Religion: Hard Questions on the Issues

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The Pope's moral stands deal with sex and complex history

The Pope and his church are out of step with contemporary Americans, including many Roman Catholics, in dealing with sexuality. In the U.S. generally, sexual pleasure has lately come to be regarded as a matter of personal gratification unconnected with social responsibility or, of course, with sin. Even among U.S. Catholics the trend is toward the belief that any individual act whatever is acceptable if it can be thought to foster love or self-esteem and enrich the life of the participants. The position of the Roman Catholic Church is that self-gratification alone is morally dangerous and that sex must be linked to commitment to marriage, children, the family, society—that its pursuit must be a reinforcement of fidelity rather than an encouragement to promiscuity. The chief issues stirred by John Paul's conservative stands on morality, however, have long and distinct histories in the church:

Birth Control. The church's hostility to contraception draws from, among other things, the Old Testament command to "be fruitful and multiply" and the need to justify marriage to early Christians in the face of attacks by otherworldly heretics. But contraception did not become a serious issue until the 20th century, when improved techniques—and laxer morals—led to widespread use of birth control devices. By 1930 the Anglican Church hierarchy at the Lambeth Conference reluctantly accepted birth control. Reacting to this, Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical Casti Conubii (On Chaste Marriage), declaring that "the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children. Those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious."

His successor Pius XII in 1951 approved the "rhythm method" of birth control. Pius XII also stated that "medical, eugenic, economic and social" motives could justify couples in limiting the size of their families. Nine years later the approval for marketing birth control pills raised the hope that such biochemical controls would be regarded as "natural" by the church. Pope John XXIII appointed a special commission to examine the matter. Its confidential, but later leaked, majority report to Paul VI in 1966 warned against avoiding childbearing for selfish reasons. Going beyond Pius XII's position, however, the report called for collaboration with "men of learning and science" to find "decent and human means" of birth control (by implication, the Pill). Morality depends on the good of the child, the couple and the family, not "the direct fecundity of each and every particular act," the report concluded. But in 1968 Paul's encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) totally rejected this theory. It declared all "artificial" methods of birth control unacceptable, thus touching off a sustained campaign of public dissent by theologians and wide disobedience among the laity, especially in the U.S., that has few parallels in modem Catholic history.