I think she opposed birth control because she
thought birth control was evil. I suppose that means she must have thought
sex for pleasure was evil, but I don't know her rationale.
If you read anything from the Catholic Church you would know that they oppose birth control because, as I understand it, it interferes with God's right to create human beings as God wills. I could be wrong, there are probably Catholics on this thread who could explain it better. She was a daughter of the Church, a bride of Christ, vowed to uphold the teachings and practices of the church. It would have been a violation of her most sacred vows--a most serious sin--for her to have approved of birth control.
I know you don't agree with Catholic doctrine. But this is why I have said repeatedly that you have to view decisions in their context. Basically, expecting her to support birth control was expecting her to be disobedient to her most sacred vows. You may see her having taken those vows in the first place as misguided. But since she did take them, I think it is quite cruel for you to say that obeying one's promises to God is misguided.
And pain killers she dismissed because-- well, why? I guess also because it was her
belief that the more suffering, the more God is pleased and bestows grace upon the world?
You keep repeating this, but you haven't yet documented a single case in which she denied available pain killers to people who would have benefited from them. Maybe she did, but I haven't seen a shred of factual evidence of that. In fact, the teaching of the Church which I posted recently explicitly requires the use of pain killers, even when they may shorten a person's life, for comfort. But there are some cases where pain killers either aren't available or aren't medically appropriate or aren't effective. In those cases, the Church's teaching is to teach about the redemptive power of suffering. Not something an atheist can have much comprehensive of, I understand, but meaningful to Christians. But that is not in lieu of pain medications.
If indeed there are documented instances of her intentionally withholding available and efficacious pain medications which a patient was requesting (some don't want the pain medications for various reasons) that would indeed give me serious pause, because it would both be cruel and would violate the teachings of the Church. But so far I have seen no factual evidence of that. And I would want to be careful about anecdotal stories from disgruntled ex-nuns since she is not here to present what may be a different view of what happened. But if you have verified, documented evidence of this, you have yet to produce it.
It isn't birth control for herself she campaigned against. It
was for others. Hundreds of millions of others.
True. Her campaign was for others. It was for the many souls which, in her belief, were being wrongfully deprived of their right to life. Not your position, I understand. But a highly principled and moral position given her belief system and the vows she had taken.
Since you deny God utterly, there is no point in discussing with you such concepts as Divine intention, or the redemptive power of suffering, or sacred vows, or other principles which informed her life. Let's just accept that they were as deep and as sincere as your beliefs. We will just have to wait for the hereafter to see which of you was the misguided one.
I understand that as a child you suffered for your atheist beliefs. I'm sorry about that. Truly. It was wrong. But I'm sorry that it didn't make you more, rather than less, open to cherishing diversity of belief and respecting the beliefs of those whose beliefs differ from yours. |
