Morality: Turn the Other Fender

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By the testimony of statistics, an automobile is clearly an instrument of destruction, if not outright murder (worldwide, automobiles kill 200,000 persons a year). By Freudian analysis, it is the supreme expression of aggression in an increasingly depersonalized society. Under these circumstances, driving a car should be an urgent matter of concern for Christian moralists, contends France's Abbe Hubert Renard, and in a 306-page book entitled The Automobilist and Christian Morality, he attempts to fashion a schema of ethical principles for the Christian driver.

The aggressive driver everywhere, Abbe Renard points out, "lets himself be guided by his instincts. He tries to enjoy to the maximum the pleasure of speed, to exalt his power, to dominate those he meets on the road." And no where is the species more homicidal than in France, whose drivers are peculiarly susceptible to "vanity, excessive impetuosity and bad manners." A recent altercation in Paris eloquently illustrates the diagnosis: annoyed when he was delayed briefly by a slow-moving panel truck, the driver of a Citroën sedan sped around it, whipped in front of it in an insulting maneuver known locally as a queue de poisson (fishtail swerve), then forced the truck to stop and shot its driver in the leg.

Sin & Smashups. Abbé Renard seriously raises the question of whether the devout Christian should perhaps renounce entirely such a diabolical tool. His answer is no—first, because such a prospect would be practically impossible; second, because sensible driving is a pleasurable good (Renard, 34, a high school chaplain in the northern French village of Bethune, likes to drive himself). The only solution to the ethical problem of the automobile, he affirms, is for Christians to cease reverting to barbarianism the moment they climb behind the wheel.

Highway regulations, the priest points out, derive from the Fifth Commandment, "Thou shall not kill," and for the careless driver he quotes St. Thomas Aquinas' stern dictum on carelessness: "He who allows certain events to happen which result in homicide by imprudence becomes guilty in a certain manner of premeditated homicide." The author even invokes the moral logic of Matthew 5: 28—"Everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart"—as making traffic violations sinful even if no smashup results. For example, contends Renard, "the motorist who gets ready to pass another without having verified whether he can do so without danger, and who does not do so because he sees a policeman at the last minute, has certainly committed a moral fault."

Those in Peril. Father Renard suggests that the more serious excesses of the mechanized libido be added to Catholicism's list of confessional sins. Among them: speeding, passing without sufficient visibility, driving while intoxicated. In sum, concludes Renard, the Christian must remember that operating an automobile is a human activity that must be "in harmony with our vocation as a spiritual being." To drive home his point, he quotes an auto-age version of the Sermon on the Mount: