The fact that prominent Catholic conservatives have felt the need to speak out against such a possibility gives some grounds for thinking that, within the Church itself, and under the protection of Pope Francis, a movement for change is underway.

Theologians going back to Thomas Aquinas have said that interfering with sexual intercourse to prevent procreation is a misuse of the human genital organs, and therefore wrong.

Earlier popes had also opposed contraception.

Nevertheless, the development and release of oral contraceptives in 1960, and subsequent evidence that many Catholic couples were using contraception, triggered calls within the Church for a reconsideration of the prohibition.

In response, Pope John XXIII set up a Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, but did not live to see it complete its work.

Instead, the commission sent his successor, Pope Paul VI, a report noting that the Church was already allowing couples to calculate the days of a woman's cycle when she cannot conceive a child and restrict sex to those days.

To this observation the commission added: "it is natural to man to use his skill in order to put under human control what is given by physical nature," and concluded that contraception is permissible if it is part of "an ordered relationship to responsible fruitfulness."

A minority report recommending against changing the Church's teaching was supported by only four of the commission's 72 members.

To most Catholics, therefore, it was a surprise when, in 1968, just two years after receiving the commission's report, Paul VI published his encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), stating that any "action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation" is "absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children."

The very existence of Humanae Vitae, and its survival without any liberalizing modifications, depended on untimely papal deaths.

John XXIII was a reforming pope, who had convened the Second Vatican Council in order to reconsider a number of Church practices.

Had he lived longer, he might well have accepted the view of the overwhelming majority of the commission he had established.

Without the sudden death of John Paul I, the successor to Paul VI who died only 33 days after his election as pope, the strict prohibition of contraception may not have survived unchanged.

Indeed, when he was Bishop Albino Luciani, John Paul I had favoured a more liberal view of contraception, writing that manufactured progesterone could be used "to distance one birth from another, to give rest to the mother, and to think of the good of children already born, or to be born."

Catholic conservatives believe that Humanae Vitae has permanently settled the question of the use of contraception to avoid pregnancy, notwithstanding the contingencies that affected its promulgation and survival.

If you are willing to believe that God conveys the truth to popes, you may also believe that God works in strange ways.

Doubts about the permanence of the Church's doctrine were raised last year, however, when the Pontifical Academy for Life released Etica Teologica della Vita (Theological Ethics of Life), a volume, in Italian, of more than 500 pages that brings together papers from a seminar along with the text that served as the basis for discussion. Some of the senior Catholic theologians contributing to the discussion suggest that the use of contraceptives in some circumstances may not be wrong. Continue reading

• Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, is a prolific author and founder of the nonprofit organization The Life You Can Save.

Many moral theologians in the country agree with that assessment.

One of them said that re-formulating Church teaching on human sexuality is one of the most "urgent" and one of the most "difficult" challenges facing contemporary Catholicism.

The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), which recently published a shocking report on abuse cases in France over the past 70 years, agrees.

One of the recommendations it made in that report is to carefully examine "how the paradoxical excess of Catholic morality's fixation on sexual matters may have a counter-productive value in the fight against sexual abuse".

The CIASE report notes that the Church's persistent strictness on sexual issues has led to a paradoxical situation by which some Catholics, especially priests, have committed serious transgressions according to the idea that "if you don't respect all the law, then you don't respect anything at all".

Not all sins are equally serious

Added to this is confusion about the various "sins against the flesh", which Catholic tradition has grouped together under the umbrella of the sixth commandment: "Thou shall not commit adultery."

"The enumeration of acts without gradation of their seriousness is highly problematic because, for example, one cannot put masturbation and rape on the same level," deplored Marie-Jo Thiel, an award-winning Catholic ethicist who teaches theology at the University of Strasbourg.

Like others, she considers rape to be "a crime that kills another", which is actually a violation of the fifth commandment, rather than the fifth.

