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A letter written to today’s young married Catholics by a grandmother, alive at the time of the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, examining the theories of sexuality which caused the rejection of its findings –
This was brought about by a handful of men against the evidence of 150,000 families, who begged that its imposition under pain of sin, as the only legitimate means of birth-control, should be lifted.

Dear Steve and Catriona,
The reason I am writing to you is that in your letter to the members of the Durham Conference you raise the question of contraception, stating that the Church’s teaching on it ‘is so challenging it defines Catholic marriage’. I certainly agree with you, indeed I feel so strongly about it I am going to write not only a very full letter to you, but will also send it to the rest of the conference members on Email, in the hope that it will give them a huge amount of information they might not have known or thought about in the same way. It is heavily documented of necessity, because it is matter seldom read.
I was having our family when the Pontifical Commission on the Family, Population and Birth was sitting in the early 1960s. It is now hardly ever mentioned, it is as though it were a glitch some wish had never happened. However, I believe, that like at the Anglican Lambeth Conference in 1930, contraceptive users were, in a sense, put on trial and their conduct examined from every angle. Both times they were found innocent by their expert peers. There are three accounts of this Commission’s work. I beg you to read at least one as you will see just how painstaking was the work done, and the sort of people who, with what they thought were the best of intentions, prevented its work becoming part of Church teaching.
1. The Encyclical that Never Was by Robert Blair Kaiser. He had been a Jesuit seminarian and was then a journalist based in Rome, who entertained many of the participants of Vatican II and the Commission in his home.
2. Love One Another by Dr. John Marshall, the British ‘safe period’ expert who had amassed many comments of his patients’ reaction to using this upon their marriages.
3. Turning Point by Robert McClory who ghost wrote for Patty Crowley, who with her husband Patrick were one of the few married couples invited onto the Commission. Here is a piece about them from the book:
‘They were president couple of The Christian Family Movement (CFM), a popular programme to help couples make the Gospel relevant to real life. The Crowleys read what the experts were saying about family limitation, and they regularly discussed the challenges of family life with bishops, theologians and priest chaplains to more than 150,000 couples involved in CFM all over the world. They had travelled widely – more widely perhaps than any members of the Commission – to every continent, to numerous world capitals as well as countless backwater villages. They had lived in the homes of the common people, shared their food, and heard their stories. Their ideas reflected – more accurately perhaps than any other members of the Commission – what truly was the sense of the faithful on the subject.’ (p6)
The Turning Point from which the book took its name was when no-one on the Commission, even the four dissenting theologians realized they could not prove the malice of contraception from Natural Law. At the end of the Commission 16 bishops were added to it. After hearing all the evidence, including that of the Crowleys’ families, 9 voted that contraception was not intrinsically evil, 3 curial bishops voted it was, whilst 3 abstained, including Cardinal Heenan of Westminster. Cardinal Wojtyla, although on the Commission, never attended. The shock came when Paul VI rejected this majority vote. This was particularly odd as all the decisions taken in Vatican II had been reached by majority voting. Despite the Commission saying its evil could not be demonstrated from Natural Law, Paul VI continued to assert it was. Many of us at the time saw this as one of the most serious miscarriages of moral justice in the 20th Century. I was one of them. Being married to a barrister I believed firmly in the adage ‘innocent unless proven guilty’. Paul VI gave as his reason for rejecting the Commission’s findings was ‘that it departed too far from what the Church had always taught.’
I set out to find what that was. I recommend to you yet a fourth book – John Noonan’s Contraception, a History of its Treatment by Catholic Theologians and Canonists. He was the Historical Consultant to the Commission and produced this huge, erudite and informative tome. Sadly I doubt anyone on the Commission read it from cover to cover, particularly Paul VI and John Paul II. The four dissenting theologians dipped into it enough to ascertain contraception had been condemned throughout tradition. What I believe no-one examined in any detail was the understanding of sexuality underlying the teaching. I believe this is flawed through and through and is an absolute reason FOR change rather than against it. Alas since Vatican II most aspects of it have been quietly changed and forgotten, except this one vital product of it – the putative guilt of contraception.


THE LEGACY OF AUGUSTINE.

