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All articles published within this section of The Cor Chronicle are the opinions of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Cor Chronicle.
I remember the first time I smoked a cigarette. It was given to me by a coworker at the Sonic I worked at in San Antonio. I promptly smoked it in the bathroom attached to the outside of the building, the door open for ventilation. At the time, I felt like the coolest cat in town. Like, Lamborghini Countach-with-popup-headlights cool. It may still be the coolest thing I’ve ever done.
Despite the rocket ship-like power of that car, I didn’t end up making cigarettes a habit. I tried them again in my freshman and junior year, until two close friends convinced me that I didn’t need them. Suddenly, I didn’t.
I was, perhaps, rather lucky to have not smoked them to a degree where they became inseparable from daily life, and luckier still to have never convinced myself that I needed them to maintain sociability.
I have seen some people near me go from never-smokers to burning the midnight tar every evening in less than a month. Others have left their former social bubbles and want to quit, but still can’t stop themselves from buying a couple packs every week.
Some try vaping as a way out or forward. Zyn is extremely common these days as a “safe” alternative; plenty just chew dip. Ease of use and immediacy of pleasure are deviously common amongst these modes of tobacco consumption.
These two qualities constitute their primary end, but they are among the lowest things Catholics ought to desire. It’s no wonder that a lot of people are giving up smoking for Lent.
Following this line of thinking, cigarettes seem to be an outright usurpation of the good of tobacco towards a more animal vein of pleasure-seeking. They achieve this via three avenues: adulteration, malperiodicity (cruel frequency) and dependency.
Cigarette manufacturers adulterate their tobacco to contain far more nicotine per gram than natural tobacco in pipes and cigars (Google it!). They do this to keep smokers hooked. Several studies have shown that decreased nicotine per cigarette makes it easier for smokers to quit.
Reinforced by this adulteration is their malperiodicity: cigarettes are designed to be smoked frequently and at any time. Their ease of use and significant pleasure contributes to a perpetual cycle of use and their malignant invasion into all parts of life, private and social. Got a moment between classes? Even during breaks as short as 2-3 minutes a cigarette is smokable.
What begins as a personal or social choice quickly becomes an essential routine. Thus arises the third usurpation: dependency. Given the high nicotine content of cigarettes, their ease and frequency of use, it is only a matter of time before smoking no longer becomes a free choice, usurping not only temperance, but also the user’s own will.
What, then, is the right use of tobacco? The Catechism of the Church in no way affirms tobacco as intrinsically sinful to use recreationally, unlike marijuana, but it must be used temperately.
Temperance is defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1809 as: “[T]he moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It…keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable.”
It seems rather plain to me that cigarettes engender an intemperate love of nicotine-related pleasure within the user. As to whether they are a near occasion of sin in this respect I leave to the reader’s conscience, but they do not seem to be the right way to consume tobacco at all.
However, when comparing the attitude cultivated by cigarettes with the attitude cultivated by cigars and pipes towards the pleasurable gift of tobacco, the difference becomes obvious. The latter two are considerable time commitments, encouraging intentionality.
Pipes especially require patience, as smoking them is not very easy and requires practice. Thus the pipe-smoker grows to love tobacco by working with the idiosyncrasies of his instrument instead of viewing it as the contents of a disposable pleasure stick. When tobacco is used temperately, it can be enjoyed without a sense of guilt or compulsion.
This is not to say that pipes and cigars cannot be used intemperately, nor that they do not have any health risks; however, according to a study, persistent pipe/cigar smoking has roughly half the risk of cigarettes in almost every category. These risks could certainly be reduced within the bounds of temperance by moderating pipe/cigar usage to one or less per day.
Therefore, let us be stewards of mind and body. Let us not puritanically abstain from pleasures due to their potential misuse, but let us not insult tobacco –and thereby its Creator – with intemperance, no matter how much horsepower the Lamborghini Countach has. As stewards of the world, we ought to cultivate a love for the use of all nature in accordance with virtue, so as to honor God who crafted it for our flourishing.