Greg Daly
Blessed Pope Paul VI 
50 Years of Humanae Vitae
It’s easy to forget, but ‘pastoral’ hasn’t always been a simple synonym for soothing, caring, or gentle. At heart, after all, it means the way a herdsman or shepherd behaves, and in the Bible that’s not always something sweet and mild.
When David offers to fight Goliath, for instance, Saul initially rejects the offer, pointing out that David is but a boy, while the Philistine had been a warrior from his youth.
“Your servant used to look after the sheep for his father,” the young David replies, “and whenever a lion or a bear came out and took a sheep from the flock, I used to follow him up and strike him down and rescue it from his mouth; if he turned on me I seized him by the hair at his jaw and struck him down and killed him.”
This passage doesn’t stand alone – the Bible isn’t short of passages about pastors protecting their flocks from wolves and how sheep are exposed to attacks from wolves when their shepherds aren’t with them. Even the sheep cared for by the shepherd of Psalm 23 is encouraged by the knowledge that the shepherd’s staff is there to ensure he comes to no harm.
Striking
All of which is to say that it’s striking that when Pope Francis has spoken about Humanae Vitae, Blessed Paul VI’s controversial encyclical on regulating human procreation, he has spoken of it as a document both prophetic and pastoral.
Interviewed by Corriera della Serra in March 2014, for instance, he was asked whether half a century on from the encyclical’s promulgation, the Church might once more consider the subject of birth control.
“All of this depends on how Humanae Vitae is interpreted,” he replied. “Paul VI himself, at the end, recommended to confessors much mercy, and attention to concrete situations. But his genius was prophetic, he had the courage to place himself against the majority, defending the moral discipline, exercising a culture brake, opposing present and future neo-Malthusianism.”
The question, he continued, is not one of changing doctrine but of entering more deeply into it so pastoral ministry can take account of particular situations and seeing what is possible for people to do.
Almost a year later the subject came up again while he was flying back from Manila when one journalist asked him about ideological colonisation and particular issues relevant to the pastoral care of families.
Ideological colonisation, he said, could be seen in situations where aid to people in the developing world could be tied to agreeing to teach certain things or act in ways alien to the culture being supposedly helped.
“They introduce to the people an idea that has nothing to do with the nation. Yes, with groups of people, but not with the nation. And they colonise the people with an idea which changes, or wants to change, a mentality or a structure,” he said, noting how the African bishops at the previous year’s Extraordinary Synod on the Family had complained about this.
“Each people has its own culture, its own history,” he continued. “Every people has its own culture. But when conditions come imposed by imperial colonisers, they seek to make these peoples lose their own identity and make a uniformity.”
As for Paul VI in particular, he continued, by saying that Paul VI was right to teach that openness to life is essential to the Sacrament of Matrimony.
“A man cannot give the Sacrament to the woman, and the woman give it to him, if they are not in agreement on this point to be open to life. To the point that it can be proven that this or the other did not get married with this intention of being open to life, the matrimony is null,” he said.
In examining this in advance of Humanae Vitae, he said, Paul VI had considered how to help families who are having problems, but went beyond the immediate problems facing ordinary families, and considered threats from outside.
“The refusal of Paul VI was not only to the personal problems, for which he will tell the confessors to be merciful and understand the situation and pardon,” he said. “Being understanding and merciful, no? But he was watching the universal Neo-Malthusianism that was in progress. And, how do you call this Neo-Malthusianism? There is less than 1% of birth rate growth in Italy. The same in Spain. That Neo-Malthusianism that sought to control humanity on the part of the powers.”
Careful to stress that there is no obligation on Christians to have large numbers of children, and that families should be responsible in this respect, he said that in preparing to ward off technocratic and neo-malthusian threats, his predecessor has been a prophet.
“Paul VI was not more antiquated, closed minded,” he said. “No, he was a prophet who with this said to watch out for the Neo-Malthusianism that is coming.”
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All of which makes particu larly interesting the publication this year of The Birth of an Encyclical: ‘Humanae Vitae’ in the Light of the Vatican Archives by Msgr Gilfredo Marengo, a professor at Rome’s Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences.
This book is a book Pope Francis really wanted to see published, explains Dr Austen Ivereigh, author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.
“Basically Marengo has gone into the Vatican archives with permission from the Pope, so this is Francis actually wanting this to happen, wanting this research done so the Vatican archives which normally aren’t very public were specially opened to allow this research to go ahead,” he says.
“I think in itself that is significant but one of the things I’ve noticed about Francis is that he shows very often the context in which a teaching appears to enable a discussion around it,” he continues. “It’s a bit like the women deacons question and choosing to have it investigated historically.”
Among the things Msgr Marengo’s research
has established are that Humanae Vitae had been preceded by a draft encyclical, De Nascendae Prolis (‘On a Child’s Birth’), prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that Paul VI had sought the counsel of the bishops gathered at the 1967 world Synod of Bishops around the question of regulating births.
