What Isn't Said in Humanae Vitae
An Analysis of the Implicit Views Behind the Catholic
Church's Stand on Contraception.
1. Introduction
In
the church today there is a fragmentation and polarization of ethics which has
taken place in the wake of the 1968 publication of Pope Paul VI's Humanae
Vitae. There are many different opinions about the biological,
sociological, and philosophical facts surrounding human sexuality. There is
also a variety of approaches to sexual ethics in general. These influences
combine to make it impossible to construct concrete moral statements with
intellectual honesty. In a world hungry for answers, I feel almost paralyzed in
my ability to help guide people to a fuller living out of the truth in this
area. Without any clear signposts it is difficult to know which road to go
down.
André
Guindon is correct in his assessment that the real solution to the complexity
of sexual ethics lays in a radically new approach to sexual ethics in general -
of taking the personalist perspective seriously and dealing with sexual ethics
on that basis rather than on an act-centered basis. Yet I struggle to propose
this approach wholeheartedly in ministry because it seems to go against
official magisterial teachings, positions I am supposed to represent by my
position within the Catholic church, but positions which seem at best quirky
and at worst morally reprehensible.
This
paper attempts to provide a deeper understanding of magisterial teachings on
sexual ethics on their own terms in order to find a way out of this
intellectual fog. To achieve this, it returns to the source of the controversy,
Humanae Vitae, and attempts to understand the rational mind set of its
author(s). Most of the current literature supportive of Humanae Vitae
simply rehashes its arguments with some small elaborations. Most of the current
literature critical of Humanae Vitae seems to dismiss it as hopelessly
naive or wildly off base, leveling critiques that are so obvious that it is
hard to believe that Paul VI did not already take them into account when he
wrote the document. My belief is that there is a basic philosophical reason for
Humanae Vitae's approach to sexual ethics which is unstated in the
document, under-appreciated in the ensuing debates, yet critically
determinative nonetheless.
2. Purpose
Humanae
Vitae supports its absolute moral ban of
contraception with many different arguments. There are arguments from
scripture, from tradition, from a theology of marriage, and from an
understanding of sexual intercourse as a physical language as well as hints of
a basic philosophical and theological analysis of the "marital act."
Many of these individual arguments have been taken up by later authors. Much
ink has been spilled and the arguments have been refuted, refined, reworked and
ultimately have settled on two sides of a distinct line; those who believe the
conclusions of Humanae Vitae and those who do not. These two camps seem
to have polarized to such an extent that no further discussion is possible:
there are simply parallel monologues.
Amidst
the debates over this teaching, one thing is clear and agreed to by all sides: Humanae
Vitae treats human sexual ethics differently than moral ethics in any other
area. For instance, it is common in Catholic moral theology to allow changing
natural processes in order to serve a greater good. For instance, a redwood
tree has its own reason for being, yet it can be morally acceptable to subvert
that, cut the tree down and use it to make a deck for one's house. Humanae
Vitae, though, holds that "each and every conjugal act remain ordered
in itself to the procreation of human life" (par. 11). There is not the
same leeway here to use conjugal acts in the service of human good in general
as there is for other natural processes. Even the taking of a human life has
more moral leeway than using contraception. Critics contend that this
distinction is at the heart of the error in this teaching. In their view sexual
ethics should be dealt with in the same manner as any other ethics. Supporters
hold to this distinction using characteristic phrases but without explanation.
This paper does not seek to provide a comprehensive analysis of Humanae
Vitae nor even to explore its natural law approach. The purpose of this
paper is to detail a philosophical/theological understanding of how acts
involving human genital organs are fundamentally different than any other
physical acts and to see the ramifications of this in moral analysis. The
analysis will be based on that of Thomas Aquinas, since this is almost
universally acknowledged as the approach favored in this document. I believe
that this is a central component of the debate over Humanae Vitae and
thus needs to be made explicit.
