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.

You can read Part 1 by clicking on the link.

In 1966, the archbishop of Kraków created his own diocesan commission to study the issues being debated by the Papal Commission. The archbishop, soon to be cardinal, was an active participant in the Kraków commission's deliberations, which also drew on the expertise he had begun to gather in the nascent archdiocesan Institute for Family Studies. The Kraków commission completed its work in February 1968, and a memorandum of conclusions—"The Foundations of the Church's Doctrine on the Principles of Conjugal Life"—was drawn up in French and sent to Paul VI by Cardinal Wojtyla.

According to Father Andrzej Bardecki, one of the participants in the Kraków process, Wojtyla's local commission had seen two drafts of a proposed encyclical on the subject of conjugal morality and fertility regulation. One draft, prepared by the Holy Office, the Vatican's principal doctrinal agency struck some members of the Kraków commission as "stupid conservatism" stringing together various papal pronouncements on the subject while neglecting to mention Pius XII's endorsement of the rhythm method of fertility regulation, or "natural family planning." The alternative draft, which Bardecki remembered as having been sponsored by German Cardinal Julius Döpfner, took the position of the "Majority Report" of the Papal Commission, which involved a serious error in its approach to moral theology, in the judgment of the Kraków theologians. By arguing that conjugal morality should be judged in its totality, and each act of intercourse "proportionally" within that total context, the "Majority Report" and the German draft misread what God had written into the nature of human sexuality, and did so in a way that undermined the structure of moral theology across the board.

Were the only alternatives, therefore, "stupid conservatism" or a deconstruction of the moral theology? The Polish theologians didn't think so. The Kraków commission memorandum, which reflected the thinking of Cardinal Wojtyla and the moral analysis of Love and Responsibility, tried to develop a new framework for the Church's classic position on conjugal morality and fertility regulation: a fully articulated, philosophically well-developed Christian humanism that believers and non-believers alike could engage.

Next Week: Part 3 from the excerpt

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