Authors: David Yallop
In October 1951, Pius XII (1939–58) had softened the somewhat austere position on birth control he had inherited from his predecessors. During an audience with Italian midwives he gave his approval to the use of the ‘rhythm’ method by all Catholics with serious reasons for wishing to avoid procreation. In view of the notorious unreliability of what became known as ‘Vatican Roulette’ it is not surprising that Pius XII also called for further research into the rhythm method. Nevertheless, Pius had moved the Church away from its previous position that had viewed procreation as the sole purpose of sexual intercourse.
After Pius XII came not only a new Pope but also the invention of the progesterone pill. Infallibility had been claimed for certain Papal opinions but no one yet claimed Papal clairvoyance. A new situation required a new look at the problem, but the four dissenting priests on the Commission insisted that the new situation was covered by old answers.
Finally the Commission wrote its report. In essence it advised the Pope that consensus had been reached by an overwhelming majority (64 votes to 4) of theologians, legal experts, historians, sociologists, doctors, obstetricians and married couples, that a change in the Catholic Church’s stand on birth control was both possible and advisable.
Their report was submitted in mid-1966 to the commission of cardinals and bishops who were overseeing the Pontifical Commission. These churchmen reacted with some perplexity. Obliged to record their own views on the report, 6 of the prelates abstained, 8 voted in favour of recommending the report to the Pope and 6 voted against it.
Within certain sections of the Roman Curia, that central administrative body of civil servants who control and dominate the Catholic Church, there were widespread reactions. Some applauded the recommendation for change, others saw it as part of the mischievous wickedness that Vatican Council II had generated. In this latter category was Cardinal Ottaviani, Secretary of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. The motto on his coat-of-arms read
Semper Idem,
‘Always the Same’.
By 1966, Alfredo Ottaviani was, next to the Pope, the most powerful person in the entire Roman Catholic Church. An ex-pupil of the Roman Seminary, he was a man who passed his whole career in the Secretariat of State and the Curia without ever being posted out of Rome.
He had fought a bitter and often successful battle against the liberalizing effects of Vatican Council II. His forehead permanently furrowed, his skull curved back dramatically as if constantly avoiding a direct question, a neck-line hidden by bulging jowls, there was about him an air of sphinx-like immobility. He was a man not merely born old but born out of his time. He exemplified that section of the Curia which has the courage of its prejudices.
He saw himself as defender of a faith that did not accommodate the here and now. To Ottaviani the hereafter was reached by embracing values that were old in medieval times. He was not about to budge on the issue of birth control; more important, he was determined that Pope Paul VI was not going to budge.
Ottaviani contacted the four dissenting priests from the Pontifical Commission. Their views had already been fully incorporated within the Commission’s report. He persuaded them to enlarge their dissenting conclusions in a special report. Thus the Jesuit Marcellino Zalba, the Redemptorist Jan Visser, the Franciscan Ermenegildo Lio and the American Jesuit John Ford, created a second document.
No matter that in doing so they acted in an unethical manner; the object of the exercise was to give Ottaviani a weapon to brandish at the Pope. The four men bear an awesome responsibility for what was to follow. The amount of death, misery and suffering that directly resulted from the final Papal decision can to a large degree be laid directly at their feet. An indication of the thought-processess applied by these four can be gauged from one of their number, the American Jesuit, John Ford. He considered he was in direct contact with the Holy Spirit with regard to this issue and that this Divine guidance had led him to the ultimate truth. If the majority view prevailed, Ford declared that he would have to leave the Roman Catholic Church. This minority report represents the epitome of arrogance. It was submitted to Pope Paul along with the official Commission report. What followed was a classic illustration of the ability of a minority of the Roman Curia to control situations, to manipulate events. By the time the two reports were submitted to Paul most of the 68 members of the Commission were scattered to the corners of the earth.
Convinced that this difficult problem had finally been resolved with
a liberalizing conclusion the majority of the Commission members waited in their various countries for the Papal announcement approving artificial birth control. Some of them began to prepare a paper that could serve as an introduction or preface to the impending Papal ruling, in which there was full justification for the change in the Church’s position.
Throughout 1967 and continuing into early 1968 Ottaviani capitalized on the absence from Rome of the majority of the Commission. Those who were still in the City were exercising great restraint in not bringing further pressure upon Paul. By doing so they played straight into Ottaviani’s hands. He marshalled members of the old guard who shared his views. Cardinals Cicognani, Browne, Parente and Samore, daily just happened to meet the Pope. Daily they told him that to approve artificial birth control would be to betray the Church’s heritage. They reminded him of the Church’s Canon Law and the three criteria that were applied to all Catholics seeking to marry. Without these three essentials the marriage is invalidated in the eyes of the Church: erection, ejaculation and conception. To legalize oral contraception, they argued, would be to destroy that particular church Law. Many, including his predecessor John XXIII, have compared Pope Paul VI with the doubt-racked Hamlet. Every Hamlet has need of an Elsinore Castle in which to brood. Eventually, the Pope decided that he and he alone would make the final decision. He summoned Monsignor Agostino Casaroli and advised him that the problem of birth control would be removed from the competence of the Holy Office. Then he retired to Castel Gandolfo to work upon the encyclical.
On the Pope’s desk at Castel Gandolfo, amid the various reports, recommendations and studies on the issue of artificial birth control, was one from Albino Luciani.
While his Commissions, consultants and Curial cardinals were dissecting the problem the Pope had also asked for the opinion of various regions in Italy. One of these was the Veneto diocese. The Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Urbani, had called a meeting of all the bishops within the region. After a day’s debate it was decided that Luciani should draw up the report.
