Pope Faces Birth Control Crisis

In a 7,500-word encyclical released July 29, Pope Paul VI flatly refused to temper the Roman Catholic teaching that “artificial” contraception is evil. The document, entitled Humanæ Vitæ, evoked a groundswell of dissent among the pontiff’s ecclesiastical subordinates. It was hard to tell which would prove to be more historic: the Pope’s reaffirmation of traditional Vatican views on birth control, or the crisis it seemed to be precipitating among the half billion members claimed by the Roman Catholic Church.

“God has wisely disposed natural laws and rhythms of fecundity which, of themselves, cause a separation in the succession of births,” said Pope Paul. “Nonetheless the church, calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law, as interpreted by her constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act (“quilibet matrimonii usus”) must remain open to the transmission of life.”

The Pope had a good word for family planning but said that only the rhythm method is moral. The rhythm method is simply abstinence from sexual intercourse during the woman’s fertile period. Because it is not possible to determine with precision the time of the fertile period, the method is unreliable. The Pope echoed Pope Pius XII in asking that medical science provide “a sufficiently secure basis for a regulation of birth, founded on the observance of natural rhythms.”

The first major sign of defiance was a statement signed by more than a hundred American Catholic theologians. The statement is openly critical of the Pope and takes issue with the encyclical, citing numerous “defects.”

“Many positive values concerning marriage are expressed in Paul VI’s encyclical,” the statement says. “However, we take exception to the ecclesiology implied and the methodology used by Paul VI in the writing and promulgation of the document.”

Never before in modern times has there been such open resistance to a papal edict. The theologians appealed to the “common teaching” in the church that Catholics may dissent from authoritative, non-infallible teachings of the magisterium when sufficient reasons for so doing exist. They concluded that “spouses may responsibly decide according to their conscience that artificial contraception in some circumstances is permissible and indeed necessary to preserve and foster the values and sacredness of marriage.”

The encyclical was presented to newsmen at the Vatican by Monsignor Ferdinando Lambruschini, moral theologian at Lateran University. “From a theological viewpoint,” he said, “the document was not to be considered infallible, but an act of great courage in its condemnation of spreading artificial methods of birth control.” He was also quoted as saying that it was not “immutable” dogma.

Humanæ Vitæ rejected the findings of a majority of a special commission appointed by the Pope to study the morality of birth control. The Commission included a number of lay experts, but the Pope said that “the conclusions at which the commission arrived could not, nevertheless, be considered by us as definitive, nor dispense us from a personal examination of this serious question; and this also because, within the commission itself, no full concordance of judgments concerning the moral norms to be proposed had been reached, and above all because certain criteria of solutions had emerged which departed from the moral teaching on marriage proposed with constant firmness by the teaching authority of the church.”

A particularly vulnerable aspect of the encyclical’s argumentation is its labeling of the rhythm method as “natural” and all other methods as “artificial.” Many Catholic medical men believe the rhythm method to be more artificial than other means.

Dissenters appeal to Vatican II for an out, but the council adopted a statement that leaves little room for interpretation when it says, “Religious submission of will and of mind must be shown in a special way to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra.”

As popes have been doing for centuries, Paul VI relied heavily upon the natural-law theory. With this rationale he addressed himself not only to the Roman Catholic faithful but also to those outside the church.See “How to Decide the Birth-Control Question” by John Warwick Montgomery, March 4, 1966, issue. Montgomery is among twenty-seven evangelical scholars who will discuss birth control and related issues August 28–31 at a symposium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, sponsored by Christianity Today and Christian Medical Society. He spoke specifically to rulers: “Do not allow the morality of your peoples to be degraded; do not permit that by legal means practices contrary to the natural and divine law be introduced into that fundamental cell, the family.”

Pope Paul acknowledged the gravity of the demographic problem but added, “The only possible solution to this question is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society, and which respects and promotes true human values.”

The Pope was very aware that Humanaæ Vitæ would not be well received. Two days after its disclosure he issued a special plea from his summer residence fifteen miles south of Rome. He expressed the hope that “Christian married couples will understand that its teaching is but the manifestation of the love of Christ for the church.”

“The knowledge of our grave responsibility caused us no small suffering,” he said. “We well knew of the heated discussions in the press. The anguish of those involved in the problem touched us also. We studied and read all we could. We consulted eminent persons. And we sought in prayer the aid of the Holy Spirit in interpreting the divine law.…”

It was a statement of pathos, almost of apology. Probably it has no counterpart in papal history.

Humanæ Vitæ not only condemned mechanical and chemical contraceptives but also repeated the church’s opposition to abortion and sterilization, “temporary or permanent.” Also reiterated is the Catholic teaching that medical intervention with an indirect contraceptive, sterilizing, or abortive effect is permissible for health reasons when this effect is secondary, not used as a means.

The gravity of the ecclesiastical crisis growing out of Humanæ Vitæ may not become apparent for a time. But already the church faces a serious situation over the celibacy rule as important priests regularly renounce the church. The latest to get married were Edward J. Sponga, 50, head of the 830 Jesuits in the Maryland Province; Joseph F. Mulligan, 48, director of higher studies for the Jesuit New York Province; and Joseph Lemercier, 55, of Mexico, disciplined by the Vatican last year for using unauthorized psychoanalysis.

