July 25, 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the promulgation of the encyclical Humane Vitae which was written by Pope Paul VI. The encyclical addresses issues related to the sanctity of life, but it is best known for its clear enunciation of the Church's teaching against the use of any forms of artificial birth control.

Pope John Paul II, then Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, was involved in the work that was done prior to the writing of Humane Vitae. The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6, Successor to St Stanislaw, which is found in George Weigel's biography of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope.

First established by Pope John XXIII, the Papal Commission for the Study of Problems of the Family, Population, and Birth Rate was reappointed by Pope Paul VI to advise him on the tangle of issues indicated in its title. For much of the world, though, this was the "Papal Birth Control Commission" and the only issue at stake was whether Catholics could "use the pill." In the highly politicized atmosphere of the immediate post-Vatican 11 Church, "birth control" became the litmus-test issue between theological "progressives" and "conservatives," even as the issue got entangled in ongoing arguments about the nature and scope of papal teaching authority. When one adds to this volatile ecclesiastical mix the cultural circumstances of the sixties in the West, including the widespread challenge to all established authority and the breakout into mainstream culture of the sexual revolution, it becomes apparent that a thoughtful public moral discussion of conjugal morality was going to be very difficult at this point. In 1968, Paul VI, who thought himself obliged to give the Church an authoritative answer on such a highly charged question, issued Humanae Vitae, which instantly became the most controversial encyclical in history and the cause of even further disruption in the Church, particularly in North America and Western Europe. The controversy was inevitable, but it might not have been so debilitating had the Pope taken Cardinal Wojtyla's counsel more thoroughly.

According to the familiar telling of this complex tale, Pope Paul's Papal Commission was divided between a majority that argued for a change in the classic Catholic position that contraception was immoral, and a minority that wanted to affirm that teaching. A memorandum sent to the Pope in June 1966—and journalistically dubbed the "Majority Report"—argued that conjugal morality should be measured by "the totality of married life," rather than by the openness of each act of intercourse to conception. In this view, it was morally licit to use chemical or mechanical means to prevent conception as long as this was in the overall moral context of a couple's openness to children. Another memorandum, dubbed the "Minority Report," reiterated the classic Catholic position, that the rise of contraceptives violated the natural moral law by sundering the procreative and unitive dimensions of sexuality. In this view, and following the teaching of Pope Pius XII, the morally legitimate way to regulate conception was through the use of the natural rhythms of fertility, known as the rhythm method.

Pope Paul VI spent two years wrestling with these opposed positions and with the pressures that were being brought to bear on him to take a side. Proponents of the "Majority Report" (which was leaked to the press in 1967 to bring more pressure on the Pope) argued that the Church would lose all credibility with married couples and with the modern world if it did not change the teaching set forth by Pius XII. Some opponents argued that adopting the "Majority Report" position would destroy the Church's teaching authority, as it would involve a tacit admission of error on a question of serious moral consequence. Paul VI eventually rejected the conclusion and moral reasoning of the "Majority Report," and on July 25, 1968, issued the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, section 14 of which began as follows: "Thus, relying on these first principles of human and Christian doctrine concerning marriage, we must again insist that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun must be totally rejected as a legitimate means of regulating the number of children." A maelstrom of criticism followed, as did the most widespread public Catholic dissent from papal teaching in centuries.

Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, well-known to the Pope as the author of Love and Responsibility, had been appointed by Paul VI to the Papal Commission, but had been unable to attend the June 1966 meeting at which the majority of the commission took the position later summarized in its memorandum. The Polish government had denied him a passport, on the excuse that he had waited too late to apply. Wojtyla played an important role in the controversy over contraception and in the development of Humanae Vitae, nonetheless. The encyclical, however, was not crafted precisely as Wojtyla proposed.

Next Week: Part 2 from the excerpt

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