The decision to give Luciani the task was largely based on his knowledge of the problem. It was a subject he had been studying for a number of years. He had talked and written about it, he had consulted doctors, sociologists, theologians, and not least that group who had personal practical experience of the problem, married couples.
Among the married couples was his own brother, Edoardo, struggling to earn enough to keep an ever-growing family that eventually numbered ten children. Luciani saw at first hand the problems posed by a continuing ban on artificial birth control. He had grown up surrounded by poverty. Now in the late 1960s there appeared to him to be as much poverty and deprivation as in the lost days of his youth. When those one cares for are in despair because of their inability to provide for an increasing number of children, one is inclined to view the problem of birth control in a different light from Jesuits who are in direct contact with the Holy Spirit.
The men in the Vatican could quote Genesis until the Day of Judgment but it would not put bread on the table. To Albino Luciani Vatican Council II had intended to relate the Gospels and the Church to the twentieth century, and to deny men and women the right of artificial birth control was to plunge the Church back to the Dark Ages. Much of this he said quietly and privately as he prepared his report. Publicly he was acutely aware of his obedience to the Pope. In this Luciani remained an excellent example of his time. When the Pope decreed then the faithful agreed. Yet even in his public utterances there are clear clues to his thinking on the issue of birth control.
By April 1968, after much further consultation, Luciani’s report had been written and submitted. It had met with the approval of the bishops of the Veneto region and Cardinal Urbani had duly signed the report and sent it directly to Pope Paul. Subsequently, Urbani saw the document on the Pope’s desk at Castel Gandolfo. Paul advised Urbani that he valued the report greatly. So highly did he praise it that when Urbani returned to Venice he went via Vittorio Veneto to convey directly to Luciani the Papal pleasure the report had given.
The central thrust of the report was to recommend to the Pope that the Roman Catholic Church should approve the use of the anovulant pill developed by Professor Pincus.
That it should become the Catholic birth control pill.
On April 13th, Luciani talked to the people of Vittorio Veneto about the problems the issue was causing. With the delicacy that had by now become a characteristic Luciani hallmark, he called the subject ‘conjugal ethics’. Having observed that priests in speaking and in hearing confessions ‘must abide by the directives given on several occasions by the Pope until the latter makes a pronouncement’, Luciani went on to make three observations:
1 It is easier today, given the confusion caused by the press, to find married persons who do not believe that they are sinning. If this should happen it may be opportune, under the usual conditions, not to disturb them.
2 Towards the penitent onanist, who shows himself to be both penitent and discouraged, it is opportune to use encouraging kindness, within the limits of pastoral prudence.
3 Let us pray that the Lord may help the Pope to resolve this question. There has never perhaps been such a difficult question for the Church: both for the intrinsic difficulties and for the numerous implications affecting other problems, and for the acute way in which it is felt by the vast mass of the people.
Humanae Vitae
was published on July 25th, 1968. Pope Paul had Monsignor Lambruschini of the Lateran University explain its significance to the Press, in itself a rather superfluous exercise. More significantly, it was stressed that this was not an infallible document. It became for millions of Catholics an historic moment like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Years later they knew exactly what they were doing and where they were when the news reached them.
On a disaster scale for the Roman Catholic Church it measures higher than the treatment of Galileo in the seventeenth century or the declaration of Papal Infallibility in the nineteenth. This document which was intended to strengthen Papal authority had precisely the opposite effect.
This celibate man, then 71 years of age, having expanded the Commission that was advising him on the problem of birth control, ignored its advice. He declared that the only methods of birth control which the Church considered acceptable were abstinence and the rhythm method ‘. . . in any use whatever of marriage there must be no impairment of its natural capacity to procreate human life.’
Millions ignored the Pope and continued to practise their faith and use the Pill or whatever other method they found most suitable. Millions lost patience and faith. Others shopped around for a different priest to whom to confess their sins. Still others tried to follow the encyclical and discovered they had avoided one Catholic concept of sin only to experience another, divorce. The encyclical totally divided the Church.
‘I cannot believe that salvation is based on contraception by temperature and damnation is based on rubber,’ declared Dr Andre Hellegers,
an obstetrician and member of the ignored Pontifical Commission. One surprising line of the Vatican’s defence came from Cardinal Felici: ‘The possible mistake of the superior [the Pope] does not authorize the disobedience of subjects.’
Albino Luciani read the encyclical with growing dismay. He knew the uproar that would now engulf the Church. He went to his church in Vittorio Veneto and prayed. There was no question in his mind but that he must obey the Papal ruling but, deep as his allegiance to the Pope was, he could not, would not, merely sing praise to
Humanae Vitae.
He knew a little of what the document must have cost the Pope; he knew a great deal of what it was going to cost the faithful who would have to attempt to apply it to their everyday lives.
Within hours of reading the encyclical Luciani had written his response to the diocese of Vittorio Veneto. In ten years’ time when he became Pope, the Vatican would assert that Luciani’s response was ‘Rome has spoken. The case is closed.’ It was yet another Vatican lie. Nothing approaching that sentiment appears in his words. He began by reminding the diocese of his comments in April, then continued:
I confess that, although not revealing it in what I wrote, I privately hoped that the very grave difficulties that exist could be overcome and the response of the Teacher, who speaks with special charisma and in the name of the Lord, might coincide, at least in part, with the hopes of many married couples after the setting up of a relevant Pontifical Commission to examine the question.
He acknowledged the amount of care and consideration the Pope had given to the problem and said that the Pope knew ‘he is about to cause bitterness in many’, but he continued, ‘The old doctrine, presented in a new framework of encouraging and positive ideas about marriage and conjugal love, better guarantees the true good of man and family.’ Luciani faced some of the problems that would inevitably flow from
Humanae Vitae: