Authors: Patrick Coffin
Chapter One
And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?
—1 Corinthians 14:8
How did we get here? How did the cultural ethos change so radically from the early 1960s, and how did it reverberate so powerfully within the Catholic Church? While polling data is not always perfectly reliable, one universally accepted truth is that a majority of today’s Catholics “have a problem with” the Church’s teaching against contraception. Anecdotal evidence suggest it’s somewhere near ninety percent.
It was not always so. Among the laity and established theologians alike, there was a firm consensus until the mid-1960s that the condemnation of artificial birth control was a closed, settled issue.
1
Even those who later abandoned the ancient position of the Church and became well-known as vocal dissenters were, in the early Sixties, solidly committed to Catholic orthodoxy on this issue. These include Karl Rahner, SJ; Father Andrew Greeley; Richard McCormick, SJ; Josef Fuchs, SJ; and others.
A shifting of the ground began after the close of Vatican II in 1965 during the long wait for the publication of an official, not-yet-named document on birth control.
2
Some still claim that the dramatic abandonment of a commonly held doctrine was somehow the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking through the “voice of the laity.”
The short answer to this is to repeat that the Catholic Church is not a democracy. If it were, then the Church of Christ would have spun itself into the Church of Arius in the fourth century, since a large majority of the faithful held to the Arian heresy.
3
What is more, in the face of bad polling numbers, Jesus would have backed down from His teaching about the Real Presence in the Eucharist.
4
Ironically, groups dissenting on contraception were led and organized primarily by clergy, including some bishops. Arguably, the strongest voices of support for Pope Paul VI have come from the laity, a sterling example being H. Lyman Stebbins, who founded Catholics United for the Faith in 1968 during the maelstrom over
Humanae Vitae
.
Americans are enamored with the ideals of democracy. The habit of making vital decisions by a vote runs deep in American life. We vote on civic laws, police chiefs, mayors, presidents. On television, we vote off survivors from islands and idols off stages. And yet, as we’ll see in Chapter Three, the Church was established by the authority of the Lord Jesus, not by the consent of His disciples. Jesus is Lord, on His terms. And if He is not Lord of our sexuality, He is Lord of nothing. The Church is a Bride with a Bridegroom, a Body with a Head. And her doctrines come from Him, not from a show of hands.
The secular causes of the shift toward dissent are easy enough to track. The timing of Paul’s encyclical could hardly have been worse, having appeared during the pause between the Summer of Love and the Woodstock Music Festival. “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” sang the chorus in
Hair!
, the nudist musical of the day. The cultural ethos bristled with the anti-traditional values of Haight-Ashbury, LSD experimentation, Hippies, hand-painted Volkswagen vans, “free” “love,” and campus unrest.
The year 1968 saw the Tet Offensive in Viet Nam and a spike in antiwar protests across the country. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy were murdered that year, the same year the French government was almost toppled by strikes and the May student uprising. Two years earlier, in Hollywood, the decades-old Hays Production Code was replaced with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings system.
5
Tumult was the theme, change the constant. The English historian Paul Johnson called it the year of “America’s suicide attempt.”
6
Into this galloping river
Humanae Vitae
was dropped, to whirl bravely upstream like a gawky, determined salmon. And whirl it did, even though, from a worldly point of view, it carried the wrong message at the wrong time to the wrong audience.
The Catholic flock of the late 1960s was disoriented as to what was expected of them in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Tens of thousands of priests and religious had fled their vows. As the Church recalibrated her relationship to the world, many Catholics recalibrated their relationship to the Church. Latin was everywhere eclipsed, quite against the mandates of the Council. Theological outlooks became congealed: the Right wanted only continuity with the past; the Left, with the future. For many of the ordinary faithful, the idea that conscience trumps truth had a seductive ring to it—an idea that would have consequences for the birth control debate, particularly in the Canada of my childhood, as we’ll see in the next chapter.
Candor requires the admission that some intra-Church factors also unwittingly encouraged dissent.
Catholics believe that popes, when they teach in union with the bishops of the world, do so infallibly in matters of faith and morals—including the common teaching of Ecumenical Councils. Again, not necessarily in temporal affairs. We can retain filial respect for leaders in the Church while affirming that not all administrative or disciplinary decisions are created equal; some have unintended and unforeseen results.
A few examples: The Second Vatican Council addressed the issue of birth control in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,
7
but declined to make any direct, explicit pronouncement since the Papal Commission on Birth begun by Pope John XIII and enlarged by Paul VI in 1964 was still in session.
8
It is odd that a more forceful statement wasn’t made in the sections dealing with marriage and family. Leftists could, and did, view the tentative tone as something of a loophole or a sign of things to come.
While the purpose of the expanded Papal Commission has never been made crystal clear, as it grew under Paul VI’s watchful eye, some of its members became virtual celebrities when portions of their deliberations were leaked to the press in 1966. Blood was in the water. Most among the vaunted Commission voted for change. Four years of whisper campaigns and fawning media coverage of the Commission’s (selectively) confidential activities were never far from the news wires.
While no one believes Paul VI was a closet dissenter who finally buckled under “curial pressure,” there is some evidence that he wanted the fullest possible answer to the question of the birth control pill, which was given FDA approval in 1960. Professor Germain Grisez assisted John Ford, SJ, a member of the Commission who stood with the Church. “[Pope] Paul also thought there might be something about the pill that was different,” Grisez told an interviewer in 2003. “And, if there was, he wanted to find out about it, because he felt the Church couldn’t ask something that God doesn’t require of them.”