Almost entirely this theology was based on St. Augustine’s two works The Good of Marriage and Marriage and Concupiscence. He taught there were three Goods of Marriage: Offspring, Fidelity and Sacramentum. The latter did not mean a sacrament, marriage was not acknowledged as such till the 11th century because of the profound suspicion about sexuality brought in by early Greek converts and agreed with wholesale by Augustine. Alas for married people he had been a fornicator, living in sin with a slave girl. His feelings of guilt for this he did not recognize as the result of his own actual sin, but thought they were the product of lust, the result of the Fall. This thinking is still with us, enshrined in the new Catechism with the words in 1607
‘As a break with God, the first sin had for its consequence the rupture of the original communication between man and woman. Their relations were distorted by mutual recriminations; their mutual attraction, the Creator’s own gift; changed into a relationship of domination and lust, and the beautiful vocation to be fruitful, multiply and subdue the earth was burdened by the pain of childbirth and the toil of work’.
The writer of this text carefully omits the words occurring in the Latin Vulgate, which translated into the Authorized Version reads:
‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shall bring forth children and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.’ (Gen 3.16).
The multiplying of conception is changed in various other translations. John Paul II, who was surely familiar with the Vulgate, never raises it in his book The Theology of the Body (TOB). I muse that it might mean that at that moment, conception ceased to be a bodily function controlled by the will. As to pain in labour, you may be amused to know that I read somewhere that, when ether was first used in labour, some clergy were up in arms saying that pain was part of women’s punishment and we should just have to put up with it. However when Queen Victoria had it they kept quiet! (I apologize for that diversion, except to say that I view protests over contraception in rather the same light).
Whilst speaking of this verse and that Catechism text it is important to state that John Paul II (in TOB) sees this as meaning the woman shall lust after her husband, and he will dominate her (both sinful acts) This appalls me. I do not believe a loving God could have changed the relationship of marriage from the Fall onwards into one of wickedness, rather one of inequality. The difference is all-important. If lust were concerned, it would give a moral authority the right to accuse under the 6th Commandment and instruct to improve; mere inequality is no concern to anyone except individual couples themselves. Seeing lust where none is was at the core of all Augustine’s teaching (as it is of TOB). Speaking from his own sinful experience of fornication with his slave girl he said:
‘I feel nothing more turns the masculine mind from the heights than female blandishments and that contact of bodies without which a wife may not be had.’(Soliloquies 1..10)
Worse, daring to change the very words of Scripture, he said :
‘In intercourse a man becomes ALL flesh’ (Sermons 62.2)
. With these words he wrote out the initial and continuous Christ-stated purpose of intercourse – oneness, and saw intercourse as a single-function act – procreation. He defined this further:
‘What food is to the health of man, intercourse is to the good of the race’.
Lacking any insight into Scriptural oneness, he saw all acts of right and proper unitive intercourse which were not procreative in intention or form as lustful abuse of the physical pleasure put in the act for the good of the race. The index entry under Intercourse in Noonan’s book lists all these with the words condemned then later permitted after several later page numbers. One such, please note, was intercourse in pregnancy. Until the discovery of the ovum in 1845 intercourse was seen as a seed planting act, and any spillage of that seed, the loss of something live, so culpable under the 5th Commandment as homicide. Once the field is planted no farmer seeds it twice. Lust clearly causes a man to ‘second sew’ his wife unnecessarily. This act continued to be classed as mortal sin till the 15th century. At that time private confession was becoming more widely practiced. It is possible after listening to the pleas of penitents that we have this from the Parisian theologian Le Maistre (Noonan p309)
‘Le Maistre emphasizes the effect of the old doctrine on the married life of Christian couples, the view that copulation for pleasure may be mortal sin – is I believe , much more dangerous to human morals.’ Given this doctrine, a simple man will readily have intercourse with any woman as with his wife when he feels the impulse for pleasure. The difficulties caused by the old theory are particularly striking when pregnancy has occurred. ‘I ask to how many dangers do they (my opponents) expose the consciences of scrupulous spouses to, for there is many a one whose wife is immediately made pregnant, and after this has happened, they expose to the danger of mortal sin whoever seeks the debt unless it is certain he does it to avoid fornication’
The other piece of Scripture misread by Augustine was Paul’s teaching in 1 Cor 7. He taught that those who have not the gift of continence (how many have) should marry and then not starve each other lest they be tempted through unrequited sexual need. Augustine seemed to think that those who have not the gift of continence should marry, lie in bed next to their wives but only have intercourse if they had no other means to overcome adulterous longings for someone other than their spouse. If you think I am talking nonsense – read this extra-ordinary piece from Noonanp249
‘In the fourteenth century, an innovating Dominican Archbishop, Peter de Palude (d.1342), carefully developed an appealing hypothetical. Suppose a man is about to speak for a long time in a private place to a woman who has tempted him before. May he not get cooled off (refrigeratus) by first having intercourse with his wife?’ Peter concluded that he might, and set out a generalization that intercourse to avoid fornication was lawful if, and only if, there were no other means to avoid adultery.’
You can see from this, I hope, that based upon the ‘single-function-procreation-temptation-to-abuse-by-lust’ model, accusations of mortal sin were heaped over and over again on couples who were having innocent and rightful acts of ‘being no longer two but one flesh’
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Between 1816 and 1823 Noonan states that there were questions addressed to the Penitentiary, i.e. the Roman tribunal for questions relating to the administration of the Sacrament of Penance. Some theologians, says Noonan, were maintaining it was mortal sin for a wife to engage in intercourse if she thought he would practice coitus interruptus. PereBlain, vicar of Chambery, was worried, and asked for advice. The Penitentiary replied that if there was serious danger to herself by refusing, the wife could proceed, but ‘should not cease prudently to warn her husband to desist from this baseness’ Noonan then gives this quotation from a printed reply from a Bishop Bouvier:
‘Serious detriment’ he wrote, varied with the woman involved ‘Even some blows do not weigh much with peasants While passing quarrels would be unbearable to a timid woman, instructed in refined conduct and accustomed to civility’ (p.399)
Here again we have that vital differing between rigorist and pastoral clergy. Like previous ones, however, it is about taking a compassionate view or no; not about intercourse having any purpose other than reproduction.


