Deja vu all over again

Whatever one thinks about the media coverage of you-know-what--in another man-bites-dog moment, I’m with Peggy Noonan in her WSJ piece--there is the you-know-what itself.  Although many MOJ readers will disagree with me—so what else is new?—I want to say it nonetheless:  This is not the first time some powers-that-be in the Church have done the wrong thing for the wrong reason.

In the matter du jour, the wrong thing:  the scandalous failure, in the United States, Ireland, and elsewhere, to deal appropriately with the abusing clergy; the wrong reason:  to preserve the reputation/credibility/whatever of “the Church”.

In the matter du temps perdu, the wrong thing and the wrong reason:  well, let esteemed Catholic (and British) theologian Nicholas Lash—for twenty years the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University (1978-99)—explain.  (Want to know more about Lash?  google “Nicholas Lash”.)

In a letter to The Tablet on “The origins of Humanae Vitae,” September 13, 2008, Lash wrote:

I do not take issue with Dr. Kal’s argument (Letters, 6 September) but with his use of the expression “the minority report”.  There never was any such report.  The Pontifical Commission on Problems of Marriage and the Family, as established by Pope John XXIII in 1963, consisted of six people. By the beginning of 1965, the membership had expanded to 55 and, part from a wider range of academic and technical expertise, it now included three married couples.  In February 1966, two months before it began its fifth and final session, 16 cardinals and bishops were added.  Cardinal Ottaviani was now president, with Cardinals Doepfner and Heenan as vice presidents.  (These heavy pastoral guns were added, it seems, because everyone now assumed that the commission was going to propose, with near unanimity, a significant change in Catholic teaching on birth regulation.)

On 28 June 1966, the commission’s report was presented to Pope Paul VI by Cardinal Doepfner and Fr Henri de Riedmatten, the secretary-general of the commission.  A few weeks earlier, four members of the commission, having decided that they were going to be unable to sign the report, released a “working paper” explaining their position.  It is the paper from which Dr. Kal quotes, and which has often, and incorrectly, been described as the “minority report” of the commission.  Two years later, after much agonized thought, Paul VI set the commission’s report aside and issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae.

The four theologians who did not sign the report took the action that they did, in large part, because they feared the damage that such a change to official teaching on birth regulation would do to people’s trust in the authority of the Church. Paul VI grounded his decision to reject the report not on better arguments in the ethics of reproduction, but on considerations of church authority: he felt unable to differ from his predecessors.  The irony, and the tragedy as I see it, is that, in the event, it seems to have been his refusal to countenance change which gravely undermined the confidence of so many Catholics in the very authority which he sought to uphold.