The very Commission on Birth Control, convened by Pope John XXIII, which Paul VI would allow him to affirm the Church’s teaching regarding artificial contraception outlined in Pope Pius XI’s Encyclical, Castii Conubii, would seal the doom of his Pontificate.
Pope Paul VI could never have imagined such an outcome.
First of all, Pope John XXIII’s Commission on Birth Control was a Papal secret, and the Vatican had lived for decades with the assurance that it could contain its secrets. Even when Pope Paul conceded the Commission's existence, he left its composition and function mysterious.
All the participants were ordered to keep their actions strictly hidden. There would be no official publication of minutes or results. Everything they said or did was to be turned over confidentially to the Pope, who could use or suppress it at his discretion. If this original plan had been followed, and the Pope wanted to ignore what the commission did, it would no more exist on the record than had Pius XI's secretly drafted encyclical on the Jews. The idea of a "runaway" commission was remote from Paul's mind.
Paul was convinced that the Commission would end up confirming Casti Connubii, perhaps on newer grounds. In this belief, he was encouraged by John Ford, the preferred expert of the Curia.
Ford had decided that old natural law arguments against contraception were weak, but the Church could not have erred, so new grounds must be found for bolstering the truth. If the Onan story could be sacrificed, then so could traditional (Thomistic) views on Natural Law, so long as the Church remained consistent in its condemnation, on whatever grounds.
Ford brought to Rome a Catholic philosopher, Germain Grisez, who helped him develop a new "will to life" argument. The Pope probably hoped this prefigured the outcome of the Commission's reflections.
The Pope was astonished when the Commission attacked the entire Casti Connubii position. And he was especially angered when the Commission's rejection of that former teaching was leaked to the Press.
What Paul VI thought he was fostering as a shrewd way of containing a problem had backfired. Miserably so. And, since the Council Fathers had failed to incorporate the teachings of Castii Connubii into any of their conciliar decrees, the task of drafting Humanae Vitae more difficult than he had ever anticipated.
The Pontifical Commission met five times, at first in the fall of 1963. Six men commissioned by Pope John XXIII meeting first in Louvain. The second meeting (and all subsequent ones) took place in Rome, in the spring of 1964, attended by thirteen men. The number was increased to fifteen for a meeting that summer.
Up to this point, no one had presumed to recommend altering the Church's teaching on artificial contraception.
However, things changed at the fourth session, held in the spring of 1965, when the size of the commission jumped up to fifty-eight, with five women included among the thirty-four lay members.
An expert called in for consultation was John T. Noonan, from Notre Dame in Indiana, whose study of the church's changing positions on usury had won scholarly acclaim. He was working on a similar study of changes in the prohibition of artificial contraception -- a book that would appear just as the commission was disbanded. In addition, a lay couple, Pat and Patty Crowley, had been invited to share the results of a questionnaire which they had circulated among the members of the International Christian Family Movement. They had surveyed the members, all devout practicing Catholics, on their experience of the use of the rhythm method of contraception.
The Commission members were stunned by the findings of the survey. The most conscientious Catholics, who followed this nervous procedure with precision, found that it was not certain -- which left them in great fear until the next menstruation (which might not occur). And in this concentration on the wife's physical conditions, her psychological needs for fondness, affection, and tenderness had to be ignored or repressed. The comments of the couples surveyed made riveting reading in the commission.
A husband, a scholar, wrote: "I have watched a magnificent spiritual and physical union dissipate and, due to rhythm, turn into a tense and mutually damaging relationship. Rhythm seems to be immoral and deeply unnatural. It seems to me diabolical."
His wife gave her side of the story: "I find myself sullen and resentful of my husband when the time of sexual relations finally arrives. I resent his necessarily guarded affection during the month and I find I cannot respond suddenly. I find, also, that my subconscious dreams and unguarded thoughts are inevitably sexual and time consuming. All this in spite of a great intellectual and emotional companionship and a generally beautiful marriage and home life."
The Commission was hearing that the rhythm method made people obsessed with sex and its mechanics while minority members at the Council were arguing that rhythm allows people to escape the merely animal urges and enjoy the serenity of sexuality transcended. The commission was also hearing from doctors that nature, of course, provides women with their greatest sexual desire at just the fertile times that rhythm marked off bounds.
The Commission members, even trained theologians and spiritual counselors who had spent years expounding the church teachings, felt they were looking at reality for the first time. To their shared surprise they felt that Church teaching had to change on this matter, that the truth, once seen, could no longer be denied. When the nineteen theologians on the Commission, convened for a separate vote, were asked whether Church teaching could change on contraception, twelve said yes, seven no.
This set off alarm bells for Pope Paul VI.
For the next meeting, the last and the longest, from April into June of 1965, members of the Commission were demoted to "advisers" (periti) and the Commission itself was re-constituted of sixteen Bishops brought in to issue the final report.
These Bishops would listen to those who had done the actual conferring, but theirs would be the final verdict. Debate before them would be presided over by Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office.
The Crowleys brought another survey with them, this one of 3,000 Catholics -- including 290 devout subscribers to the magazine St. Anthony's Messenger -- of whom 63 percent said that rhythm had harmed their marriage and 65 percent said that it did not actually prevent conception, even when the right procedures were followed exactly.
The Jesuit priest Josef Fuchs, who had taught Casti Connubii's standards for twenty years, said he was withdrawing his moral textbook and resigning his teaching post at the Gregorian University in Rome now that he could no longer uphold what he was asked to profess. The vote of the theologians who were presenting their findings to the bishops was now fifteen to four against the claim that contraception is intrinsically evil. The vote of the larger group was thirty to five.
The climactic vote of the commission -- the one of the sixteen bishops -- was nine to three for changing the Church's position on artificial contraception, with three abstentions.
An agreement had been reached before the vote was taken to submit only one report for the commission, but Cardinal Ottaviani and Father Ford, seeing how things were going, had prepared a document of their own, which would later be misrepresented as an official minority document. There was only one official document, the sole one voted on by the bishops who had authority to report the body's findings. (Ottaviani was the one who had brought in these officials, hoping to get the result he wanted. When he failed to, he ignored his own device.)
The so-called “minority report" said that any change was inconceivable because “The Church could not have erred through so many centuries, even through one century, by imposing under serious obligation very grave burdens in the name of Jesus Christ, if Jesus Christ did not actually impose these burdens."
It was the one argument that, in the end, mattered to Paul VI. He took advantage of the so-called "minority report" to say that he could not accept the Commission's findings since there had been disagreement with it. Nine of the twelve bishops, fifteen of the nineteen theologians, and thirty of the thirty-five non-episcopal members of the commission were not enough for him.
The Commission members left their work convinced that the Pope could no longer uphold the teaching against artificial contraception. When their report was leaked to the press, Catholics around the world took heart at the signs of change.
Yet, what would unsettle their faith and rock the very foundation of Papal authority was what Paul VI did next: issue Humanae Vitae, with its reiteration of Casti Connubii's ban: "The church, calling men back to the observance of the natural law, as interpreted by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life."
The vast majority of Catholics worldwide responded. We shall consider that response in Part III of this continuing series.
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