"Even today, anything that goes outside the framework promoted by the Church would be 'wrong'," says Dominican Sister Véronique Margron, president of the Conference of Men and Women Religious of France (Corref).

"We thus maintain confusion between wrong and failure, which all human beings encounter at one time or another in their emotional and sexual life. As a result, we don't know how to recognize what is really wrong, such as sexual violence, or perceiving the other person as an object," she said.

"Catholic sexual ethics remain very normative"

Catholicism's focus on sexuality and procreation has intensified since the 19th Century in proportion to its loss of socio-political influence. But that focus actually goes back to the beginnings of Christianity.

The contribution of Saint Augustine of Hippo is particularly "weighty" in this matter, according to Alain Thomasset SJ, professor at the Centre Sèvres, the Jesuit school of theology in Paris.

"For Saint Augustine, sexual desire remained an effect of original sin. It is only saved by the act of procreation within marriage," he said.

The Second Vatican Council certainly opened up sexuality to purposes other than procreation, such as communion between spouses.

But Thomasset believes there is still much work to be done to transcend the culture of merely "what's allowed and what's forbidden" and to broaden our view.

"Catholic sexual ethics remain very normative," the Jesuit pointed out.

"It is much more normative than the Church's social doctrine, which takes into account relationships, circumstances, intentions, the complexity of reality, etc. Relational anthropology, already present in social doctrine, would be welcome in sexual ethics," he argued.

A Church people are no longer listening to?

The 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae, with its prohibition of artificial contraception, did much to discredit the Church's discourse on sexuality.

Then the 2019 book, In the Closet of the Vatican, which alleged the widespread existence of homosexuality (and pedocriminality) among priests and bishops in Rome, seemed to further weaken the Church's voice on this issue.

Some Catholics regret this. They believe the Church is right to insist that our bodies are a gift of God that should not to abused or that sexual intimacy should not be trivialised at a time when pornography has never been so easily accessible.

So, is it conceivable that there can be an evolution Church teaching on human sexuality?

"First of all, we must keep in mind that a good part of the French episcopate remains marked by the heritage of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who defended a sexual morality with clear norms, in the name of human nature," emphasized Francine Charoy, a moral theologian who taught for twenty years at the Institut Catholique in Paris.

Moving beyond a "confrontation between two blocks"

Pope Francis has taken a different approach by encouraging more discernment in complex situations. But he has not changed Church doctrine on the substance of the matter.

This has left some theologians "disappointed".

They believe that the pope could make changes to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which, among other things, calls homosexual acts "intrinsically disordered"), as he did in 2018 concerning the death penalty.

Charoy, meanwhile, wants to see the Church move beyond a "confrontation between two blocs", progressive and conservative.

"We need to work in synodality among different theologians, to analyze together the denial regarding pedocriminality in which the institution has remained for so long," she argued.

The theologian said it would be a way to start dismantling the "culture of silence" highlighted by the CIASE report.

• Mélinée le Priol is a journalist for LA CROIX France. She has a particular interest in topics related to the Middle-East but also more widely religious news.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

While abuse of power can take many forms, many abusers rely on the excessive and, let's say it, clericalist use of secrecy.

For decades many Church bodies, including the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, have repeatedly called for removing the pontifical secret.

On December 17, 2019, Pope Francis finally lifted it for cases of sexual violence and abuse of minors committed by members of the clergy.

Nevertheless, this is just one step.

A culture of secrecy still exists in the Church, for reasons not always justified and or even healthy.

This culture continues to contribute to authoritarianism, clericalism and patriarchalism - all attitudes deeply disrespectful of equality among the baptized.

We can cite three examples.

Crimen sollicitationis, a text that remained secret for more than a century

We know today, without yet knowing all the twists and turns, the journey of the text Crimen sollicitationis, aimed at setting up procedures to respond to the case where a cleric solicits sexual favours in the context of confession.

The issue was explosive. The Church first addressed it in 1741 and included it in the 1917 Code of Canon Law.

