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Church Once Stood Firm On Contraception Says Smith

Imagine a Catholic Church in which bishops spoke out unequivocally and priests sermonized from the pulpit on the evils of contraception.

There was a time when that was the case, said Dr. Janet Smith in a Defend Life-sponsored talk at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg  April 14.

Smith, a professor of Moral Theology at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Seminary, told some 120 seminarians, priests and students, most of whom were too young to remember, that before 1960, although the Pill had not yet made its debut, a contraceptive culture thrived in the U.S., thanks to condoms, diaphragms and douches.

Swimming against the tide was the Catholic Church.

“The Catholic Church was very energetic in defense of the Church’s teaching,” said Smith.

“The priests were well-educated on it.  They understood the meaning of marriage and the importance of children to marriage, and they preached it from the pulpit.”

Various religious orders, such as the Redemptorists, Passionists, Jesuits and Paulists, would conduct missions, spending a week at each parish, during which contraception was a regular topic, she said.  And parish priests would bring it up in the confessional.

The bishops fought against pro-contraceptive legislation in newspaper editorial pages, through pastoral letters read from the pulpits, and via the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the precursor of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“Legislators were terrified of Catholics!  They were a huge voting block,” said Smith.

By the 1950s, no more than 35 percent of Catholics admitted to using contraception.  The majority were having large families.

“They felt they were 100 percent Catholic and proud of it, proud they were not giving in to the materialism of the culture,” said Smith.

But in the early 1960s a series of events converged which resulted in the Church backing off from its vigorous public teaching on contraception.

Most important was the invention of the Pill, which became the subject of theological debate.

Some theologians thought that because it didn’t interfere with the sexual act – it just extended a woman’s period of infertility – it might not come under the Church’s ban on contraception.

Added to this was a growing fear that the world was immensely overpopulated.  

In his book, The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that in 20 years people would be waging wars over food supplies.

In addition, the feminist movement spread the concept that children were an obstacle to women’s fulfillment through careers.

“In 1968 Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, which said that the Church couldn’t change its teaching on contraception; it’s God’s teaching, not man’s teaching,” said Smith.

But there was widespread dissent.

“Fr. Charles Curran held a press conference on the steps of Catholic University of America, saying you could follow your conscience; eventually the Church will change its teaching.

“He has been a major force in this debate,” said Smith, who herself has debated him:  “Most people when they hear, ‘Do whatever your conscience teaches you,’ hear, ‘Do whatever you want.’”

Curran’s statement was given to seminarians of the time; they were not given Humanae Vitae to study, said Smith.  That’s one reason why priests have been silent from the pulpit on contraception.

Another theologian, Fr. John Courtney Murray, held that in respect to contraception, “You should not make a private sin a public crime.  In the 1960s he got Cardinal Cushing to withdraw from a vigorous, aggressive fight against contraception,” said Smith.

But Dr. Smith believes that a new mood and a new acceptance is growing among the laity and seminarians, thanks to Pope John Paul II’s teachings in Familiaris Consortio and his talks on the Theology of the Body.

In the meantime, the prevalent culture remains a contraceptive one, she said.

“Most people in our culture contracept before marriage and during marriage.  They stop for only a short time to conceive one or two children.  Then they get sterilized, then they divorce.”

They have never had an extended period of time where they were not contracepting and were having satisfying sex which, she maintains, couples who practice natural family planning experience.

“Our culture is nowhere beginning to understand the profound effect contraception is having on relationships,” Smith asserted.

She noted that a biologist with the unlikely name of Lionel Tiger, in his 1999 book, The Decline of Males, attributes the growth of irresponsibility and fecklessness in men to contraception, Smith noted.

Tiger cites studies on monkeys which suggest that males are much more attracted to females when they are in the fertile phase of their cycle.

When all the females in one study were contracepted, the male monkeys started playing sexually with each other.

Drawing a parallel to modern society, Tiger thinks that the fact that so many women contracept explains the pervasiveness of pornography, homosexuality and deviant sexuality.

“People still haven’t figured out that contraception is a major reason why our culture is so messed up,” Dr. Smith concluded.