9
While widely respected, Paul VI did not elicit the kind of spontaneous affection from the public that Pope John XXIII did with his ample girth and cherubic grin. Nor did he command the august bearing of a Pius XI or a Pius XII, neither of whom had any known allergies to confrontation. Pope Paul’s work of overseeing three quarters of the Second Vatican Council got him labeled too conservative for the progressives, too progressive for the old guard. By temperament, Paul VI was more Prince Hamlet than King Lear.
Agitation for change came drop by drop, sometimes from unexpectedly high places in the Church. Pope Paul continued to wrestle with his response. In a private meeting with Archbishop Sheen, the Pope confided to the famous U.S. prelate that when he (Paul VI) rested his head on his pillow at night, he felt as though it were made of thorns.
10
During his General Audience on July 31, 1968, at the end of his four-year study period, Paul VI admitted that he “trembled before alternatives,” and never felt the burden of his high office more keenly in his entire papacy.
The Commission’s Majority Report, as it’s colloquially known, argued for a change in the two-thousand-year-old teaching. The arguments are similar to that of the Anglican Lambeth Conference in 1930. To say that flappers have a lot in common with hippies is to put too fine a point on it. But both groups, old Anglican bishops and new Catholic theologians, took corresponding pains to insist that birth control is to be used only in exceptional cases—and only in marriage—and that such use would not, could not, should not, lead to any social problems like promiscuity or marital breakdown.
11
Two years went by after the leak. Pope Paul continued to deliberate, ever bombarded by an unremitting pressure to capitulate to the whisper of the world to consider the Pill morally neutral or even good.
When the encyclical was finally released on July 25, 1968, Paul VI inexplicably chose Monsignor Ferdinando Lambruschini to announce it at a press conference. A moral theologian at Lateran University, Monsignor Lambruschini voted for change at the final meeting of the Papal Commission.
12
During the press conference, he promptly announced that the encyclical was “not infallible,” and his subsequent nuances did little to undo the conclusions drawn by the press.
Never in history has a papal document of thirty-one succinct paragraphs set off such a maelstrom. The print on the paper was still warm when a Vietnam War-style protest was held on the steps of Catholic University in Washington, DC, to denounce it. Well-organized theological elites in America issued statements and signature rolls dismissing the encyclical.
Humanae Vitae
was even lampooned on TV’s
Laugh-In
.
Why it took so long to produce such a short encyclical may never be known. An unnamed cardinal confided to Frank Sheed that some of the Pope’s advisors insisted that the first version was “held to be too long for the public’s reading habits: a document half as long would be more likely to be read,” Sheed recalled in his autobiography. “But instead of being rewritten at the new length, it was chopped about till it was short enough. Even on a Cardinal’s word I find this hard to credit. But it would certainly explain the result.”
13
The actual encyclical, while faithfully communicating the truth about sexuality and marriage, does not argue its case so much as re-present established teaching. Professor J. Budziszewski voices this quibble while strongly endorsing Paul’s conclusion. In fact, Professor Budziszewski and his wife entered the Catholic Church a few years after writing these lines:
Though addressed not only to Roman Catholics but to “all men of good will,”
Humanae Vitae
is both diffuse and elliptical; its premises are scattered and, to non-Catholics, obscure. Though the encyclical letter is magisterial in the sense of being lordly, it is not magisterial in the sense of teaching well. It seems to lack the sense, which any discussion of natural law requires, of what must be done to make the self-evident evident, to make the intuitive available to intuition, to make what is plain in itself plain to us.
14
Neither Vatican II (in
Gaudium et Spes
) nor
Humanae Vitae
employed the traditional language of Catholic sexual morality whereby procreation was seen as the primary end or purpose of sex, and the unity and pleasure as secondary ends. From this shift in approach, some critics of
Humanae Vitae
—both liberals and traditionalists—concluded that the old distinctions had been abandoned in favor of the new paradigm of the “inseparability of the procreative and the unitive meanings.”
15
But this is not the case.
The linguistic shift occurred, among other reasons, to keep pace with the change in cultural attitudes toward sexuality. A more personalist mode of communication stemmed from a new emphasis in Catholic sexual ethics in which subjectivity—the human person and his experience of himself as man or woman—is taken as a starting point instead of objective moral norms or “rules.” One could say that the entire corpus of Karol Wojtyla’s writings comprise a bridge between the older “manualist” approach (which is still valid) and the post-Conciliar emphasis on inner experience.
16
Where the wording of
Casti Connubii
lays emphasis on the vertical, objective demands of God’s law,
Humanae Vitae
and subsequent magisterial teaching stresses the horizontal, subjective experience of being human as a way of discovering and embracing this law. When Paul VI taught that man must not separate the procreative from the unitive meaning, he is teaching exactly what Pius XI taught, albeit from another angle. It is still Catholic teaching to affirm procreation as the primary end of sex as long as this is understood to be looking at the act from an abstract, philosophical point of view. It does not mean that couples must always deliberately intend each sex act to be fecund (“we must respect the primary end!”) nor that the “secondary ends” of unity and pleasure are somehow second fiddle or unimportant.