Humanae Vitae

John XXIII created a small commission on population and family in 1963. Paul VI inherited it, enlarged it repeatedly until it held around seventy members including married couples, and kept the question out of the Second Vatican Council so that the commission could finish. By 1966 it had reported. A large majority held that the Church's teaching on marriage could accommodate methods of regulating birth other than periodic abstinence, and that the moral question should be assessed over the whole of a marriage rather than act by act. A minority held that a change was impossible without conceding that the Church had taught error for centuries.

Paul VI did not take the majority view. Humanae Vitae, dated 25 July 1968 and released four days later, restates the inseparable connection between the unitive and the procreative meanings of the marriage act and concludes that each and every act must remain open to the transmission of life. Recourse to infertile periods is permitted; direct interruption of the generative process is not.

The encyclical also contains a passage of prediction, arguing that widespread contraception would lower moral standards, encourage infidelity, and lead men to regard women as instruments rather than as companions. That passage is quoted by its defenders as vindicated and by its critics as unproven, and it has become a proxy for the whole argument.

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.