On July 12, 2014, The Tablet carried an article by Charles Curran on preparations for the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, to be convoked by Pope Francis in Rome this coming October. A questionnaire had been sent to bishops all over the world, asking how the faithful thought about issues of family and sexuality, with recommendations on how to respond to the reported difficulties. The Vatican has just published an instrumentum laboris (“Work Sheet”), summarizing the findings and making recommendations of its own on how the teachings of the Church could best be effectively conveyed. According to Curran, Catholic progressives will be disappointed that the document simply repeats and reaffirms the teachings of the Magisterium (the Church’s authoritative body of doctrine) on matters such as indissolubility of marriage, non-marital cohabitation, same-sex unions—and contraception (arguably the issue on which the Church is most at odds with just about anyone else in Western societies). The disappointment is a bit premature: After all, the instrumentum was asked to propose an agenda for the Synod, not to preempt its conclusions. Curran doubts that any radical outcomes are likely, beyond greater pastoral flexibility in adapting the teachings to local or individual circumstances (which is very much in line with Francis’ statements on such matters). Contraception has been a divisive issue both within the Catholic Church and in its relations with the outside, ever since 1968 when Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae vitae authoritatively laid down the rigid stance on contraception which characterizes the Catholic position today. The issue has again become politically salient in this country by the clumsy effort of the Obama administration to force Catholic institutions to cover contraception in the health insurance offered to their employees, and by the recent Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case extending the “religious exemption”, granted (reluctantly) by the administration to some religious organizations, to some “closely held” corporations (in this case held by one pious family). Curran is hardly an uninvolved bystander. He is a Roman Catholic priest and theologian, a vigorous critic of Humanae vitae and other conservative positions by the Church. In 1986 this got him removed from the faculty of the Catholic University in Washington; he is now the Elizabeth Scurlock Professor of Human Values (great title!) at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
The instrumentum covers a large number of issues. Contraception is probably the most questioned and ignored in practice by Catholic lay people. It is all the more important that on this issue, as with all others concerned with marriage, gender and sexuality, the claim is made that the Church not only teaches its specific beliefs but that these are grounded in natural law. Supposedly the “openness to life” (that is, to procreation) is intrinsic to the grounding of marriage in the “order of creation”. Thus these beliefs apply in principle not only to Catholics but to all human beings with the gift of reason. If “natural law” is, as the Apostle Paul thought, “written in the heart” of people everywhere, it is exceedingly difficult to verify empirically. It is noteworthy that Paul VI based his encyclical on the minority report of the commission set up to deal with the issue of contraception; the majority took a much more nuanced position. Not surprisingly, Catholic social teachings can be interpreted quite differently. Take another important encyclical in the history of Catholic social thought, the encyclical Quadrogesimo anno, issued by Pius XI in 1931. Its assertion of the right of workers’ organizations served to legitimate the “corporate state” in fascist Italy, Austria and Spain in the 1930s, but also the development of democratic labor unions in the United States about the same time.
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