The year 2018 will mark the 50th, or Golden, anniversary of Humanae Vitae (HV), in which Paul VI restated what had been, until 1930, an unbroken and universal Christian teaching. Today, on HV’s 44th anniversary, the Bellarmine Forum is launching The Campaign for Humanae Vitae. Our goal is to gather a million signatures on our petition
conveying to the Holy Father and our bishops our prayerful gratitude,
encouragement, and support for their efforts to preach and to defend
this vital teaching of the Magisterium.
Why now? Consider this: my colleague on the Notre Dame faculty, Professor Gary Gutting, has proclaimed in the New York Times
that “it is not for the bishops but for the faithful to decide the
nature and extent of episcopal authority,” and that, in matters of
sexual morality, “Catholics have decisively rejected it.” Therefore,
Professor Gutting concludes, “The immorality of birth control is no
longer a teaching of the Catholic Church… the issue has been settled by
the voice of the Catholic people.”[1]
Professor Gutting really believes that. But he’s wrong. Here’s why.
Lambeth
The Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930 was the first time any
Christian denomination ever said that contraception could be a morally
good choice. The Lambeth Conference in 1908 had condemned contraception
in words that could have been written by John Paul II or Benedict
XVI.[2] Since Lambeth 1930, Pius XI and the succeeding Popes have
continued to teach that contraception is wrong, first, because it deliberately separates the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act; second,
by so changing the nature of the act, the man and woman make
themselves, rather than God, the arbiters of whether and when life shall
begin; and third, contraception frustrates the total mutual
self-donation that is essential to the conjugal act. Contraception
also implies that there is such a thing as a human life not worth
living—the life of the child whose existence the contraceptors choose to
prevent.
The Truce of 1968
The advent of the Pill in the 1960s increased the use of
contraceptives among Catholics and others. The promulgation of HV in
1968 precipitated a storm of dissent. In 1968, Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle
of Washington, D.C., disciplined nineteen priests who had dissented
publicly from HV. Three years later the Vatican Congregation for the
Clergy ordered Cardinal O’Boyle to lift canonical penalties from those
priests who told him privately that they agreed that the teaching on
“the objective evil of contraception” was “an authentic expression of
[the] magisterium.” The Congregation explicitly refrained from
requiring that priests who had dissented publicly must retract their
dissent publicly. George Weigel described the effects of this “Truce of
1968:”
What I [argued] in my 2002 book, The Courage to be Catholic,
and what I would still argue today, is that the Truce of 1968
(exemplified by the settlement of the Washington Case) taught various
lessons to…the Church in America.
The Truce of 1968 taught theologians, priests and other Church
professionals that dissent from authoritative teaching was, essentially,
cost-free.
The Truce of 1968 taught bishops inclined to defend authoritative
Catholic teaching vigorously that they should think twice about doing
so, if controversy were likely to follow; Rome, fearing schism, was
nervous about public action against dissent. The result…was that “a
generation of Catholic bishops came to think of themselves less as
authoritative teachers than as moderators of an ongoing dialogue whose
primary responsibility was to keep everyone in the conversation and in
play.”
And Catholic lay people learned… “that virtually everything in the
Church was questionable: doctrine, morals, the priesthood, the
episcopate, the lot.” Thus the impulse toward Cafeteria Catholicism got
a decisive boost from the Truce of 1968: if the bishops and the Holy
See were not going to defend seriously the Church’s teaching on this
matter, then picking-and-choosing in a supermarket of doctrinal and
moral possibilities seemed, not simply all right, but actually
admirable—an exercise in maturity, as was often suggested at the
time.[3]
The Failure of the Bishops
The American bishops, with exceptions, have miserably failed to
educate Catholics and others on HV and the similar teachings of John
Paul II and Benedict XVI. The bishops on the national level have made
some commendable efforts to
correct the situation. But generations of parishioners—and students
whose religion classes focus on collages, banners and political
correctness—are still paying the price. The result is an appalling
ignorance among Catholics of HV and other Catholic doctrines
and principles. A Gallup poll released in May 2012 found that 82% of
Catholics in America believe contraception is “morally acceptable.”[4]
“If you love me,” said Jesus Christ, “keep my commandments.”[5] But if
someone had kept a log of homilies delivered in the United States over
the past fifty years, what would be the ratio between generalized
exhortations to “love” and specific explanations of the Commandments?