3. Philosophical Analysis
A
key to understanding the nature of human sexual acts is that they are linked to
procreation, the coming to be of another human person. In Catholic thought,
procreation is crucially different than animal reproduction. From the first
line of Humanae Vitae:
The
most serious duty of transmitting human life, for which married persons are the
free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator, has always been a source
of great joys to them, even if sometimes accompanied by not a few difficulties
and by distress. (par. 1)
What
is implied here in the use of the term "collaborate?" Human beings
collaborate with God in the transmitting of human life in a much more immediate
sense than do animals in reproduction. In reproduction, everything that goes
into a new life comes immediately from the parents. In procreation, the parents
supply the material ingredients, but God directly supplies an immaterial
ingredient also. Thus God is directly involved in the creation of every new
human life in a way that God is not in the creation of new animal life.
A
rock, lying on the ground, is only a physical reality. There is nothing
"behind it," no other hidden reality or dimension linked to its
existence (cf. ST I, 84, 1). The same is true for a plant. It has a soul, an
animating and unifying principle, but there are no indications that this principle
goes beyond the physical existence of the plant. When one physically
experiences the plant, one experiences all there is of the plant (cf. ST I, 75,
3). If one were to physically destroy it, there would be nothing left. Human
beings, however, have a more complex reality. Not only do we have a soul, an
animating and unifying principle, we have the ability to know. This power of
understanding seems to go beyond physical limitations (ST I, 75, 2 and ST I,
84, 2). If knowledge were only physical, it would be limited by physical
constraints. This does not appear to be true. Thinking appears to be limited by
physical constraints, but knowing does not (ST I, 84, 7). All abilities of a
living being are grounded in the soul. Human souls, being intellectual, must
therefore be immaterial.
This
belief in the immateriality of the human soul affects our understanding of how
a new human life can come into being. When we see a plant or an (non-sentient)
animal reproduce, we see that each parent has contributed something physical to
the offspring. Since the new life has a merely material existence, we find no
reason to doubt that this physical begetting tells the whole story. One
physical thing has transformed into another physical thing, sperm and egg have
united into embryo which grows into a new autonomous life. We see
transformations of physical things all the time.
The
human soul is immaterial. Any actually existing immaterial reality cannot cease
to exist, since there is nothing that can cause it to corrupt (ST I, 75, 2
& 6). For the same reason an immaterial soul cannot be divided into
multiple souls. A new physical human body comes from an egg and a sperm, a part
of each parent. A new human soul in its immateriality cannot come from parts of
the parents' souls; they are not the kind of things that can be divided. For
the same reason a new human soul cannot come from the transmutation of another
immaterial soul. A new human soul must therefore be uniquely created out of
nothing, for we have run out of other possibilities (ST I, 90, 2). Only God can
create something from nothing (ST I, 45 5). Every other thing creates by
transforming what already exists into something else (ST I, 90, 3). In this way
God must be directly involved in the creation of each new human person, as directly
involved as the mother and father. This is why human beings are said to
"collaborate" with God in the creation of new human life.
When
human beings collaborate with God, philosophy has clearly moved into the realm
of theology since it involves the work of God and the relationship between God
and humanity. The important argument here is that God directly creates each
human soul. We come to this understanding from recognition that human souls,
being immaterial, require divine intervention in their creation. This
conclusion could perhaps also be supported through a study of revelation but
this would be outside the scope of this paper. It would be an interesting
exercise for the future and would perhaps be much more useful for contemporary
Christians.
4. Supporting Readings
In
Casti Connubii, Pius XI spoke of human beings "cooperating"
with God in procreation. "How great a gift of divine goodness and
how remarkable a fruit of marriage are children born by the omnipotent power of
God through the cooperation of those bound in wedlock" (3). It is by God's
power that children are born, not by some innate power in human parents
themselves. The human parents merely cooperate in the creation of their child.
Later he said, "Both husband and wife, however, receiving these children
with joy and gratitude from the hand of God, will regard them as a talent
committed to their charge by God" (4). This seems to be a complete
embracing of this philosophical approach and a paradigmatic image of its
ramifications. God in heaven creates children and hands them to parents who, if
they disturb this process at all, are directly refusing a gift of God and
frustrating and insulting the Creator. Since God is the active party in this
picture, any human action can only be interpreted as being for or against God,
not as neutral.
