questions of a similar nature (although it is hard to definitively prove this negative claim). Finally, Fr. Zolba, the architect of the argument which the Holy See employed (if it did indeed grant the dispensation) would himself seem to not stand by the precedent absolutely. +++