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In this episode, Trent pulls back the curtain on the drama surrounding Humanae Vitae and examines myths surrounding a commission dissenters hoped would change Church teaching.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, and speaker, Trent Horn. And today I want to talk to you about a common myth related to Humanae vitae. This is the 1968 encyclical written by Pope Paul VI that upheld the church’s teaching on contraception. But before I do that, I really want to thank everyone who is supporting this channel, and if you want to help us to grow and reach more people, if you could take just five seconds to like this video and hit the subscribe button, I would really appreciate it.
All right, so people who reject the church’s teaching on contraception, they often bring up something called the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control or the Pontifical Birth Control Commission. They say Pope Paul VI simply ignored the solid research of this commission, a commission he asked to determine if contraception is immoral. The Catholic feminist Celia Wexler says, “The commission, which included Catholic married couples and physicians, reportedly voted overwhelmingly to lift the Vatican’s blanket ban on artificial birth control and to permit married couples to prudently plan their families.” But that hope was dashed in 1968 when Paul VI, writing in his encyclical Humanae vitae, once more declared artificial contraception intrinsically wrong. These dissenters say that Catholics were harmed because the Pope acted out of a fear of rejecting tradition and when he should have listened to the so-called best theological minds of the Birth Control Commission.
And in a recent article at the National Catholic Reporter, two dissenting theologians, Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler, say the fact that nine bishops on the commission voted in favor of permitting birth control, and because of this, this shows that the teaching is not infallible. They also say the traditional teaching on contraception is something, quote, “faithful, credible, mature, and adult Catholic theologians have thoroughly deconstructed.”
Okay. All right, so let’s go on a history tour so I can break down what most people don’t understand about the Birth Control Commission. First, we have to start in 1930. This was when Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti connubii condemned contraception. Pope Pius XII, his successor, said that Pius XI’s teaching on this subject was in full force today as it was in the past and so it will be in the future. But by the 1960s, there were millions of American women who were using the new FDA-approved birth control pill, as well as women in Europe. Some theologians claim that unlike condoms, the birth control pill didn’t create a physical barrier between the spouses during the marital act, so under their logic, it could be a legitimate way to space children. They also said the birth control pill was necessary to stop overpopulation from happening. This was a time when you had environmentalists like Paul Ehrlich saying that overpopulation would cause famines that would kill hundreds of millions of people, countries like England would be wiped off the map by the year 2000. Spoiler alert, didn’t happen.
So in response, Pope John XXIII created a committee to discuss all of this. In their very first meeting, this Birth Control Commission reaffirmed the conclusions of Popes Pius XI and XII but said the mechanics of the birth control pill required more study before any conclusions could be reached about it. However, during this time period, there were bishops in Europe that were openly teaching couples could simply follow their conscience and use the birth control pill because the church had not reached a definitive conclusion about it. In response to this, Pope Paul VI brought the commission back together. Its formal title is the Pontifical Commission for the Study of Population, Family and Births, and then, added more members to it for the discussion, some of whom were notorious dissenters against church teaching.
You see, when people talk about the Pontifical Birth Control Commission in the ’60s, they often assume the Pope just selected the best theologians in the church, and so he should have just followed whatever they said. But there’s evidence Pope Paul VI wanted a commission that would give him arguments to test and not just advice to blindly follow. The late moral theologian Germain Grisez actually worked behind the scenes to help one of the commission members, Father John Ford, defend the church’s teaching. Before he died a few years ago, he said the following to the Catholic News Agency, “Pope Paul VI was perfectly happy to have a lot of people on the commission who thought that change was possible. He wanted to see what kind of case they could make for that view. He was not at all imagining that he could delegate to a committee the power to decide what the church’s teaching is going to be.”