TWENTIETH CENTURY DEBATE - LOVE ENTERS THE EQUATION.

What is even more interesting, looking at that index page of Noonan’, is to see that ‘intercourse for love’ is first mentioned on p491. This was by Von Hildebrand as late as the early 1920s who was the first married theologian to write. He was followed by Herbert Doms OSB who said
‘In the perfect act, worthy of human beings, the two partners grasp each other reciprocally in intimate love, that is spiritually they reciprocally give themselves in an act which contains thee abandonment and enjoyment of the whole person and is not simply an isolated activity of organs.’
In another place he compares union of the couple with the union with Christ in the Eucharist:
‘The physical union in marriage completes the moral participation in the life of the other, just as the physical union with Christ in the Eucharist completes the moral union with Christ’
Doms’ works were put on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Holy Office. An elderly Benedictine monk told me of the shock this gave the Order at the time. I cannot help wondering if St. Augustine, living in the twentieth century might have realized his error and been at the forefront of producing a new theology of marriage. However instead of this we have this incredible piece defending Augustine’s inheritance from Pius XII, who may have been thinking of Doms when he wrote:
‘Personal values’ and the need to respect them is a subject that for the past twenty years has kept writers busily employed. In many of their elaborate works, the specifically sexual act too has a position allotted to it in the service of the married state. The peculiar and deeper meaning of the exercise of the marital right should consist in this (they say): That the bodily union is the expression and actuation of the personal and affective union” (The Address to Midwives 43)
Is not what (they say) a paraphrase of ‘they two shall be one flesh – therefore are they no longer two but one’. Even in 1956 the unitive meaning of intercourse is being denied by a pope. He continues expounding Augustine’s teaching, calling it the will of the Creator:
‘Now if this relative appreciation merely emphasized the value of the persons of the married couple rather than that of the offspring, such a problem could, strictly speaking, be disregarded. But here is a question of a serious inversion of the order of values and purposes which the Creator as established. We are face to face with the propagation of a body of ideas and sentiments directly opposed to serene, deep and serious Christian thought’ (ibid 47)
‘The truth is that marriage is not ordered by the will of the Creator towards the personal perfection of the husband and wife as its primary end, but to the procreation and education of new life. The other ends of marriage, although part of natures plan, are not of the same importance as the first, still less are they superior’ (ibid 48)

AN ALTERNATIVE SUGGESTION

If one were to say that the initial and continuous purpose of marriage and intercourse within it is the union of the couple, and that the procreation of children is the occasional privileged use of the act we are nearer the truth. Furthermore we may add that the welfare of the children depends on the continued oneness of the couple. There is never a time in the marriage when sustaining their union is NOT a duty of the couple. Surprisingly in the same Address to Midwives Pius XII admits for the first time in moral theology that there are times in a marriage or even for the duration of that marriage when procreation should not occur.
There are two ways of curtailing fertility 1. Changing the nature of the act, by removing the ‘possibility of possible fertility’ of it - fertility the couple at that time should not exercise. 2. By changing the nature of the relationship by a cyclical removal of sexual intercourse from it, unless the couple risk the very pregnancy they should avoid.
Whilst the morality of contraception has been widely debated and seen as innocent by most, the morality of an authority outside the marriage making such a demand on the couple has never been discussed.
I suggest it should be because according to Christ’s teaching they are demanding the couple should NOT at certain periods in the menstrual cycle, be one flesh. A very real form of putting asunder which has come into being only since the discovery of the physiology of ovulation in 1933.
If we look back at the lists of types of unitive intercourse which were non-procreative in intention or form which were banned to the couple under pain of sin, we see that ‘making them no longer one but two’ has been the misguided pastime of some clergy down the ages. Others, the compassionate, had argued against all of these, and fortunately these ‘non-sins’ were eventually recognized as innocent acts.
Since the discovery of the ovum we can see that barrier methods of contraception kill nothing, they are a pre-life act in a couple who cannot at that time in prudence exercise their fertility. So the act which was once condemned under the 5th Commandment through physiological ignorance, can no longer be so. It is not they who are actively rejecting their fertility, it is their circumstances, admitted by the Church as legitimate which makes that a necessity. John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio argues that they sin against unitive intercourse by putting a barrier against full union by rejecting part of each other – that fertility. However I believe he is doing something far more serious because by his imposition of NFP he is putting a barrier between their ‘being one flesh’ which contraception makes possible. Coitus interruptus was indeed an imperfect union, but contraception obviates the need for this odious practice.