This
understanding of God's role in procreation is followed early on by John Paul
II. In 1960, before the publication of Humanae Vitae and before he was
pope he wrote:
A
man and a woman by means of procreation, by taking part in bringing a new human
being into the world, at the same time participate in their own fashion in the
work of creation. They can therefore look upon themselves as the rational
co-creators of a new human being. ...The essence of the human person is
therefore - in the Church's teaching - the work of God himself. (qtd. in Smith
239)
Clearly,
God is the primary creator of "a new human being" and we are
co-creators with God. This is more than saying that God is the primary creator
of humanity in the abstract. It implies that God is the direct creator of each
and every new human being as outlined in the preceding philosophical analysis.
Janet
Smith notes that as pope, John Paul II never explicitly denied this opinion
(242) although his support of Humanae Vitae flows rather from the
intrinsic connection between the unitive and procreative aspects of conjugal
love and the personalist approach this engenders. John Paul II has, in fact,
made support of Humanae Vitae on these terms a pillar of his papacy (McClory
152). In her analysis, Smith uses all of John Paul's writings equally, with no
distinction of time (HV 8, footnote 21) and thus does not leave room to
note the development in John Paul's thought. In reality, John Paul's shift of
emphasis seems to be so complete that as pope he never speaks about human
parents being co-creators with God with the same force. The only reference
given by Smith supporting this approach during John Paul's tenure as pope is
the following: "Procreation is rooted in creation, and every time, in a
sense, reproduces its mystery" (255). The addition of the phrase "in
a sense" certainly changes the implied level of God's creative presence in
procreation. In the understanding of the quote from 1960, following the previous
philosophical analysis, God acts directly in procreation, not "in a
sense." This indicates a development in John Paul's thought despite what
Smith believes.
The
position of the conciliar document Gaudium et Spes is also more
ambiguous, perhaps pointedly so (McClory 130), but could be construed as
agreeing with this understanding. It reminds parents that their proper role is
to "transmit human life" (par. 50) to their offspring, although it is
unclear as to whether they transmit it from themselves or directly from God.
Later it notes that the human "faculty of reproduction wondrously
surpass[es] the endowments of lower forms of life" (par. 51). The way in
which it surpasses it, is not specified. It could be through the more direct
action of God or simply because human procreation is united to love.
Pope
John XXIII set up the Pontifical Commission for the Study of Population, Family
and Births to study the issue of regulating the number of births and to
determine if a change in Catholic understanding was called for. He died before
it convened, but the commission was reconvened by his successor, Paul VI. After
three years of work, the commission gave its recommendation to the pope through
a short report entitled "Responsible Parenthood," accompanied by
volumes of information containing explanations, meeting notes, and summaries.
Four of the members of the committee dissented and rewrote a working document
of the commission, entitled "State of the Question: The Doctrine of the
Church and its Authority" and gave it to Paul VI separately. These reports
were supposed to remain secret, but instead were published in the National
Catholic Reporter on April 19, 1967. They became known as the Majority
Report and the Minority Report. Together, they give a good insight into the
state of the question as Paul VI had it. It is important to note that Humanae
Vitae follows the conservative Minority Report against the Majority Report.
In fact, the Majority Report was dismissed out of hand without rebuttal of its
argumentation (Hoyt 23).
The
Minority Report notes that the church's ban on contraception could not have
been based on any scholastic philosophical position since it was first put
forth several hundred years before scholastic theology was worked out. It goes
on to say that:
[The
teachings of the church] attribute a special inviolability to this act and to
the generative process precisely because they are generative of new human
life, and life is not under man's dominion. It is not because of some
philosophy which would make the physical order of nature as such the criterion
of the morality of human acts. (Hoyt 34)
The
unique character of conjugal acts has something to do with the fact that they
deal directly with specifically human life. Yet there must be more. Even the
taking of a human life is not treated so absolutely by Catholic ethics (for
instance, in the cases of war and capital punishment). Admitting that the
argumentation supporting the ban cannot be "clear and cogent based on
reason alone" (34) the document still indicates a solution:
The
substratum of this teaching would seem to presuppose various Christian
conceptions concerning the nature of God and of man, the union of the soul and
the body which creates one human person, God as the Supreme Lord of
human life, the special creation of each individual human soul. (35)
The
fact that God creates each individual soul in the divine image makes each human
life in some sense inviolable. Thus the issue of contraception is
"analogous to the inviolability of human life itself" (34). The fact
that God acts directly in the creation of each individual human soul must be
what causes the further injunction that makes contraception absolutely wrong.
