Catholicpunk / A (Semi) Final Draft (#4)
Chapter One / A Crack in Everything
What you read below concludes the second part of Chapter One, which explores the resurgence (or insurgence) of a medieval Catholic cosmology in post-war America through the lens of Germain Grisez and Catholic teachings on contraception in the momentous years spanning 1963 and 1965.
This part of the chapter really focuses on making two points. The first is that Catholic views on marriage, sexuality, and the family are absolutely and unequivocally the core of their social teaching. The Church simply does not exist without the bond between sex and procreation. These views are not subject to review. The Church will live or die on this battlefield.
The second is that the Church remains a medieval, anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment institution, to the degree it rejects liberal Enlightenment notions of progress and, in particular, fantasies of human liberation and emancipation. The Catholic arc of history bends nowhere until the return of Christ. For the Church, the fall of man colors everything.
The politics of the Church establishment reflect this pessimism, emerging from philosophical ontologies and epistemologies that scorn the democratic surges and urges of its lay populations. From the Big Guy on down, power like water only flows downhill for the Catholic Church.
Next up: Richard Feynman and our third cosmology: science, heat, energy, motion, entropy, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Germain Grisez was not an official member of the Commission but served as an advisor to the Catholic University theologian John C. Ford, who had been appointed to the commission by Pope Paul VI. This working relationship gave Grisez a unique position to influence the commission's work while not being formally listed among its members.
Russell Shaw, who served for decades as scribe and sounding board for Grisez, tells us how in 1963 and 1964, his intense focus on the Church’s position on contraception allowed him to reimagine almost entirely the foundations of Thomist Natural Law. In 1963, a Georgetown colleague named Louis Dupre had proposed to a lay audience that contraception might not be always wrong. When Grisez disputed the logical foundations of Dupre's arguments, he received a "ferociously nasty reaction" from members of the audience, to which his faculty colleagues, stingingly, raised no objection.
Grisez later recalled the incident as "the beginning of a kind of personal antagonism. I got mad." In response, he decided, “Well, I ought to write the article on contraception.” After two weeks of focused effort in the spring of 1964 he produced the manuscript of a book entitled Contraception and the Natural Law, published early in 1965 (leaving the rest of us wonder why we also can’t write a book in two weeks). Grisez remained a professor at Georgetown for nine more years, but lingering acrimony among the faculty concerning his role in the birth control controversies of the mid-1960s contributed to his departure from the university in 1972.
Which raises an important point. Conservative Catholics love to imagine themselves as persecuted, scorned, and beleaguered. There is a certain amount of dissembling in this stance. However, it’s also a fact that in postwar America, (and likely postwar everywhere), vast majorities of Catholics disdained the Vatican’s unyielding line on contraception and generally simply ignored it.
As we’ll shortly see, this opposition from the ranks of the faithful did not matter in the mid-1960s any more than it appears to matter in the 21st century. Indeed, the strength of the medievalist position has always been that Church authorities, who have their own direct pipeline to God, do not need to care about majority support, nor about any form of legitimacy this support might confer. Indeed, democratic, majoritarian commitments, which require publicity and transparency, represent active limits on their true preference, which is to operate in secret, in the shadows, beneath the floorboards.
Contraception and the Natural Law defended the Church's teaching against artificial birth control while proposing a new approach to moral reasoning, based on the human capacity to freely and consciously choose good over evil, and centered on respect for fundamental (but anodyne) human goods—such as life, health, truth, beauty, work, play, friendship, and faith—that together comprise the “common good.” Grisez’s early efforts became the foundation for the New Natural Law theory developed in the 1970s that has become the framework for contemporary philosophical and political culture war assaults on the various “emancipations” heralded within liberalism’s vision of progress.
The New Natural Law – ostensibly about anchoring morality to our capacity as humans to choose freely to pursue, neglect, or undermine basic human goods—differed from neo-Thomist canon by adopting a more Aristotelian focus on human flourishing that existed independently of the ordinances of God captured in scripture. The New Natural Law takes seriously the notion that all humans – Christian or not – possess rational faculties that enable them to objectively recognize and pursue these basic human goods.