What will be the effect upon humanity of the Pope’s decision? Theoretically, those who restrict their birth rate will ultimately be engulfed by those who do not. But surveys have shown that most Roman Catholics are ignoring their church’s ban on contraceptives. The resulting integrity gap may be a more serious threat to the church than open defiance or mass exodus.

SINCE ST. AUGUSTINE

Contraceptive medicines were known and used in biblical times, and were condemned on various grounds by the early Church Fathers. By the time of Saint Augustine’s Marriage and Concupiscence, the belief became explicit: Couples who “for the sake of lust” obstruct “procreation by an evil prayer or an evil deed” are not really married. Some, with “cruel lust,” even “procure poisons of sterility,” and if these don’t work they resort to abortion, the saint lamented.

The opinions of bishops and theologians first gained authority over an entire province of the Church in the sixth century when Bishop Caesarius of Gaul condemned birth-control “potions” and affirmed that procreation was the only lawful reason for sex. Gregory the Great, first of the strong medieval popes, not only repeated this idea in his Pastoral Rule but also said any pleasure in the act was unlawful.

By the high Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas had worked Augustine’s ideas into his natural-law framework, but explicitly approved sex even if the couple was sterile—thus allowing an exception to procreation as the only motive.

In 1588, Pope Sixtus V issued the bull Effrænatam, which condemned those who “induce sterility in women, or impede by cursed medicines their conceiving or bearing.” He advocated punishments equal to those for homicide. But two and one-half years later his successor, Pope Gregory XIV, repealed penalties except for abortion of a forty-day-old fetus.

In the first papal encyclical on marriage after the papal-infallibility decree of 1870, Pope Leo XIII avoided mention of contraception. Meanwhile, belief and practice outside the Catholic world were shifting. In 1930, the bishops of the Anglican communion overturned their position of 1908 and 1920. Their statement permitted deliberate birth control “in those cases where there is … a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence.”

Half a year later Pope Pius XI issued his landmark encyclical Casti Connubii, with these key passages:

“Since the act of the spouses is by its own nature ordered to the generation of offspring, those who, exercising it, deliberately deprive it of its natural force and power, act against nature and effect what is base and intrinsically indecent.… Any use whatever of marriage, in the exercise of which the act by human effort is deprived of its natural power of procreating life, violates the law of God and nature …”

And by normal theological tests, it can be argued that this is an infallible decree, writes John T. Noonan, Jr., law professor at Notre Dame, in his monumental book Contraception. But the emphasis on “the exercise” of the marital act could leave room for chemical preventatives.

In his 1951 address to a convention of maternity nurses, Pope Pius XII approved deliberate use of the infertile period (the “rhythm method”) to avoid procreation for “medical, eugenic, economic, and social” motives.

World Council On Birth Control

Last month’s World Council of Churches assembly at Uppsala approved a document on “World Economic and Social Development” that included this statement on birth control, modified to mollify the Eastern Orthodox:

“The implications of the world’s unprecedented population explosion are far reaching with regard to long-range economic planning, the provision of food, employment, housing, education, and health services. Many churches are agreed that we need to promote family planning and birth control as a matter of urgency. An ever growing number of parents want to exercise their basic human right to plan their families. We recognize, however, that some churches may have moral objections to certain methods of population control.”

In 1962, Pope John XXIII created a small commission of advisers to study birth control. Two years later Pope Paul VI expanded the group to a major sixty-member body of experts. In 1966 the experts made their report. Last year, as Pope Paul VI struggled with his decision, Catholic papers printed pro and con texts from this secret commission and reported that a solid majority had urged change in the church position.

On July 29, 1968, Paul issued Humanæ Vitæ.

OUTSIDERS’ REACTIONS

Eugene Carson Blake, general secretary of the World Council of Churches: “It is disappointing that the initiative taken in 1964 to re-examine the traditional Roman Catholic position on family planning and birth control seems with the encyclical Humanæ Vitæ to have ended up approximately where it began, despite such a long and careful study.

“Some member churches of the World Council of Churches, particularly some of the Orthodox theologians, take a position very close to that expressed by Pope Paul. It is, however, a disappointment to many Christians in all the member churches of the World Council as well as to many Roman Catholics, that no early breakthrough to a solution to this problem can be envisioned.

“My personal reaction to the encyclical, at the first reading of the central parts, is that the distinction between artificial and natural means of birth control must be more thoroughly examined. It also appears that the Roman Catholic position as now stated depends too much upon an old conception of natural law to be persuasive to twentieth-century man.”

Arthur Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury: “… The moral teaching given by the encyclical on the use of so-called artificial means of contraception is widely different from that of the Anglican Community.… The means adopted to limit the number of children in a family are a matter for the conscience of each husband and wife. The use of ‘artificial means’ of contraception is not excluded. The changes in human society and world population as well as development in the means available for contraception which have occurred since 1958 seem to me to reinforce rather than challenge the arguments employed and conclusions reached at the Lambeth Conference in 1958.”

Billy Graham, evangelist: “In general, I would disagree with it.… I believe in planned parenthood.” Graham spoke of seeing the effects of the “population explosion” in his worldwide travels.

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