it remains a problem. When limiting
family size first became necessary, the
only solution for faithful Catholics was
obvious, though very difficult. When a
couple had all the children they could
deal with, they abstained from marital
intercourse, and sometimes did so for
many years.
Marital intercourse is God’s gift to
married couples that enables them to
express and helps them live out their
personal one-flesh unity. But when they
cannot responsibly conceive a child
because they need to meet their other
responsibilities, they are obliged to
abstain, despite the fact that abstaining
for long stretches is difficult and tends to
put pressure on a marriage.
It’s worth recalling what St. Paul
says: “Do not refuse one another except
perhaps by agreement for a season, that
you may devote yourselves to prayer; but
then come together again, lest Satan
tempt you through lack of self-control” (1
Cor 7:5). Of course, Paul also says later
in the same letter, “God is faithful, and
he will not let you be tempted beyond
your strength, but with the temptation
will also provide the way of escape, that
you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor
10:13). Still, it is not easy to be continent
under such circumstances, and it began
to seem to many people that to exclude
Every major Protestant denomination
eventually approved contraception, so
that today only the Catholic Church
proclaims the once universally accepted
Christian teaching that contraception is
intrinsically wrong.
Contraception was not the only moral
issue that societal changes gave rise to.
The Catholic Church was also faced with
the spread of divorce and the beginnings
of societal approval of abortion. Indeed,
the traditional conception of marriage as
a whole was under attack. To provide a
better treatment of those issues and to
defend the Catholic teaching, therefore,
Pius XI wrote the 1930 encyclical Casti
Connubii.
At this time, too, Natural Family
Planning began to be introduced.
Although Pius XI did not address it in
his encyclical, he did reaffirm that sterile
couples are entitled to exercise their
conjugal rights, and in 1951 Pius XII said
that for serious reasons a couple can have
recourse to the sterile periods.
Some Catholics, however, began to
claim that married couples have a right
to have sex whenever they want, and they
considered the abstinence NFP requires
to be a serious imposition. This situation,
along with the widespread acceptance
of contraception outside the Catholic
Church, put growing pressure on the
“God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond
your stre ngth, but with the temptation will also provide
the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.”
(1 COR 1 0 : 1 3 )
contraception even in dire circumstances
unnecessarily burdened people, and from
her earliest days the Church has sought
to avoid adding burdens (see Acts 15:28;
cf. Luke 11:46).
The problem just described, which
put great pressure on marriages and
was widely experienced by Christians,
led Protestant churches to give up on
the previously universally accepted
teaching, beginning with the Anglican
Church’s Lambeth Conference in 1930.
10
Church to approve of contraception.
During the period from Casti connubi
to Vatican II—from the 1930s to the
1960s—there were important societal
changes that increased this pressure. The
Great Depression brought a tremendous
economic setback that left many people
without jobs. And the late 1930s brought
a great disruption of life with many
conflicts, culminating in WWII, which
extended into the mid-1940s. During that
period, the pressure that urbanization and
Sacred Heart Major Seminary | Mosaic | Spring 2018
industrialization were putting on people
to limit the size of their families was
becoming ever stronger. When you are
out of work, or at war, or displaced, it’s
obviously not a good time to have children!
The situation eased in the late 1940s and
1950s, followed by a baby boom. But by
the time the 1960s arrived, many couples
already had all the children they thought
they could bring up and educate.
The dissent that began to be
manifested in the 1960s had no doubt
been quietly brewing underground
in the preceding decades, when the
teaching was neither well taught nor
wholeheartedly and universally accepted,
as it had been before society began to
change. Those who rejected the teaching
needed arguments to justify their dissent,
but they did not produce any new
arguments. Instead, Catholic theologians
essentially reiterated the utilitarian pro-
contraception arguments made earlier by
Protestants.
What was Paul VI’s attitude toward
contraception? He continued the
Commission on Population, Family,
and Birth Rate that John XXIII had
initiated, and he waited quite some time
before issuing Humanae Vitae. There is,
however, no evidence to support the
claim that Paul VI was in doubt about
the Church’s teaching on contraception.
He knew that Pius XI condemned
contraception in Casti Connubii, and
there is no reason to think he considered
that teaching false or questionable. But
he also wanted to help married couples
in any way he could, and did not want to
condemn anything the tradition did not
require him to condemn. He was open
to arguments defending the view that
married couples somehow can practice
limitation in ways not considered before
and that are faithful to the tradition. But
he was not convinced by theologians who
argued using the Pill is not an instance of
the contraception that had always been
condemned.
For this reason, when Paul VI reaf-
firmed the Church’s traditional rejection
of contraception, he defined it as “any ac-
tion which either before, at the moment
of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifi-
cally intended to impede procreation”
(Humanae Vitae, no. 14), thus making it