In the shadow of Vatican II, Grisez lamented the consequences of what he took to be ethical imperfections of Aquinas’s moral philosophy. According to Grisez, Aquinas had placed a limit on the instrumental application of the Natural Law by focusing almost exclusively on systematic theology (and only incidentally, it would seem, on sexual repression). And so in the 1960s, Grisez himself—sensing opportunity in the rancorous debate about contraception within the Church—stepped in to fill this breach, with a prodigious output of scholarship culminating some 30 years later in The Way of the Lord Jesus, a compendium of pastoral guidance on all questions that touch upon the religious faith and obedience of Catholics (including weirdly specific and technically explicit sexual instructions for believers).
The New Natural Law, as first formulated by Grisez, constituted a moral philosophy based on the vision of an “ordered love” governing the thoughts and deeds of humans. Indeed, the psychic comforts of “well-ordered” environments pervade NNL, the order that finds everyone and everything occupying their proper place within the medieval great chain of being constituting the preeminent good. In almost symmetrical counterpoint to the loosening of sexual morality in the 1960s, then, Grisez tightened the screws. Despite an ostensibly broad focus on the shared goods all humans might rightly seek in order to flourish, Grisez actually shrank and concentrated the scope of natural law moral philosophy to a sexual catechism serving this highest human good: species procreation.
For New Natural Law proponents, the most basic and unassailable human good is procreation. The choices “to contracept” and “to abort” are disordered forms of hatred that violate this ultimate good “and as such can never be justified.” In this foundation precept of the new natural law, Grisez anticipated Humanae Vitae, termed by some “the most important papal document since the Reformation,” which unconditionally condemned any use of contraception by Catholics (especially, of course, those swallowing the bitter Pill). Upon this foundation of reaction to the promiscuity of the times, Grisez and those who followed labored to explain, improve, and proselytize tenets of the new natural law, fortifying it as a dam against surging and interlaced global tides of sexual immorality, cultural debauchery, and infant murder.
Using this new framework, Grisez displaced the mechanistic arguments of Casti Connubii – that certain forms of “artificial” birth control pervert (and therefore “frustrate”) the natural and divinely ordained end of the sexual faculty, which is procreation. Instead, Grisez shifted the focus to human intentions in relation to the pursuit of these fundamental human goods. The moral failure intrinsic to the use of artificial birth control methods does not proceed from physically frustrating nature, but from choosing actively to deny a basic human good, almost certainly the most basic human good, which is generating human life.
All of this was happening in 1964 in the shadow of Vatican II and the work of the Birth Control Commission (which was also in shadow). In the spring of 1965, shortly after the publication of Contraception and the Natural Law, distressing reports filtered in from Rome about the progressive tilt of the Commission, which was comprised of theologians, physicians, clergy, sociologists, and psychologists.
The Commission notably also included five married women, who emphasized the practical and emotional challenges of natural family planning (or the rhythm method) the only sanctioned Catholic birth control method. Patrick and Patty Crowley, who had founded the Christian Family Movement, a global Catholic lay movement for supporting Catholic married couples and families, were among the more prominent lay members of the Commission. According to Christian Family Movement surveys, the Crowley’s reported, natural family planning “did nothing to foster marital love and provided no greater unity between the spouses.”
Survey data harvested by another lay member of the Commission, Colette Potvin, indicated that only 7 percent of French-Canadian couples voiced satisfaction with the Church’s marriage doctrine, with half finding the rhythm method to be “an anguished and difficult task” that hindered marital growth. Potvin famously asked Commission members, “When you die, God is going to say, ‘Did you love?’ He isn’t going to say, ‘Did you take your temperature?’” Potvin’s emotional testimony about the deficiencies of the rhythm method and Church teachings on contraception deeply affected celibate clergy on the Commission hearing for the first time how the Church had ignored or devalued the experiences of women in discussions of birth control and family planning.
