Saint Lawrence is the Patron Saint of Librarians. He is also the Patron Saint of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon, cooks and of the poor.

            In 257, during the Papacy of Sixtus II, Lawrence held the positions of Archdeacon, Treasurer of the Church of Rome, and as Librarian of Sacred Books. When Pope Sixtus was arrested by the Roman Emperor, Valerian, he instructed Lawrence to distribute the Church’s wealth to the poor. Pope Sixtus was overheard in this request and when Valerian was informed of this talk of wealth he called Lawrence before him and ordered the Deacon to turn over all the Church’s treasures to Valarian’s Chief Magistrate. Lawrence asked for three days to assemble all of treasures of the Church and this request was granted.

            After three days had passed, the Chief Magistrate looked out from his palace and saw assembled before him thousands of widows, virgins and orphans along with the lame and the blind.

            “Here is all the Church’s treasure,” Lawrence exclaimed to the Magistrate before he was seized, tortured and roasted to death on a giant gridiron. His final words were reportedly, “Turn me over, I’m done on this side,” and from that day, August 10, 257, to today, Librarians of every stripe, Catholic or not, have celebrated his Feast Day with commemorative tee shirts and barbeques.

            Yesterday, Newt Gingrich, a Johnny-come-lately to the Holy Roman Catholic Church, having converted in 2009 just in time to enter into the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony with his third wife, entered his opinion on the HHS ruling that in Catholic Hospitals where the majority of employees are not Catholic insurance must offer insurance that fully cover birth control options.  Gingrich termed the decision a declaration of “war” and “the most outrageous assault on religious freedom in American history.”

            Newt joins the United States Conference of Bishops in their condemnation of the decision. Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, who characterized the pedophile scandal that has rocked the Church as a “witch hunt,” stated his belief that, “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences or foregoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable. It is as much an attack on access to health care as on religious freedom.”      

            Archbishop Nolan, who is slated to become Cardinal Nolan in less than two weeks, also added his opinion that, “The government should not for Americans to act as if pregnancy is a disease to be prevented at all costs.”

            What Archbishop Nolan, one of the many extreme conservatives put into ecclesiastical power since the death of Pope John Paul I, ignores is that 98% of all sexually active Catholic women use some form of artificial birth control. In fact, sexually active Catholics, as a whole, are more likely to use artificial birth control than the rest of the U.S. population.

            I was raised in a Catholic family that has extremely devout roots. My parents were married October 27, 1962 in Sts. Joe & Paul’s Catholic Church in Owensboro, Kentucky. I was born exactly nine months after the day at the now defunct Our Lady of Mercy Hospital. My mother said that she went to Mass every day while pregnant and prayed that I wouldn’t come early. Even though this was the first, and last, time I would ever oblige her, and despite the fact that she was a respectably married woman, she wasn’t allowed to walk with her graduating class at Owensboro Catholic High School because of her pregnant condition. Later, when I was in second grade at Our Lady of Lourdes, a favorite teacher had to step down from teaching because she was pregnant. Even though she was living in the Estate of Holy Matrimony it was considered improper for impressionable children to be exposed to the sight of a pregnant belly in a school setting. That was how the Catholic Church viewed pregnant women in the 1960s.  

            My birth went without a hitch. My mother was given scopolamine, the so-called “twilight sleep,” and remembered nothing of the birth itself, but if something had gone wrong, physicians working at Catholic hospitals were instructed to try and save the fetus even if the life of the mother was at stake. The reasoning went, the mother was (presumably) already Baptized and if she had done everything she was supposed to do as a good Catholic she would get a one-way ticket to Heaven, with the martyrdom of childbirth to back her up she could even bypass Purgatory, but if the fetus died without being Baptized then that fetus would forever be consigned to Limbo, recently abolished on the hope that God will take mercy on un-Baptized babies with “no personal sins.” Anyone growing up in those days probably heard stories of Priests squirting Holy Water into the birth canal to Baptize a fetus that looked like it wasn’t going to make it out alive. It was my first exposure to the notion of women as vessels.

            I remember being about six years old finding the round packet of birth control bills while playing in my mother’s parked car. I remember reading the name on them, Carolyn Hamilton, and being incredibly hurt and upset. It was upsetting to think of my mother committing such a grave sin and hurtful to think that she didn’t love us children enough to surround my brother and me with as many siblings as possible. It seemed to show a lack of commitment to the strength of our family.

            Of course, there was a lack of commitment to the strength of our family, my parents divorced when I was eight, but I don’t think that had anything to do with birth control although I guess if my mother were continually pregnant it would have been more difficult for her to cat around or it may have just presented us with a passel of half-siblings being passed off for as long as possible.