The
Majority Report of the commission makes very little reference to this area.
When it does, it refutes this understanding. It forwards its arguments about
the necessity of change in our understanding of contraception through other
reasoning. Yet it is not ignorant of this line of reasoning. In taking up the
arguments from natural law it responds: "The sources of life, just as
existent life itself, are not more of God than is the totality of created
nature, of which he is the Creator" (68-9). Also, "The sources of
life are persons in and through their voluntary and responsible
conjugal acts" (70). Clearly, this goes against our analysis where God is
seen as a direct source of each human soul, in this at least on par with the
biological parents as a source of life. It is directly refuted that God is
acting in procreation in a way that is qualitatively or quantitatively
different than the way God acts in the world in general. Remember, however,
that this report was largely ignored by Paul VI in his final version of Humanae
Vitae.
John
Noonan was an advisor to the commission on the history of the doctrines
concerning contraception. His 1965, Contraception: A History of its
Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists was influential in the
commission's deliberations. In the last chapter of the 1986 version, he
summarizes the opinions that were in circulation during the formulation of Humanae
Vitae. Here he notes a typical Thomistic rebuttal of a call to change the
doctrine: "The act of coitus is sacred, is invested with a nonhuman
immunity. It is sacramental for Christians and non-Christians alike. Why is it
thus? Because by means of it God permits two human beings to join in the
creative task of producing human life" (530). This is an almost exact
repetition of the Thomistic arguments listed above. He goes on to say that this
understanding could be supported by Christian tradition only if one isolated
the teaching from its reasons and contexts (531). The specifics of the
arguments had changed so drastically over the centuries that this understanding
was certainly inadequate, yet in fact Paul VI chose to follow exactly this
reasoning.
Humanae
Vitae itself has several additional
references which support the Thomistic interpretation. In par. 8 the document
repeats that we "collaborate with God in the generation and education of
new lives." More explicitly, par. 13 indicates this understanding when it
quotes John XXIII, "Human life is sacred, ...from its inception it reveals
the creating hand of God." Inception of human life does not "speak
of" God's creative power, it "reveals" it. This strong statement
can only be understood with a philosophical underpinning similar to the one
developed above.
5. Moral Demands
Humanae
Vitae links this direct involvement by
God in procreation to moral imperatives in this statement:
To
use this divine gift [of conjugal love] destroying, even if only partially, its
meaning and its purpose is to contradict also the plan of God and His will. On
the other hand, to make use of the gift of conjugal love while respecting the
laws of the generative process means to acknowledge oneself not to be the
arbiter of the sources of human life, but rather the minister of the design
established by the Creator. In fact, just as man does not have unlimited
dominion over his body in general, so also, with particular reason, he has no
such dominion over his generative faculties as such, because of their intrinsic
ordination towards raising up life, of which God is the principle. (par. 13)
In
the opinion of Humanae Vitae, acts involving human genital organs are
objectively different from any other physical acts in that they are by nature
linked to the direct creative action of God in the world. This is "the
mysterious tangential point between the created universe of being and
God's creative love" (Carlo Caffara qtd. in Smith 104). This point of
connection is unique. Any direct attempt to limit this connection would be
against nature and contrary to God's will.
Through
creation ex nihilo of the human soul, God is the immediate source of
each human life. Biological parents participate with God in bringing about new
human life. Any sexual use of our genital organs is objectively participating
in this process, whether or not one acknowledges this or is even aware of it
(Carlo Caffara qtd. in Smith 104). As Gaudium et Spes puts this:
When
it is a question of harmonizing married love with responsible transmission of
life, it is not enough to take only the good intention and the evaluation of
motives into account; the objective criteria must be used, criteria drawn from
the nature of the human person and human action, criteria which respect the
total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of
true love. (par. 51)
As
noted above, the paradigmatic image for God's operating in this way is that of
human parents receiving children from the hand of God. With this understanding,
how could we morally do anything but accept? Framing the question this way
leads almost directly to the answer. As Janet Smith says, "Any argument
based on this understanding of human life would object to contraception as an
act that serves to shut God out of an arena designated by Him as the special
locus for His creative action" (103).
