Some two dozen Catholic theologians, philosophers and other scholars gathered in Rome last month for a three-day conference dedicated to defending and explaining the implications of the Catholic Church’s prohibition of contraception, as set out in St. Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae.”
The conference, whose speakers included the legal philosophers John Finnis of Notre Dame Law School and Robert George of Princeton University, was organized in response to what just a few years ago would have been an unlikely source of questioning on the topic: the Vatican.
Under Pope Francis, who has encouraged debate on a number of questions previously considered closed—including divorce and homosexuality—the church at its highest levels is now debating the morality of contraception, more than half a century after another pope was supposed to have handed down a definitive statement on the matter.
The speakers at the conference voiced varying levels of incredulity and dismay at this development among church leaders.
Both sides agree that what is at stake isn’t merely a particular prohibition but the church’s wider approach to sexual and medical ethics.
“Do they not realize that the Catholic Church is literally the last line of defense in the battle to protect the dignity of both men and women? Can they not see that relinquishing our hold on the teaching of ‘Humanae Vitae’ is the final act of a drama written for us by the serpent in the garden?” said Deborah Savage, who teaches theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio.
Last year, the Pontifical Academy for Life, a Vatican think tank founded by St. John Paul II to focus on bioethical questions, published a book, “Theological Ethics of Life,” whose lead essay included the assertion that artificial birth control might in some circumstances be a “wise choice.”
The head of the academy, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, wrote in the book’s introduction that the wide-ranging lead essay, which also addressed other bioethical topics including euthanasia and in vitro fertilization, was a response to Pope Francis’s call for “a radical paradigm shift” in the church’s intellectual life to match the challenges of the contemporary world.
A Catholic debate on contraception might seem to be an academic concern at this point in history. A 2014 Univision poll found that large majorities in traditionally Catholic Brazil (93%), Italy (84%) and the Philippines (68%) favored the use of artificial birth control. According to a 2016 survey by Pew Research Center, only 13% of U.S. weekly Mass-goers said the use of contraception was morally wrong.
Yet both sides in the debate agree that what is at stake isn’t merely a particular prohibition but the church’s wider approach to sexual and medical ethics. One side stresses the objective morality or immorality of specific acts; the other seeks to give greater emphasis to a person’s intentions and the particular circumstances in which he or she acts.
Conservatives warn that lifting the categorical ban on artificial birth control would open a Pandora’s box by contradicting the reasoning behind other prohibitions. Janet Smith, a retired professor of ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, told the conference in Rome that contraception leads to the acceptance of promiscuity, gay relationships, assisted reproductive technology and transgenderism.
On the other hand, the Rev. Carlo Casalone, a theologian at the Pontifical Academy for Life, said in an interview that denying couples discretion in the matter of contraception poses other risks.
“The norm [against contraception] reflects a value, and the conscience must always take into account the norm and the value when it decides how to behave. But there are a variety of norms, which can be in conflict, so the conscience must exercise discernment and make choices,” he said. “There are two dangers if we neglect the role of conscience and discernment in the moral decision-making process: first, that of an abstract morality that does not speak to people’s lived experience: second, that the Gospel could be reduced to law.”
The church has traditionally taught that it is wrong to prevent procreation except through abstinence from sexual intercourse. The explanations for this teaching have varied over time in accordance with developments in theology, philosophy and science, as recounted in John T. Noonan, Jr.’s book, “Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists.”
Biblical warrant for the prohibition has been found in the story of Onan in the book of Genesis, struck dead by God for practicing coitus interruptus. But the primary reasons for the church’s condemnation of contraception have come not from scripture but from natural law—a tradition of moral philosophy with roots in classical antiquity that holds that there is moral order in the universe that is discernible by reason even without divine revelation.
For medieval theologians such as the 13th-century St. Thomas Aquinas, Noonan wrote, “the first argumentation against the unnaturalness of contraception rested on its contradiction of the natural purpose of the genital organs and the genital act.” Thomas laid particular emphasis on the act of insemination, which he held “was invested with a God-given quality not to be touched by rational control or manipulation,” wrote Noonan.
The invention of the contraceptive pill, approved for use in the U.S. in 1960, inspired new moral arguments in favor of artificial birth control, since the pill didn’t interfere with the mechanics of the sexual act itself, said the Rev. Robert Gahl, a professor of ethics at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.
The core of St. Paul VI’s argument in “Humanae Vitae” was based not on biology but on what he called “the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance” in sexual intercourse between spouses. In other words, every human life should be the result of an act of love, and no instance of sexual intercourse can be fully loving unless it is open to the potential for new life. Any deliberate separation of these meanings is “intrinsically wrong” and never permissible, he wrote. Abstinence from sex during a woman’s fertile period to avoid pregnancy can be acceptable, however, since that practice doesn’t “obstruct the natural development of the generative process.”
What has changed since 1968? Pope Francis has laid increased emphasis on the role of an individual’s conscience in discerning factors that mitigate culpability in particular circumstances. “The consequences or effects of a rule need not necessarily always be the same,” the current pope wrote in 2016, encouraging leniency in some cases for those who divorce and remarry without an annulment of their first marriage, a situation that the church has traditionally condemned as adulterous.
This current of thought has encouraged a re-evaluation of the teaching on contraception, which proponents cast as a reinterpretation rather than a repudiation of St. Paul VI.
“The letter of the law can change, but not to invalidate it but rather to deepen its meaning and promote the values at stake,” said Msgr. Renzo Pegoraro, rector of the Pontifical Academy for Life. The rule against contraception “signals values that must be preserved in married life—in particular the sense of sexuality and the transmission of life—but it is also true that other values worth protecting may be present in the situation that the family is experiencing.”
For instance, Msgr. Pegoraro said, contraception might be permissible “in the case of a conflict between the need to avoid pregnancy for medical reasons and the preservation of a couple’s sex life.”
Ms. Smith, in her lecture to the December conference, said that “Theological Ethics of Life” offers an erroneous portrait of conscience, “not as the place where the precepts of natural law are naturally known, the place where a person hears the voice of God, [but as] the repository of the values one has adopted through one’s choices.” The Academy’s new paradigm of moral theology, she said, seems to be “a jettisoning of a morality determined by objective realities and replacing it with a morality of our own making.”
Pope Francis hasn’t publicly taken sides in the debate on contraception. But he has made it clear that he will have the last word, telling reporters in July: “The duty of theologians is research, theological reflection. You cannot do theology with a ‘no’ in front. Then it is up to the Magisterium to say, ‘No, you’ve gone too far, come back.’”