Authors: Patrick Coffin
A bachelor’s degree in religious studies and philosophy seemed like a good start. So I enrolled at the local Catholic institution of higher learning, Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, which still stands watch over the blue grey Bedford Basin.
By the time I got there in the early 80s, “the Mount” had already begun to drift from its Roman Catholic moorings, institutionally beguiled by the elusive ghost known as the spirit of Vatican II. My theology syllabus read like a Who’s Who of Catholic dissenters. We got regular samplings of: Hans Kung (whose lecture in Halifax was regarded by the local liberals as an Elvis appearance); ex-Dominican and now ex-Catholic Matthew Fox; ex-Augustinian Gregory Baum, who had been a
peritus
(expert advisor) at the Second Vatican Council; Richard McCormick, SJ; Bernard Haering, CSsR; Rosemary Ruether-Radford; and Father Richard McBrien. Even radical lesbian and self-described witch Mary Daly lectured us.
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All of these either reject certain aspects of moral theology, have been formally censured by the Magisterium, or have left their religious vows (or the Church) altogether.
It was fairly drilled into us that theologians functioned as a kind of parallel or second Magisterium, and we were taught to see them as prophets speaking truth to power.
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That most of the above leaders had been in trouble with The Official Church made them all the more fashionable. These graying sages weren’t going to be the Pope’s automatons. They were scholars, with PhDs and everything. What mattered, especially to the young and impressionable like the present writer, was that it was all so terribly cutting-edge. Better to run with the trail-blazers than to stumble with the papists who, by comparison, could only spout catechisms by rote. What are you going to go with, the Armani or the polyester?
This is not to pick on the Mount. The slide of contemporary Christian colleges into secularity has been well documented in
The Dying of the Light
by Father James Burtchaell, CSC, and
The Soul of the American University
by George Marsden, and in the experience of anyone who was an adult at the close of Vatican II. In fairness, my professors were dedicated, friendly, and gifted. I don’t remember anyone setting out to offend, and I admired them as teachers and Christian educators. Put charitably, however, a commitment to Catholic orthodoxy was not an institutional priority.
Stripped of academes, the gist was that one’s commitment to Christ could bypass the Church’s Magisterium depending on how much of a “problem” you had with a given teaching, and on how much you “prayerfully considered your choices.” That was the criteria, pretty much. (See the Winnipeg Statement later in this chapter.) The Church was assumed to be standing between God and us, as opposed to sacramentally uniting us with Him—an ironically Protestant bent to ostensibly Catholic training.
A key presupposition here was that Church doctrine could change from one era to the next, and that a “plurality” (liberal code for contradictory) of theological opinion was not merely inevitable or worrisome—it was marvelous. Integral to my reversion to the Faith was the discovery that doctrine develops organically, like a cub into a lion, not a kitten into a warthog. Christ’s doctrine grows richer over time without fragmenting into clashing viewpoints. In other words, while it can be expanded and deepened, Christian teaching in one generation can’t be contradicted in the next.
While the Catholic Church recognizes the legitimacy of withholding public assent if a given doctrine is in doubt—a rare occurrence in itself, and pertaining mainly to professional theologians—what I signed onto was beyond that. In waving the flag of dissent, and doing my best to ignore the inconsistency, I’d crossed some mysterious mental line. It’s embarrassing to recall how long it took me to see that “disagree” and “faithful” are mutually exclusive.
Powering the engine of dissent is a popular, and mistaken, view of conscience. The Second Vatican Council, in the document
Gaudium et Spes
(“The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”) indeed taught the importance of conscience:
Deep within his conscience man discovers a law that he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and do what is good and to avoid evil, tells him inwardly at the right moment: do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His dignity lies in observing this law, and by it he will be judged. His conscience is man’s most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths (16).
These sensible words were twisted to mean that one may pick and choose among doctrines because, well, we can veer safely from “the pope’s teaching” because his is only one Christian voice among many—although we must “take it respectfully into account.” As theologian Jiminy Cricket said to layman Pinocchio, “Let your conscience be your guide.”
Protestants could keep
Sola Scriptura
and
Sola Fide
; we had
Sola Consciencia.
At least in Canada, by far the most influential post-Vatican II document on the matter of conscience relative to birth control appeared eight weeks after
Humanae Vitae
was issued. It was the Canadian bishops’ response to
Humanae Vitae,
dubbed the Winnipeg Statement after the Manitoba city where they met. Most Catholics wouldn’t recognize the Winnipeg Statement if it was posted on their fridges in neon. But as a symbol of Saint Paul’s “uncertain sound,” its effects nonetheless echoed down the teaching arm of the Church to my native Canada, and far beyond our shores.
Being one of the very first responses from the world’s episcopal conferences, it undoubtedly influenced the statements from Scandinavia, Austria, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, all of which openly amended Paul VI’s absolute prohibition of contraception. As elsewhere, a popular American high school religion textbook still repeats the false claim that Pope Paul VI approved of the Statement.
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The document begins in harmony with the encyclical, but ends with a note of doubt so glaring that the English language editor of
L’Osservatore Romano
declined to run it.
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“Thus in accord with the accepted principles of moral theology,” intoned paragraph 26, “if these persons have tried sincerely but without success to pursue a line of conduct in keeping with the given directives, they may be safely assured that,
whoever
honestly chooses that course which seems right to him does so in good conscience.”
