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Let me first express my appreciation to Dr. Janet Smith and Dr. Ronald McArthur for their thoughtful responses to my article on Humanae Vitae. And let me acknowledge that Janet Smith cannot be blamed for Humanae Vitae's failure, for she, perhaps more than anyone else, has done everything possible to advocate its teaching and, as she says, "to supply what is missing."
What I find most striking about the two responses is the great deal of agreement expressed. First, there is general agreement that Humanae Vitae has failed to teach and to persuade Catholics. While viewpoints differ concerning the cause, there is agreement that the failure to present Scripture, Tradition, the Magisterium and natural law was at least partially responsible. Dr. McArthur says, "The fact is that the encyclical did not intend 'to present the Catholic teaching in all its fullness and beauty,' did not intend an extensive discussion of natural law and the traditional doctrine." Dr. Smith says, "I, too, have bemoaned the Church's abandonment of natural law in many of its documents." When one gets statements of agreement as strong as these from one's putative opponents, it would be foolish to hope for more.
While the two respondents may contest my conclusions, I'm grateful that their responses grant me the opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings caused by my lack of clarity in the article, rather than wasting words in pointless debating.
1. Both writers feel that I present the issue as a contest between Humanae Vitae and Casti Connubii. Let me clarify: the contest is not between one document and another, but between Humanae Vitae on one side and all of sacred history on the other. If anything, my article quotes more often from Pius XII than from Pius XI, but both popes merely represent a long line of tradition dating from the day when God first breathed life into Adam and told him to "be fruitful and multiply." This tradition is continued when God repeats His message numerous times in Genesis, when the Psalms speak repeatedly of fruitfulness, when St. Paul says that marriage is for the sake of begetting children. It is reinforced by Chrysostom, by Augustine, by Aquinas. This message is repeated by every recent pope including the two mentioned above, but also by Pope Leo XIII and the often neglected Benedict XV, who is quoted in my article on the issue of obedience, and who is also the author of the canon law upon which his successors founded much of their teaching. This sacred history - from the moment of creation until the very day of Vatican II - spoke with one unanimous voice on the topics of marriage, sex and procreation, a voice that is missing from Humanae Vitae.
2. Dr. McArthur, however, believes Humanae Vitae does speak with the same voice: "The encyclical teaches with magisterial intent the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church." Let's examine the issue: Does Humanae Vitae teach us to "be fruitful and multiply"? No, instead it warns us about overpopulation. Does Humanae Vitae specify the "primary purpose of marriage," a teaching considered so crucial by his predecessors and even by Pope Paul himself when he intervened into the writing of Gaudium et Spes? No, instead Pope Paul declares that Humanae Vitae gave "love" the "preeminent position that rightly belongs to it in a subjective evaluation of marriage." Does Humanae Vitae teach submission of wives to husbands as the foundation of the "order of love" within marriage? No, instead it bowdlerizes Ephesians and proposes "changes in how we view the person of woman and her place in society." Does Humanae Vitae promote the education of children? No, instead Humanae Vitae mentions the expense of education as a reason to avoid having a large family.
Cardinal Mercier, one of Europe's most prominent twentieth-century churchmen, expressed the traditional teaching this way: "The original and primary reason for the union of man and woman is the foundation of a family, the begetting of children whom they will have the honor and the obligation to rear in the Faith and in Christian principles…. Rather than seeking out the means - even legitimate means - of limiting the offspring, what is really important for the married couple is to discover the reasons for having many children. How beautiful are such reasons!… The law of fecundity expects the parents to have as many children as they are capable of rearing in a human and Christian manner. As for birth control, the law of chastity sets the rule: nothing may be done artificially to frustrate conception."
Humanae Vitae has maintained only that final part. Those Catholics who mistakenly believe this is the whole of Church teaching may be satisfied that it did just this much.
