To many Catholics, the schism that split the Catholic Church occurred at 4:30 a.m. on Monday, July 29, 1968.
On that day, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, an encyclical which was supposed to settle the question about contraception and Catholics once and for all. In it the Pope declared: "Every matrimonial act must remain open to the transmission of life. To destroy even only partially the significance of intercourse and its end is contradictory to the plan of God and to His will."
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It has become conventional wisdom that this was the moment when the Catholic Church split in two.
There were countless Catholics, faithful and practicing, who used birth control, and Humanae Vitae would drive them out of the Church. This separated the Church into two factions: enlightened, progressive modern liberals who were products of Vatican II, the Church council of the early 1960s that liberals claim opened up the Church to the modern world, and constricted killjoys who hated sex and wanted drag the Church back to the dark ages of the 1950s.
Yet this is a distorted picture. The change in thinking had actually taken place before Humanae Vitae. In charting how the consensus in the Church began to crack, we can chart how the demonic was allowed influence within the Church and the larger culture.
I use the term demonic intentionally; as I have explored in various essays and articles, we have become conditioned to think of demonic influence as manifesting itself with smoke and lights and hisses. In truth, it is much more evident in common, this days almost banal, degradation, most often of a sexual nature. At the end of the book The Exorcist Fr. Merrin, the old and wise priest, tells Fr. Damien, a younger and hipper priest, that the devil doesn't care about our wars and massive geopolitical earthquakes. He'd much rather regrade us sexually. That strikes more directly at our dignity and our souls.
Before the opening of Vatican Council II in 1962, Catholic magazines Commonweal and Jubilee -- both progressive -- asked some important lay and religious people their views on what they expected of the Council. Birth control was hardly mentioned, and no one asked that the doctrine forbidding it be changed. In the spring of 1965, Father Andrew Greeley wrote that American Catholics had no problem with the Church teaching.
Many Catholics felt that contraception was an evil. In 1962, a St. Louis pharmaceutical firm announced that "a new push-button aerosol contraceptive foam" was available and being advertised "in bridal, Negro, and religious magazines, and in Negro newspapers." The Jesuit magazine America editorialized in the form of a conversation:
REPORTER: I hear that you're marketing a new aerosol product. Word is that it's foamy, like canned shaving lather or whipped cream. Any advertising?
PR MAN: There sure is. We've bought space in Negro magazines, Negro newspapers and in some religious publications. Bridal magazines, too!
REPORTER: That's limited coverage. Why so much of it in the Negro press?
PR MAN: Just to get it started. When our product gets a grip on the popular mind, we plan to spray the whole country.
REPORTER: About those religious magazines. Any names?
PR MAN: Later, not now. You can't tell about reactions from some of these nuts with a fix on the "dignity" of man, or whatever.
In 1963, President Kennedy was asked about including birth control as part of foreign aid. Kennedy gave a vague answer about research into fertility. America again editorialized, dismissing "the trial balloons which are periodically sent up suggesting that the Church is about to change her doctrine on the immorality of artificial contraception . . . . The Church is not about to do any such thing."
Then the editors wrote this: "morality is not a magic incantation, by definition irrelevant to public policy. Marriage and the family are social institutions of fundamental public importance. People's beliefs about the nature and function of sex and marriage are moral beliefs. If the people who hold them also believe in God (and most people do), their moral beliefs are part of their religion. These beliefs cannot be ruled out, on that ground, from the discussion of public policy."
They went on to conclude that "all policies are framed ultimately in the light of some conception of human good. Those of us who believe that the practice of contraception is profoundly opposed to the true nature and meaning of marriage are not ‘seeking to impose our private beliefs on others' when we object to the fostering of contraception as a public policy. After all, the government is our government as much as any other citizens'."
What changed all this was not Humanae Vitae, but the 1965 Supreme Court decision Griswald v. Connecticut. Griswald v. Connecticut ruled that all state laws banning the sale of contraceptives were unconstitutional. Such laws had been passed in Puritan America; but in 1948, when the issue came up in a referendum, it was the Catholic Church that had fought to uphold them.
By the early 1960s, this had changed.
Perhaps the best way of charting the progression of Catholic thought on the matter is through Commonweal and America, two of the oldest and most popular Catholic magazines at the time. Both magazines, in 1963 and 1964 respectively, editorialized that laws prohibiting the sale of contraceptives would be overturned, and that this was nothing to get overly excited about. But they still flip-flopped, often contradicting themselves.
In the winter of 1963, Commonweal columnist James O'Gara wrote, "The truth of the matter, I think, is that birth control is simply not a proper matter for public law, one way or the other. Good law demands a certain consensus, and that consensus is clearly lacking on this question." The marriage relationship, he concludes, is "personal and sacred...we should keep the state strictly out of the bedroom."
In 1964, America -- which only months earlier had opposed government funding of birth control, claiming "it's our government too" -- shifted positions. "It may be hard for many people to grasp," the magazine editorialized, "But the truth is that the state cannot effectively legislate against everything that is morally wrong...When the community comes to be seriously divided over the morality of an action, the state's effort to prohibit the action by law becomes different and finally impossible."
The Catholic magazines were in fact just catching up with the media, which had been running a campaign against the Church and its stance on contraception.
In 1961, the popular magazine Look published an article by Father John A. O'Brien from Notre Dame. In "Let's Take Birth Control Out of Politics," Father O'Brien both defended the Church's stance on birth control while arguing that the state take no position on the matter. In 1963, Father O'Brien published the same article in two magazines, Ave Maria and The Protestant Christian Century.
In it, he argued for family planning and population control. Population control was the obsession of the increasingly hysteric media. At that point, however, much of the Catholic media wasn't giving way. In the Jesuit magazine America, John C. Knott reputed Father O'Brien: "The mind of the Church has been and is in favor of life. She is not frightened by the statistical data presented by demographers and described in nightmare terms by propagandists." Commonweal at this point started to flip-flop on the question of contraception, running both pro- and anti pieces about the pill.
After Griswald v. Connecticut was decided, both Commonweal and America praised the decision -- America even claimed that the court had discovered, in the right to privacy, a concept of natural law.
Of course, that same natural law would soon not apply to letting babies live.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearReligion and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
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