The Catholic Church in Mexico has been fiercely criticised for accepting donations from drug traffickers. Critics say that it should not accept the proceeds of such a dirty trade; those in favour say that some money is better than no money, no matter where it comes from. They argue that if money is needed to build an orphanage, for example, then it is better to use money from drugs to build it than not to build it at all. While I can see the rationality in this latter argument, my instinct is to back away from it in distaste. Would you accept money made through causing drug-related misery, so as to avert misery elsewhere? It’s a difficult one, and it shows the dangers inherent in outright rationalism. While at first glance the thing to do would be to take the drug money and use it for a positive purpose – “purifying” it, in the words of the Mexican bishop at the centre of the controversy – I think that the natural reaction most of us would have, which is to recoil from the prospect or to do it and then feel tainted, is the correct one. It is a pity that there is no guidance except for our own unreliable consciences in matters such as this. There is obviously nothing in the Bible about the acceptance of alms from dealers in cocaine and heroin, who hope to buy their way into heaven, and no story against which we may draw a parallel – though somehow, I have an inkling that if Christ had been offered a hand-out by a cocaine trafficker, with instructions to use it as he thinks best, he might just have turned it down.

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A woman wrote to a newspaper a few days ago to pose a question that perplexes many of us: how can lawyers defend known drug traffickers, when they know that their fees will come from the profits of selling heroin and cocaine to kids and to older sad-sacks who somehow never got to grips with life? When those fees are then spent on the material accoutrements that cushion everyday life, is the drug money “purified”, like the drug money accepted by the Mexican bishop?

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The Archbishop of Malta has spoken out forthrightly against the creation of test-tube babies, a procedure that has been made more palatable by the use of the Latinate phrase for precisely the same thing: in vitro fertilisation, or fertilisation in glass. Will the archbishop’s condemnation stop anyone from seeking to obtain a baby by doing this? Of course it will not. They will set the prospect of a child and the opprobrium of the Church against no child and the approval of the Church, and they will think – well, I had better not be specific. Suffice it to say that they will think and do exactly as the vast majority of people think and do in the face of the Church’s condemnation of contraception – at least, judging by the birth rate and the widespread sale of contraceptives. For some, the approval of the Church may be more desirable and necessary than a child, but in this day and age, their numbers are surely not great.

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We have past experience of the Church expounding its policies and ruining many lives as a consequence of the fear of hell in which the faithful lived – only to have the Church climb down or soften its harsh and uncompromising approach. Even when the Church has not climbed down, education and greater social freedom have brought people to conclude that it is not necessary to suffer needlessly on earth so as to gain access to heaven. Yesterday I was chatting to our home help, who was speaking with regret over the dismal life her mother lived. She gave birth to 15 surviving children, had several miscarriages in between, worked like a slave to keep them fed and the house clean, with little money and no help at all from the paterfamilias (the Church again, failing to tell fathers to help look after their own children), and then dropped dead of exhaustion at 62. My home help is the youngest, born when her mother was well into her 40s and had been getting pregnant and giving birth since she was around 19. “I never remember her as anything other than sad, old and tired,” she said. “She had no life at all.” I asked why her mother had had so many children, and she said: “She thought it was a sin not to have as many as possible. The parish priest used to tell the women in the parish that it was sinful. So she kept having babies and having babies, and then she died.”

Of course, there is a great difference between telling your parishioners that it is sinful not to make as many babies as you possibly can, and telling them that it is sinful to have sex using ways and means of ensuring that you will not get pregnant. It is a distinction that went right over the heads of many old-time priests, and still more over the heads of their parishioners. That is why, in their preaching in favour of unbridled conception, these priests were more successful in parishes where the standard of education was low and women were thought of (and thought of themselves) as chattels. Sixty years ago, families of 15 and 20 children were common only in the poorer, less educated households of Malta, but they were not at all common where there was a little more affluence and education. Earlier than that, large families were the order of things right across Maltese society. The change occurred somewhere after World War I, when it became less and less easy to afford the army of servants, nursery maids, nannies and wet nurses that made it possible for fairly educated or affluent women to have 15 children without actually looking after them. My paternal grandfather was one of nine children, but they were raised by nurses and nannies and kept well out of their parents’ way. When educated Maltese women faced the prospect of looking after their own children, they immediately stopped having as many, leaving the broods of 10, 15 and 20 to those who were least equipped, financially and otherwise, to cope. Babies died through lack of proper care and attention, women haemorrhaged to death, families of siblings were separated and sent to orphanages because fathers could not or would not look after them – so much suffering, all in the name of religion. Who made these rules?

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The thought of either of my grandmothers producing a battery of 20 children reduces me to tears of incredulous laughter. They were both hugely determined individuals who refused to be imposed upon. They each had a pigeon pair – one son, one daughter – and they lived their lives as far away as possible from nursery or kitchen.

When I told my home help this, adding that they were also devout Catholics and that one in particular was forever making weghdi and praying for the missions, it was her turn to look at me incredulously. “How did they manage that?” she asked. I told her that I assume they took pretty much the same attitude that we do today: that no church on earth has the right to turn women into brood mares; that we should only have as many children as we feel we can cope with, mentally, physically and financially, even if this means having none at all.

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Women like my home help’s mother are the real martyrs of the Catholic Church. Christianity has been built on respect for the individual, but poor and uneducated women were granted no such respect at all. Their dreams were thwarted and their rights were trampled upon, and they were turned into baby production units to swell the ranks of the Catholic Church. They lived atrocious non-lives, and then they died. That this has changed is a good thing, and let no one tell us otherwise.