Robert McClory confirms this in his book, Turning Point, which is a chronicle of the history of the Birth Control Commission. According to McClory, who himself supports changing church teaching on contraception, the invitation to one liberal theologian, Bernhard Haring, said the following, “It is the high authority who has wanted diverse currents of opinion to be represented in the group. Yours are well known.” He was a well-known, very liberal theologian at the time. One example of Haring’s diversity of thought was his claim that procreation was not an essential end of the marital act because it’s physiologically impossible for many acts of intercourse to result in pregnancy, such as when a woman hasn’t ovulated. But that’s like saying learning is not an essential end of reading because it’s physiologically impossible to remember everything we’ve ever read. Over the next few years, though, the commission grew to over 70 members, though some of them, like Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, was unable to attend the meetings because of Soviet travel restrictions.
Two notable attendees, however, were Patrick and Patty Crowley. They were a married couple who were the Catholic founders of the Christian Family Movement. The Crowleys said that they had conducted a lot of surveys with Catholic married couples, and they said that their surveys showed that the rhythm method, this was an older, less effective form of natural family planning, quote, “did nothing to foster marital love and provided no greater unity between the spouses.” Colette Potvin was another married woman on the commission, and she just slammed natural family planning. She said, “When you die, God is going to say, ‘Did you love?’ He isn’t going to say, ‘Did you take your temperature?'”
Now, a few members of the commission tried to steer the discussion away from the consequences of forbidding contraception and remind everybody there who was at the meeting about the more serious consequences of allowing contraception, like, “What are the bad things that could happen if we do allow this?”
For example, the Jesuit priest, Father Marcelino Zalba, asked about, quote, “the millions we have sent to hell if these norms in favor of contraception were not valid.” And people like Patty Crowley just dismissed him, utterly dismissed him, and said things like, “Father Zalba, do you really believe that God has carried out all your orders?” So you see, the commission was not composed of the brightest minds in the church. In several cases, it was composed only of the loudest voices so that every argument could be heard. So by this point, a majority of the commission drafted an 11-page report summarizing their position that contraception should be allowed. This was called the majority report. Meanwhile, Father John Ford and a few other commission members who rejected that proposal wrote a 9,000-word defense of the church’s teaching. This would later be called the minority report, even though it was not an official document in and of itself.
Regardless, both of the reports were given to Pope Paul VI on June 28th, 1966. Four months later, the Pope commented on the majority report. He said it carried grave implications, which demanded logical considerations. Now, the commission members also leaked the majority report to the National Catholic Reporter, a newspaper known then and now for allowing dissenting opinions to be promoted within it against church teaching.
Robert Kaiser was a journalist who reported extensively on the birth control commission at that time, and he said that because of the leak, quote, “people would have proof positive that authorities in the church were not only divided but also leaning preponderantly to a new view of marriage and the family that did not condemn couples to hell for loving each other no matter what the calendar said.”
Despite the public leak of this document, people who cited against Humanae vitae usually have never read it. They just say, “Well, why wouldn’t you agree with the commission that the Pope set up to investigate birth control?” And this makes me want to say in response, “Well, why wouldn’t you agree with the Pope, the successor of St. Peter, who is acting in continuity with the teaching of the entire Catholic Church for the last 2,000 years when he condemns birth control?” So in response to this, liberal critics of the church usually claim the Pope was just, he was clinging to this inherited, biased tradition against contraception. They say the commission showed how these new modern understandings of marriage and sexuality support changing church teaching, but the report doesn’t achieve that goal in the slightest. For example, the commission claimed that developments in the church’s teaching on sex, such as the primacy of expressing love, as well as social developments like lower infant mortality rates, means contraception must now be moral. But the intrinsic morality of an act is not dependent on demographic facts or social opinions.
For example, the commission rejected abortion as a way of spacing children, but modern dissenters would say the church should also change this teaching because, well, women’s place in society has changed. You see how the argument ends up being a slippery slope. The report also gives what becomes a standard interpretation among dissenters of church teaching on the issue of contraception. It says this, quote, “It is not to contradict the genuine sense of this tradition and the purpose of the previous doctrinal condemnations if we speak of the regulation of conception by using means, human and decent, ordered to favoring fecundity fertility in the totality of married life and toward the realization of the authentic values of a fruitful matrimonial community.”