            My mother went on to marry three more times after she and my father divorced. During her second marriage there was a time when she thought she might be pregnant and was happy about it.

            “If it’s a girl I’m gonna name her Audra,” my mother announced, “and if it’s a boy I’m gonna name him Troy.”

            Only she wasn’t pregnant. Her doctor ran tests and told her she had a “pre-cancerous” condition. She underwent a hysterectomy at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital when she was twenty-eight. Thankfully, because I cannot imagine having to keep ties with the monster she was married to at the time.

            Two other Catholic women in my family made a huge impression on my thoughts about birth control as well.

            My Great Aunt Isabel and my Great Uncle Rex always wanted children but couldn’t conceive. Isabel went to her doctor who told that surgery, considered relatively minor even for the 1930s, would allow her to conceive and carry a child to term. Isabel sought out her Parish Priest for a second opinion. The Priest told her it would be a mortal sin to have the surgery.

            “If God wants you to have children, God will provide you with children,” the Priest told her, never considering that the surgery could be God’s providence at work. Isabel didn’t have the surgery and she and Rex never had a child of their own.

            The other woman was my daughter’s grandmother, Frances Sapp. Frances was a devout Catholic woman married to a devout Catholic man. Neither believed in any form of birth control; natural or artificial. Frances was pregnant 19 times for a total of 27 children; 11 of whom lived to adulthood. My daughter’s father was the surviving half of a set of twins. He wasn’t expected to survive either, but he did, although the expectation of early death left him sharing a first name already in use by another brother. Frances was insane. Literally. She had spent several spells in the State mental hospital at Hopkinsville because she was tormented by the voiced of her dead children whom she would hear speaking to her from within walls. Still, she kept having children. It would be a sin to deny her husband his conjugal rights and it would be a sin to use birth control to stop the pregnancies from coming. When Frances died in 1983 at the age of 57 she left behind a thirteen year old daughter who was left an orphan two years later when her father died at the age of 59.

            By the time I was an adolescent, Griswold v. Connecticut was firmly established as the law of the lane while advances in birth control, especially the birth control pill, facilitated the engine of women’s liberation. When I read Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies I was incredulous that a physician would tell a woman the he doesn’t prescribe birth control because he’s a Catholic OBGYN and prescribing birth control would put him out of business. I was even more horrified that Jean Kerr didn’t get off the table, put on her clothes and leave in search of a more enlightened physician. I guess somewhere along the way the Administrations of either LBJ or Richard Nixon managed to convince me that pregnancy is a disease to be prevented at all costs but by then I knew that the key to equality, to stability, to the whole goddamned kingdom, lies in the ability to control one’s own reproduction; one’s own body, one’s own life.   

            I still consider myself a Roman Catholic, albeit a non-practicing, badly lapsed one. I was Baptized at eight days old and Confirmed into the Church at the age of thirteen. I have never renounced my Faith and I’ve never received any sort of registered letter from the Vatican telling me I’ve been excommunicated either. I have managed to sidestep the whole issue of artificial birth control by marrying a Protestant who underwent a vasectomy back in 1988, when our youngest son turned a year old.

            Of course the Church doesn’t recognize my marriage and considers my children bastards but that’s an issue between me and my Church, not Me, my Church and my Government. If my Church really wanted to they could order me to separate from my husband until he agreed to a proper Catholic wedding, and then excommunicate me if I don’t and that would be between me and my Church; not Me, my Church and my Government. If the Catholic Church wanted, they could demand that all parishioners refrain from using artificial birth control and if a Priest suspects someone in his congregation is using artificial birth control he can confront them and demand to see their medical records and the parishioners can agree or not agree but if they are unwilling to submit to the Authority of the Church then the Church can excommunicate them or, if they are found to be using artificial birth control, choose to excommunicate them, publicly, in front of the entire congregation, but the Church doesn’t do that. Not yet.

            Catholics since the Reformation have been pretty good about understanding the concept of Rendering Unto Caesar what Belongs to Caesar. As Roman Catholics in America we don’t boycott or refuse to pay taxes in States that choose to employ the Death Penalty, for example. We understand the bedrock concept of Separation of Church and State is not built on shifting sands. We understand when the Government, as a matter of fairness, requires all employers to provide insurance that covers the reproductive needs of all their employees and then it’s up to the individual and the conscious of that individual to do the rest. We need to remember that the Church is not Newt Gingrich or Timothy Dolan or Pope Ratz and when the Church stands in opposition to 98% of its members maybe it’s time for those members to stand behind Saint Lawrence in reminding them that we are what gives the Church value and we are pretty close to done.