THE MINORITY THEOLOGIANS AND THEIR LEGACY OF INJUSTICE

What was the stumbling block to bringing about any change in teaching? The four Minority theologians on the Commission in their Working Paper said this:
‘If contraception were declared not intrinsically evil, in honesty it would have to be acknowledged that the Holy Spirit in 1930, in 1951 and in 1958 assisted the Protestant Churches, and that for half a century Pius XI, Pius XII and a great part of the Catholic hierarchy did not protest against a very serious error, one most pernicious to souls: for it would be suggested that they condemned most imprudently, under pain of eternal punishment, thousands upon thousands of innocent acts which are now approved.’
As I said at the beginning of this letter, I do not think people on the Commission had read Noonan cover to cover. If they had they would have seen all the quotations I’ve listed above, showing that, yes, clergy have been doing just that all down the centuries. This because they based their ideas on the flawed teaching of Augustine, seeing intercourse as having only ONE legitimate function – procreation and that lust is the cause of its use over and above that. Furthermore, even although the married people on the Commission said they were not being hedonistic or selfish in having frequent intercourse the Minority said this in response:
‘This (psychological good of intercourse) can be obtained in some other way, which is something the contraceptive theory is silent about – for conjugal love is above all spiritual (if the love is genuine) and requires no specific carnal gesture, let alone its repetition in some determined frequency. Consequently the affirmed sense of generosity and absence of hedonism are suspect when we find the intimate love of the whole person between a father and a daughter and a brother and a sister without the need of carnal gestures’
It beggars belief that men who could make such a remark could consider themselves fit to sit in judgment on the morals of married people. Yet these were the people who swayed Paul VI to continue the embargo on contraception. In Scriptural terms they had not understood Christ’s teaching about that ‘carnal gesture’ being the catalyst that makes the couple one!
There was another powerful voice behind Paul VI. We are told in various books about him that Cardinal Wojtyla was a strong persuader too, in bringing about Humanae Vitae. This is what he said in The Theology of the Body p389
‘Even if the moral law formulated in Humanae Vitae is not literally found in Sacred Scripture, nonetheless the fact that it is contained in tradition and as Pope Paul VI writes has been ‘very often expounded by the Magisterium to the faithful’ it follows that this norm is in accordance with the sum total of revealed doctrine contained in Scripture’
This was why I quoted Pius XII at such length to show that what he taught did not accord with Scripture but was the terminal product of a flawed tradition which was set aside by Vatican II.


