Catholics and Contraception

In the midst of the wall-to-wall press coverage of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the U.S. last week, The New York Times paused to note that many American Catholics pay little heed to papal authority, and instead bestow on the pope a particularly American commendation: They'd love to sit down and chat with the man, Catholic to Catholic. However homey the image, a stained-glass rendition of the favored American method of choosing a president (sans beer), the Times also pointed out, in explaining the lack of official Church data on how Americans really feel about the authority of this or any pope, that the Church is not a democracy. And, despite how nonchalantly many Americans speak about the relevance of the Vatican on their lives, the effect of a hierarchy headed by a man who built his career on opposition to liberation and feminist theology is real, and renders liberal or pro-choice Catholics today dissenters criticizing doctrine from outside the Church.

While Benedict pointedly neglected to address the issues those dissenters press on -- the bans on contraception, condom use, gay and lesbian rights, and ordination of women -- the unbending position of the Vatican was made clear during a 60,000-person mass at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, where he reminded the throngs of faithful that obedience as a Catholic is non-optional.

"Authority. Obedience. To be frank, these are not easy words to speak nowadays, especially in a society which rightly places a high value on personal freedom," he told the crowd, continuing to cite the scriptural lesson that "true freedom" comes from turning from sin, from "self-surrender" and "losing ourselves": an emphasis on hierarchy and submission more common to fundamentalist Christianity and orthodox doctrine across denominations than within the heterogeneous Catholic church itself.

It's also an unsubtle reminder that, however much American Catholics may disdain the 40-year old order of Humane Vitae -- that "each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life" -- following their own consciences on matters of artificial contraception is still an act of rebellion.

An immediate outpouring of dissent greeted the document in 1968, when 600 theologians protested the ruling, Rosemary Radford Ruether, a feminist theologian at the Pacific School of Religion, recalled on a conference call convened by Catholics for Choice to commemorate the document's fortieth anniversary. These theologians, she explains, were responding to the real consequences of Natural Family Planning -- the only method of birth control the Church had allowed since 1930, when it banned condoms and diaphragms in a renewed emphasis on Augustine's anti-contraception teachings -- in Catholics' family life, where the anti-contraceptive emphasis "almost began to seem the point of being a Catholic." As representatives of lay Catholic couples testified to the 1966 Catholic Commission on Birth Control, the pressures of following NFP, and abstaining during infertile periods, led to great marital discord for Catholic couples. The priests on the Commission were shocked by the experiences of the laity, and voted overwhelmingly to recommend that birth control be allowed for married couples. A small group of anti-contraception dissenters created a second "minority report" for the pope, calling the Commission's conclusions threatening to the Church's authority, as the Church could not admit to having "so wrongly erred during all those centuries of history." Four years later, it was this dissenting point of view that was reinforced in Humanae Vitae.

Today 97 percent of sexually active Catholic women use some form of contraception at some point, and, Radford Ruether says, many Catholic priests don't press the issue, considering it a "teaching that has not been received" by the people. Indeed, in 1974, 83 percent of Catholics said they disagreed with Humanae Vitae, and in 1999, according to the National Catholic Reporter, 80 percent of Catholics said they believed they could practice birth control and remain "good Catholics" (presumably leaving the remaining 17 percent guiltily disobedient). But despite this 40-year disconnect, which many theologians agree has led to greater skepticism about Church infallibility than acceptance of contraception ever could have, calls to liberalize the doctrine are repeatedly shot down with what theologian Anthony Padovano calls "incredibly inflated language," such as Pope John Paul II's assertion that questioning the ban on contraception was equivalent to questioning the holiness of God.