But the text explaining the procedure to be followed in case of the "crime of solicitation", which gave its name to this document, was published for the first time in 1922.

Yet it remained secret. We only learned of its existence in 1962!

This document contained practical procedures to follow when dealing with an abusive cleric. But it was never officially published. It was sent only to a few episcopal conferences.

Which conferences and why?

Is it enough to invoke a certain idea of "harm done to the Church" to justify this secrecy?

Was it not, on the contrary, a question of doing "good" to the Church at a time when it had to face up to the evidence of reality?

Crimen sollicitationis remained in force until 2001.

The lack of transparency surrounding the condemnation of contraception

The second example has been investigated many times.

At the time of Vatican Council II, Pope Paul VI reserved the question of birth control for himself.

He appointed a "Papal Commission for the Study of Problems of the Family, Population, and Birth Rate". Its work was to remain secret.

But in June 1964 the pope revealed the commission's existence.

Catholic public opinion was overwhelmingly positive.

Successive leaks have revealed that experts known for their conservatism had rallied around the idea of new directives, and thus Paul VI felt compelled to enlarge the commission several times.

But in the end, the majority of the commission's members agreed that "contraceptive intervention", i.e. the pill, was permissible!

But the text was not published, nor were the negotiations that took place from October 1966 (when the commission submitted its report to Pope Paul) until the July 1968 publication of Humanae vitae.

That controversial encyclical, of course, did not endorse the commission's report. Instead, it condemned the use of artificial contraception.

As Martine Sevegrand reminds us, "the encyclical is the revenge of the men of the curia... disavowing practically all the experts and a strong majority of bishops".

Two conclusions can be drawn from this.

First, according to the words of Christ, "nothing is hidden that will not be revealed, nothing is secret that will not be known" (Luke 12,2), and at the moment of revelation, the scandal is twice as bad.

And then, was Humanae vitae never welcomed because the People of God (and even the fathers of the council) were not ultimately involved in this reflection that took place in the shadows?

Female diaconate, a report never published

A third example is both a protest and a demand for today.

It concerns the commission for the female diaconate set up by Pope Francis on April 9, 2020.

Following the 2003 work of the International Theological Commission, Francis appointed a commission in 2016 in response to numerous requests, including that of the International Union of Superiors General (UISG).

It finally submitted its report in May 2019.

But this document, which was supposed to provide arguments, was never published.

Why?

What were they afraid to disclose?

The pope himself was not satisfied and appointed a new commission.

But what will come of it? Will this commission finally make its arguments public?

The question of the diaconate, like that of birth control, and like many other issues, cannot be confined to the secret archives of the Roman Curia.

These texts are not secret, since they must be rooted in the Word of God and the practices of the early Church.

All their arguments must absolutely be published and made available to the People of God. If they are not, the people cannot accept them.

Wanting to maintain the secrecy of texts that should not be kept secret is to further contribute to the logic of collapse highlighted by the recently published report on the sexual abuse in the French Church.

• Marie-Jo Thiel is a physician who teaches ethics in the theology department at the University of Strasbourg (France). She is an award-winning author of numerous books and essays.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

I was an army chaplain at Puckapunyal preparing conscripts for Vietnam and, at the same time, an undergraduate at Melbourne University where the Vietnam War was taboo. Those two worlds were a universe apart.

As I drove into the university car park the car radio told me that Paul VI had reaffirmed the intrinsic immorality of contraception.

I was shocked.

His advisory group had advised differently.

We now know he went against most of the bishops he had chosen to consult.

Little did I know that this was just the start of a journey to sexual common sense for the whole church.

Five years later, I was parish priest of a brand-new parish full of baby boomers with growing families. They were enthusiastic Catholics who loved parish involvement. Life was full on.

As families grew, so did the parish school. Vatican II was the guiding charter. Liturgy was alive — the source and summit of the life of the parish.

Two things were of interest.