CRITICAL DEBATES IN VATICAN II AND THE PONTIFICAL COMMISSION

This letter would not be complete without some reference to the writing of Gaudium et Spes. I insert a quote from Turning Point so as to show the clash of views in Vatican II. Cardinal Ottaviani, the pro-Prefect of the Holy Office, was the twelfth of thirteen children, and had expressed hostility both to the calling of Vatican II, and the idea of allowing parents to decide on the number of children they would have.
‘Meanwhile in Rome the final touches were being put to the text of the chapter on marriage…Repeatedly the Ottaviani forces had been routed. The attempts to restate in the text the old distinction between primary and secondary ends of marriage failed. So also did the effort to incorporate a juridical definition of marriage as ‘the right over the body to generate children.’ Far from reviving distinctions, rating relative values, or relying on textbook definitions, the final draft called conjugal love ‘eminently human’ and ‘involving ‘ the good of the whole person’ This love ‘merging the human with the divine, leads the spouses to a free gift of themselves, a gift proving itself by a gentle affection and by deed. Such love pervades the whole of their lives….This love is uniquely expressed and perfected through the marital act. The actions within marriage by which the couple are united intimately and chastely are noble and worthy ones.’
On November 9th, while schema 13 discussions progressed , (a Minority Theologian ) John Ford SJ wrote to the apostolic delegate to the USA saying he had to see the pope immediately. He had incontrovertible evidence that at least one member of the Birth Control Commission, Canon de Locht ‘had taught contraception to the priests and people of Belgium for some years; he professes a type of situation morality which is clearly opposed to the decrees of the Holy Office… and judging by his writing I cannot but conclude that he is one of those who does not believe the Church has any right to bind the consciences of individuals in moral matters. Ford was one of the best known moralists in the USA. Together with his colleague and fellow Jesuit Gerald Kelly, he had authored manuals in use in many seminaries…..As a new member of the Commission at its most recent meeting, Ford had been enraged at the seeming ease with which a heavy majority of theologians determined that Casti Connubii contained reformable, non-infallible positions…..Ford believed he could help the pope stem the tide….
On November 22nd Ford obtained his audience with the pope and claimed the Council’s marriage text implicitly denied the intrinsic evil of contraception (even though it did not touch on birth control methods) and would shake the faith of the strong and encourage gross immorality among the weak. Evidently the pope was moved by Ford’s arguments’
I hope this is enough to show a similar sort of argument between rigorist and pastoral theologians was going on in exactly the same way as in previous centuries over other forms of intercourse which were not procreative in intention or form. A later extract in the book gives us insight into the bishops’ debate in the Commission itself; p121-122
‘Cardinal Julius Doepfner, archbishop of Munich, made clear his view: ‘Contraception is not intrinsically evil’. It is, he said, a ‘physical evil’, which can and should be allowed for a greater good; to protect a wife from pregnancy that might endanger her health or life, or give a couple the opportunity to care for and educate the children they already have, or to avoid the uncertainty of rhythm. Without hesitation Doepfner declared Casti Connubii is not infallible and is subject to doctrinal development – just as Vatican II approved of religious liberty without apologizing for its past assertions about ‘no salvation outside the Church’
Everyone expected Doepfner to take such a stance. They were not prepared when Cardinal Gracias of Bombay arose. His long record of opposing efforts by the Indian government to control population growth, were well known. At first he sounded like John Ford. ‘If the Church changes here’ he said, ‘then there will be a crisis in Christendom and the Church’s enemies will rejoice’. But he continued, ‘There is a resurrection after every death. The Church will survive. And we will find a way to help couples. He said he still had personal problems with contraception, but had given much thought to the pill and believed it would be a godsend for the teeming masses in his country.
Then came a third occurrence that propelled further the move for change. Bishop Columbo, alarmed by what seemed Gracias’s defection from the conservative camp, interrupted the cardinal. If the Church backtracks on contraception, he warned his colleagues, they ‘would endanger the very indefectibility of the Church, the teacher of truth in theses things which pertain to salvation. Wouldn’t this mean the gates of hell had prevailed in some way against the Church?’
Zalba (another minority theologian) could not agree more. ‘What then’ he asked, ‘with the millions we have sent to hell if these norms are not valid?’
Patty Crowley could not contain herself, ‘Father Zalba’ she interjected ‘do you really believe God has carried out all your orders?’
A momentary stunned silence followed, then some chuckles at this intrusion of common sense into these austere deliberations. Patty seized the moment and spoke further.
‘On behalf of women in general, I plead that the male Church carefully consider the plight of at least half of its members, who are the real bearers of these burdens. Couples are generous. Christian couples wand to have children. It is the very fruit of their love for each other. What is needed is to rid ourselves of this negative outlook on psychological and spiritual values. Couples can be trusted. They will accept the progress of change, and they will have increased confidence in the Church as she helps them grow in love and demonstrates her trust and confidence in them.’
I have quoted the conversation between Fr. Zalba and Mrs. Crowley, because I agree with her entirely, and wish the legacy of the likes of the Rev. Zalba could be expunged forever!
Alas the damage he did was not yet finished. Turning Point relates what happened after the Commission had handed its findings to the Pope to await his ruling: p131-132
‘In the mind of Ottaviani, no ‘question’ existed. He retained as his consultors the four co-signers of the Minority Report: Ford, Visser, Zalba and de Lestapis. To this nucleus he added Fransiscan Ermenegildo Lio, a long time consultor to the Holy Office. It was Lio’s reactionary chapter on Christian marriage prepared for the Vatican Council, that had so disturbed Cardinal Suenens in 1963 that he pressed for the formation of the Birth Control Commission. And it was Lio along with Ford who were the presumed authors of the so-called modi that attempted to insert the rigors of Casti Connubii into the final version of the marriage chapter in 1965. Twice a loser in the open, public processes, Lio now returned behind the scenes but with the same agenda.
According to Bernard Haring, Lio admitted to associates that Pope Paul was at first favorably impressed with the Majority Report and was attracted by its conclusions, but after two meetings with Ottaviani and Lio himself, the Pope realized his mistake and was “reconverted”.
In his authoritative biography of the Pope, Paul VI: The First Modern Pope, Peter Hebblethwaite wrote that at that point the birth control issue was entirely in the hands of Ottaviani and his closest associates. “From their point of view it should never have been taken out of their hands in the first place: the whole experiment of consultation and letting non-professional theologians into the debate had already inflicted untold damage on the Church. …the issue provided a test case on the superiority of an encyclical to the Council. No matter what the chapter on marriage of Gaudium et Spes, said, and even though it pointed clearly in the direction of ‘responsible parenthood’ the Holy Office could (and did) reply that Gaudium et Spes is only as pastoral text while Casti Connubii is the milk of pure doctrine’.
Elsewhere Hebblethwaite cited the view of two men who knew Paul intimately. Mario Rossi, former head of the Italian Student Action Coalition,” saw in him a man trapped between his Christian instincts and his role in an authoritarian institution. Said Rossi, “He served the system faithfully, whilst understanding the need to revolt against it. This led to a deep conflict within himself, which had the further handicap of a failure to understand the ordinary world, a remoteness from everyday life, and a consequent lack of balance. He was always tempted by abstraction and idealism” Cardinal Silvestrini called him the “intellectual” who “saw all too clearly the infinite complexities of situations…He saw beyond immediate day-to-day questions and tried to force reality to conform to his demands.” Ottaviani’s influence on Paul was critical, said Hebblethwaite: “Ottaviani had the greatest hold over him because he was an old friend from the 1930s, permanently resident in Rome, and played on Paul’s fears of undermining papal authority. By comparison Suenens and Haring were late comers in his life; in any case Suenens visits were rare and Haring was denied access….Quietly in total secrecy, Ottaviani set about reversing the Majority Report”.
Some people assert that Paul VI was inspired directly by the Holy Spirit to write Humanae Vitae. I hope to have shown from this long quotation that owing to the complexities of his character Paul VI was not a man who could make a decision easily, and was swayed this way and that by others. Finally it was a truly powerful single-minded, blinkered man who was so sure in his opinions, (based on the infallible teaching of Pius XI that he could brook no opposition, who finally took control and imposed his views. This over-riding all the witness of people who had had to live out the teaching instead of merely giving it intellectual assent. As I write I hope I will have persuaded many young Catholics to buy this book and form their own opinions. In the meantime this very day I have received from CTS a translation of a letter from Cardinal Trujillo still talking of Natural Law and the selfishness of contraceptive users, versus the generosity of NFP users! (I have five children and one of the leading exponents of NFP in this country has only two!)


