They don't know love

In a 1957, Mike Wallace interviewed Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger who talked "about why she became an advocate for birth control, over-population, the Catholic Church, and morality." If one reads the transcript, one can agree on what Dawn Eden says in her blog of MS, "There's no eugenicist like an old eugenicist."

There is one stinging rebuke that she makes of the Church, and I should say that it is MS who doesn't know how to love.

Here I quote from that interview:

WALLACE: Well let's look at the official Catholic position...opposition to Birth-Control. I read now from a church publication called "The Question Box" in forbidding Birth Control it says the following: It says the immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children, when the marital relation is so used as to render the fulfillment of its purposes impossible--that is by Birth Control--it is used unethically and unnaturally. Now what's wrong with that position?

SANGER: Well, it's very wrong, it's not normal it's -- it has the wrong attitude towards marriage, toward love, toward the relationships between men and women.

WALLACE: Well the natural law they say is that first of all the primary function of sex in marriage is to beget children. Do you disagree with that?

SANGER: I disagree with that a hundred percent.

WALLACE: Your feeling is what then?

SANGER: My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases the very finest relationship has nothing to do with bearing a child. It's secondary. Many, many times and we know that --you see your birth rates and you can talk to people who have very happy marriages and they're not having babies every year. Yes, I think that's a celibate attitude...

WALLACE: Surely, a celibate attitude but you agree that Catholicism according to the tenets of Catholicism they rule that birth control violates not only the church's position --it isn't the church's position but they say it violates a natural law as I have just explained, therefore birth control is a sin no matter who practices it. Now the violation of the natural law--you certainly can take no issue with the natural law as the hierarchy of the Catholic Church regards it...

SANGER: Oh, I certainly do take issue with it and I think it's untrue and I think it's unnatural.

WALLACE: Well let me ask you

SANGER: ... It's an unnatural attitude to take --how do they know? I mean, after all, they're celibates.They don't know love, they don't know marriage, they know nothing about bringing up children nor any of the marriage problems of life, and yet they speak to people as if they were God.

Unfair and most untrue. Even then, the Church hierarchy has asked the laity in consultation in many of her decrees and pronouncements. As she does today. And I do not believe that she speaks as if she were God.