The Reception and What It Opened

The reaction had no modern precedent. Within days a statement signed by hundreds of theologians in the United States asserted that Catholics could responsibly decide otherwise. Several national bishops' conferences then issued pastoral letters on the encyclical, and they did not say the same thing. The Canadian bishops' Winnipeg statement and the German bishops' Koenigstein declaration both allowed a place for a conscience that had genuinely tried and could not accept the teaching. Others insisted on plain assent. The documents are all official, all on the record, and mutually inconsistent in emphasis.

That is what makes the encyclical a landmark case. The substantive question, contraception, is one theological dispute among many. The procedural question it raised is structural: what does an ordinary act of papal teaching, not proposed as an infallible definition, require of a believer who disagrees after study and prayer? Vatican I's Pastor Aeternus had defined the infallible case in 1870 and said nothing about this one. Vatican II's Lumen Gentium had asked for religious submission of will and intellect without saying what that permits.

Surveys of Catholic practice in Europe and North America since 1968 record majorities that do not follow the teaching. The teaching has not been altered by any of Paul VI's successors and it remains in force. The atlas records the instrument and the fact of the divergence, and does not adjudicate either.