As long as he “tries sincerely” to “honestly choose” to do “what seems right to him,” one does so “in good conscience”? It’s difficult to imagine any other Christian instruction so coiled up in caveats. Would the same kind of phrasing be imaginable concerning, say, stealing, adultery, or exploiting the poor? With all due deference, and despite assurances from its defenders, the Winnipeg Statement was, and is, interpreted as a
de facto
license to dissent.
The final paragraph quotes Cardinal Newman: “Lead kindly light amidst the encircling gloom.” Given the mixed message of the Statement and its repeated emphasis on the difficulties involved in following the Church’s teaching, it’s reasonable to interpret the gloom as an allusion not to the forces of secularism or temptation, but to the encyclical itself.
You can’t get squeezed toothpaste back into the tube, but you can start brushing. On December 12, 1973, the Canadian Catholic Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) issued a Statement on the Formation of Conscience, which, while not explicitly mentioning
l’Affair
Winnipeg, tried to shore up the flood tide by making a strong case for the authentic Catholic view of conscience.
On April 3, 1989, the bishops of Manitoba released a solid defense of the encyclical titled,
Responsible Parenthood
.
On June 30, 2003, a sub-committee of the Canadian bishops known as the Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF) issued
The Church Says Yes to Love
, a warm commemoration of the thirty-fifth anniversary of Paul VI’s encyclical.
In May, 2008, speaking at the convocation of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy in Ontario, Archbishop of Ottawa Terrance Prendergast, SJ, pleasantly surprised his audience by saying, “The encyclical gives the Church a deeper understanding into the beauty of married love and responsible parenthood. It offers a clearer understanding of the harm of contraception and the great value of Natural Family Planning (NFP). Further, it challenges married couples, healthcare professionals and clergy to live and teach these profound truths about human sexuality and dignity.”
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In March of 1988, the Austrian bishops retracted their problematic 1968 response to
Humanae Vitae
.
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Hopefully, other national Conferences will, in time, follow their brother bishops’ lead in amending their initial reaction. Regardless, all spiritual fathers whom God has placed over us in Christ need and deserve our prayers and encouragement. If you want to know what is expected of bishops, their high duties are listed in the Vatican II document
Christus Dominus
. To say the very least, it’s a humbling read.
In September, 2008, the Canadian bishops issued a
de facto
repudiation of their Winnipeg Statement, almost exactly forty years later. It is a clarion call to fidelity to
Humanae Vitae
, a strongly worded challenge to the faithful to reexamine what it calls Pope Paul’s “prophetic” teaching. This author believes it is the definitive anti-Winnipeg Statement statement. It is robustly titled
Liberating Potential
and even cites the work of Christopher West, the popular exponent of John Paul II’s theology of the body. Here is a short sample: “Nevertheless,
Humanae Vitae
is much more than a ‘no to contraception.” This encyclical is in reality a major reflection on God’s design for human love. It proposes a vision of ‘the whole man and the whole mission to which he is called … both its natural, earthly aspects, and its supernatural, eternal aspects.’ It is an invitation to be open to the grandeur, beauty and dignity of the Creator’s call to the vocation of marriage.”
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I certainly don’t blame the Winnipeg Statement alone for my recalcitrance. The theological training I received undercut the bishops as teachers in the first place. Nor do I recall holding any fancy theories that kept me from accepting
Humanae Vitae.
Only after I reverted to “full meal deal” Catholicism did I learn the philosophical principles behind most forms of dissent in the Church.
The battle over
Humanae Vitae
is connected to the much broader question of the ecclesial relationship between the governed and those who govern (and teach, and sanctify).
By far, the greatest success of the parallel magisterium has been to undermine confidence in the Church’s credibility to teach “bedroom zone” doctrine at all. If ordinary Catholics could be convinced that obedience to allegedly non-infallible doctrine was an open question, next up at bat would be fornication, homosexuality, in vitro fertilization, remarriage after divorce, and abortion—the whole cohort of what we snidely called “pelvic issues.”
In truth, my “problem with”
Humanae Vitae
was just an important-sounding way of saying I was confused and divided. Buying into the contraceptive mentality was of a piece with that confusion. I suffered a major blind spot that I’ve since found is very common: I was unable to see the difference between birth prevention through contraception and birth regulation through natural family planning, which I treat in Chapter Ten.
On the one hand, I argued glibly that NFP and contraception are essentially the same and that it’s ludicrous to press the matter. On the other, if I’d been challenged to simply support NFP—with its lack of negative side effects, its easy-to-learn methods, and its high effectiveness rates—I would have replied, “Forget it, they're different!”
Exactly right. They’re different, and how. For couples with a serious reason to postpone pregnancy, natural family planning demands a level of self-mastery that contraception never does. And I knew it. Yet it’s possible to deny what you know.
Cardinal Newman once said that ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt. Although there was no single thunderbolt moment, over time the desire to work through the difficulties bested the stamina of my doubts. Up to that point I doubted everything save my doubts. The closest I came to a “Eureka” was the slowly percolating idea that contraception squashes a woman’s capacity for fertility, turning every day into an infertile day. Contraception is sex plus some device; NFP is sex interspersed with abstinence. More about this in Chapter Ten.