Marriage, Sacramental Grace, and Contraception
- Marriage, Sacramental Grace, and Contraception1
The teaching of the Catholic Church on the matter of contraception is deeply controversial. Or, at second glance, perhaps it is not. Pope Francis, in his post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), unequivocally affirms the ancient, uninterrupted, and unyielding stance of the Church in opposition to contraception.2 But the anticipation, and hence the subsequent reaction, surrounding the issuance of Amoris Laetitia was heavily focused on what have become the hot-button issues of the day: concerns related to same-sex attraction and the reception of the Eucharist by divorced and civilly remarried couples. In turn, Francis’s affirmation of the Church’s condemnation of contraception seems to have attracted relatively little attention. There may, however, be a second reason for this comparatively muted response: the Church’s teaching on contraception is now so routinely and comfortably ignored that it has simply lost its ability to stir up controversy.
There is, it should be acknowledged, a remnant, a small minority of the faithful who have held firm to two millennia of Christian thought on contraception. Is there a course to be charted that might [End Page 1051] lead others back into the teaching of the Church? Pope Saint John Paul II, with his instruction on marriage, forged an intellectual framework that may well be conducive to this very end—to helping us think with the Church regarding the problematic nature of contraception. Focusing on the notion of marriage as a sacrament, we can find in John Paul’s teaching a line of argument that might resonate particularly well with those who are actively living out a sacramental life of faith—an argument that might lead them to rethink the very plausibility of contraception within a Catholic marriage.
Before considering the theological deliberations of John Paul II, however, I will provide a brief historical sketch of the events surrounding the issuance of the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae.3 This background information will be helpful in setting the stage for the remainder of this essay, but it may also be instructive in its own right, in part because many of the Roman Catholics who currently reject the Church’s teaching on contraception have likely been influenced, whether consciously or not, in important ways by the immediate and explosive reaction to Humanae Vitae and the aftershocks set into motion by that reaction.
The Reception of Humanae Vitae—Then and Now
The encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, promulgated by Pope Paul VI in July of 1968, offered a steadfast affirmation of two millennia of Church teaching on the issue of contraception. It also gave birth to a vociferous outcry of cantankerous dissent. Among the more visible objectors was Charles Curran, a Catholic priest and, at the time, a member of the theology faculty at The Catholic University of America. Curran guided a coordinated rebuttal to Humanae Vitae that included a written statement of protest—signed by eighty-seven theologians and accompanied by a press conference in Washington, DC—a mere one day after the official release of the encyclical in Rome. Two days later, Curran held a second press conference, by which time he had presided over the mailing of more than 1,200 letters—return postcards included—in a continuing effort to garner signatures for his statement of opposition.
Curran’s statement plainly stipulates that the Church’s teaching on contraception is fallible and then proceeds to set forth a laundry list of claims in opposition to the encyclical (only partially enumerated here): it arose out of a highly centralized and insular Church hierarchy that [End Page 1052] overstepped the bounds of its authority; its conclusions follow from an overly narrow theological analysis; it is inattentive to an impending overpopulation problem; and its dire predictions regarding the widespread use of artificial birth control are simply unfounded. On the basis of these shortcomings, the statement concludes by advising that compliance with the Church’s teaching on contraception is properly relegated to the dictates of one’s conscience.4
Another highly visible dissenter was Bernard Häring, a German theologian who served on a commission established by Pope Paul VI to study the...