CURRENT TEACHING

I come now to some research I have been doing since I returned from Durham i.e. trawling through the Catechism: I believe answers therein support my approach that Natural Family Planning with its mandatory imposition of continence is an attack on the relationship of marriage.
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Under the Sacrament of Matrimony 1627 states:
‘The consent consists in a human act by which the partners mutually give themselves to each other.
‘I take you to be my wife/husband’. This consent that binds the spouses to each other finds its fulfillment in the two becoming one flesh.’
Under the 2nd Commandment 2174 states:
‘Promises made to others in God’s name engage the divine honour, fidelity, truthfulness and authority. They must be respected in justice. To be unfaithful to them is to misuse God’s name and in some way make God out to be a liar.’
Under the 7th Commandment 2410 states:
‘Promises must be kept and contracts strictly observed to the extent that commitments made in them are morally just’
Still under the 7th Commandment 2411 continues:
‘Contracts are subject to commutative justice which regulates exchanges between persons in accordance with a strict respect for their rights. Commutative justice obliges strictly; it requires safeguarding property rights, paying debts and fulfilling obligations freely contracted’.
Under the 8th Commandment 2472 states:
‘The duty of Christians to take part in the life of the Church impels them to act as witnesses to the Gospel and of the obligations that flow from this. This witness is a transmission of the faith in words and deeds. Witness is an act of justice that establishes the truth or makes it known.
It is worth mentioning here that I was astonished when reading John Paul II’s Letter to Families 1996 to read the marriage vow he quotes, which comes from the Rituale Romanum Ordo Celebrandi Matrimonium:
I ,N. take you, N. to be my wife/husband. I promise to be true to you in good times and bad, in sickness and in health. I will honour you all the days of my life.’
Other than mention of the words husband/wife, this is a vow of lifelong friendship. Contrast this with ours from the pre-Reformation Sarum Rite, which is much more explicit:
‘I call upon these witnesses here present to witness that I, N. do take thee N. to be my lawful wedded wife/husband to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.’
The all-important words say, I believe, what spousehood is all about – a lifelong faithful relationship in which sexual love (have) and tenderness (hold) are promised. The negative times are a succinct list of times when conception should not occur. There is no caveat that at such times that the ‘having’ should be suspended.
Hence I feel cyclical denial of intercourse to a couple, unless they risk the very pregnancy they should avoid, is contrary to the consent of marriage, an order to break a promise, and is a lack of commutative justice in that it has no respect for their rights. Thinking this is contrary to the teaching about marriage by Christ in the Gospel, caused by the mistaken ideas of Augustine, I am impelled to speak!


