To the Editor:
Bishop Tobin was spot on in his July 17th “Without a Doubt” piece when he wrote Pope Paul VI’s birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae “set off a firestorm of debate that still manages to inflame passions today.”
Even among the members of the original pontifical commission, created by John XXIII and continued by Paul to study human sexuality and in particular birth control, there was serious dissension, with nine of the 16 bishops (four abstaining) and 15 of 19 theologians on the panel voting for a change in the Church’s traditional ban on contraception.
Moreover, the reproductive experts comprising the commission raised serious questions about the Church-approved rhythm method, now euphemistically called Natural Family Planning, as no different in intention from artificial birth control and severely disruptive to marital relationships.
Actually some, if not many, Catholic scholars believe today that the real reason for Paul’s surprise rejection of his own commission’s recommendation to back down from the traditional stand on contraception was fear among the curia, especially Cardinal Ottaviani, and the pontiff himself that the doctrine of infallibility would be undermined.
As Paul said, “Any attenuation of the law would have the effect of calling morality into question and showing the fallibility of the Church.”
A member of the panel, Jesuit Father John Ford, said it this way, “…if the Church sent all those souls who practiced contraception to hell, it must keep on maintaining that that is where they are.” He continued, the teaching must be maintained “for the good of the Church.” It is, however, married Catholics, not the Church, who must live the teaching.
Why, one might ask, did the pope permit the commission to continue its work to completion when all along he never intended to modify the Church’s long-standing ban on the practice? In retrospect, instead of leading the faithful to believe a change was being considered, it would have been better for him to have simply dissolved the commission, restated the Church’s traditional position and let it go at that.
He would have saved himself a lot of grief and criticism during the last ten years of his papacy and there would have been no firestorm of debate.
Interestingly, Paul never wrote another encyclical after Humanae Vitae.
Henry Miller
Youngstown, Ohio
