Critics who reject the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception often cite the 1966 “Pontifical Commission on Birth Control” to justify their dissent. They say Pope Paul VI ignored the research of the commission he directed to determine if contraception is immoral. According to Celia Wexler, author of Catholic Women Confront Their Church,
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.”
Critics like Wexler say the faithful were harmed by the pope’s fear of rejecting tradition when he should have listened to “the best theological minds” in the Church. Catholics for Choice puts it this way: “Humanae Vitae marked a turning point for the Catholic church, as Pope Paul rejected the theologically sound findings of his own Papal Birth Control Commission in favor of a turn to rigid orthodoxy.”
For many Catholics, Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii laid the issue of contraception to rest. Pope Pius XII said his predecessor’s condemnation of acts done to hinder the procreation of new life within the conjugal union “is in full force today, as it was in the past and so it will be in the future.” But by the 1960s, millions of American women, including many Catholics, were using the new FDA-approved birth control pill.
Some theologians claimed that, unlike condoms and diaphragms, the Pill did not create a physical barrier between the spouses during intercourse, so it could be a legitimate way to space children. They also said the Pill was needed to stop population increases that would, according to environmentalists like Paul Ehrlich, kill hundreds of millions through global famines (a threat that, by the way, never materialized for the Pill to neutralize).
In response, Pope John XXIII created a committee to discuss the issue whose first meeting reaffirmed the conclusions of Popes Pius XI and XII on contraception but said the mechanics of the birth control pill required greater study before any conclusions about it could be reached. However, some bishops in Europe were teaching that couples could follow their conscience regarding use of the Pill precisely because the Church had not reached a definitive conclusion about it. In response, Paul VI reconvened the Pontifical Commission for the Study of Population, Family, and Births and added seven members, some of whom were notorious for their dissent against Church teaching.
When people speak about the commission, they often assume that the pope simply selected the best theologians in the Church, and so he should have followed whatever they recommended. But there is evidence that the pope wanted a commission that would give him arguments to test rather than advice to follow. The late moral theologian Germain Grisez, who worked behind the scenes to help future commission member Fr. John Ford defend Church teaching, told the Catholic News Agency,
[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.
The committee eventually grew to over seventy members, though some members, like the future Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, could not attend due to Soviet travel restrictions. Two notable attendees were Patrick and Patty Crowley, the Catholic founders of the Christian Family Movement. The Crowleys said surveys they conducted among married couples showed that the rhythm method “did nothing to foster marital love” and provided no greater unity between the spouses. Colette Povin, another married woman invited to the commission, slammed temperature-based rhythm methods: “When you die, God is going to say, ‘Did you love?’ He isn’t going to say, ‘Did you take your temperature?’”
By this point, the commission had moved far away from its original focus on the mechanics of the birth control pill. A majority of theologians, many of whom were moved by the stories of Catholics who felt that the prohibition on contraception harmed their marriages, claimed that contraception is not intrinsically evil, and they drafted an eleven-page report summarizing their position. Meanwhile, Fr. John Ford, along with a handful of other commission members, drafted their own 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.)
The commission’s main report (now called the “majority report”) claimed that contraception is not intrinsically evil. It and the minority report were given to Paul VI on June 28, 1966. Four months later, the pope commented on the majority report, saying it carried “grave implications . . . which demanded logical considerations.” Some members worried that the entire report would be buried, so they leaked it to the National Catholic Reporter.
Robert Kaiser, a journalist who reported extensively on the commission at the time, said that because of the leak, “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.”
Does the commission’s report include irrefutable arguments, or a “new understanding” of marriage that overturns what the Church has always taught about the need not to eliminate the procreative end of the conjugal act? Not by a long shot.
The commission claimed that “developments” in the Church’s teaching on sex (such as the primacy of expressing love) and social developments such as lower infant mortality rates make contraception acceptable even though it was condemned in the past. Testimonies such as those compiled by the Crowleys also made an indirect appearance in this statement from the majority report: “Then must be considered the sense of the faithful: according to it, condemnation of a couple to a long and often heroic abstinence as the means to regulate conception, cannot be founded on the truth.”
But the intrinsic morality of an act is not dependent on demographic facts or societal opinions. For example, the commission steadfastly rejected abortion as a way to space children, but modern dissidents say the Church should change this teaching, too, because women’s place in society has changed and many Catholics who identify as pro-choice find it impossible to follow a complete ban on abortion.
According to Catholic philosopher Paul Gondreau, liberal descriptions of the traditional teaching on sexuality are a caricature. Furthermore,
Few know that the “consciences”—and subsequently the votes—of the nine bishops labored under an erroneous understanding of the science of contraception. They believed 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 issue with reducing the traditional teaching on sexuality to just a concern about the marital act being procreative in nature. He says that although our existence as animals means that the sexual act is obviously ordered toward procreation (as it is in all other animals), human bodies exist not merely for animal purposes. He writes,
[Because] 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 HV makes plain.
The traditional view of Catholic sexuality recognizes that sex is for the expression of marital love and it is unitive precisely because it involves the full gift of the spouses, including the gift of their respective fertility. That’s why Pope Francis said in an address to a conference on natural family planning that “there is a need always to keep in mind the inseparable connection between the unitive and procreative meanings of the conjugal act. . . . When these two meanings are consciously affirmed, the generosity of love is born and strengthened in the hearts of the spouses, disposing them to welcome new life.”