Church & Birth Control: From Genesis to Genetics

For Roman Catholics, contraception is currently the most explosive of religious questions; can Pope Paul VI modify the teachings of his predecessors and admit to the church some means of birth prevention apart from abstinence? During the worldwide debate on the subject, few Catholics have had the chance to examine the full record of what Popes and theologians of other centuries really said about birth control. Now they have. In Contraception (Belknap Press, Harvard; $7.95), Notre Dame Law Professor John T. Noonan Jr., 38, has produced a magisterially documented history of church teaching on birth control, from Genesis to genetics. Noonan conclusively proves that Catholic doctrine has consistently anathematized contraception--yet also suggests that there are good reasons why the traditional stand can change.

The church's attack on contraception, Noonan says, must be seen in its historic context, as a response to a particular challenge. In the first two centuries of Christian history, church leaders were forced to defend the value of procreation against Manichaeans and Gnostic heretics who saw in the Biblical counsels about virginity a commandment to abstain from sex entirely. Christians also had to defend the sanctity of life against a pagan Rome that accepted both abortion and contraception as a way of life.

The early church saw these attitudes toward sex as unnatural. In defining what they meant by natural, theologians turned to an idea of the Stoics--that the nature of something was defined by its purpose. Just as the eye was for seeing, the generative organs were for generating. And only for generating. Thus, St. Justin Martyr in the 2nd century wrote: "We Christians marry only to produce children." Even stronger in tone was St. Augustine. Apart from childbearing, he gloomily concluded, "the marriage chamber is a brothel . . . husbands are shameful lovers, wives are harlots."

A Handsome Apple. St. Thomas Aquinas, the most profound thinker of the Middle Ages, declared that contraception "does injury to God." Nonetheless, says Noonan, the Scholastic theologians of the 13th century also began to abandon Augustine's grim view that sex apart from procreation was sinful. Aquinas' mentor, St. Albert the Great, tentatively proposed that sexual intercourse, since it was ordained by God, might have a value in itself. And while Renaissance churchmen still denounced contraception, a few pioneering thinkers were beginning to talk about the human values of sex. In the 15th century, Martin le Maistre of Paris formally declared that sexual pleasure was a positive good; Columbus' contemporary, John Major of Scotland, wrote that it was no more a sin to copulate for pleasure than "to eat a handsome apple for the pleasure of it."

Even though the historical circumstances that gave rise to the church's anticontraceptive stand were gradually changing, official Catholic teaching was solidifying into an orthodoxy, supported by a juridical theology that emphasized precedent and natural law. In 1930, birth control had become an accepted fact of secular life and was even endorsed by the Anglican Lambeth Conference of bishops. Yet that same year, Pope Pius XI denounced all forms of birth control in the strongest terms as the "ruin of morals."

No Prophecy. Pius' encyclical Casti Connubii may have been the apogee of the church's denunciation of birth control. Five years after it appeared, German Theologian Herbert Doms was tentatively proposing a personalist theology of marriage that gave primacy to love rather than childbearing. Although the Vatican at the time criticized Doms's theories, papal statements on marriage were soon to shift emphasis. Even as he denounced "the pill" as immoral in 1951, Pope Pius XII strongly affirmed the spiritual values of sex. "The conjugal act," he said, "is a personal action, which, according to the word of the Scriptures, effects the union 'in one flesh alone.' "

At the third session of the Vatican Council, three cardinals and a patriarch of the church openly acknowledged the agonies of conscience that the church's traditional teaching creates for millions of married Catholics. Pope Paul acknowledged it, too, as he beseeched a papal commission of experts to help him formulate a modern-day principle of Christian marriage. Although he does not prophesy what Pope Paul may ultimately decide, Noonan cautiously concludes that there is no valid reason why the church cannot move with the times. Already it has come a long way toward acceptance of the principle that other personal values can take primacy in marriage over childbearing, and has long since abandoned the medieval view that sexual intercourse during menstruation and pregnancy is a sin equal to that of contraception.

It is a perennial mistake, Noonan concludes, "to confuse repetition of old formulas with the living law of the church. The church, on its pilgrim's path, has grown in grace and wisdom." And, he suggests, will continue to grow.

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