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Recalculating Sex
John Williams on Why an Ecumenical Revisiting of Humanae Vitae May Be Timely
James S. Spiegel's "A Great Crowd of Moral Witness" (Touchstone, January/February 2018) provided substantial texts from across the centuries attesting to the "complete consistency on the issue [of the proscription of homosexual actions] among Christian scholars until recently"; there was, Spiegel wrote, "actual unanimity—agreement without exception [among Protestants and Catholics] . . . until the mid-twentieth century." Somewhat surprisingly, he does not attempt to speculate on what might have happened to disrupt the continuity.
In earlier pages of the same issue of Touchstone—which include James M. Kushiner's editorial, "Getting Sex Wrong Is a Foundational Error," and the full text of the Nashville Statement on sexuality—there is expressed a similar dismay before the pass to which we have come. That the explanation for it might be found—in part, at least—in our culture's embrace of contraception during this time period is not suggested.
But is there actually a connection?
The Root of the West's Travail
How in the 1960s did a whole new pastoral approach to "homosexuals" (the term itself is of rather modern vintage) begin to appear, develop vastly, and then take up, in cases, new moral slants? A year before the publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968, an Anglican commentator, Canon D. A. Rhymes of Southwark Cathedral, offered a response to the last part of that question: with the growing ecclesiastical abrogation of the proscription against contraception, he suggested, it would become inconsistent to hold old views and the old line of morality on other aspects of sexual activity, including homosexual activity: "The Church has," he wrote in a paper -reproduced in the Dublin Review (No. 512, Summer 1967), "at long last, allowed the possibility of sexuality which is not for the procreation of children. It has . . . allowed birth
control."
Paul Blanchard, that irrepressible observer of the religious scene in the mid-twentieth century—(Does anyone remember "Protestants and Others United"?)—reported, approvingly, in 1966: "Throughout 1964 and 1965, the movement in the United States toward the acceptance of birth control became almost a landslide. . . . American Protestantism and American Judaism were virtually unanimous in favoring change." Alas, despite pockets of brilliant and faithful resistance to the upheaval—an upheaval strengthened by the unrelenting medical, governmental, and social promotion of birth control, as well as by demographic studies claiming overpopulation—American Catholicism was, for a plethora of reasons, not poised in the late 1960s, and for a while afterwards, to advance vigorously what had been ensconced as a truth through time: that the conjugal act ought to be the embodiment of the total, mutual self-giving which characterizes matrimony, and that the natural order of sexual intercourse should not be frustrated. This teaching formed an integral part of marital chastity.
Msgr. George Kelly, an indefatigable campaigner for Humanae Vitae, spoke with reference to some who had abandoned the cause against contraception: "Don't they realize that contraception is at the root of the West's travail?" If Kelly came close to identifying accurately the root, then many in pastoral leadership greatly missed the challenge of the hour, and the West's travail was not assuaged. Even so, during the turbulent years of dissent that deprived the encyclical of its energy to influence the course of culture, two of the most articulate and influential voices on behalf of natural family planning were the Lutheran missionaries, writers, and teachers Walter and Ingrid Trobisch.
Pope Paul VI's dire predictions in Humanae Vitae regarding the sexual anarchy that would follow upon the widespread acceptance of birth control were met with scorn in many quarters in 1968, but they have regrettably proven to be accurate. But Paul's real wisdom cannot be fully perceived from a merely consequentialist appraisal. The pope did not issue his admonition based on a shrewd reading of current social trends; rather, he was convinced that tampering with the divinely ordered nature of human sexuality would lead inevitably to grievous consequences. Could not this conviction form the basis of ecumenical
conversation among those concerned with the restoration of sexual morality and social order? It would be timely now, as well, when impressive numbers of American women are discontinuing their use of "the pill" because of its harmful side effects and millennials are turning to apps that track natural fertility indicators.
The suggestion for a review is not outrageous. In the wake of the 1930 Lambeth Resolution, that watershed moment when contraception began to be legitimized in the Anglican Church, and the subsequent preconizing of contraception by the Federal Council of Churches, a number of Protestant leaders were outspoken in their opposition, among them the towering figure of Bishop Warren -Candler of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Pope Pius XI's encyclical Casti Connubii (December 31, 1930) represented, of course, the reiteration of the Catholic position. Pastors and theologians across denominations understood that with the advancement of contraception, they were being confronted with a major point of contention.
In a widely circulated address (October 28, 2017) delivered to a conference in Rome anticipating the fiftieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae, German cardinal Walter Brandmueller referred to those 1930s, when strong voices emanated from Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches rejecting contraception. Back then, the cardinal reminded his audience, even the secular media were represented in the protest, as witness this excerpt from a Washington Post editorial published on March 22, 1931: "Carried to its logical conclusion, the [Lambeth] Committee's report, if carried into effect, would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be 'careful and restrained' is preposterous."
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