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By Russell Shaw
In the last 100 years, eight popes have issued 116 of the teaching documents called encyclicals, on subjects ranging from the Sacred Heart to atheistic communism. Amid this outpouring of papal instruction, Humanae Vitae ("On Human Life"), Pope Paul VI's document on artificial birth control, is easily the most controversial and had the largest impact on the Church.
Whether Humanae Vitae was a prophetic document or a blunder remains in dispute. But 40 years after its issuance on July 25, 1968, it stands as a watershed in Catholic life.
Where fewer than one-third of American Catholics approved of artificial birth control in 1963 -- a rate less than half that among non-Catholics -- by 2005 three out of four Catholics believed it is possible to be a good Catholic, in the pollster's words, "without obeying the Church hierarchy's teaching on birth control."
In November 2006, the American bishops, speaking in a collective statement, called the common acceptance of contraception an "impoverished, even sad" view of sex.
Much else also has changed in these four decades since Humanae Vitae first appeared.
n Dissent from Church teaching on a variety of issues has become entrenched among some Catholic theologians. Ten years after the encyclical, the most famous dissenter of them all, Father Charles Curran, said some of them rejected the Church's views not only on birth control but on "sterilization, artificial insemination, masturbation, [and] the generic gravity of sexual sins."
For good measure, he added that "newer approaches have recently been taken to the question of homosexuality." In the 30 years since then, the scope of this dissent has grown and has come to include issues in the area of dogma as well as morals.
n Acceptance of the Church's teaching authority has declined among U.S. Catholics. A 1993 survey found that only 12 percent of Catholics under the age of 50 and only 28 percent of those older than 50 agreed with everything the Church taught on faith and morality.
n The Church's solidarity has been weakened, with Catholics deeply divided on many matters of doctrine and discipline. Opinion polls consistently show that regular Mass attendees are far more likely to agree with the Church on a range of issues than those who seldom or never go to Mass, although adherence to the Church's views on matters is more or less shaky even among those who regularly attend Mass.
Although some 75 percent or more of their co-religionists apparently disagree with them, defenders of Humanae Vitae have by no means given up the fight, and they have significant support.
In his 27 years as pope, Pope John Paul II frequently and vigorously reaffirmed the teaching against contraception. He also expounded an innovative theology of the body, which has attracted a core of committed followers. The natural family planning movement remains small but determined in the United States. And the troubling consequences of sexual permissiveness, including abortion, out-of-wedlock births, HIV/AIDS and marital breakdown, have nudged a goodly number of people in the direction of a traditional sexual ethic.
Four decades later, the battle lines drawn over Humanae Vitae are still in place. But the shape of the conflict that was to come was clear even before the encyclical appeared.
Forty years ago, the condemnation of artificial means of preventing conception was hardly a new element in Christian teaching. Church fathers like St. Clement of Alexandria (150-215) and St. Augustine (354-430) condemned abortion and birth control. For centuries, this teaching was universally preached and taught.
The first break in the Christian consensus came in 1930, when the Anglican Communion's Lambeth Conference declared that contraception by married couples could be permitted in some circumstances. Other Christian denominations soon took the same line.
In 1931, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical called Casti Connubii ("Chaste Marriage"), reaffirming the traditional doctrine that all acts of artificial birth control are morally wrong. Pope Pius XII repeated this teaching a number of times, including in one of his last public talks before his death in 1958.
But by then, other things had started putting growing pressure on the doctrine.
Warning of an impending "population bomb," an activist population-control movement demanded the inclusion of contraception in government-sponsored foreign aid and domestic anti-poverty programs.
Oral contraceptives -- or "the pill"-- had become all the rage as a central part of the sexual revolution by then underway in society. One of the pill's principal developers, Dr. John Rock, was a Harvard medical professor whose record as an active Catholic layman made him an effective advocate of oral contraception in Catholic circles.
Other voices suggesting change in the Church's position also began to be heard. When the Vatican's Holy Office (predecessor of today's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) said in 1961 that nuns in the Congo who were in danger of being raped could take the pill, some took it as an opening to exploit.
Most observers assumed that the Second Vatican Council, which began in the fall of 1962, would deal with the question. But in 1963, not long before his death, Pope John XXIII took the matter out of the council's hands and turned it over to a new Commission for the Study of Problems of Population, Family and Birthrate -- in time, known as the "birth control commission." It had only six members at the start, but was expanded by Pope Paul VI, who succeeded Pope John, and eventually numbered 72, including cardinals and bishops, theologians, physicians and married couples.
Pope Paul also was responsible for a key footnote on birth control added to Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. Attached to a passage cautioning Catholics not to use means of birth regulation "forbidden ... by the teaching authority of the Church," it cited Casti Connubii and anti-contraception pronouncements by Pope Pius XII.
Meanwhile, a majority of the birth control commission was heading in a different direction. Early on, the commission moved beyond the question of oral contraceptives to the larger issue of whether the condemnation of artificial birth control as a whole should stand.
In March 1965, a majority agreed that the teaching of Casti Connubii was "re-formable." By now, the commission was split between a liberal faction favoring contraception and a smaller group that supported the traditional teaching.
Matters came to a head on June 23, 1966, when a majority of the group's bishop-members voted for a "majority report" favoring contraception. They included Cardinal Lawrence Shehan of Baltimore and Archbishop, later Cardinal, John Dearden of Detroit. Coadjutor Archbishop Leo Binz of St. Paul-Minneapolis abstained. The majority report and a "minority report" backing the traditional doctrine were presented to Pope Paul on June 28.