MY ANSWER TO A YOUNGER AUTHOR WHO SUPPORTS JOHN PAUL II

I have also been reading a book on the Listening 2004 website interpreting John Paul’s TOB, called Men and Women are from Eden by Mary Healy (b.1964). I put her birth date to show she is too young to have followed the debates of Vatican II which we, who are older, did. She, ignorant of the finding of the Commission that contraception could not be demonstrated to be contrary to natural law, states
‘As the pope observes, the ‘inseparable connection between sex and procreation is not something peculiar to people of faith. It is part of natural law (her bold), the capacity to discern good and evil, which God has written in every person’s conscience’. She adds a get-out caveat ‘Human reason can discover the natural law, as long as it is not clouded by the culture (in which they live)’. P96.
On p97 she continues:
‘The couple who use contraception violate the intrinsic connection between love and life which God has inscribed in their bodies. They thereby “act as ‘arbiters’ of the divine plan and they ‘manipulate’ and degrade human sexuality…by altering its value of total self-giving”. In the language of the body, the difference between NFP and contraception is the difference between refraining from speech for a time and lying.
As philosopher Janet Smith has observed, some couples resist NFP because they realize it would require a considerable change in their lifestyle. But the very fact that there is a major lifestyle difference is a clue that there is a significant moral difference too. The practice of periodic abstinence shapes the character of the couple, deepening their respect for each other as persons, strengthening their mutual love by fostering communication and non-genital forms of intimacy and thus helping them to grow in chastity.’
I have quoted this at some length because it is the kind of argument which convinces some of the idea that HV is a moral stand against the world which has produced a wonderful sanctity in the married lives of those who follow NFP. Let us examine this. Blind people say that being sightless increases their other senses of touch and hearing. (non-genital intimacy and communication in NFP) this does not mean that their lives are normal in the sense it would be if they had full use of their faculties at all times. Like surgery or glasses which restore the sight, contraception enables full normal intimacy when outside circumstances make procreation imprudent. What has happened is that someone (the papacy) has removed married couples’ right to speak the language of the body at certain times if they should not conceive a child. Consequently they try as best they can to compensate by other expressions of affection, rather than the unique marital act of being one flesh. This they accept gladly because they believe it is God’s will. Rather it is the product of a group of people who think they alone have the ultimate insight into right and wrong, which contradicts the above description of natural law being open to all. I quote a piece from Pius XI’s Casti Connubii making just this mistake:
:
‘Everyone can see to how many fallacies an avenue would be opened up and how many errors would become mixed with the truth, if it were left solely to the light of reason of each to find out, or if it were to be discovered by private interpretation of the truth which is revealed. And if this is applicable to many other truths of the moral order, we must all the more pay attention to those things which appertain to marriage where the inordinate desire for pleasure can attack frail human nature and lead it astray.’
This piece was also quoted by the Minority Theologians. They used it to pour scorn on the witness of the married who they, in common with Pius XI and other rigorists of the past, assumed were blinded by lust and needed the light of the papacy to show them the error of their ways. Pius XI is, let us remember, having a swipe at their heretical and lustful lordships of the 1930 Lambeth Conference. He failed to realize that they, and the ordinary couples he derides, had the insights of the sacrament of matrimony which he did not! Moreover, quoting him no less than thirteen times, he bases this encyclical on Augustine’s Three Purposes of Marriage with Procreation as the Primary; and the ‘single- purpose – procreation - abused – by – lust - resultant- upon - the- Fall’ theory of intercourse. Yet Pius XI does not realize the person he quotes with such fervour was speaking as just such a one who had himself been led away by lust etc (see above)!
Mary Healy says picturesquely that:
‘ This inseparable connection is, literally, the crux of the theology of the body. It is where the horizontal (human spousal love) meets the vertical (God’s creative power). Pp91
May I give you an alternative visual illustration of this idea. Place your elbows on the table and join your hands together at the wrist. Imagine these are the creative hands of God gently holding the relationship, He Himself has made, to keep them as one (the vertical). Then raise your elbows in the air so that your arms form the horizontal of that crux. Clench your fists and imagine you are holding a little man and a little woman just close enough so they can embrace, but pulling their bottom halves apart. This is the papacy misguided, I believe, but with the best of intentions it must be said, inflicting a ‘false cross’ on the couple by denying them that union in one, rightfully theirs, when they may most need it. It is a terrible mistake to believe that just because a teaching is hard to follow it is necessarily right!
I believe true infallibility lies in maintaining teaching which is based on that of Christ in Scripture. Augustine’s misquoting it saying ‘In intercourse a man becomes all flesh’ has been the gates of Hell prevailing! Although Christ made a promise they should not prevail, there was no promise they should not try. What better than the sin of a theologian of the stature of Augustine, to poison the happiness of marriage all through the ages with putative sin; to separate them through the Confessional from that other wonderful union with Christ in the Eucharist - this by giving them a wrongful choice between ‘sinful’ sorts of union with each other, or continence to be able to receive the Eucharist?

