From the editor’s desk

Birth control and belief

In his memoir, A Crown of Thorns, Cardinal John Heenan of Westminster called the crisis that overtook global Catholicism in the summer of 1968 "the greatest shock the Church has suffered since the Reformation". He was referring of course to the publication of the papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae, at the end of July in that tumultuous year, and its painful and divisive aftermath. Forty years on, the most striking feature of his statement is not the exaggeration - the French Revolution surely counts as a greater political earthquake, the Holocaust as a greater moral catastrophe - but the implication that the crisis came as a surprise. The foundations for what happened next were buried in the faultlines of the text itself. Cardinal Heenan - co-chairman of the papal Commission on Birth Control - was in a good position to foresee trouble ahead.

He could have foreseen, for instance, that Tom Burns, then editor of The Tablet, would fulminate in his immediate post-Humanae Vitae editorial: "We who are of the household and can think of no other have the right to question, complain and protest, when conscience impels. We have the right and we have the duty - out of love for the brethren." Thinking Catholics who knew what had happened in Rome before the encyclical, who had absorbed all that Vatican II had to say about the Church as the People of God, had assumed that their concerns would be listened to and change in the Church's stance on birth control was inevitable. Even the Cardinal seemed to think so.

The Commission began with the assumption that the immorality of artificial birth control was easily proved by natural law, and was astonished to find that it could not be. Pope Paul VI did not heed the implied warning that merely to repeat these natural law arguments would be to guarantee a strong reaction; to buttress those arguments by invoking papal authority would broaden that reaction into a challenge to that authority. It was a strategic miscalculation. Instead, in several places in the encyclical, Paul VI makes plain his view that natural law objections to contraception are so obvious, they hardly need explaining. The gulf of mutual incomprehension was immense. The Vatican thought millions of loyal faithful would put aside their newly acquired contraceptive pills and prophylactics, blow the dust off their natural family planning handbooks and temperature charts, and obey. The fact that they did not produced a seismic shift in the way many Catholics saw Church authority. And still do. The Tablet's survey of Mass-going Catholics in England, conducted by the Von Hügel Institute in Cambridge, shows that, 40 years on, more than nine out of 10 of them do not think the use of condoms is wrong. That is their verdict on Humanae Vitae, though surprisingly half of them have never heard of it. The encyclical failed to equip bishops and priests with good arguments that would change the minds of married Catholics who found, and still find, the Church's official teaching at odds with their experience. That is not to rule out that such arguments could be found in the future, or to suggest that the gulf between hierarchy and laity on this issue should remain unbridgeable. 

The situation is different now, more complex. The demographic issue has become part of the concern over climate change; population growth usually slows as girls become better educated. And the education of girls in the developing world is a field where the Catholic Church leads; education is directly linked to economic development, which in turn is about unfair trade and unfair debt.

There are plenty of issues to be revisited. Whether they would be considered by a body like the papal Commission on Birth Control seems unlikely today. Trust between hierarchy and laity has yet to recover from the blow suffered 40 years ago. That trust may well be repaired with honesty. That is why The Tablet believes the time has come to face the reality of Catholics and contraception by means of this definitive survey, in the interests of truth.