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Moral theology after Humanae Vitae: by D. Vincent Twomey The author discusses some of the major developments in fundamental moral theology which were sparked off by the publication of the hugely controversial encyclical, Humanae Vitae (1968), as well as the impact of its rejection by many leading moral theologians. Within the broader cultural background of modernity, Professor Twomey analyses this dissent and attempts to sketch an alternative moral theology based on the recovery of virtue as the context for moral reflection and on a new appreciation of the nature of sexuality. He also attempts a positive appreciation of the generally neglected 'doctrinal content' of Pope Paul VI's encyclical that shook the world when it appeared in order to explain why Humanae Vitae remains to this day a sign of contradiction within the Church and beyond. D. Vincent Twomey is professor emeritus of moral theology, Pontifical University, Maynooth. ISBN: 978-184682-201-8 To order a copy of this book go to our website at: www.fourcourtspress.ie To order this book in the UK click HERE (Freephone: 1-800-9446190). Email: sue@isbs.com www: http://www.isbs.com Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................7 ABBREVIATIONS..............................................8 INTRODUCTION...............................................9 PART ONE 1 THE CULTURAL BACKGROUND.................................17 Secularization and the Church's Teaching on Morality......17 Secularization and Sexuality..............................19 Cultural Background to the Contemporary Moral Crisis......23 The Technological Mentality and Bioethics.................28 The Political Context.....................................35 2 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS.........................41 Human Nature..............................................41 Natural Law...............................................50 Preliminary Remarks on Conscience.........................59 Conclusion................................................64 3 THE CRISIS IN MORAL THEOLOGY............................66 The Philosophical Context.................................67 Implications of Philosophical Developments................69 The Crisis of Authority...................................71 The Encyclical Veritatis Splendor.........................79 Intrinsically Wrong Acts..................................80 Fundamental Option........................................85 The Recovery of the Passions in Moral Theology............86 The Recovery of Virtue....................................91 4 TOWARDS A RENEWAL OF MORAL THEOLOGY.....................97 Moral Development and its Preconditions..................100 Virtus enim est spontaneus ... assensus..................103 The Nature of Moral Knowledge............................107 The Public Responsibility of Moral Theologians...........118 Epilogue.................................................122 Concluding Remarks on Conscience.........................124 PART TWO 5 NEW ATTITUDES TO HUMAN SEXUALITY.......................129 The Kosnik Report........................................129 Sexual Desire............................................133 Love and Procreation.....................................140 Ambiguous and Neg 6 THE PASSION OF LOVE....................................150 Human Passions and Divine Love...........................150 The Passions and Morality................................161 The Moral Dimensions of Love Itself Love and Marriage....164 Excursus on Deus Caritas Est.............................175 7 THE VIRTUE OF CHASTITY REVISITED.......................179 Fortitude................................................180 Temperance...............................................183 Chastity.................................................185 Two Modes of Chastity....................................187 Chastity and Sensual Enjoyment...........................188 Nature and Grace.........................................189 8 THE THEOLOGICAL VISION OF HUMANAE VITAE................192 EPILOGUE.................................................200 BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................203 INDEX....................................................215
Introduction
When Pope Paul VI published his encyclical on ‘the transmission of human life’, Humanae Vitae, in July 1968, it literally shook the Western world to its core. At the time, the West in particular was at the height of a series of sexual and political revolutions. The sexual revolution would develop into the general acceptance of sexual licence in Western countries and those under their influence. Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution, begun in 1966, was at its height and inspired the student revolutions in 1968, beginning with the May revolution in Paris, which spread like wildfire to the rest of the Western world. The Prague Spring ended with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The 1968 civil-rights protests in Northern Ireland metamorphosed into civil war between IRA and Unionists, while the student revolts led to the emergence of political terrorism, such as the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Group) in Germany. Anti-authoritarianism was the common element in these various revolutions. Freedom was the new catchword – freedom from the constraints of the past, freedom from alienating authorities (Church, State, and traditional families), freedom from the limits imposed on us by our bodies, freedom of expression, including sexual expression. Anything goes. Within the Church, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were being implemented with haste, above all through the introduction of the new rite of Mass. They engendered a sense of freedom from what was perceived as the shackles of tradition. Change was in the air, not least in the field of moral theology, which the Council had stressed was in need of a radical rethink, which it was. The encyclical, Humanae Vitae, was preceded by a Papal Commission originally set up by Pope John XXIII in March 1963 to deal with the discovery of the ‘pill’, a temporary sterilizing chemical, which its inventor, a Catholic physician, was convinced would satisfy the demands of the moral teaching of the Church since it involved no interference with the conjugal act itself as was the case with other contraceptive methods in use since the dawn of time. Considered to be too technical a point to be included in a Council document,2 the Papal Commission was confirmed in its task by Pope Paul VI who appointed new members – including laity and theologians as well as bishops and cardinals. The deliberations of the Commission continued after the end of the Council, when on 28 June 1966, they submitted their final report to the Pope. They had summoned experts, reviewed surveys taken from thousands of Catholic couples from various countries, and engaged in intense debates not only on human sexuality but on the more fundamental questions of moral theology, such as the natural law, the principle of totality, etc. A section of a report – attributed to the majority (thirty) of the Commission’s members – was leaked to the public. It supported change in the Church’s teaching. This was followed by the leaking of a second report – the so-called minority report (five) – arguing against change. Looking back on these reports, we can see that, within the Commission, the debate had moved from the area of