STERILITY IN LACTATION THE UNEXAMINED PHYSIOLOGICAL FACTOR

There is one last physiological factor to mention. In 1933 the discovery of the physiology of ovulation has been raised to a quasi religious revelation pointing to ovum dodging being a pious way of life. However in 1980 research was done into sterility in lactation. This is produced by the hormone prolactin. Provided a woman breast feeds at least 6 times in 24 hours for periods of at least 10 minutes, ovulation and menstruation are suppressed. (There are, of course, deviations from the norm as in every other hormone function). Until the vulcanization of rubber, which along with condoms, produced teats, babies were breast fed until they were two years old or more, either by their mother, or in rich families by a wet nurse, probably delighted by its contraceptive effect! In other words Nature herself (created by God) puts a hormone in place to space births. Sometimes necessary bottle feeding produces an artificially early return to fertility. I believe a bottle-feeding woman is merely copying Nature if she takes contraceptive measures to space her family, or anticipate the sterility of the menopause when her family is complete.
Undoubtedly the unitive and the procreative aspect are never separate in the male. Both happen in a single act that may take a mere 10 minutes or thereabouts. For a woman procreation is a cycle of 9 months pregnancy followed by lactation, which when concluded the whole cycle may be able to start again. Yet throughout her life she is capable of sexual arousal so is able to take part in unitive intercourse until her marriage ends. If the Magisterium are going to attempt to moralize from biology, then they ought to take sterility in lactation into account. John Paul II does not mention it. I wonder if he knew about it?
I am writing all this to you and circulating it round everyone else, because having spaced our first four children by prolonged lactation (to avoid the on/off marriage of NFP) I agonized in conscience after I this fourth child weaned herself early and cash was running short. We then used NFP with barrier methods when I was fertile, and had my third son later as an unexpected happy bonus.

CONCLUSION

I believe that at Durham there was a genuine longing to be of service to marriage and family life. It is the same longing which drove the Crowleys in their day. I believe, after much prayer and thought, that it is my strange and unique vocation to put right what I see as an appalling moral wrong. I have put years of research into this matter. The above letter contains some of the pertinent material I have found. Like the Crowleys before me, I want to bring it to the eyes of you all, as part of the mystical body, where all cells should work together for the betterment of the whole. Particularly in just assessment of what is sin or not.
I have produced something like it before in a pamphlet called Seeing Sin Where None Is. This is obtainable from Catholics for a Changing Church 14 West Halkin Street London W1X 8JS. This organization came into being in protest against HV. We long for the moment when the Sensus Fidelium agreeing with contraception is recognized as being valid, rather than the product of what is odiously called ‘a contraceptive mentality’. Dr. John Marshall, our member of the Pontifical Commission, wrote a letter to The Times
‘Even the Commission’s minority, he noted, “admitted they could not demonstrate the intrinsic evil of contraception on the basis of natural law”. The majority had based its conclusions on years of study only to see them not refuted but ignored. The pope’s claim that contraception would lead to wholesale immorality casts a gratuitous slur on married couples who practice contraception and whose family life is an example to all.’ Marshall wondered what the ‘criteria’ that the Commission had ‘departed’ from in reaching its conclusions. The failure to specify these criteria creates a theological impasse, said Marshall, since “theology cannot advance without being in danger of falling into the same alleged errors” Turning Point p141
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Rather I would say those ills are due to loss of a religious faith, to act as a guide to moral behaviour, pornography, or indeed James Bond films, which portray intercourse as a ‘first-night-of-meeting-recreation,’ let alone drunkenness which leads many girls into acts which sober they might shun! I think the Church makes itself idiotic in the eyes of the world by a teaching which no-one except those with an over inflated idea of papal infallibility believe to be true. I long more than anything for a church which instead fulfils its mission and brings people to Christ by teaching His true message about sexuality in marriage. This, lovingly celebrated, unites us as one in the way God wished from the beginning of Time!
When I told the members of CCC I intended to write this letter (I never dreamt it would be 8000 words), a priest member sent me this quotation from the Vatican II document on priests –No.9:
‘They (priests) should listen to the laity willingly, consider their wishes in a fraternal spirit, and recognize their experience and competence in the different areas of human activity, so that together with them they will be able to read the signs of the times’
On that hopeful note, I end this with love to all, and best wishes to you both Steve and Catriona for being the inspiration to write this letter. And my love to that sweetest of sons!

Elizabeth Price