The draft encyclical was apparently a doctrinally dense piece that didn’t take account of the role of sex in conjugal love, and although it was initially accepted by Paul VI it was revised and then ultimately rejected.
In Gaudim et Spes the Second Vatican Council had recognised responsible parenthood as a value, according to Msgr Marengo, thus changing the Church’s vision of marriage and necessitating a change in the Church’s sexual morality. The challenge for Paul VI, he continued, was to explain how the use of contraceptives could not be licit while at the same time affirming the need for responsible parenthood.
Emphasis
Humanae Vitae’s emphasis on the “inseparable connection” between the “unitive and the procreative” qualities of married love was an attempt to square this circle, while the Pope’s rewriting of the encyclical’s “pastoral directives” was an attempt to reflect Vatican II’s approach, in such a way that, Msgr Marengo said, the Pope was effectively saying: “I will explain the teaching and if you try to understand it, you will see that it is true and is what is best for you.”
His consultation with the bishops is something else that has hitherto not been known, revealing how unfair attempts to frame Humanae Vitae as the act of an autocratic Pope have been. The 1967 synod was the first synod of bishops, and although Blessed Paul asked the bishops for their thoughts, between October 9, 1967, and May 31, 1968, just 25 of the gathered 199 bishops replied to him.
Only seven of these 25 – including, strikingly, both the famous American Bishop Fulton Sheen and Krakow’s Bishop Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope St John Paul II – urged him to maintain the Church’s teaching on contraceptives. While the 18 who were in favour of change said they were open to the use of birth control in some circumstances, none would say that using the pill was a good thing.
It’s important to grasp the circumstances in which Humanae Vitae appeared, says Dr Ivereigh. “They were very turbulent – there was huge pressure on Paul VI from all sides, and of course huge pressure to accept artificial contraception, and what he did was affirm the ban on contraception, but in a document which was about as pastoral as it could be. It was actually about family love, and really rejected this preconciliar idea about sex.”
Paul VI’s decision to hold the line on Church teaching wasn’t the act of a reactionary or someone who wanted to uphold a narrow line on sexuality being there purely for procreation, Dr Ivereigh continues.
“It was because he genuinely looked at the world and saw the consequences of the artificial separation of conjugal love and procreation,” he says. “And he saw it not so much in terms of individual liberty, he saw it in terms of powerful interests corporate and colonial coercing poorer people to have fewer children so they work more productively.”
Marker
Paul VI, he says, was putting down a marker against this, noting how in the aftermath of the encyclical’s promulgation, the Latin American bishops’ council recognised this.
“There Humanae Vitae is praised as a bulwark, as a prophetic mark against a neo-colonialism, a malthusian coercion of the poor by the rich,” he says. “And that’s a very different context – a very different frame – for debate to that the North Atlantic countries were having at the time which was all about individual liberty and authority within the Church and society.”
Francis’ reading of Paul’s actions are far from the common one in Europe and North America which sees them as autocratic and a betrayal of the vision of a synodal Church, but is also one that reaches out with attention to individuals’ specific circumstances.
“There must be mercy and pastoral sensitivity,” says Dr Ivereigh. “For Francis, Humanae Vitae was the act of a pastor, a courageous prophetic act, but also the teaching of a pastor who is protecting his flock from the wolves, from predators, from coercive powers.”
It’s interesting too, he adds, that Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who Pope Francis has appointed to head the Pontifical Academy for life has been speaking about Humanae Vitae and praising its prophetic stance against the increasing detachment of the generation of life from human procreation.
“In other words test tube babies, wombs for rent, same-sex adoption…now he’s saying Humanae Vitae is prophetic because it looks forward to this disassociation of generation from the natural processes of procreation and childbirth, and I think that’s very much Francis’s take as well – he wants to defend the human ecology from technocracy,” he says.
The circumstances around which the document was first published are too turbulent for it to be regarded as absolutely settled teaching, Dr Ivereigh adds, but that doesn’t detract from its importance.
In Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s most recent book length interview, he notes: “Benedict said he was unhappy with the reasoning of Humanae Vitae – he believes Paul was right to affirm the ban, but the reasoning wasn’t very good.
“All this highlights the genesis of the encyclical,” he continues, noting how Paul VI agonised over it, rejected the advice of a commission to consider the matter, prayed over it and then in reaffirming the ban did something he knew would be traumatic.
“John Paul II purposely upheld it,” he then adds, “and the Popes since John Paul have purposely upheld it, and I think we have to understand what Francis is saying that this is a brave and prophetic act by a pope who discerned the signs of the times, saw the dangers, and acted to protect humanity from the dangers, and that’s how it should be seen, in that broader context.”
Pope Francis tends to see the document, he continues, not as a test of orthodoxy or of papal authority, but of a brave document which is difficult to accept and which seeks to help hold together things that naturally go together but which the modern world would split.
“This is part of the Church’s attempt to hold things together which modern society is trying to separate – the Church is trying to hold together sex and marriage. It’s trying to hold together sexual procreation and marriage. It’s trying to keep those things together because they belong together, and I think that’s the sense in which it’s to be understood,” he observes.
