It was 1968, and the Vietnam War, assassinations, and urban riots had shredded faith in institutional authority.That summer got a little hotter on July 29, when Pope Paul VI released his encyclical on sexuality and birth control, "Humanae Vitae."
Public attention zeroed in on the pope's insistence "that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life" and his upholding the Roman Catholic church's ban on artificial contraception.
The news leak that a majority of an advisory commission had urged dropping the church's no-exceptions ban didn't help the pope's position.
Other cultural battles of that era faded long ago. But on this 40th anniversary, the controversy over "Humanae Vitae" endures.
Some contemporary critics of the Vatican's policy contend, for example, that the church could save lives in AIDS-ravaged Africa by relenting on its opposition to condom use.
Traditionalists counter that the pope was prescient in condemning a culture that seems often to treat life as a disposable soda bottle.
"There's no document in the 20th century that did more to undermine the church's teaching authority than 'Humane Vitae,' " says Stephen Pope, a theology professor at Boston College. That's a supreme irony, he says, as Paul had worried that altering the church's contraception teaching might call into question other aspects of the magisterium.
"Exactly what he didn't want to happen happened, and some people liken 'Humanae Vitae' to the Catholic Vietnam," says Pope, adding that this is not to deny that Paul sincerely believed what he preached in the encyclical.
In her 2004 book "Catholics and Contraception," Catholic University of America historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler says that half of American priests in surveys did not agree with the encyclical. Tentler reports that some church leaders, including Boston's Cardinal Richard Cushing, while publicly quiet, gave impressions to their priests that they were dubious about the pope's conclusions.
If the hierarchy was split, the reaction was vitriolic among their lay flock, fewer than a third of whom agreed with the ban, Gallup found one month after "Humanae Vitae's" release.
According to a story posted earlier this year on the website of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 75 percent of American Catholics continue to believe you can be a good Catholic while ignoring the ban.
Pope, who is a practicing Catholic, does not agree with the conclusion that, as Paul wrote, artificial contraception is "intrinsically disordered" and that a rigid prohibition is appropriate. But he notes that we live in a world and an American culture in which sex is often commercialized or otherwise shorn of love and commitment, while Paul laudably argued that those values should be inseparable from sex.
But "Humanae Vitae" acknowledged concerns about unfettered population growth and "a new understanding of the dignity of woman and her place in society."
Paul also wrote tenderly about married love: "This love is above all fully human, a compound of sense and spirit. . . . [It is] an act of the free will, whose trust is such that it is meant not only to survive the joys and sorrows of daily life, but also to grow, so that husband and wife become in a way one heart and one soul, and together attain their human fulfillment."
The Rev. Robert Imbelli, who also teaches at BC, said the pope was compassionately pastoral, not harshly condemning, toward Catholics who used contraception.
That vision is "even more important today than it was in 1968," said Imbelli. He knows some young Catholic couples, "often graduate students, who have discussed the beauty of the teaching and are seeking to live it out," by practicing natural family planning, which the Vatican supports.
While the encyclical did contribute to a loss of lay respect for church authority, he adds, "Humanae Vitae" was also "swept up into the incredible anti-authority [feeling] of the time."
Pope agrees that the inseparability of marriage and love is a necessary message today.
"The problem with a rigid reading of 'Humanae Vitae,' " he said, "is [that] it reduces everything to whether there's a condom or not."
Reductionism was nevertheless to be Paul's albatross.
"He was taken aback and deeply hurt by the rebellion of Catholics in certain parts of the world," said Pope. "It seemed to a lot of Catholics that Rome did not understand the ordinary struggles of life that people go through."
That sense may obscure what Pope calls Paul's significant achievements: shepherding the Second Vatican Council's reforms into enactment, engaging the world with calls for social justice and peace, the appointments of quality bishops.
Traditionalists would add "Humanae Vitae" to that list of accomplishments.
Most Catholics, though, would agree with Pope when he says the letter "has to be considered his black eye."
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