Fifty years on, it’s still the Pope vs. the Pill
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of a signal moment of cultural revolution and conflict. By the summer of 1968, the sexual revolution had already gathered force, a scythe cutting down traditional mores on sex, marriage and family. The question before Pope Paul VI that summer was whether he would accommodate himself to the sine qua non of the sexual revolution, contraception.
Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the traditional teaching on the immorality of contraception in his encyclical Humanae Vitae (On Human Life). It was the most reviled teaching document in the entire history of the papacy.
The pope “bans the pill” was the headline, but of course popes don’t ban contraception anymore than they “ban” theft. They teach what conforms — and what does not conform — to the moral law.
But in 1968, the idea that Pope Paul VI would reaffirm the traditional Christian teaching on the immorality of contraception was an outrage. The sexual revolution was by then dismantling divorce laws across the world, popular culture had taken a decisive turn toward endorsing premarital sexual activity, and the Protestant world had moved away from the historic Christian consensus on the immorality of contraception. The Anglicans were first in 1930, followed in subsequent decades by other heirs of the Reformation, despite the fact that both Luther and Calvin were fierce in their denunciation of the practice.
Paul VI stood fast however, teaching that what was immoral yesterday could not be morally good tomorrow. Much of the Church and nearly all of the world ignored him. He was the man who stood athwart history to yell “Stop!” He was shouting into a tsunami.
The key issue, then as now, was whether sex has an intrinsic meaning, or whether it can have whatever meaning we wish to give it. Can we set aside the long tradition — by no means limited to Christianity alone — that insisted that sex and love, sex and marriage, sex and babies all go together?
That de-coupling has been the most important social phenomenon of our time, with the long-term consequences now evident 50 years later. Women have been de-coupled from men, either by divorce or never-formed marriages; children de-coupled from parents, especially fathers; and the future de-coupled from the present as the developed world is no longer reproducing itself. Sex has been so separated from love and commitment that a hook-up culture — evident on campus or any reality TV show — has taken root where sexual partners no longer need even to know each other. Still, hearts get broken.
Paul VI foresaw much of this, predicting that men would begin to treat women more as objects to be used rather than potential collaborators in a family project that requires mutual responsibility across generations. There is a great difference, Paul VI intuited, between saying to another, “Let me enjoy you” and saying “Let me take responsibility for life with you.”
Was he right? We have now a culture completely awash in pornography. Some of the most affluent and successful young women complain of being under siege from a rape culture, to say nothing of those in more vulnerable parts of society where repeated sexual assault is a more likely outcome than marriage.
The debate of 1968 still continues. Does the family have a nature and meaning and mission; or can it be what we decide it to be? Does biological sex have a meaning, or is maleness and femaleness subject to the meanings we decide upon? On that it would appear that Paul VI would still be on the losing side.
Yet there are voices here and there that are listening again. In the Catholic Church, the growing and vibrant parts embrace the traditional teaching; the dying parts still reject it. In the broader Christian world, there are some who, amid the catastrophic decline of the very main line Protestants who most eagerly accommodated themselves to the new sexual ethic, wonder if maybe their own tradition, shared with Catholics, was correct after all.
Here and there feminist voices ask whether the entire edifice of women’s medicine, built on the idea that natural fertility is a disease to be treated, might have weak foundations. Ecologists who worry about introducing foreign elements into the ecosystem are thinking twice about trying to prevent what all nature exerts itself to do, that life wants to live.
Fifty years on, Paul VI has not prevailed in the culture. But then prophets seldom do.