Monday, July 21, 2008

Birth-control ruling still echoes for church (Contribution)

We are nearing the 40th anniversary of an event that, more than any other in recent history, shocked the Catholic world: the publication of the document that outlawed all forms of artificial birth control.

It was a trauma from which the church hasn't recovered.

The seismic waves from that ban continue to reverberate in an ongoing conflict among Catholics over the present and future of their church.

Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), as the ruling was called, was issued by Pope Paul VI on July 25, 1968, ending a period of intense speculation.

Advocates of lifting the church's traditional prohibition against artificial birth control, in at least some settings, had reason to hope.

The Second Vatican Council, which had ended three years earlier, defined the church essentially as the "people of God," whose views were to be taken seriously - rather than a hierarchical structure that simply handed down judgments without consultation. The Council's focus was on heeding the views of the laity.

Pope John XXIII had convened a commission to help him decide whether the recently available contraceptive pill and other factors in modern society should cause the church to liberalize its teaching on birth control.

After John's death in 1963, Pope Paul expanded the commission greatly, with theologians and lay people from around the world.

The commission said yes, but ultimately Paul said no.

Progressives were stunned and angered.

Opponents of change, on the other hand, saw the pope's stand as an affirmation of a line of thinking whose authority reached far back into the past; they applauded him for refusing to bend to secular trends.

Protests by dissidents captured the headlines, overshadowing the quiet relief of those who were content with the results.

The dissidents - including priests, nuns and lay people - marched, signed petitions, and defied church authorities, swept along in part by the pattern of social confrontation prevalent during the 1960s.

It turned out to be a wedge that, in the eyes of many, separated the church from modern realities.

Soon, throughout the United States and Europe, lay people showed their displeasure by attending church less often, or not at all, and using artificial contraception in spite of the church's teaching.

What had been a highly conformist flock became fragmented. Not long after, according to polls, upward of two-thirds of the laity, then more than three-quarters, refused to accept the ban.

From there, the gap between laity and church has only broadened and deepened.

Much of that rejection came from Catholic women, who were in the throes of a wider movement protesting sexual discrimination.

Many women regarded Humanae Vitae as another sign that their viewpoint and experience as mothers and wives struggling to maintain families meant nothing to church leaders.

Many other Catholics looked favorably on what they saw as the pope's courage in holding the line against modernism, soulless hedonism, and feminism. To many of these, the pill signified self-seeking and sexual license that led to a disregard for the sanctity of the married state and for the authority of the church.

Though the protesters gained the immediate spotlight, and many dropped out of the church (according to Pew, one third of native-born Catholics have left), the outlook in favor of Humanae Vitae has dominated church leadership ever since.

The Vatican Council's model of "shared" authority between people and leadership still exists, but only peripherally. Paul VI would have given it a huge boost by acceding to his birth control commission.

It would have signaled that Catholics in the pews were being heard.

Forty years later, Paul's choice seems fateful indeed. It was the first major test of the Council's intention to reform how the church worked, a chance for the church to become more inclusive in the way it decided what Christianity teaches.

By choosing to align himself with the traditional top-down process inherited from his predecessors, Paul VI cast his lot with the past and against a newer openness to elements of the modern world that were of God's making, including a semblance of democracy.

There is much to be admired in Humanae Vitae. It was in many respects an elegantly constructed tapestry of logic, theology and philosophy. It upheld a vision of the sacredness of marriage, in which sex and procreation were inviolable. If you accept its presuppositions, it flows with consistency.

But it ignited a furor in the wake of Vatican II, when Catholic reformers saw the possibility of shedding that monarchical past.

By wounding their hopes and reviving those of the traditionalists, the birth-control verdict set the church on a tense, divided course whose end is nowhere in sight.
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