3. Both writers assert that the sacred tradition represented by Casti Connubii can be said to have failed just as much as has Humanae Vitae. But this does not coincide with the facts of history. E. Michael Jones has documented the fact that the postwar "baby boom" was almost strictly a Catholic phenomenon. My article presented data showing Catholic birthrates remained high until the late 1960s, whereupon they plunged to even lower levels than Protestants. Notes on Moral Theology in 1962 claimed unanimous agreement among moralists and declared that contraception was a "theologically closed issue." Catholic doctrine succeeded in convincing the faithful (including theologians) for as long as it was taught.
Contrary to Dr. Smith's statement that "Casti Connubii is still in print," and Dr. McArthur's statement that only "someone lusting for anything the Pope will give him" would "try to justify NFP as the norm of matrimony," the traditional doctrine has been discarded since Humanae Vitae. No less a personage than Msgr. Cormac Burke of the Roman Rota has published articles announcing that the Church's traditional doctrine on marriage has been repealed by the papacy's recent silence on these topics, combined with the new personalist approach to marriage. Fr. Torraco, who answers morality questions on EWTN's website, claims that those who decline to use NFP and "leave procreation in the hands of God" are practicing a "deficient," "deceptive" and "less than human" approach." Father Hogan, who answers NFP questions, tells Catholics that "it is better to have 2 or 3 children you can educate all the way than 7 or 8 that you can only take so far." If this is what the Roman Rota and EWTN teach, one shudders to think what is taught by liberals (although in fact we know only too well).
4. Janet Smith presents it as a pragmatic issue of finding the most effective arguments, and she even proposes focus group research. Here let me agree with her statement, "I am quite content with a reaffirmation of the Truth." I am not looking for persuasive arguments; rather I am convinced that men recognize the Truth when they hear it, even if they choose to deny it. If the Devil proposed a pragmatic lie that he guaranteed would bring back the faithful to Catholic doctrine, we must unequivocally reject it. (Yet isn't it ironic that these pragmatic lies never do succeed as promised?)
Can this Truth that needs to be reaffirmed be found in any document that abandons Scripture, Tradition, the Magisterium, and Thomistic philosophy? No, for these are Catholic doctrine, these are the Truth. There is no other. If someone (even a pope or even an NFP advocate) were to "speak with the tongues of men and angels" but the content of his message was something else, then he is just a "clanging cymbal." Can we say, as do Smith and McArthur, that the encyclical is good enough, but it just doesn't meet John Galvin's private standards? As far as I can tell, the standards I am applying are eminently public, defined by the Church, and taught for millennia. Without Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium you have no Catholic doctrine, and without teleology, you have no natural law. While McArthur might maintain that "the emphasis of the encyclical lies in its reaffirmation of the natural law," he offers no supporting citations, while Janet Smith, a professor of Thomistic philosophy specializing in natural law, makes no such claim; in fact she admits the opposite.
5. Lastly I will address the point made explicitly by Dr. McArthur, but which is implicit in virtually all defenses of Humanae Vitae: "Paul VI saw fit to write the document he did, and we believers have the obligation to accept it." Here I must defer to Fr. Chad Ripperger's brilliant article, "Operative Points of View," published in The Latin Mass magazine. Fr. Ripperger explains better than I can that at a time when "some ecclesial documents today do not have any connection to the positions held by the Magisterium prior to the Second Vatican Council," Catholics are faced with a choice either to be a "magisterial positivist" who believes that "whatever the current Magisterium says is always what is 'orthodox,'" or to be a "traditionalist" who takes "Scripture, intrinsic tradition, extrinsic tradition and the current Magisterium as the principles of judgment of correct Catholic thinking." This, finally, is where the reader must take a stand: Do you believe that "because it is present (Hegelianism), because it come from us (immanentism), [the newer] is necessarily better," or do you "hold to the extrinsic tradition as something good, something which is the product of the wisdom and labor of the saints and the Church throughout history"?
There is one last point that needs to be addressed: Dr. McArthur's claim that Pope John Paul I was a dissenter against the Church's teaching on contraception. This is a novel claim and a serious charge, which if true, would indeed be groundbreaking news. But I suggest that such an accusation requires at least a minimum of proof, preferably a great deal more than a minimum.
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