Parental Guidance

Dr Bones used to look after a young woman called Hilary who was a mixed-up Child of the Manse not unlike Dr Bones herself, because her own parents were very bad at it. The Dr gave Hilary odd jobs to do on her boat and referred to her affectionately as Slave, though she was a very unwilling and usually inefficient skivvy.  One day we heard that Hilary had met Carl on a train, who was twice her age and very soon an attachment. We were dismayed, but somehow despite being to all appearances a wastrel, Carl stuck, and in time even got a job. They ultimately produced three offspring and in fact parenthood was the making of Hilary despite all our forebodings.

That’s not true of everyone. I was under strict orders from Ms Formerly Aldgate never to tell her parents where she was, though as she’d been in regular contact with them before getting together with me and leaving London I did feel obliged to let them know she was still alive, as I thought a) this was kind and b) it made them less likely to come looking for her. As far as I could work out, they were just a bit rubbish - for instance, as many divorcing couples do, treating her like a bit of furniture to argue over. 'Rubbish' is an inadequate word for the parents of my friend CG who told me ‘When I dared to ask them why they had me if they didn’t want me, they just hit me harder’.

I have never wanted to have children. This isn’t because I don’t like them: as time goes on I find I like children rather more than I do adults, and I appreciate quite keenly the way the love couples have for each other, at its best, extends to produce children. I glimpse this in the parents, and the children, I deal with in the course of parish life, and in my own mum and dad. Years ago I digitised all their old slide photographs, and found myself entering, through the snaps, into their relationship with the infant me, which I knew can’t have been an altogether easy one as I got older. So, as I say, I have come to like children, but it doesn’t follow that I want to make one of my own. I am fond of saying by analogy that I like the Taj Mahal but don’t want to build one in the garden. Actually, don’t give me ideas.

So when Pope Francis goes on about the selfishness of people who don’t have children, I wonder. I have long felt that the priest is the last person who knows the truth about their flock: remember John and Mary, the couple in Father Ted who loathe each other murderously but who smile, embrace, and present the perfect marriage as soon as Ted appears. This is the only explanation for the kind of fantasy world so many clergy seem to live in. There is projection, too, of course. Several people who have been in the position of advising me over the years have blankly told me that I must really want children and all I am waiting for is the right person to have them with. No, I think whenever this comes up, that’s because that’s how you feel and you can’t possibly imagine anyone feeling differently. To me, the desire to reproduce is weird. It’s completely beyond my experience, something I have never, ever felt. It’s not because having children would force me to give up the way I live – I could imagine getting together with someone who already had a child, though at my advanced age even that doesn’t seem likely - but it comes from a deep, visceral and intense dislike at the idea of having offspring of my own. Disgust, in fact. Make of that what you will.

There’s an ideological element to what the Pope has to say, too. Catholic Natural Law theory assumes that God has made human beings to function in certain quite narrowly constrained ways, and to defy those ways a) is sinful and b) will hurt them. Thus he arrives at arguing that human beings should ignore their deep instincts and deliberately act against them: this is how human beings are supposed to be. So CG’s parents, who beat her, did the right thing in producing a child they didn’t want. He doesn’t say that about gays, strangely: about gays, famously, he says ‘Who am I to judge?’ But then he’s not that much of a theologian.

He brought the same subject up a little while ago, specifically in connection to fatherhood rather than parenthood. Papa Francesco isn’t a complete idiot so he anticipated the argument that a celibate priest banging on about how selfish people are for avoiding fatherhood is a bit incongruous, and he insisted that priests have a relationship to their parishioners which is analogous to fatherhood. There are, I can gladly admit, similarities, especially if a priest stays a long time in one church community. But to say this is in any way equivalent in degree to actually producing new human beings in whom you can trace your own genes and those of your partner and your respective families is, not to put too fine a point on it, an insult to actual parents.

God’s intention is that human beings learn to love and to give of themselves, to give themselves to something greater than their own individuality. Most people do that through parenthood. But the point is that they do it, not that they do it in a particular way.  Perhaps those of us who are not parents need to pay greater attention to being loving and productive. But experience suggests even that isn’t true. Not that the Church ever placed much store by experience, did it?