PHOTO BY JOHN CASAMENTO

Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae in July 1968, a month after I became a Catholic at Oxford. ‘Great expectations’ were abroad. Experts predicted ‘a change’ in Church teaching on birth control. A pamphlet from Ealing Abbey prepared women for change. It vanished when the papal teaching appeared! I regret not buying a copy – a collectors’ item.

However, quieter voices said that ‘a change’ was out of the question. This would reverse accepted and constant moral teaching, as set out by Pius XI in Casti connubii and repeated by Vatican II in Gaudium et Spes, 50, 51. But quieter voices were ignored in the Sixties, a confused era for Catholics seeking moral guidance on spacing the birth of children.

Doubts and Hopes
The anovulant pill raised doubts about the classical teaching. It did not involve mechanical means. It was invisible and could have medical applications. Little was known then of health hazards or early abortion effects, and few recognised the disruptive psychological dimensions of contraception.

A campaign spread across Europe and North America to allow the pill for Catholics. Confessors gave conflicting advice: some saying ‘no change’, others ‘wait for it’, others ‘follow your conscience’, code for ‘go ahead’. Well before the encyclical, the elastic conscience took hold in the Church.

However there were other problems. Natural methods were not trusted, not ‘scientific’ enough to satisfy a contraceptive mentality. All natural methods were called ‘rhythm’. Married people were sceptical when told that this old ‘calendar method’ had been superseded by the basal body temperature method or the simpler Billings ovulation method.

As I observed in England, some promoters of natural methods were not convinced of Church teaching nor, hence, of the need for their essential work. I believe they had lost heart. Some were not open to new developments, the Billings OM or the sympto-thermal approach.

‘High hopes’ were also raised by the commission set up by Pope Paul VI to review the question. The majority report the commission presented to the Pope was in favour of change. That report was widely publicised. The more prudent, minority report, against change, was derided.

The Encyclical
When the encyclical appeared on 25 July 1968, I was on an Oxford students’ pilgrimage to Lourdes. This fresh convert was amazed at the uproar among the young women in our group. But they had been primed to expect the very opposite to the Pope’s teaching. A Sydney seminarian with us was not surprised. Jeremy Flynn knew the encyclical was not one Pope’s hesitant ‘decision’, rather that it was his confident restatement of unchangeable teaching. Before his untimely death, Jeremy worked as a priest among AIDS victims.

On the day the encyclical was released it was undermined in Rome. Monsignor Lambruschini told the media the teaching was ‘not infallible’, a signal to ignore it. Later, studying the exact authority of the papal teaching, I came to the opposite conclusion. But in 1968 I did not know enough theology to understand that when a pope repeats and elucidates constant Church teaching, this is the infallible teaching of the Ordinary Magisterium. Humanae Vitae did not have to be proclaimed with a public ceremony, like a dogma defined by the Extraordinary Magisterium.

What most of us did not know at the time was how much a young Polish cardinal had influenced the way Pope Paul VI presented the teaching. Karol Woytyla had written Love and Responsibility back in 1958. As Pope John Paul II he would develop and enrich Humanae Vitae.

A Debate
Later in 1968 I was at the famous Oxford debate between some Dominicans and Professor Elizabeth Anscombe. She defended Humanae Vitae logically and easily won, although not in the opinion of
many crammed into the Newman Rooms. Emotions counted more than reason. During the debate, a young Australian named John Finnis quoted a footnote in the encyclical, referring to St Thomas Aquinas on natural law. The Dominicans were flustered. At that time some English members of this great Order had absorbed Marxism. Later in a pub I heard one cynically describe Humanae Vitae as an opportunity for power struggles in the Church.

Poor Follow-up and Dissent
In the wake of Humanae Vitae, aggressive dissent seemed to freeze many Catholic leaders, even the Pope himself to an extent. Acts of discipline against vocal priests, for example in Melbourne, only made media martyrs. Charles Curran cut a figure in the US, but Hans Küng, Karl Rahner and Bernard Häring made dissent respectable. Küng went on to attack infallibility. He understood the authority of the papal teaching.

The Pope was not only attacked in the secular press. Under the editorship Paul Burns, the London Tablet dissented from Humanae Vitae. A later Tablet editor censored a letter of mine contradicting another dissenter, Dr Jack Dominian. I had written that Mother Teresa’s sisters were teaching natural family planning in India. You could not even make fidelity to Humanae Vitae look good!

Then came the most tragic part of the saga. Notwithstanding the compassionate pastoral tone of the encyclical, ‘pastoral statements’ from some episcopal conferences modified the Pope’s teaching in a slippery way. Canada was perhaps the worst, but in 1974 Australia followed. What was a young priest to think when a senior bishop apologised to him for losing the vote that let the Australian statement appear? After complaints to Rome, it was corrected, but the damage had been done. Through the media, Catholics heard ‘follow your conscience’, a green light for birth control and sterilisation.

Pope Paul VI, a Prophet
Pope Paul VI deserves to be described as a prophet. At the time he seemed to be a martyr. His letter on the transmission of human life was his finest hour. It had an uncanny accuracy in light of the past 40 years. He said that contraception harmed women (Humanae Vitae, 17). People laughed at him. Forty years down the track several feminists agree with him. He argued that artificial birth control can be used by governments to impose population control. Vatican-led struggles against population control at the UN Conference in the1990s have vindicated his stand. He was criticised for linking sterilisation and abortion to contraception. But recent decades have revealed that these three ugly sisters of the ‘culture of death’ are inseparable.

His teaching that the love-giving and life-giving dimensions of the marriage act must never be separated has been vindicated by manipulation of human life – IVF, surrogacy, embryo experimentation, cloning. Human-animal hybrids were recently approved by the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ (Great Britain), which first legalised abortion in 1967.

Pope Paul VI argued that love, not just life, is disrupted by anti-natal practices. People who actually read his encyclical find a rich doctrine of married love. But the creative development of that dimension had to wait for another pope.

Pastoral Hopes
After the 1980 Synod of Bishops on the family, Pope John Paul II personalised Humanae Vitae in Familiaris Consortio, 28-35. Benefiting from the woman’s cycle, couples cooperate with God as ministers of life, open to the divine plan. He promoted the truly interpersonal natural regulation of fertility (FC, 32).

That is the only pastoral way forward – widely promoting natural regulation of fertility, so-called ‘natural family planning’. What is truly natural can be a means of grace in marriage. Moreover, in the face of so many fertility problems, couples can achieve a pregnancy by reversing these methods. In my opinion, until there is a natural family planning teacher in every parish, we are not being serious about the prophetic teaching of Pope Paul VI, his liberating message of love and life.