Memories of pre-contraception Catholicism

More from last Sunday’s visit to Leuven.

 

This lovely old medieval church near the centre of Leuven has been mothballed since 1968 – in other words, closed to the public and given just enough attention – keeping the roofs intact against rain and the doors against tramps ­– so as to be reusable at same unspecified time in the future.

 

Later I found this touching plaque near the main hospital, "in thankful memory of the Hospital Sisters, who between 1184 and 1999 took responsibility for the sick and travellers", that is until they shut for lack of vocations.

Why the closed church, the death of the nursing community? The reasons are many and complex. But one of the biggest and simplest is, very prosaically, contraception.

Without it, the norm in a Catholic family was between four and six kids. And in a reasonable pious household, you could expect at least one, if not two, to go into the Church as a celibate priest or nun, often abroad, in Belgium’s African colonies or to South America. Add to this infant mortality and the odd war, it kept the population kept pretty constant without condoms or the pill. 

I’m not saying the level of piety or education was that high. In particular among the women’s communities it could be pretty basic, the more so because, with a shortage of men after World War I, for a woman to enter a convent was often the only socially acceptable alternative to being 'left on the shelf'. And for working class boys, too, seminary was often the only way to get a decent education.

And if you have six kids, and not much else to do on a Sunday morning, it does not take many families to fill a church building.

Much was wrong with this Western European Catholicism - the dying days of which I remember as a teenager in the 1960s -, but there remains a regret for certain things that were good in it: especially a sense of decency, intact families, and an understanding that there were other things more important in life than wealth or pleasure.