6. Other Views
This
quote from Smith wonderfully sums up this approach taken up in Humanae Vitae
and later by countless other supporters. It seems obvious after one understands
God's unique creative gesture in procreation. If one, however, denies the
uniqueness of God's action in procreation the issue changes dramatically. An
example of this would be the majority of the members of the Pontifical Birth
Control Commission. In direct opposition to this understanding, the Majority
Report states:
The
sources of life, just as existent life itself, are not more of God than is the
totality of created nature, of which he is the Creator. The very dignity of man
created to the image of God consists in this: that God wished man to share in
his dominion. God has left man in the hands of his own counsel. To take his own
or another's life is a sin not because life is under the exclusive dominion of
God but because it is contrary to right reason unless there is a question of a
good of a higher order. ...In the matter at hand, then, there is a certain
change in the mind of contemporary man. He feels that he is more conformed to
his rational nature, created by God with liberty and responsibility, when he
uses his skill to intervene in the biological processes of nature so that he
can achieve the ends of the institution of matrimony in the conditions of
actual life, than if he would abandon himself to chance. (68-9).
In
this understanding, the working of God in the creation of a new human life is
not seen over and against the working of God in the rest of the created
universe, it is identified with it. Thus it follows that we should deal ethically
with areas concerning human sexuality the same way as we deal with other areas,
holding forth that we were created in the image and likeness of God and
therefore given the great burden of responsibility to use our full faculties in
taking care of and perfecting nature.
In
both Humanae Vitae and the Minority Report, we can see the direct
linkage between one's views about the uniqueness of procreation and the ethics
of contraception. In point of fact, this standpoint by itself seems
determinative. Philosophically, though, it seems tenuous to use the level of
God's operation in the world to indicate the surety of God's will. Even granted
that procreation is the sole tangential point between God's direct creative
presence and the world, it is a leap of logic to make the further claim that
therefore God's will is more fixed in this area. Human will is not determined
in this way, and there are no other indications that God's will operates in
this fashion. In any case, God's action in procreation seems to follow upon
human action and human biological activity (which itself follows upon a
recognition of goodness placed in the world by God) and it is unclear what
God's will would be in response to an non-fecund human action. This tight
linking between conjugal relations and God's will seems to be more the result
of our paradigmatic image of children coming from the hand of God than from any
independent theological reasoning.
7. Epilogue: Personal Reflections
In
the end, I think the determinative theological question in Humanae Vitae
was not the nature of human sexuality. It was about whether or not the pope was
willing or able to change this long-standing teaching. As Robert Hoyt noted
shortly after the document's release: "In the wake of the encyclical,
then, the central argument is no longer about birth control or sex or 'nature,'
but over the authority of the church and its role in instructing men's
consciences" (13). The Minority Report of the commission agrees with this
framing of the issue. When the report asks the crucial question as to why the
church cannot change this teaching it replies, "because the Catholic
church, instituted by Christ to show men a secure way to eternal life, could
not have so wrongly erred during all those centuries of history" (Hoyt 37).
I find this statement and its mind set absurd. It was directly refuted in the
Majority Report (67). Should we have used the same reasoning to keep our
teaching about slavery from changing? Certainly that issue caused more
suffering in the world than contraception ever did. We may be THE CHURCH
INSTITUTED BY GOD FOR ALL TIMES FOR THE SALVATION OF THE WORLD, but I think as
an institution we still take ourselves too seriously. This is epitomized for me
by a small exchange from the last session of the Birth Control Commission
conveyed by McClory on page one. Marcelino Zalba S.J. asked, "What then
with the millions we have sent to hell, if these norms were not valid?"
Patty Crowley replied, "Father Zalba, do you really believe that God has
carried out all your orders?"
In
all of the debates which have followed the publication of Humanae Vitae,
each party seems to have approached its analysis with a preset opinion,
interpreting the data to fit a conclusion already decided. This is apologetics
at its worst. An honest, open discussion of God's role in procreation has the
real possibility of opening up the mystery of God's intimate creative presence
in all of creation. It could reveal much not only about sexual ethics but about
sacramental theology as well. But I am not convinced that anyone is really
interested in the discussion. All sides are stuck in cacophonous monologues. To
be in discussion, one has to be willing to change one's mind. In this debate
this was well stated by one person involved: "The debates convinced me
more of the intrinsic danger in irreformable statements than of the intrinsic
evil in contraception" (Hoyt 19).
