How Old Were You Forty Years Ago?

Were you even born?

The Tablet
January 5, 2008

Humanae Vitae 40 years on
Elena Curti

The headline “Pope bans Pill” reverberated
around the world when Humanae
Vitae was published on 29 July
1968. Forty years on, Paul VI’s teaching against
contraception contained in his famous encyclical
is barely heeded by many Catholics
in the West.

Spain and Italy, for instance, have among
the lowest birth rates in Europe. Either the
form of natural family planning has improved
to a remarkable degree, or couples are disobeying
the Church’s edict on artificial birth
control. And it is hard to avoid the conclusion
that such wholesale disobedience has diminished
the Church’s authority.

The publication of Humanae Vitae was a
seminal moment in the modern history of the
Church. It caused a breach among Catholics
that survives to this day, and among outsiders
cemented an image of a Church out of touch
and lacking in compassion.

The latter point gained force when
HIV/Aids spread through the developing
world and the Church’s position on the use
of condoms, formally at least, remained unchanged.

The shock that greeted the encyclical was
the greater because many Catholics had expected
a reversal of the Church’s teaching. The
so-called “rhythm method” of natural family
planning had been sanctioned by Pius XII
in the 1950s. Later, many Catholics felt that
this signalled the green light for artificial birth
control, particularly the contraceptive pill,
which became available in Britain in 1962.
Hopes of reform had further been raised by
the pastoral constitution on the Church in the
modern world, Gaudium et Spes (1965), which
identified conjugal love and responsible parenthood
as the pillars of married life. But perhaps
the biggest cause for hope was the
findings of a pontifical commission on birth
control which concluded that the ban on artificial
contraception “could not be sustained
by reasoned argument”. The commission included
among its members bishops, moral
theologians and married couples. Its leaked
report was published in The Tablet in April
1967, much to the anger of Paul VI.

Paul VI deliberated for two years before publishing
Humanae Vitae. Among his principal
concerns were his fear that appearing to
reverse the teaching of previous popes would
be damaging to papal authority, a belief that
allowing the use of artificial birth control
would lead to even greater promiscuity in what
was becoming known as the “permissive society”
and that it would give encouragement
to countries that wanted to introduce controls
on population growth.

The latter two objections made their way
into the final draft of Humanae Vitae together
with a restatement of the Magisterium’s
teaching on the impossibility of separating
the unitive and procreative purposes of the
“conjugal act”. Pope Paul went on to express
his support for married couples who wished
to avoid pregnancy for “honest and serious”
reasons, though he stressed that this could
be done only using “the natural rhythms immanent
in the generative functions”. The
Church, he wrote, was absolutely certain that
“means directly contrary to fecundation”
were “always illicit”.

In what was a huge understatement, the
encyclical acknowledges that it “will perhaps
not easily be received by all”. The then editor
of The Tablet, Tom Burns, ended his leader,
headed “Crisis in the Church”, on a note of
defiance: “Loyalty to the faith and to the whole
principle of authority now consists in this:
to speak out about this disillusion of ours, not
to be silenced by fear. We who are of the household
and can think of no other have the right
to question, complain and protest, when conscience
impels,” he wrote.

Such was Paul VI’s dismay at the manner
in which his encyclical was received that he
never wrote another in the remaining 10 years
of his pontificate.