sexual ethics to fundamental moral theology, where an abyss was opening up between the two sides of the debate. Signed on 25 July 1968, Humanae Vitae was published in August. There was no mention of the contraceptive ‘pill’, though it soon became known to the man-in-the-street as the ‘pill-encyclical’. Instead, the Pope teaches: ‘there is an unbreakable connection between the unitive and the procreative meaning [of the conjugal act], and both are inherent in the conjugal act. The connection was established by God, and Man is not permitted to break it through his own volition’ (HV, 12).3 Almost immediately it was publicly rejected by a concerted number of theologians, initially on the basis that the encyclical was not an infallible teaching of the papal magisterium, as had been admitted by Monsignor Lambruschini, the prelate who presented the document at the press conference in the Vatican. This was interpreted in such a way that Catholics – in particular theologians – who did not agree with the encyclical could in conscience reject its teaching. The encyclical unleashed a storm of criticism and debate within the Church and outside, in particular in the affluent Western world.4 Episcopal Conferences throughout the world were divided;5 though they generally tried to show a united front, some were ambiguous and, influenced in part by the dissenting theologians, in part by popular support for ‘the pill’,6 left it up to the ‘conscience’ of the faithful to decide for themselves.7 The hostility of the Western media to Pope Paul VI was almost palpable. He never published another encyclical. The debate within moral theology soon moved in two distinct but interrelated directions. The first concerned the very nature of morality, more specifically the area of fundamental moral theology, which deals with the underlying principles of moral reflection and action. The second concerned the nature of sexuality and the specific moral questions relating to sexual ethics. One of the first attempts to justify contraception within marriage was the principle of totality (already found in the Majority Report) – a casuistic principle used in medical ethics to justify, for example, amputation, which was permitted for the sake of the health of the whole body – was now applied to the overall openness to children within a marriage, which, it was said, could justify individual contraceptive acts for the sake of the whole marriage, especially if there were already children in the marriage. Later this principle would be replaced by the notion of the fundamental option understood in the light of Karl Rahner’s theology, which undervalues the significance of individual or categorical actions in favour of the basic, transcendental orientation of a person’s life to pleasing God. The encyclical claimed that deliberately to deprive the conjugal act of its fertility is intrinsically wrong or immoral (see HV, 14), and so could not be used in any circumstances. To counteract this, those who rejected Humanae Vitae denied that any human action could be intrinsically wrong or evil and that the morality of any action could only be decided by considering the circumstances and/or the motivation involved in the act. It was further claimed that the encyclical’s understanding of natural law was biologistic or physicalist – namely it was attempting to derive moral principles from the physical or biological laws of intercourse – and that, in addition, it failed to take cognisance of the modern evolutionary understanding of man. The latter, in turn, lead eventually to the denial that there is anything such as a human nature that is common to all people of all times and places, interpreting natural law as the exercise of our reason in the circumstances we find ourselves. Finally, the judgement of private conscience was now interpreted as the final arbiter in moral issues. In tandem with these developments were attempts to redefine sexuality and marriage. To help resolve the fundamental moral issues, Pope John Paul II issued Veritatis Splendor, the first-ever authoritative document issued by the Church on the subject of fundamental moral theology. It was a development of traditional moral principles, which had been questioned, principles which Pope Paul VI had enunciated in Humanae Vitae 14.8 The other direction taken by the debate was in the area of human sexuality. The rejection of Humanae Vitae amounted to the acceptance that the conjugal act could be decoupled from the transmission of life. This in turn led to a new examination of the meaning of sexuality, now that it was no longer understood as having procreation as its primary ‘end’ or purpose. Once procreation and intercourse were separated, then intercourse could be more easily separated from the context of marriage. Intercourse outside marriage, either with the opposite sex or with the same sex, was now re-evaluated in terms of the nature of the loving relationship involved, which in turn led to a re-evaluation of the nature of love and marriage. Today, the family itself is being redefined by various legislations. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was the background to these developments. Soon, developments in biotechnology would enable scientists to separate the transmission of human life from the conjugal act. Ten years after Humanae Vitae, the first test-tube baby was born. This was the beginning of revolutionary developments in biotechnology which are ongoing. The debate within moral theology was influenced from the start by the acceptance on the part of so many moral theologians of the legitimacy of separating the conjugal act from the transmission of life. What has become obvious over the past forty years is that the issues raised by Humanae Vitae have their origin in, or at least reflect, that radical cultural shift – a truly paradigmatic shift – in human sensibilities and behaviour which has transformed Western civilization. The publication of Humanae Vitae could be seen as a protest against that cultural shift and its values or disvalues. It caused a crisis within the Church that has yet to be resolved. To understand why this is so, we have first to take a look at the wider cultural issues that have shaped the modern world and at the various movements in the field of moral theology since the Second Vatican Council. Endnotes 1 Tracey Rowland, Joseph Ratzinger's faith: the theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford, 2008), p. 13 with reference to Lyotard's book The post-modern condition: a report on knowledge.
5 See John Horgan (ed.), Humanae Vitae and the bishops: the encyclical and the statements of the national hierarchies (Shannon, 1972). 6 The use of the pill was widespread even in Catholic Ireland, as Heinrich Böll observed in the early sixties; see his comments in his Irish Journal, translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz (London, 1967). In the Epilogue written for the book’s reissue, the author looks askance at the changes that had taken place in Ireland during the thirteen years since he first visited it. He noted the enthusiasm with which ‘the Pill’ was greeted everywhere. 7 This was due in some part to the way the inadequate treatment of conscience by the Second Vatican Council left itself open to later misinterpretation; for Ratzinger’s criticism of the Conciliar presentation of conscience, see Tracey Rowland, op. cit., pp 39–40.
Copyright © D. Vincent Twomey and Four Courts Press 2010 Version: 27th April 2010
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