No contest. But this cannot be blamed simply on parish priests. As
Dean Emeritus Jude Dougherty, of the School of Philosophy of the
Catholic University of America, put it: “From the pulpit, when have you
ever heard a sermon on any one of the Ten Commandments, the sacraments,
or the virtues? It takes a genius, and few have the talent, to make
sense of the disparate biblical readings, which lend themselves to
storybook repetition, rather than to the preaching of doctrine. And
then there are those petitions, often self-contradictory, often the
reflection of someone’s political and social agenda, as if the petitions
in the canon of the Mass were not enough.” [6]
In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Cardinal Timothy
Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB),
acknowledged both the failure of the bishops and the hunger, especially
among young adults, for more authoritative teaching on sexuality:
Doesn’t the church have a problem conveying its moral
principles to its own flock? “Do we ever!” the archbishop replies with a
hearty laugh. “I’m not afraid to admit that we have an internal
catechetical challenge—a towering one—in convincing our own people of
the moral beauty and coherence of what we teach. That’s a biggie.”
For this he faults the church leadership. “We have gotten gun-shy…in
speaking…on chastity and sexual morality.” He dates this diffidence to
“the…60’s, when the whole world seemed to be caving in, and where
Catholics…got the impression that what the Second Vatican Council
taught…is that we should be chums with the world, and that the best
thing the church can do is become more and more like everyone else.”
The “flash point,” the archbishop says, was “Humanae Vitae,” Pope
Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical…. It “brought such a tsunami of dissent,
departure, disapproval of the church, that I think most of us—and I’m
using the first person plural intentionally, including myself—kind of
subconsciously said, ‘Whoa, we’d better never talk about that, because
it’s just too hot to handle.’ We forfeited the chance to be a coherent
moral voice when it comes to one of the more burning issues of the day.”
Without my having raised the subject, he adds that the church’s
sex-abuse scandal “intensified our laryngitis over speaking about issues
of chastity and sexual morality, because we almost thought, ‘I’ll blush
if I do…. After what some priests and some bishops, albeit a tiny
minority, have done, how will I have any credibility in speaking on
that?’”
Yet the archbishop says he sees a hunger, especially among young
adults, for a more authoritative church voice on sexuality. “They will
be quick to say, ‘By the way, we want you to know that we might not be
able to obey it…. But we want to hear it. And in justice, you as our
pastors need to tell us, and you need to challenge us.”[7]
In a recent address to American bishops, Benedict XVI understated the
point: “Certainly we must acknowledge deficiencies in the catechesis
of recent decades, which failed at times to communicate the rich
heritage of Catholic teaching on marriage as a natural institution
elevated by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament, the vocation of
Christian spouses in society and in the Church, and the practice of
marital chastity.” [8]
The Church Goes to Court
Pursuant to the Law of
Unintended Consequences, Obama’s Health Care Mandate has opened for the
bishops a clear field to advance the truth of HV.
The Mandate requires almost
all religious organizations and other employers, or the employer’s
insurer, to provide insurance coverage for their employees for
contraception, abortifacient “contraceptives” and sterilization.
Lawsuits challenging the Mandate were filed last May by Catholic
dioceses, hospitals, schools, church agencies and universities. The
lawsuits claim that the Mandate violates the Constitution and federal
laws, including the religious freedom protected by the First Amendment.
As the bishops correctly insist, the suits do not themselves involve the
legal status of contraception or the merits of the Church’s teaching on
contraception. Those suits are not resolved by the Supreme Court’s
recent upholding of Obamacare’s Individual Mandate requiring individuals
to buy health care insurance for themselves.
A Teaching Moment
In violating the fundamental right of religious freedom, Obama has
given to the Church a teaching moment on two issues: 1. Conscience, and
2. Contraception. The bishops have preserved their ability to use that
teaching moment. A letter they ordered read in every parish in the
land said: “We cannot—we will not– comply with this unjust law.”[9] But
why is that law unjust? Because it compels, contrary to conscience,
immoral cooperation with an intrinsic evil—contraception.
Conscience
The bishops have an opening to teach the American people that the
“dictatorship of relativism” trivializes conscience by reducing it to an
expression of personal taste with no transcendent claim to immunity
against oppression by the State.
