1966 papal commission favored lifting contraception ban

Virulently toxic is the only way to describe the current political environment surrounding the debate over the Reproductive Health (RH) bill pending in Congress. Bishop Nereo Odchimar, head of the powerful Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) raised the temperature level to fever-pitch when he announced last September that the Church may excommunicate  President Benigno “PNoy” Aquino III if he continues with his support of the RH bill.

Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma, CBCP vice president, followed by shrilly denouncing RH supporters as “no better than terrorists because the measure could lead to the death of innocents.”

Many priests have even refused to give Holy Communion to known supporters of the RH Bill. But those same priests see no problem in handing them out to known murderers, drug dealers, plunderers, or philanderers as long as they oppose the RH bill.

During this past Holy Week, a Baguio priest asked RH supporters who were attending mass to leave his church. “What is the use of going to Church if you’re pro-RH bill?” he asked them.

Two weeks ago, Philippine Catholic Church leaders allied with the Citizens Alliance for the Protection of Human Life (CAPHL) called on lay Catholics to refuse to pay taxes to protest the RH bill. Rep. Mikey Arroyo, charged with failing to pay P73 million pesos in back taxes, can now claim religious conviction as a defense.

[Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago pointed out that Catholic priests don’t pay taxes so “how can they call on their followers to break the law and risk going to jail when priests risk nothing?”]

Philippine  Protestant churches and the Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) have expressed their full  support for the RH bill as has esteemed constitutional scholar Fr. Joaquin  Bernas who has been criticized as a “Judas” by some members of the Catholic hierarchy because of  his refusal to join what he calls “the rabid attack dogs against the RH  bill”.

Fr. Bernas wrote that “there are many valuable points in the bill’s Declaration of Policy and Guiding Principles which can serve the welfare of the nation and especially of poor  women who cannot afford the cost of medical service.”

The current toxic environment would have been completely unnecessary if Pope Paul VI had only adopted the recommendation of the papal birth control commission in 1966 to lift  the Catholic Church’s prohibition against contraception.

The commission was formed as a result of discussions within the Church at the highest levels about the need to reevaluate the Church’s prohibition against all means of contraception. This was in line with the call by the Second Vatican Council for greater integration of scientific knowledge into church teaching.

In response to this push for church modernization, Pope John XXIII established in 1963 a small commission for the Study of Problems of Population, Family and Birth which his successor, Pope Paul VI expanded to 58 members.

The commission’s job, according to Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for Free Choice, was to study “whether the pill and issues such as population growth should lead to a change in the church’s prohibition on all forms of contraception.”

As Kissling wrote, the papal commission was composed of bishops and cardinals, including a Polish bishop named Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope  John Paul II, who was not allowed by the Communist government of Poland  to attend meetings. They were assisted by scientists, theologians—including Protestants, whose church had ended its own opposition to contraception three decades earlier—and even several lay couples.

The commission sought to reconcile the Church’s historic opposition to contraception with its encouragement for Catholics to plan their families, bear only the number of children they can afford, and to consider the impact of family size on a community and the planet.

The commission, headed  by Dominican Fr. Henri de Riedmatten of the Vatican’s Office of Secretariat of  State, discussed the 1930 encyclical (papal letter) of Pope Pius XII  called Casti Connubii (“on chaste wedlock”), which acknowledged  that couples could seek pleasure in their sexual relations, so long as the act  was still somehow linked to procreation.

After three years of deliberations, the commission in 1966 presented its preliminary report to  Pope Paul VI which recommended lifting the prohibition on contraceptives. Of the 40 active members of the commission, 35 supported the majority report which was published in the National Catholic Reporter and appeared in other publications in 1966.

Of the five bishops who dissented from the majority, three met privately with the pope to urge him to reject the majority’s recommendation.  One of them was Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and a powerful church conservative.

Two years after the report was presented to him, Pope Paul VI rejected it and instead issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, likely written by Cardinal Ottaviani, which affirmed the church’s official ban on all forms of artificial contraception.

As Kissling noted, the Church’s prohibition on contraception “would help erode the  church’s power with European and American Catholics. Lay people overwhelmingly disregarded it, and bishops throughout Europe undermined it with statements reassuring couples to “follow their consciences.” American bishops were more circumspect, but a survey of Catholic priests in the early ’70s showed that  about 60 percent of them believed the prohibition was wrong. Fr. Andrew Greeley, a noted sociologist, traces the decline in church membership and even vocations to the priesthood in the mid-1970s to Catholics’ disillusionment with the  church’s integrity on birth control.”

The Vatican ignored the opposition of Catholics in Europe and the US and focused on Africa, Latin America and Asia where bishops were considered to be more dependent on Rome for support. The Vatican also linked modern birth control to European and American colonialism, advancing the novel argument that western colonialists want to control poor people and reduce their numbers instead of addressing the real causes of poverty.

The Vatican strategy has worked particularly well in the Philippines where, under Spanish colonial rule, the most conservative Spanish priests were often assigned to the Philippines to spread their most  extreme interpretations of church theology.

Their toxic colonial legacy lives on.

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