50 years on, we still live with fall-out of Church’s anti-contraception doctrine
On the 50th anniversary of the Catholic Church’s publication of ‘Humanae Vitae’ — which opposed all form of artificial contraception — looks back at an ill-conceived document which not only has caused enormous harm to papal authority itself but has also been the source of worry, stress, and misery for millions of Catholic couples around the globe.
After the press conference in the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin to launch the encyclical in July 1968, I warned in my report for the Irish Press the following day that the Catholic Church might be on the threshold of one of the greatest crises in its history.
The press conference itself, arranged by the redoubtable Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, had been
a PR disaster. The Archbishop had chosen Monsignor Frank Cremin, professor of moral theology at Maynooth, to introduce the encyclical to the media. Cremin misread and mishandled the occasion very badly.
Looking back now from a distance of 50 years at all that has happened since, it turns out that my assessment of the encyclical was more perceptive than I had imagined.
In Cork, Fr James Good, who had been teaching medical ethics in UCC — the only dissenting clerical voice in the country — described the encyclical as “a major tragedy”.
And he was right. The encyclical in question was Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI. And we are still living with the fall-out from it.
If Martin Luther, in launching the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago, struck a grievous blow against papal authority, then the pope himself was directly responsible for the additional damage done to his office 50 years ago.
And the instrument that caused the damage was not 95 theses, as in Luther’s case, but a single thesis in
the form of a 36-page encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae (‘Of Human Life’), opposing all form of artificial contraception.
This ill-conceived document has caused enormous harm, not only to papal authority itself, but has also been the source of worry, stress, and misery for millions of Catholic couples around the globe.
Its publication on July 25, 1968, caused widespread disappointment, even dismay, and sparked huge controversy. The crisis it created was the greatest faced by the Catholic Church since the Reformation in the 16th century.
In retrospect, that was no exaggerated claim, and today, half a century later, we are still living with the divisions stemming from that encyclical.
In the aftermath of its appearance, millions of Catholics stopped going to confession and many others abandoned the Church altogether.
The encyclical was published three years after the end of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), when there was a broadly shared expectation that the ban on artificial methods of contraception would be lifted.
That ban can be traced back to Pope Pius XI’s encyclical on Christian marriage, entitled Casti Connubii (‘Of Chaste Wedlock’) and published on December 31, 1930. This was a response to a general conference of the Anglican Church at Lambeth, which said contraception could be permitted in special cases.
Pius XI, who was pope from 1922 to 1939, said that “the conjugal act is of its nature designed for the procreation of offspring” within matrimony, and any interference designed to deprive the act of its natural power to procreate was against the law of God.
That was the way the doctrine remained until 1963 when Pope John XXIII, who had convened Vatican II, appointed a six-man commission to advise him on the birth control issue. But Pope John died in June of that year before the commission had even met.
Nevertheless, a precedent had been set for his successor, Paul VI, and he enlarged the membership so that men and women, married and single, were involved. The enlarged commission included one Irish member, Archbishop Thomas Morris of Cashel.
Altogether, a total of 72 people (five cardinals, nine bishops, and 56 theologians and lay members) served on the commission, which met in sessions between April 1964 and June 1966. The commission’s final report was given to Pope Paul VI on June 28, 1966.
This was the majority report; a second report, from a small group of members headed by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, was also presented to the Pope. This opposed any change, and the group included Archbishop Morris of Cashel.
The majority report, which urged the pope to change the Church’s traditional teaching on birth control, was widely expected to be adopted by the Paul VI and used as the basis of an encyclical by him.
That never happened, and it came to be known as “the encyclical that never was” (the title of a brilliant book on the work of the commission by Robert Blair Kaiser of Time magazine).
The majority report, recommending change, was never officially published by the Vatican. But copies were leaked to the National Catholic Reporter in Kansas City, USA, and to The Tablet, the Catholic weekly in London.
An Irish-born American journalist, Gary MacEoin (who had family connections with Cork), played a key role in helping to get the document to the two journals. The report was published on both sides of the Atlantic in April 1967.
Understandably, it added greatly to the belief among ordinary Catholics that change was on the way.
“When the commission’s final report landed in the London offices of The Tablet in the spring of 1967, staff members looked at one another with wild surmise,” wrote Kaiser.
“For several years, The Tablet [and its readers] had been following the worldwide debate over birth control. By all accounts, and against all the odds, change in the Church’s official teaching was beginning to seem more and more possible. Now here was solid proof, and from the Pope’s own commission.”
What followed was a period of official silence in Rome.
But a lot of lobbying went on behind the scenes. Such signals as came from the papal apartments were ominous: Paul VI had been persuaded that he would have to ignore the recommendations of his own commission, and that his encyclical would have to fall into line with the teaching of Casti Connubii enunciated by Pope Pius XI in 1930.
The publication of Humanae Vitae in July 1968 came as a great shock to many.
The key passage, and the cause of all the trouble, was the following: “The Church, calling men back to the observance of the natural law, as interpreted by her constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.”
In other words, artificial intervention to prevent pregnancy was against the natural law. It was always wrong, always gravely sinful. Imagine the consequences of this for a couple over the span of, say, a 30- or 40-year marriage.
Great numbers of Catholic couples simply ignored the encyclical.
“In and through what came to be known as ‘the birth control debate’, many Catholics — possibly an 85% majority — found out that, in matters of their own marital morals, the pope wasn’t in charge. They were,” wrote Kaiser.
But that fact never resonated with the Vatican. During his long pontificate, Pope John Paul II steadfastly upheld the teaching of Humanae Vitae, as did his successor, Pope Benedict XVI.
So far, although he appears to have wavered, this support for the encyclical continues to be upheld by Pope Francis. It is surely time for a formal renunciation of the anti-contraception doctrine.
Here in Ireland, the encyclical was used for years as a bulwark against attempts to introduce family planning legislation that would permit the use of contraceptives.
A breakthrough didn’t occur until the McGee case in December 1973, when the Supreme Court found that the ban on the importation of contraceptives was unconstitutional. The court said Mary McGee, a married woman, had the right to import contraceptives for her own use, and the right to limit the number of her children by artificial means.
However, while this ruling removed an important barrier, the Oireachtas would still face an uphill struggle to introduce legislation (the story of that struggle is well told in Chrystel Hug’s book The Politics of Sexual Morality in Ireland).
And it was not until February 1985 that the Health (Family Planning) (Amendment) Bill was passed by Dáil Éireann — a bill that allowed contraceptives to be sold to the public without a prescription for the first time.
Sadly, elsewhere in the world, and especially in some of its poorest regions where women are already disadvantaged, Humanae Vitae continues to be invoked to thwart efforts to make contraceptives available, even in the battle against diseases such as Aids. It’s long past time for an abandonment of this ill-fated encyclical.
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