Aquinas,
Thomas. Summa Theologica. Online: http://www.knight.org/advent/summa/
1995.
Vatican
Council II. "Gaudium et Spes." Vatican Council II: The
Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents. Ed. Austin Flannery. New York:
Costello, 1981. 903-1001. Online: http://www.christusrex.org/www1/CDHN/v4.html
Guindon,
André. "Sexual Acts or Sexual Lifestyles? A Methodological Problem in
Sexual Ethics." Eglise et Théologie 18 (1987): 315-340.
Hoyt,
Robert. The Birth Control Debate. Kansas City, MO: National Catholic
Reporter, 1968.
McClory,
Robert. Turning Point. New York: Crossroads, 1995.
Noonan,
John. Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians
and Canonists. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.
Paul
VI. Humanae Vitae. Online: http://listserv.american.edu/catholic/church/papal/paul.vi/humanae-vitae.html
Pius
XI. Casti Connubii. Online: http://listserv.american.edu/catholic/church/papal/pius.xi/casti.connubii
Smith,
Janet E. Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later. Washington: Catholic UP,
1991.
***
Additional Sources:
on church & contraception
Leslie Griffin on Contraception and Religious Liberty
on Papal Infallibility, a book review of Hans Kung "Infallible? An Inquiry"
Infallible? An Inquiry Reconsidered
***
THE HUMANAE
VITAE CONTROVERSY
George Weigel on The Humanae Vitae
Controversy
The following is the text of
George Weigel's coverage of the Humanae Vitae controversy. It is taken from
Chapter 6, Successor to St Stanislaw,
of his biography of the Pope, Witness to Hope
|
First established by Pope John XXIII, the
Papal Commission for the Study of Problems of the Family, Population, and Birth
Rate was reappointed by Pope Paul VI to advise him on the tangle of issues
indicated in its title. For much of the world, though, this was the "Papal
Birth Control Commission" and the only issue at stake was whether
Catholics could "use the pill." In the highly politicized atmosphere
of the immediate post-Vatican 11 Church, "birth control" became the
litmus-test issue between theological "progressives" and
"conservatives," even as the issue got entangled in ongoing arguments
about the nature and scope of papal teaching authority. When one adds to this
volatile ecclesiastical mix the cultural circumstances of the sixties in the
West, including the widespread challenge to all established authority and the
breakout into mainstream culture of the sexual revolution, it becomes apparent
that a thoughtful public moral discussion of conjugal morality was going to be
very difficult at this point. In 1968, Paul VI, who thought himself obliged to
give the Church an authoritative answer on such a highly charged question,
issued Humanae Vitae, which instantly became the most controversial
encyclical in history and the cause of even further disruption in the Church,
particularly in North America and Western Europe. The controversy was
inevitable, but it might not have been so debilitating had the Pope taken
Cardinal Wojtyla's counsel more thoroughly.
According to the familiar telling of this
complex tale, Pope Paul's Papal Commission was divided between a majority that
argued for a change in the classic Catholic position that contraception was
immoral, and a minority that wanted to affirm that teaching. A memorandum sent
to the Pope in June 1966—and journalistically dubbed the "Majority
Report"—argued that conjugal morality should be measured by "the
totality of married life," rather than by the openness of each act of
intercourse to conception. In this view, it was morally licit to use chemical
or mechanical means to prevent conception as long as this was in the overall
moral context of a couple's openness to children.69 Another
memorandum, dubbed the "Minority Report," reiterated the classic
Catholic position, that the rise of contraceptives violated the natural moral
law by sundering the procreative and unitive dimensions of sexuality. In this
view, and following the teaching of Pope Pius XII, the morally legitimate way
to regulate conception was through the use of the natural rhythms of fertility,
known as the rhythm method.
Pope Paul VI spent two years wrestling
with these opposed positions and with the pressures that were being brought to
bear on him to take a side. Proponents of the "Majority Report"
(which was leaked to the press in 1967 to bring more pressure on the Pope)
argued that the Church would lose all credibility with married couples and with
the modern world if it did not change the teaching set forth by Pius XII. Some
opponents argued that adopting the "Majority Report" position would
destroy the Church's teaching authority, as it would involve a tacit admission
of error on a question of serious moral consequence. Paul VI eventually
rejected the conclusion and moral reasoning of the "Majority Report,"
and on July 25, 1968, issued the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae,
section 14 of which began as follows: "Thus, relying on these first
principles of human and Christian doctrine concerning marriage, we must again
insist that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun
must be totally rejected as a legitimate means of regulating the number of
children."70 A maelstrom of criticism followed, as did the most widespread
public Catholic dissent from papal teaching in centuries.
Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, well-known to
the Pope as the author of Love and Responsibility, had been appointed by
Paul VI to the Papal Commission, but had been unable to attend the June 1966
meeting at which the majority of the commission took the position later
summarized in its memorandum. The Polish government had denied him a passport,
on the excuse that lie had waited too late to apply.71 Wojtyla
played an important role in the controversy over contraception and in the
development of Humanae Vitae, nonetheless. The encyclical, however, was not
crafted precisely as Wojtyla proposed.
In 1966, the archbishop of Kraków created
his own diocesan commission to study the issues being debated by the Papal
Commission. The archbishop, soon to be cardinal, was an active participant in
the Kraków commission's deliberations, which also drew on the expertise he had
begun to gather in the nascent archdiocesan Institute for Family Studies. The
Kraków commission completed its work in February 1968, and a memorandum of
conclusions—"The Foundations of the Church's Doctrine on the Principles of
Conjugal Life"—was drawn up in French and sent to Paul VI by Cardinal
Wojtyla.72
According to Father Andrzej Bardecki, one
of the participants in the Kraków process, Wojtyla's local commission had seen
two drafts of a proposed encyclical on the subject of conjugal morality and
fertility regulation. One draft, prepared by the Holy Office, the Vatican's
principal doctrinal agency struck some members of the Kraków commission as
"stupid conservatism" stringing together various papal pronouncements
on the subject while neglecting to mention Pius XII's endorsement of the rhythm
method of fertility regulation, or "natural family planning." The
alternative draft, which Bardecki remembered as having been sponsored by German
Cardinal Julius Döpfner, took the position of the "Majority Report" of
the Papal Commission, which involved a serious error in its approach to moral
theology, in the judgment of the Kraków theologians. By arguing that conjugal
morality should be judged in its totality, and each act of intercourse
"proportionally" within that total context, the "Majority
Report" and the German draft misread what God had written into the nature
of human sexuality, and did so in a way that undermined the structure of moral
theology across the board.
Were the only alternatives, therefore,
"stupid conservatism" or a deconstruction of the moral theology?
The Polish theologians didn't think so. The Kraków commission memorandum, which reflected the thinking of Cardinal Wojtyla and the moral analysis of Love and Responsibility, tried to develop a new framework for the Church's classic position on conjugal morality and fertility regulation: a fully articulated, philosophically well-developed Christian humanism that believers and non-believers alike could engage.
The starting point for moral argument,
they proposed, was the human person, for human beings were the only creatures
capable of "morality." This human person, male or female, was not a
disembodied self but a unity of body and spirit. My "self" is not
here, and "my body" there. As a free moral actor, I am a unity of body
and spirit. Thinking about the moral life has to be thinking within that unity,
taking account of both dimensions of the human person.
The Kraków theologians went on to argue
that nature had inscribed what might be called a moral language and grammar in
the sexual structure of the human body. That moral language and grammar could
be discerned by human intelligence and respected by the human will. Morally
appropriate acts respected that language and grammar in all its complexity,
which included both the unitive and procreative dimensions of human sexuality:
sexual intercourse as both an expression of love and the means for transmitting
the gift of life. Any act that denied one of these dimensions violated the
grammar of the act and necessarily, if unwittingly, reduced one's spouse to an
object of one's pleasure. Marital chastity was a matter of mutual self-giving
that transcended itself and achieved its truly human character by its openness
to the possibility of new life.
This openness had to be lived responsibly.
"The number of children called into existence cannot be left to
chance," according to the Kraków memorandum, but must be decided "in
a dialogue of love between husband and wife." Fertility regulation, in
fulfillment of the "duty" to plan one's family, must therefore be
done through a method that conformed to human dignity, recognized the
"parity between men and women," and involved the
"cooperation" of the spouses. By placing the entire burden on the
woman, chemical and mechanical means of fertility regulation like the
contraceptive pill and the intra-uterine device violated these criteria.