In other words, couples don’t have to abstain from contraception because it’s intrinsically evil. They just have to make sure their use of contraception doesn’t go overboard, that it does not affect the fecundity in the totality of married life. Salzman and Lawler make a similar argument in their NCR article. They say this, “The majority report was based on the new interpersonal union model that emerged from the Second Vatican Council that focused on the total meaning of marriage and of sexual intercourse within the marriage relationship. The interpersonal model continues to be the judgment of the majority of Catholic theologians and the vast majority of Catholic couples.” However, the Catholic philosopher Paul Gondreau calls Salzman and Lawler’s descriptions of the traditional teaching on sexuality a caricature, it’s a misrepresentation, and he criticizes their appeal to the bishops on the committee who voted in favor of contraception, as if that determined what the teaching is.
He writes the following, “Few know that the consciences and subsequently the votes of the nine bishops labored under an erroneous understanding of the science of contraception. They believe that the birth control pill acted not as a block or inhibition of the natural procreative process but as a kind of medication that helped nature by prolonging the woman’s natural period of infertility.” We know this from the testimony of Georges Cardinal Cottier, a close friend of the Swiss Dominican who served as the Secretary of the Papal Commission.
Gondreau also takes Salzman and Lawler to task for reducing the traditional teaching of sexuality to just a concern about the marital act being procreative in nature. That’s never been the traditional teaching. He says that while our human existence as animals means the sexual act is obviously ordered towards procreation, just like sexual acts between animals are, human bodies don’t exist only for animal purposes. Gondreau writes, “We are not pure bodies, but incarnate, rational spirits with an ordering to interpersonal love. Human sexuality also owns an essential ordering to interpersonal unitive love. In brief, God has endowed us with a sexed design for the joint purpose of procreation and unitive love, as Humanae vitae makes plain.”
The traditional view of Catholic sexuality recognizes that sex is for the expression of marital love. It isn’t just for procreation, even if procreation must be left open and not purposely closed off because the saints and doctors of the church never condemned older, infertile married couples. Or younger married couples, when the wife is pregnant, it’s never condemned them engaging in the marital act, even if procreation is not possible, because procreation has never been the only end of marriage. The marital act is unitive precisely because it involves the full gift of the spouses, including the gift of their respective fertilities to one another. And this is true even if that fertility is temporarily absent due to a hormonal cycle or it is permanently absent due to age or health conditions. The point is that that both spouses give fully of themselves to one another.
The interpersonal union model that Salzman, Lawler, and these other dissenters promote, it only gives lip service to the unity that is created by the procreative end of the marital act. They basically say, “Well, you can use contraception. Just make sure you’re overall open to life.” But imagine if someone said, “You can have a loving marriage, even if you commit occasional acts of adultery. Just make sure you are overall faithful to your spouse.” Just as every single sexual act between a husband and wife must be a faithful gift to your spouse, every single sexual act must be a fruitful gift that gives whatever fertility you may have to your spouse. Only that way can the marital act be the complete and total gift of self between a man and a woman so that they become one flesh.
In the section of Humanae vitae on unlawful birth control methods, Pope Paul VI actually addressed those who would defend the use of contraception for the end of promoting the overall good of the marriage. Here’s what he said, “Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good, it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it. In other words, to intend directly something which, of its very nature, contradicts the moral order and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family, or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse, which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.”
In their editorial in the Reporter, Salzman and Lawler conclude with this ominous remark that reveals how dissenters won’t stop at just contraception. They write, “Once the church recognizes the flaws in Humanae vitae’s foundational principle, the entire edifice of official Catholic sexual teaching crumbles.” This is important to remember when dialoguing with those who claim to want to uphold Catholic teaching but just want to make this small change, say, “Oh, well, it’s just contraception for married couples. Just small change.” Because for many of them, their ultimate goal is not to reform sexual ethics, it’s to replace it with a secular model that is Catholic in name only but endorses things like masturbation, homosexual conduct, polyamory, and other things that I cannot even mention on YouTube.
All right, well, I hope that was helpful for everyone, and if you want a good book on this subject, I would definitely recommend Janet Smith’s 2018 anthology, Why Humanae Vitae is Still Right.
Thank you guys so much, and I hope that you have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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