IN 1486, two Dominican priests, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, wrote Malleuv Malleficarum (The Hammer of Evil), a manual on the detection, diagnosis and torturing of witches. In it we find proof that the devil, working through witches and sinners, "can prevent the flow of semen to the members... by, as it were, closing the seminal duct so that it does not descend to the genital vessels, or does not ascend again from them, or cannot come forth, or is spent vainly". Satan, in other words, invented vasectomy.
And, the learned friars tell us, all those who assist in his work must, if they are witches, be burned at the stake. If, however, they are merely purveyors of "contraceptives, such as potions or herbs that contravene nature" they should get off lightly and merely be executed as murderers.
In 1997, a Catholic bishop, Dr Philip Boyce of Raphoe, tells us that vasectomy is a sin, a "type of mutilation", and a breach of God's law. He is supported by a spokesman for the Irish Catholic Church as a whole who tells us that anything that makes the "sexual faculty incapable of procreation" is a sin.
A prominent gynaecologist and anti abortion activist, Dr Louis Courtney, tells the nation on Questions and Answers that he is informed by an unnamed medical colleague who knows about such matters that men who have vasectomies suffer loss of libido, depression, and a feeling that they are no longer real men.
Isn't it good to see that some of our more venerable traditions have survived the passage of the centuries? These days, when there is such nostalgia for the old certainties, when the whole notion of tradition is enveloped in such a rosy glow, it is no harm to have our memories stirred. Dr Boyce, Dr Courtney and the three doctors who picketed the vasectomy clinic at Letterkenny General Hospital could almost be said to have provided a useful public service.
They have helped to remind us of two things. One is that it is usual to wait until something is gone before feeling nostalgic about it: how can we miss Catholic fundamentalism when it never went away? The other is that much of what passes for tradition is really superstition. With ideas, as with people, age is no guarantee of wisdom.
Notions that have been handed down through the centuries are at least as likely to be nonsense as those that were thought up yesterday.
Lest it be thought unfair to link Bishop Boyce and the doctors who picketed the vasectomy clinic to the witch hunters of the middle ages, it is worth pointing out that until 1977 the Catholic church officially refused to marry any man who could not produce "real semen" - in other words, seminal fluid containing sperm.
This fixation with real semen did not, by the way, stop the church employing castrati in sacred choirs - but that's another day's hypocrisy.
In 1944, for instance, the church decreed that a man who had been forcibly sterilised by the Nazis should not be allowed to marry. Only for the last 20 years has the Sacred Congregation of the Faith decreed, in its enormous generosity of spirit, that "those who have suffered a vasectomy or find themselves in similar circumstances should not be hindered from marrying".
That decree, of course, has not changed the Church's basic position that vasectomy is the devil's work: the use of the word "suffered" is eloquent in itself.
Why are we loath to name this for what it is.
Whether it is dressed up in religious language by Dr Boyce or in medical language by Dr Courtney, it is no more than a strange prejudice that has more to do with magic than with morality. It belongs in exactly the same category as the belief that devils and witches are interfering with our sperm, or, in a modern equivalent, as the air force commander in Doctor Strangelove who thinks the Commies are sapping his vital juices.
It comes forth from some dark and fetid psycho sexual swamp to stalk the earth, or at least that part of it unfortunate enough to come within the remit of the North Western Health Board.
When a man tells his followers that Comet Hale Bopp is a harbinger of alien spacecraft coming to take them away to a better life, no one calls him a religious leader, or tells us that we should be careful not to offend the deeply held beliefs of his flock.
When another man tells his male followers that they will be doomed for all eternity if they have a tiny piece of their vas deferens removed, he is a spiritual teacher, whose views are not only to be listened to, but taken into account in the provision of public health services.
One kind of superstition is treated with contempt, the other with respect. The only real difference between them is that one has the sanction of centuries, while the other hasn't.
THE second superstition may not be as dangerous as the first, but it does a lot of harm all the same. It encourages one of the worst forms of male stupidity - the belief that not only a man's sexuality but his worth as a human being is centred in his penis.
In terms of their deepest prejudices, though not, of course, of their behaviour, the doctor or theologian who thinks that a man with a piece of his vas deferens missing is not really a man is not as far as he might like to think from the gouger who measures his manhood by the number of women he has managed to impregnate.
And it also helps to deprive many couples of the benefits of vasectomy, not just by stopping the provision of the service but by spreading baseless fears.
Having had the operation myself, I can bear witness to the fact that it is not to be undertaken casually. Spreading Immac in places it was never intended to go is no laughing matter. Neither is trying to carry on a polite conversation with a man who has a laser gun pointed at the most vulnerable parts of your anatomy. And there may be some men who will feel their virility threatened by not being able to jangle coins in their trousers pockets for at least a week.
But all that rubbish about loss of libido and low self esteem comes from those wonderful folks who told us that masturbation makes you blind.
When it comes to virility, there is no accounting for taste. But I suspect that a real man might prefer to undergo a relatively minor operation himself rather than put his partner through the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy.
A real man might find his self esteem enhanced by the thought that his partner doesn't have to keep taking the pill for another 20 years. A real man might imagine that the content of his family life is more important than the content of his seminal fluid.
And a real man might prefer to live in a society where he can take decisions about his own body and his own life without being beholden to the ignorance of some county councillors or the medieval mindset of some clerics.