“Conscience is a judgment of reason by which the human person
recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act.”[10] A properly formed
conscience will judge that the Mandate compels immoral cooperation with
contraception and abortion. As Cardinal Raymond Burke said, “It is not
only a matter of what we call ‘material cooperation’ in the sense that
the employer by giving this insurance benefit is materially providing for the contraception but it is also “formal cooperation” because he is knowingly and deliberately doing this, making this available to people. There is no way to justify it. It is simply wrong.”[11]
The Unjust Law
When the bishops said, “We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust
law,” they were not kidding. Some laws are unjust as contrary to
“human good” because they are beyond the authority of the lawgiver, are
oppressive or seriously violate equality. We may have to obey such laws
(think of the income tax) to avoid a greater evil. But, as St. Thomas
Aquinas further said, “laws may be unjust through being opposed to the
Divine good; such are the laws of tyrants inducing to … anything …
contrary to the Divine law; and laws of this kind must nowise be
observed.”[12] If a law compelled a physician to perform an abortion, he
would be morally obliged to disobey even on pain of death. And the
same goes for the bishops and others compelled by the Mandate to
cooperate immorally in a violation of the divine law. They must—and
they do– refuse to obey. They deserve our gratitude, vocal support and,
especially, prayer.
Contraception as a Denial of God
If the State is above conscience so as to be able to compel one to
violate the law of God, then the State is God. Obama can get away with
such an edict only because the American people have lost their
recognition of God’s law as a rule of life. Thirteen days after 9/11,
Pope John Paul II warned the leaders of Kazakhstan against a “slavish
conformity” to Western culture which is in a “deepening human, spiritual
and moral impoverishment” caused by “the fatal attempt to secure the
good of humanity by eliminating God, the Supreme Good.”[13]
The practice of contraception leads to loss of faith in God and the
displacement of the law of God by the law of the State. As Fr. John A.
Hardon, S.J. (1914-2000) said: “[T]he single, principal cause for the
breakdown of the Catholic faith in materially overdeveloped countries
like ours has been contraception. St. James tells us that faith without
good works is dead. What good is it to give verbal profession of the
Catholic faith, and then behave like a pagan in marital morality?” [14]
When a man and woman change the nature of the conjugal act in order
to prevent new life, they put themselves, rather than God, in charge of
deciding whether and when human life shall begin and, implicitly, when
it shall end. As Pope John Paul II put it, “When…through contraception,
married couples remove from the exercise of their conjugal sexuality
its potential procreative capacity, they claim a power which belongs
solely to God; the power to decide, in a final analysis, the coming into existence of a human person.” [15]
The Impact of Contraception
The abandonment of HV by the American Church has practical
consequences. “If a person can violate [by contraception] the natural
integrity of the moral act with moral impunity,” said Dean William J.
Kenealy, S.J., of Boston College Law School two decades before HV, “then
I challenge anyone to show me the essential immorality of any sexual
aberration.”[16] “Contraceptive sex is the fundamental social fact of
our time.”[17] Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution has analyzed
social science data confirming that the sexual revolution triggered by
the Pill is an accelerating disaster, especially for its main
victims—women and children. If you make yourself the arbiter of whether
and when life shall begin, you will predictably put yourself in charge
of when life shall end, as in abortion, euthanasia and suicide. The
contraceptive society cannot deny legitimacy to homosexual activity
without denying itself. If it is man’s decision as to whether sex will
have any relation to procreation, then the only objections to same-sex
“marriage,” polygamy, bestiality, etc., are reduced to the aesthetic and
arbitrary. The separation of sex from procreation undercuts any
reservation of sex for marriage and any reason for permanence of
marriage. It also encourages the objectification of women by
pornography.[18] Eberstadt correctly says HV “warned of four resulting
trends: a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise
in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the
coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.”[19]
Eberstadt fittingly quotes Archbishop Charles Chaput: “If Paul VI were
right about so many of the consequences deriving from contraception, it
is because he was right about contraception itself.”
When an objective history of this period is written, the practical
abandonment by the American Catholic Church of the theretofore unbroken
Christian teaching on contraception will be seen as astonishing, craven
and frivolous.
