Five days after the closing ceremony for World Youth Day, on July 20, the Catholic Church will mark the 40th anniversary of the release of Humanae Vitae - the encyclical in which Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the church's ban on the use of artificial contraception. In less than a week, the spotlight will shift from the church's ability to capture the imagination of young people to one of the principal reasons for its inability to hold their hearts and minds as adults.
Humanae Vitae had a momentous impact on the life of the church for two reasons. First, in rejecting the findings of the majority report of the Papal Commission on Birth Control and insisting that "each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life", the encyclical symbolised a growing rift between official teaching and the attitudes and practices of ordinary Catholics with respect to human sexuality.
Second, although the Second Vatican Council had ended three years before the release of Humanae Vitae, the encyclical closed off any hope that institutional reform generated by the Council would continue. For all the expectation about adapting to the "signs of the times", the church was not about to change in any fundamental way in respect of its hierarchical organisation, celibate male priesthood or traditional moral teaching.
Many Catholics responded to this turn of events by choosing to ignore the diktats of Rome and making decisions about their personal lives on the basis of what their consciences told them. This was one step removed from picking and choosing what being Catholic meant in terms of the ritual and sacramental life of the church and, ultimately, one small leap away from abandoning the faith.
Other Catholics mounted a kind of guerilla warfare campaign for what they regarded as the lost promise of the Council, but their ranks were gradually depleted by natural attrition and sheer exhaustion under the unsympathetic pontificate of Pope John Paul II.
Evidence of the subsequent disengagement of adult Catholics from the institutional church is not hard to find.
Although the official Catechism of the Catholic Church insists that "On Sundays … the faithful are bound to participate in Mass", for instance, weekly Mass attendance has been declining for many years in Australia and now stands at about 15 per cent of the Catholic population.
Even more alarming is the fact that during the 1990s, weekly attendance rates among Catholics were dropping five times faster than weekly attendance rates among Anglicans and Protestants.
About 60,000 of the 775,000 people aged 15 to 24 who had identified themselves (or had been identified by their parents) as Catholic in the 1991 national census did not identify themselves in that way a decade later.
A 1996 Catholic Church Life Survey found the most often cited reason Catholics gave for non- or less frequent attendance at Mass was that they no longer felt this to be a requirement of being a committed Catholic (cited by 54 per cent of respondents).
The second most often cited reason was disagreement with the church's teaching on, or attitude to, personal sexual issues including contraception, premarital sex and homosexuality (cited by 31 per cent of respondents).
A major report on the participation of women in the Catholic Church in Australia (published in 1999) identified disagreement with the church's teachings on sexuality, contraception, divorce, remarriage and abortion as a major source of dissatisfaction together with the exclusion of women from key decision-making roles even though they outnumber men among active participants in the church by three to two.
In 2006 the Pastoral Projects Office of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference conducted in-depth interviews with 41 male and female non-Mass attenders across the country. Twenty-one of them gave as their main reason for non-attendance a sense that the church was out of touch with the rest of society, citing its teachings on sexual morality as evidence. Another 15 participants said they didn't go to Mass because they felt that the church misused its power and authority.
Pope Benedict recently described Humanae Vitae as a "significant show of courage", the truth of which "does not change".
But until the church changes its tune it will find it hard to translate the tens of thousands of young people it brings onto the streets of Sydney in July into tens of thousands of adult parishioners in its pews on Sunday.
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