Catholicpunk / A (Semi) Final Draft (#3)
Chapter One / A Crack in Everything
Moving on. This next section of Chapter One has been a bitch. I’d hoped to finish it today, but do not think I will be able to. But here’s what I have so far. It’s pretty bold. I don’t think I’ll be making too many friends. But I like the Plan B joke. You’ll probably see how that plays out in the stuff I post tomorrow. I also like the robbing “Peter to pay Paul” joke.
Germain Grisez and Plan B (What comes in and saves the day)
The gothic style embodies tensions between spiritual aspiration and the claims of the flesh, between innocence and purity and sin and desire. Indeed, one might without exaggeration propose that Catholic dogma is ultimately about nothing more nor less than sexual repression, that spirituality is merely sublimated sexuality.
In this sense, contraception itself, by offering the opportunity to decouple the pleasures of sex from the work of procreation, has always threatened to unwind this tension, to introduce cataclysmic disorder into the house of God and unroot Catholic dogma at its core. Indeed, for conservative Catholics, contraception and abortion are merely two sides of the same coin because both sever the bond between sex and procreation.
From this perspective, even as these matters remained far outside their purview, it’s understandable how the condom contretemps that flared between my father and Mr. Soprano on the doorstep of my home in Princeton in 1964—framed as a clash of sexual values and cultures—was a thunderclap signifying the onset of a furious storm that 60 years later has yet to crest and break.
Have you heard of Germain Grisez? Neither has anyone else. However, Grisez (1929-2018) is almost certainly the most influential and consequential American Catholic theologian and moral philosopher of the 20th century. Through the ideas and activities of Grisez – all collocated in a series of publications and commentaries on the remarkably complete and well-organized website called The Way of the Lord Jesus – we can begin to trace the contours of Catholic Natural Law as it adapted to contemporary realities and began to more actively insinuate itself in American life and articulate in contemporary forms the gothic dynamics of medieval spirituality.
In 1963, Germain Grisez was 34 years old, a devout young professor of philosophy at Georgetown University who had made it his life’s mission to reclaim the morality and ethics of Thomas Aquinas for the modern era. Pope John had called the Second Vatican Council in 1962. We’ll revisit Vatican II further on down the line, but for now suffice to say that among the many controversial reform items the Council was undertaking to consider, the Church’s long-standing strictures on the use of contraceptive methods to prevent pregnancy was not among them.
Nonetheless, clarification of the position of the Church on matters concerning contraception, birth control, and family planning required urgent attention. Let’s wind back three decades to see why.
In 1930, the British Anglican Church convened its seventh Lambeth Conference, an assembly of Anglican bishops summoned every so often to address and cast (non-binding) votes on major theological issues of the day. At the 1930 Lambeth Conference, according to the Times of London, the bishops changed “the social and moral life of humanity” when they adopted, by a vote of 193 to 67, a resolution that for the first time sanctioned the use of contraceptives by married couples to prevent pregnancy. Here is the text of the resolution.
Where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles. The primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles. The Conference records its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.
The Conference did not stop there, however. In a matter not unlike robbing Peter to pay Paul, the bishops also adopted a related resolution on sexual intercourse between persons not legally married, declaring it a “grievous sin” that the use of contraceptives in no way tempers.
Sexual intercourse between persons who are not legally married is a grievous sin. The use of contraceptives does not remove the sin. In view of the widespread and increasing use of contraceptives among the unmarried and the extention of irregular unions owing to the diminution of any fear of consequences, the Conference presses for legislation forbidding the exposure for sale and the unrestricted advertisement of contraceptives, and placing definite restrictions upon their purchase.
The latter resolution might have given some comfort to the Catholic Church of that era, but of course it didn’t. The Church did not dally in its response. On December 31, 1930, Pope Pius XI published the papal encyclical on sex and marriage, Casti Connubii (On Chaste Wedlock), which pulled no punches and which locked down, likely permanently, the Church’s official position on contraception.
Casti Connubii stated in no uncertain terms that those who “frustrate the marriage act … sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.” As if this weren’t enough, Pius XI invoked poor Onan—whom all of us generally assume committed the sin of masturbation, but in fact likely had committed the apparently far more grievous sin of coitus interruptus, for which the Lord “slew him also.”
Casti Connubii concedes that many regard offspring as a “disagreeable burden of matrimony,” which they seek to avoid not through “virtuous continence,” but by a deliberate marriage act of “frustration,” allowing them to gratify their desires without consequence. Others will complain that they can neither remain continent nor have children because of difficult family circumstances. But as Pius XI explains to his “venerable brethren,” no reason or excuse can suffice in which an act “intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good.”
In other words, some bads cannot be justified no matter how many goods they produce.
As always the subdural, subversive meanings—those which are illicit rather than licit—are more fun, interesting, and revealing than the overtly earnest moralizing of the Church establishment. Pope Pius XI wrote Casti Connubii at the tail end of a decade of exuberance and profligacy, but the colorful and evocative language he uses to characterize and castigate the follies of the Roaring Twenties anticipates the unspooling of new possibilities as the Sixties were unfolding.
When we consider the great excellence of chaste wedlock, Venerable Brethren, it appears all the more regrettable that particularly in our day we should witness this divine institution often scorned and on every side degraded.
For now, alas, not secretly nor under cover, but openly, with all sense of shame put aside, now by word again by writings, by theatrical productions of every kind, by romantic fiction, by amorous and frivolous novels, by cinematographs portraying in vivid scene, in addresses broadcast by radio telephony, in short by all the inventions of modern science, the sanctity of marriage is trampled upon and derided; divorce, adultery, all the basest vices either are extolled or at least are depicted in such colors as to appear to be free of all reproach and infamy.
Books are not lacking which dare to pronounce themselves as scientific but which in truth are merely coated with a veneer of science in order that they may the more easily insinuate their ideas. The doctrines defended in these are offered for sale as the productions of modern genius, of that genius namely, which, anxious only for truth, is considered to have emancipated itself from all those old-fashioned and immature opinions of the ancients; and to the number of these antiquated opinions they relegate the traditional doctrine of Christian marriage.
Sex freed from procreation represents emancipation. Of course we cannot have that!
Thirty years later, what had changed? Everything.
The FDA approved the first oral contraceptive, “the Pill,” in 1960. The birth control pill revolutionized reproductive autonomy for women and radically shifted the landscape of sexual identity and sexual ethics by decoupling sex from procreation. In 1962, over a million American women were using it, evidence of a broader cultural shift toward female control over fertility.
The development of hormonal contraceptives had blurred the line between “natural” and “artificial” methods, forcing the Church to reevaluate its 1930 Casti Connubii ban. Progressive theologians, such as Hans Küng, argued there was no coherent theological basis for the prohibition, while conservatives feared undermining papal authority.
Why did any of this matter? It’s important to appreciate how virtually entire edifice of the Catholic Church rests upon the pillar of the “natural family.” And pretty much the only thing sustaining this pillar is how it binds sex exclusively to procreation.
While the Second Vatican Council aimed to modernize Church teachings, the topic of contraception was deliberately excluded from its main discussions due to internal resistance of Church traditionalists fearful of the topic’s explosive ramifications. Instead, Pope John XXIII and later Paul VI created a separate Papal Birth Control Commission to study the issue.