An Opening for Humanae Vitae
Obama’s Mandate, however, creates an opening for the bishops. The
truth about contraception can have a life-changing impact, and not only
on Catholics. “The effective separation of sex from procreation,” said
R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary, “may be one of the most important defining marks of our
age—and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among
American evangelicals and it threatens to set loose a firestorm…
[E]vangelicals are rethinking…birth control—and facing the hard
questions posed by reproductive technologies.” [20]
HV is a game-changer because it challenges the core of the
secularist, relativist and individualist religion of America’s ruling
class. The nobility of that teaching can have an impressive impact on
young people. With John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the Church has seen a
rebirth of faith among the young. But many of them lack a solid
foundation. “One cannot escape,” said John Paul II, “the fact that more
than in any other historical period, there is a breakdown in the
process of handing on moral and religious values between generations.”[21] John Paul and Benedict have called on the bishops to fix that breakdown.
The Campaign for Humanae Vitae
On its 40th anniversary, Benedict emphasized the centrality of HV:
Forty years after its
publication [HV] not only expresses its unchanged truth but also reveals
[its] farsightedness…. The Magisterium [must reflect] on the
fundamental principles that concern marriage and procreation. ….The
truth expressed in [HV] does not change; on the contrary, precisely in
the light of the new scientific discoveries, its teaching becomes more
timely and elicits reflection on [its] intrinsic value…. The urgent
need for education…primarily concerns the theme of life. I…hope that
young people…will be given very special attention so that they may learn
the true meaning of love and prepare for it…without [being] distracted
by ephemeral messages that prevent them from reaching the essence of the
truth at stake…. The teaching expressed by [HV] conforms with the
fundamental structure through which life has always been transmitted
since the world’s creation, with respect for nature and…its needs.
Concern for human life and safeguarding the person’s dignity require us
not to leave anything untried so that all may be involved in the genuine
truth of responsible conjugal love in full adherence to the law
engraved on the heart of every person.[22]
Cardinal Dolan frankly admitted that the bishops have doubted that
the Catholic people of the United States would accept a forthright
teaching of HV. But, as Benedict XVI noted in his homily on July 15,
2012, the prophet Amos preached “what God says and not what people
wanted to hear.” In our times, Benedict said, “This remains the mandate
of the Church: she does not preach what the powerful want to hear. Her
criterion is truth and justice, even if that garners no applause and
collides with human power.”[23]
The Campaign for Humanae Vitae will
offer to the bishops and to the Holy Father the support of Catholic
people who plead for the Church to proclaim and teach the truth of HV.
On the 50th anniversary of HV in 2018, we aim to present
one million signatures to the bishops to make that anniversary a
celebration, a Golden occasion to thank God for the Truth affirmed by HV
and the Magisterium.
The “nuclear weapon” of the Campaign for Humanae Vitae, however, is
prayer—for our country and for our Church, especially through the
intercession of Mary, the mother of Life. As John Paul II wrote in a
letter to U.S. bishops in 1993, “America needs much prayer—lest it lose
its soul.”[24]
[1] Gary Gutting, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15.
[2] See Allan Carlson, “Children of the Reformation,” Touchstone, May 2007; www.touchstonemag.com.
[3] George Weigel, “The ‘Truce of 1968,’ once again,” www.dioceseofmarquette.org; May 17, 2006.
[4] LifeSiteNews.com, May 28, 2012.
[5] John 14:15.
[6] Jude P. Dougherty, “The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,” The Wanderer, May 3, 2012, p. 4A.
[7] James Taranto, “When the Archbishop Met the President,” online.wsj.com, March 31, 2012.
[8] Pope Benedict XVI to American bishops, Ad limina, March 14, 2012.
[9] www.theblaze.com, Jan. 30, 2012.
[10] Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1796.
[11] www.lifenews.com/2012/04/10
[12] ST. I, II Q. 96, art. 4.
[13] Pope John Paul II, Address, Sept. 24, 2011.
[14] John A. Hardon, S.J., “Contraception: Fatal to the Faith and to Eternal Life,” Eternal Life, April 19, 1999, 27, 29.
[15] Pope John Paul II, Discourse, September 17, 1983.
[16] 46 Catholic Mind (1948), 11.
[17] Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, (2012), 157.
[18] Eberstadt, op. cit., Chapters 2 and 3.
[19] Ibid., p. 136.
[20] Russell Shorto, “Contra-Contraception,” New York Times Magazine, May 7, 2006, 48, 50.
[21] Pope John Paul II, Address, March 16, 2002.
[22] Pope Benedict XVI, Address, May 10, 2008
[23] LifeSiteNews.com, July 16, 2012.
[24] Pope John Paul II, Letter to the U.S. Bishops, June 11, 1993; 38 The Pope Speaks (1993), 374, 376.
