Boston Globe

Birth control and church’s power grab

By James Carroll

 |      February 20, 2012 Article

HERE’S A book title suited to recent headlines: “The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control.’’ Alas, the battle over birth control has been reignited, with Catholic doctors (and nurses, professors, social workers, and others whose health insurance is at issue) finding themselves in the thick of conflict, whether they want to be or not. Catholic bishops, having a generation ago squandered the treasure of moral leadership, have lately been offered a pulpit from which to bully. They’re back.
Never mind that the bishops have been had. Conservative Republicans, knowing which buttons to push, have successfully conscripted the Catholic hierarchy into the battle to unseat President Obama. As the right cheers the bishops on, they can dream that the long-settled issue of birth control is still lively.
The administration, and many Catholics who ignore church teaching on birth control, attempted to show respect anyway. But the bishops rejected Obama’s compromise, refusing to yield their point even after winning it. Such deluded lust for power would be sad, but they brought this embarrassment on themselves. A short history of the Catholic contraception argument shows how.

The book “The Time Has Come’’ was, in fact, published in 1963 by Harvard gynecologist John Rock, inventor of the birth-control pill. He argued that the pill, in using “natural’’ responses of a woman’s body, was not “artificial.’’ Therefore the pill was birth control the church could approve. That this was a genuine opening to change was reinforced when Pope John XXIII convened the six-member (three clergy, three laity) Papal Commission on Population, the Family, and Natality, and when the Second Vatican Council put “responsible parenthood’’ on its agenda. The time had come.

But in 1964, the new pope, Paul VI, diluted the papal commission by expanding its membership to 72, almost all clerics, including 16 cardinals and bishops (and only five women). This stacked the deck against any change in church teaching on contraception, which became even more unlikely when the pope abruptly ordered the council not to take up the question, reserving it to himself alone.

The bishops are up to something else with this campaign - seeking the public voice they lost more than four decades ago.

The day of such dogmatic unilateralism was over, though. A leading prelate, Cardinal Leon-Joseph Seunens of Brussels, stood to oppose the pope’s intervention: “I beg you, my brother bishops, let us avoid a new ‘Galileo affair.’ One is enough for the church.’’ Astonishingly, when the stacked papal commission reached its conclusions in 1966, the overwhelming majority (including nine of the 16 cardinals and bishops) favored not only approving the pill, but lifting the ban on all forms of contraception. When this was leaked to the press, the result was not a Catholic earthquake, but a communal sigh of relief.
The earthquake came later. Spurning his own commission, Pope Paul reiterated the birth control condemnation in 1968 - an act so out of sync with the clear “sense of the faithful’’ (sensus fidelium, too, is a source of dogmatic truth) that the teaching was widely rejected by the Catholic people, including thousands of priests, theologians, and even multiple national conferences of bishops. From then on, sexual partners made their own decisions.
Why did Paul VI do this? In 1930, his predecessor had condemned “artificial’’ birth control just as Protestants were deeming it acceptable. The prohibition became a hallmark of Catholic identity and an emblem - big families - of Catholic acceptance of church authority. The pope feared that change would undermine that authority - and the papacy’s own position. Birth control was not, in fact, the issue. Church authority was. The tragic irony is that in trying to shore up that authority, Pope Paul completely undermined it.
The American Catholic bishops today are repeating that error. Birth control isn’t the real issue; unlike abortion, contraception is a subject on which all but a fringe have achieved consensus. The battle is over. Indeed, any authentic desire to reduce abortion requires the promotion of contraception.
No, the bishops are up to something else with this campaign - seeking the public voice they lost more than four decades ago. This won’t work either. They want to end their new Galileo affair, while still insisting that the sun revolves around the earth. Meanwhile, the moralizing political reactionaries who so cynically exploit these sad Catholic leaders could not care less about birth control. The issue, as ever, is authority. This time, not the pope’s. The president’s.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Glob