• Nobody ever mentioned contraception.
• Very few went to confession.

Fifteen years later, the younger generation was courting and moving into partnerships.

First, they had sleepovers, then holiday trips together, then they moved in together. Their baby-boomer parents moved gradually from concern, to acceptance and, finally, approval.

The younger generation was re-educating the older.

Some saw this as an erosion of values; others saw it as the emergence of common sense, replacing a strongly ingrained pre-judgement that sex was bad and dangerous.

Then they started thinking.

• Was the pill a bad thing because it allowed license, or a good thing because it allowed greater freedom?
• Was vasectomy a violation of nature, or a newly available option for alleviating anxiety?

Were the tortuous arguments of Catholic moralists based on a prejudice that sex is somehow suspect, rather than an integral part of a fully human life?

John Paul II pre-occupied with sexual morality

The 80s were dominated by Pope John Paul II's fight back on the issue.

He had a hand in framing the original encyclical and seemed pre-occupied with sexual morality.

Over a five-year period, he lectured on his Theology of the Body at the Wednesday Papal Audiences. These cerebral, rationalistic talks moved the focus of discussion of sexuality from human experience to rules and regulations.

He was an old-time student of scholastic philosophy which he propounded in the Wednesday talks and in the two encyclicals "Veritatis Splendor" and "Fides et Ratio."

Human sexuality, as a wholistic human experience, got lost in this arid universe. Was he fighting his own inner demons?

Sexual ethics, a new Church industry

John Paul II's intense pre-occupation with sexual ethics emboldened the law and order wing of the Catholic Church and created a new industry.

In 1981 he established the Pontifical Council for the Family. Its chief focus was sexual morality, especially opposition to contraception.

Under the 18 years of the controversial Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo's presidency, it was renowned for opposition to family planning, use of condoms, even as AIDS prevention, gay marriage and embryological research.

Another spinoff was the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family.

It has developed a heavily ideological course program using the JP II Theology of the Body as its ideological bedrock.

Allied to established theology schools, it grants degrees under a moral theology or bioethics rubric. George Pell promoted this institute in Australia first under the leadership of Anthony Fisher and then Peter Elliott.

Moral theologians like Charles Curran, who argued a more nuanced view of Humanae Vitae, were blackballed by the pope.

During the 37 years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI a chasm grew between an ever more entrenched, Roman, anti-sex mentality and a Catholic faithful who had adapted to a more wholistic vision of sexuality in human life and love.

Official Church ossifies

The church at large was getting freer while church officialdom dug in and ossified.

The doubters were not just pleasure seekers.

They sensed that integral humanity was at the core of their conviction. A narrow, cerebral path of study had led officialdom away from God's reality.

Margaret Farley, a leading American moral theologian, backed up this intuitive sense with her book "Just Love." Justice is the top criterion for loving - including sexual love.

At the same time, something new was crystalizing in this cauldron of ideas.

The mind of the church is formulated by the teachers ("magisterium" in Latin), but it needed to be received by the church at large to receive its final endorsement.

Reception theology now had its day. Ask Father Ormond Rush, an Australian theologian in the forefront of this study. The common sense of the faithful was solidly founded after all.

Cat out of the bag

Paul VI was shocked by the response of the church at large to his encyclical. It caused turmoil for many and departure from the church for some, including priests.

But it prompted others to formulate their conscience for themselves.

No longer is the pope's or bishop's word law. Make the case or lose the argument.

So, Humanae Vitae turned out to be a watershed moment.

Paul VI meant to settle the matter but, instead, began a movement that put conscience, reception and sexual taboo under the microscope.

John Paul II laboured for 27 years to bag the cat again - but lost.

What a roller coaster ride it has been!

But the church is, consequently, better informed and wiser.