Contrary to the claims of the sexual revolution, such artificial means of
contraception freed men for hedonistic behavior while violating the biological
integrity of women with invasive and potentially harmful tools. Family planning
by observing nature's biological rhythms was the only method of fertility
regulation that respected the dignity and equality of the spouses as persons.
The Kraków theologians openly admitted
that living marital chastity this way involved real sacrifice, a "great
ascetic effort [and] the mastery of self." Education in the virtue of
chastity must begin with "respect for others, respect for the body and
[for] the realities of sex." Young people had to be taught "the
equality of right between man and woman" as the foundation of "mutual
responsibility." Pastors who shied away from programs aimed at educating
couples in fertility regulation through natural biological rhythms were
derelict in their duties, and were complicit in the "grand confusion of
ideas" that surrounded sexuality in the modern world. Moreover, the
memorandum continued, the pastor did not fulfill his responsibilities as a
moral teacher by inveighing against promiscuity. On the contrary, no one could
preach or teach persuasively on this subject unless the entire question was put
in the humanistic context necessary for the Church's teaching to ring true. It
was imperative that pastors work with lay people in this field, for "well-instructed
Christian couples" were better positioned to help other couples live
chaste lives of sexual love.
Elements of the Kraków commission's
memorandum may be found in Humanae Vitae, but Father Bardecki's
suggestion that sixty percent of the encyclical reflected the approach devised
by the Polish theologians and Cardinal Wojtyla claims too much.73 Humanae
Vitae did make references to Christian personalism, to the good of sexual
love, and to the duty of responsibly planning one's family.74 But
the encyclical did not adopt in full the rich personalist context suggested by
the Kraków commission. Absent this context, with its emphasis on human dignity
and on the equality of spouses in leading Sexually responsible lives, Humanae
Vitae's sharp focus on sexual acts opened it to the charge of legalism,
"biologism," and pastoral insensitivity, and left the Church vulnerable
to the accusation that it had still not freed itself of the shadow of
Manichaeism and its deprecation of sexuality.
Although the charge would likely have been
made in any case, the encyclical's failure to adopt the full Kraków context
made this indictment more difficult to counter. The Kraków proposal came to the
same conclusion as the encyclical on the specific question of the legitimate
means of fertility regulation. Kraków, however, offered a more compelling
explanation of why this position was better fitted to the dignity of the human
person, and particularly to the dignity of women.
The timing of Humanae Vitae could
not have been worse; 1968, a year of revolutionary enthusiasms, was not the
moment for calm, measured reflection on anything. It is doubtful whether any
reiteration of the classic Catholic position on marital chastity, no matter how
persuasively argued, could have been heard in such circumstances. On the other
hand, one has to ask why a position that defended "natural" means of
fertility regulation was deemed impossibly antiquarian at precisely the moment
when "natural" was becoming one of the sacred words in the developed
world, especially with regard to ecological consciousness. The answer is
obviously complex, but it surely has something to do with whether Humanae Vitae
provided an adequately personalistic framework in which to engage its teaching.
The Kraków memorandum also demonstrated
that the marital ethic it proposed was not a matter of Catholic special
pleading (still less Polish Catholic special pleading); its moral claims could
be debated by reasonable people, irrespective of their religious convictions.75 Humanae
Vitae did not demonstrate this adequately. The encyclical was a step beyond
the "stupid conservatism" that had worried some participants in the
Kraków Commission, but it was not enough of a step. Kraków had dealt with the
fact that changing cultural conditions required articulating a new context for
classic moral principles. Rome remained rather tone-deaf to the question of
context. The result was that the principles were dismissed as pre-modern, or
just irrational.
The failure to explicate a personalist
context for the Catholic sexual ethic, compounded by the politicization of the
post-Humanae Vitae debate in the Church, had serious ramifications for
the Church's effort to articulate a compelling Christian humanism in the modern
world. In its first major post-Vatican II confrontation with the sexual
revolution—the most potent manifestation of the notion of freedom as personal
autonomy—the Church had been put squarely on the defensive. Had the Kraków
commission's memorandum shaped the argumentation of Humanae Vitae more
decisively, a more intelligent and sensitive debate might have ensued.
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