It’s not surprising then, that according to these reports reaching Grisez, at least two-thirds of the theologians on the Commission were open to changing the Church’s position on birth control, particularly with regard to acceptance of the use of the Pill as a “natural” birth control and family planning technology. Having also reviewed early version of what would eventually take shape as the Commission’s “Majority Report,” Grisez approached Father John Ford. “Let’s talk,” he said. From June 1965, on, Grisez collaborated closely with Ford on Commission-related work, spending the entirety of June of 1966 in Rome working behind the scenes “drafting stuff, criticizing stuff.”
After years of deliberation, the Commission finalized the "Majority Report," written and submitted to the Pope by Commission Chairman Father Henri de Riedmatten. The Majority Report recommended that the Catholic Church amend its traditional teaching against artificial contraception, as expressed in Pope Pius XI's 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii. The majority of the commission (64 of 69 voting members) also advised lifting the contraception ban.
In response, Grisez and Ford drafted what became known as the "Minority Report," a counter-document which upheld the traditional teaching that artificial birth control is always and without qualification "morally an intrinsically evil act." This report emphasized the constancy of Church teaching on contraception throughout history, the potentially disastrous effects a change would have on Church authority, and the moral reasoning behind the prohibition of contraception. We might call this Minority Report Plan B (or what one does when things go terribly awry).
There is definitely some silliness in the Minority Report, with bitter asides alluding to the preposterous notion that the Holy Spirit would rather assist the fallen Anglican Church on birth control teaching than the Mother Church, which had ever remained constant. This jibe is of a piece, more generally, with an insistence that the Church cannot shift its position on a matter that previously had been irrevocable without collapsing effects on the Church’s authority on all matters of morality and dogma.
The Minority Report also takes major issue with theologians who call into question the idea of “intrinsic evil” itself, claiming this would lead to the belief that “there is no human act which is so intrinsically evil that it cannot be justified because of a higher good of man.” Which might lead to such earth-shattering conclusions as “masturbation is for the good of personal equilibrium, or homosexuality good for those who are affected with abnormal inclinations and seek only friendship with the same sex for their balance. The same could be done for the use of abortives or of abortion directly induced to save the life of the mother.”
But finally, we return to the main game. Well, there are actually two main games. The first game is a sweaty, earnest, high-stakes contest to secure the moral high ground for the Church, come what may. Here the Commission’s Minority Report declares that no moral truth has been so “constantly, solemnly, and definitively stated” as the sanctity of the natural family, without which none among us might pass through the gates of Heaven.
For this reason, it’s not possible to imagine no evil more “vicious” than the harms that sexual pleasure, when emancipated from the burdens and obligations of marriage, will inflict upon the sacrament of marriage. If this truth were to fall for the Church, none would remain unshaken. For it is this truth through which “the Holy Spirit promised to the Church to lead the faithful on the right way toward their salvation.”
The second game played out on a different battlefield in which certain combatants possessed an asymmetrical advantage. The Majority Report of course favored revisions to the Church’s birth control strictures and, more generally, a loosening of the sexual chokehold. It represented an overwhelming preponderance of voices on these matters. And they would have seemed to have triumphed on that basis. To secure this victory, the majority activated Plan A, which was to release this report to the public without prior authorization, so that they might also triumph in the court of public opinion, by preemptively claiming control of the narrative.. For this reason, as Grisez observed, the common understanding of what happened with the commission had been "shaped by people who were pro-contraception."
What few learned until many years later was that following the release of the report, the minority almost instantly activated Plan B. Which was to say absolutely nothing, to remain fully silent, secure in the knowledge that they held the trump card. They would wait for the Pope to speak authoritatively. And they could do so with confidence, because they already knew how the Pope intended to speak. Grisez later stated that Pope Paul VI had privately told Ford as early as 1966, two years before the publication of his birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae, that he was not going to change the Church's teachings on sexuality.
Grisez's perspective was that Pope Paul VI was not seeking to delegate decision-making authority to the commission but rather wanted to see what arguments could be made for changing the teaching. As Grisez put it: "[The Pope] was perfectly happy to have a lot of people on the commission who thought that change was possible. He wanted to see what kind of case they could make for that view. He was not at all imagining that he could delegate to a committee the power to decide what the Church's teaching is going to be."