Continue reading

• Eric Hodgens was ordained a Catholic priest in 1960. In 1973 he graduated M.A. from Melbourne University Criminology Department in 1973. For seven years he was Director of Pastoral Formation of Clergy for the Archdiocese of Melbourne. In 1965 he was appointed an Australian Army chaplain part-time. He was heavily involved in the army's Character Guidence Course program during the Vietnam National Service conscription period. He held this appointment for 15 years. Eric now blogs at Catholic View. Reproduced with permission.
• Image: La-Croix International

It reiterated the condemnation of artificial contraception for spouses.

Many in the Catholic world had been hoping for a change in the papal teaching based on the newer approaches of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and the call to change the teaching that was in the "Majority Report" of the papal commission studying the issue, which had been leaked the year before.

But rumors began circulating in the spring of 1968 that the pope was going to issue an encyclical reaffirming the contraception ban.

Humanae Vitae raised two different issues — the teaching on contraception and sexuality, and how the church goes about its authoritative teaching role.

The second issue is more extensive and important and is the subject matter of this essay.

The authoritative teaching on contraception, as explained at the Vatican press conference releasing the encyclical, involves authoritative, noninfallible church teaching.

Defenders of dissent from such teaching, including myself, proposed three basic reasons to justify such dissent. (The day after Humanae Vitae was released, I was the spokesperson and leader of a group of theologians who issued a public statement saying that Catholics could dissent in theory and in practice from the teaching of Humanae Vitae on artificial contraception and still consider themselves to be loyal Roman Catholics. More than 600 Catholic scholars ultimately signed this statement.)

First, history shows that the church has changed its teaching on a number of significant moral teachings over the years, such as slavery, the right of the defendant to remain silent, democracy, human rights, religious liberty, and the role of love and pleasure in marital sexual relations.

Second, noninfallible teaching by its very nature is fallible.

Noninfallible is a subterfuge to avoid using the word fallible.

Third, the primary teacher in the church is the Holy Spirit. Yes, the Spirit speaks through the hierarchical magisterium, but the role of the Spirit is broader than the role of the hierarchical magisterium.

Through baptism all Christians share in the teaching and prophetic role of Jesus.

The strongest argument against the legitimacy of such dissent insists that the Holy Spirit guides the church and would never allow church teaching to be wrong in a matter affecting so many people in their daily lives.

Instead of helping people live the Christian life, would the Spirit allow the Church to lead them astray?

The strongest rebuttal is that slavery was a much more significant and important issue than contraception for spouses.

Immediately following Humanae Vitae, a firestorm of debate arose over dissent and its legitimacy, but as time went on, the debate has greatly subsided.

Catholic spouses are fundamentally no different from Protestant spouses in their use of artificial contraception in marriage.

The vast majority of Catholic theologians, but by no means all of them, recognize the legitimacy of dissent in the case of contraception.

Popes and bishops have continued to strenuously support the teaching opposing contraception, have never explicitly recognized the legitimacy of dissent and have punished some theologians defending such dissent, but they have not disturbed the consciences of those spouses using contraception.

Fifty years after Humanae Vitae, there is little or no discussion about this issue. Catholic couples long ago have made up their conscience on the issue of contraception.

Priests and confessors have overwhelmingly accepted in practice the legitimacy of such dissent.

Today, one could maintain that the present situation in the total church has justified the legitimacy of such dissent.

But there are problems with this present solution. Continue reading

• Image: The Catholic Thing

Prepared by independent think tank the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, it will be published in New York tomorrow at an event hosted by the UN Population Fund. Read more

Artificial contraception ban challenged]]> 87267 https://cathnews.co.nz/2016/09/16/encyclical-contraception-difficult-text-benedict/ Thu, 15 Sep 2016 17:00:07 +0000 http://cathnews.co.nz/?p=87026

Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI has revealed that while he agreed with the conclusion Pope Paul VI drew in his encyclical letter (Humanae Vitae) on artificial contraception, he struggled with the reasoning Pope Paul used to arrive at his conclusion. "In the situation I was then in, and in the context of theological thinking in which Read more