August 10-16, 2008 Issue |
Posted 8/5/08 at 9:56 AM
Pope Paul
VI’s courageous encyclical Humanae Vitae is the
only papal encyclical to have been received with a firestorm of dissent by
theologians, lay Catholics, and even bishops. To understand the vital
importance of Humanae Vitae’s 40th anniversary, which is
being celebrated this month, it is necessary to penetrate more deeply into the
reasons behind such unprecedented dissent.
By July of 1968, many lay Catholics
and theologians had been swept along by the ideological claims of the sexual
revolution. But that wasn’t the only reason that more than 50% of Catholic
married couples were already practicing contraception by the time the
encyclical was issued.
Many believed that change in the
Church’s consistent teaching against contraception was imminent. More than 60%
of the laity expected such a change, according to a Gallup poll in mid-1965.
How had such anticipation developed that what in fact could not be changed
would be changed?
One key factor: Prominent
theologians were beginning to speak out publicly in dissent against the
Church’s teaching prohibiting contraception as a means of birth control. In
highly publicized lecture tours, theologians like Hans Küng, Charles Curran and
Bernard Häring made their dissent known.
Another influential figure on the
public stage at the time was a Catholic gynecologist from Boston, Dr. John
Rock. In 1963 he published his work, The Time Has Come: A Catholic
Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control. Rock
speciously argued that use of the birth-control pill was simply a refinement of
the “rhythm method,” since it did no more than extend the woman’s naturally
infertile period.
It does not require extensive moral
training to recognize the fallacy in Rock’s reasoning.
To argue that performing the
conjugal act after inducing sterility, thus eliminating its procreative
meaning, is morally equivalent to abstaining from the conjugal act during the
woman’s naturally fertile period for serious reasons, in order to respect both
the unitive and procreative meanings of the act, is a fallacy so evident that
no further elucidation is necessary.
Rock did not content himself with
the publication of his book. He also appeared in such venues as Life,
TheSaturday Evening Post, and Newsweek,
as well as television interviews. As a result, he was a key player in the
secular media’s de facto legitimization of Catholic dissent.
But Catholic publications also began
voicing their dissent.
The December 1963 issue of Jubilee
magazine carried an influential article bluntly critical of Church teaching by
Rosemary Radford Ruether, then a graduate student in Church history and mother
of three young children. Her specious line of reasoning is revealed quite
plainly in the following sentence: “Hence, sexual acts that are calculated to
function only during times of sterility are sterilizing the act just as much as
any other means of rendering the act infertile.”
Once again, to claim that abstaining
from sexual intercourse during the woman’s fertile period is the same as sterilizing
the act of intercourse is blatantly false. It is simply not the same to abstain
from an act in order to respect its intrinsic meanings (unitive and
procreative) as to engage in that act while eliminating its procreative
meaning.
Even The Pontifical Commission for
the Study of Population, Family and Births came to be a factor in leading many
Catholics to think that a change in the prohibition against contraception was
just around the corner.
Originally created by Pope John
XXIII with six members, the commission was expanded several times by Paul VI.
Its membership stood at 72, including
bishops, priests, lay experts and married couples, when it met for the final
time in the summer of 1966.
Unable
to reach a consensus, the purely advisory body presented two reports to Pope
Paul VI. What soon came to be known as the “Majority Report” called for a
change in the Church’s teaching on contraception; the “Minority Report”
outlined the reasons that the Church could not make such a change, due to the
intrinsic evil of contraception.
Though
all the members were bound by secrecy, the reports were leaked to the press and
published in April 1967 by the National
Catholic Reporter. The story
greatly intensified expectations, at least among the laity, that the teaching
would soon be amended.
Priests
were a final factor in the swell of expectations for change. Many found
themselves influenced by the voices of dissent and were reluctant to stand
behind the Church’s teaching against contraception in confession or personal
consultations.
As
a result, they would often tell husbands or wives to follow their own
consciences, to simply do what they thought was right. “Anyone wanting to
practice birth control today can do so if he looks for the right priest,” wrote
a couple from Syracuse, N.Y., in 1965.
The Great Silence
Given the groundswell of forces
anticipating a change in Church teaching, perhaps the firestorm of dissent that
greeted Humanae Vitae was not entirely surprising.
But as the months and years passed, by the early 1970s a new phenomenon arose,
what Jesuit theologian Richard McCormick called “the silence since Humanae
Vitae.” Leslie Woodcock Tentler affirms in her book Catholics
and Contraception: An American History, “Thus, not long after Humanae
Vitae, a great public silence came to prevail with regard to
contraception” (273-274).
Andrew Greeley characterized the
situation in 1972 as follows: “A peculiar, implicit gentleman’s agreement has
developed between clergy and hierarchy in which the hierarchy commits itself
not to try seriously to enforce compliance with Humanae
Vitae so long as the clergy is not too open and public in its
opposition to the encyclical.”
Since approximately 80% of Catholic
married couples still fail today to practice the Church’s teachings regarding
contraception, this silence has proved just as devastating for the future of a
culture of life as the actual open dissent to Humanae Vitae. By
1972 Pope Paul VI would famously declare: “Satan’s smoke has made its way into
the temple of God through some crack. … One no longer trusts the Church; one
trusts the first profane prophet that comes along.”
John Paul II
On Sept. 5, 1979, the great silence
over Humanae Vitae was definitively broken with words that continue,
even now, to reverberate more and more deeply in the hearts and consciences of
Catholics throughout the world. At a Wednesday general audience, Pope John Paul
II began elaborating on his theology of the body, which was the most
comprehensive, cogent, and compelling defense of Humanae Vitae
ever.
Catholic
thinker Sean Inherst, to convey the intense drama of the present attack on
God’s plan for man and woman, does not hesitate to identify the contraceptive
ideology as a modern heresy: “anti-conceptionism.” Inherst affirms John Paul
II’s theology of the body by explaining how married love is at the heart of
God’s entire plan of salvation and will one day gain victory over this new
threat to the faith and humanity.
I’m
sure we are living in that age which Catholics of the future will describe as
the near-triumph of the heresy of anti-conceptionism. They will recount that
this heresy not only threatened millions of souls, but millions of bodies, as
well.
As
has always been the case in theological development, they will recognize that
this attack against the original plan of God — disclosed as his “marital plan”
— will have been vanquished by a precise theological elaboration on the place
of the marital covenant: the very heart and center of the economy of salvation.
Legionary Father Walter Schu
is author of The
Splendor of Love on John
Paul II’s theology of the body, a course for couples of Familia.
wschu@legionaries.org
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