It was in the late 60s, that Aoife was engulfed in giggles when she told me.
Carmen's husband, Frank, had in desperation appealed to her christian sense of charity, that Aoife might have sex with him...(sleep with him, was the euphemism).
Poor Frank. Carmen had two children, a boy and a girl, and had medical advice that another child might kill her.
I've always wondered about, and never discovered, what kind of medical or physiological condition leads to this diagnosis.
However, that's what they said, and, as vatican2? proscribed contraception, there poor little, skinny, (rich), Frank was, an honourable and idealistic young man facing 30, 40 or 50 years of celibacy, and quite out of his mind with desire. Testosterone doesn't flag on vatican command. There were "bad girls" around, but Frank would have been too naive to know of them, and brothels were illegal. It may have been fortunate for him that he died young, and significant that it was of cancer: so often a disease reflecting an insuperable resentment, anger or difficulty, that gnaws away: gnaws away: gnaws away: in the mind, then in the heart, then in the body.
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I think that was quite a common diagnosis in those days, perhaps even more common in RC circles. Had they never heard of Vatican Roulette, which is the one permitted form of contraception (short of the above diagnosis, of course)?
Oh yes, you are so right, R.R.
A friend of ours was an obstretician, and he told of women who were excommunicated from the church because they were using contraception.
But , their husbands were not.
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