The other American supporters of contraception on the commission included Pat and Patty Crowley of Chicago, leaders of the Christian Family Movement; Dr. John R. Cavanagh, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist; and John T. Noonan, a law professor and, later, California judge. Noonan was author of a scholarly book concluding that the Church had condemned artificial birth control from the start.
On the minority side were Jesuit Father John C. Ford, at that time the most prominent Catholic moral theologian in the United States, and Msgr. George Kelly, family life director of the Archdiocese of New York and founder of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.
Although the commission's proceedings were supposedly confidential, leaks to the press were common. True to form, the documents presented to the pope were leaked, appearing simultaneously in April 1967 in the National Catholic Reporter in the United States and The Tablet, a Catholic weekly published in London. The intent plainly was to put pressure on Pope Paul VI.
With interested parties and the press fanning public expectations of change, the pope agonized another year, then finally stood firm on the traditional doctrine. While writing Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul is said to have read and been influenced by the writings of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Krakow and a member of the birth control commission who had been unable to attend its meetings. In 1978 Cardinal Wojtyla was to become Pope John Paul II.
The Church, Pope Paul declared in Humanae Vitae, "teaches that it is necessary that each conjugal act remain ordained in itself to the procreating of human life." And the birth control commission's majority report? Pope Paul thanked the commission for its work but pointed out that nothing it said could relieve him, the supreme teacher of the Church, of his "duty of deciding" the question.
A worldwide uproar, predictable in light of the advance buildup, greeted Humanae Vitae. Within 24 hours, Father Curran released a statement carrying the names of 87 theologians -- later, reportedly 600 -- who dissented from its teaching. (Some later changed their minds.)
Most bishops' conferences voiced support, although in some cases more or less weakly. At least three conferences -- the Canadian, Dutch and French -- said couples could conscientiously decide to practice contraception.
In November 1968, the U.S. conference of bishops issued a long pastoral letter -- also covering the war in Vietnam -- which supported Humanae Vitae but also laid out "norms of licit theological dissent." By contrast, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox churches, Athenagoras I, expressed agreement with the pope.
The bitterest public battle in the United States took place in Washington, D.C., where Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle suspended a number of archdiocesan priests who announced that their intention to ignore the encyclical in their pastoral practice. Most eventually left the priesthood. In April 1971, the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy directed that the suspension of those who remained be lifted without requiring them to back down.
Humanae Vitae's critics have insisted from the start that it isn't infallible. Even the man handpicked to present it at a Vatican press conference -- Msgr. Federico Lambruschini, a member of the birth control commission who supported changing the Church's teaching -- said that.
In fact, though, to ask whether this encyclical is an infallible document misses the point. The real question is whether the doctrine on birth control that Humanae Vitae repeats was taught infallibly long before the encyclical by the ordinary magisterium as prescribed by Vatican II (Lumen Gentium, No. 25).
In an article published in June 1978 in the journal "Theological Studies," Father Ford and Germain Grisez, an American ethicist and theologian who worked with the priest on the birth control commission's minority report, argued that indeed the teaching had been infallibly proposed in this way for centuries. There has been no refutation of their argument to date.
Instead, many moral theologians now not only oppose Church teaching on birth control and other specific issues, but base their opposition on ethical systems at odds with the Catholic tradition.
This dispute pits the Church's insistence on absolute moral norms against utilitarian and relativistic theories with names like "consequentialism" and "proportionalism." The new theories hold that circumstances determine the morality of particular actions, and no kind of action can be excluded before the fact.
Pope John Paul rejected that idea in his 1995 encyclical Veritatis Splendor ("The Splendor of Truth"). "The negative precepts of the natural law are universally valid. They oblige each and every individual, always and in every circumstance," he said.
Earlier, in a document issued as follow-up to the 1980 world Synod of Bishops, Pope John Paul joined the representatives of the world's hierarchy in endorsing the teaching of Humanae Vitae. Winding up his "theology of the body" talks in 1984, he went even further. The condemnation of artificial birth control, he said, "belongs not only to the natural moral law, but also to the moral order revealed by God."
Pope Benedict XVI says he prefers to stress what is positive in Catholic doctrine to emphasizing prohibitions like the teaching on contraception. But his position on artificial birth control is clear.
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he wrote Father Curran in 1985 saying he could no longer teach as a "Catholic theologian" on the pontifical theology faculty of The Catholic University of America because of the "inherent contradiction ... that one who is to teach in the name of the Church in fact denies her teaching."
And last May, in an address to a conference on Humanae Vitae in Rome, he strongly defended the encyclical. "What was true yesterday remains true also today. The truth expressed in Humanae Vitae does not change," he said.
In a long interview with German journalist, published in the United States in 2002 as "God and the World" (Ignatius Press, $19.95), he expressed sympathy for people who sometimes fail in living up to the teaching on contraception. But he rejected the idea that the Church was causing human "misery" in this way.
"Misery comes from demoralizing society, not from moralizing it, and the condom propaganda is an essential part of this demoralizing," the pope-to-be declared.
Pope Paul VI made much the same point. It was no surprise, he said in Humanae Vitae, for the Church to find itself in the role of a "sign of contradiction" -- after all, Christ also was one of those. But that, he insisted, was "no reason for the Church to abandon the duty entrusted to her of preaching the whole moral law firmly and humbly, both the natural law and the law of the Gospel."
The Church's duty hasn't changed in 40 years. There is no reason to think it will.
Russell Shaw is a contributing editor to Our Sunday Visitor.
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