A New View on Birth Control

Revisions in theology start inconspicuously enough--usually as footnote-laden articles in grey, learned journals with modest circulations. Future church historians may well date a profound change in Roman Catholic thinking on marriage from the current issue of a scholarly Belgian periodical called Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, There, the Rev. Louis Janssens, 56, a respected professor of moral theology at the University of Louvain, cautiously endorsed oral contraceptive pills as a legitimate means of family limitation for Catholic couples.

Catholic moralists in the U.S. reacted to the article as if Canon Janssens had nailed a 96th thesis to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. The Rev. Francis J. Connell, former dean of the School of Sacred Theology at Catholic University, said that the article was "absolutely contrary to the teaching of the church in this area." In a rebuttal of Janssens' thesis that was printed by many diocesan papers, Jesuit Father Edward Duff wrote that "no established Catholic theologian is on record as agreeing with him."

On record they may not be, but privately some of the keenest theological minds of Catholic Europe wholeheartedly agree with Janssens. Perhaps the most personally meaningful aspect of the worldwide contemporary renewal of the Roman Catholic Church is a new approach to the marital relationship that is being thought out in the seminaries and chanceries of Germany, France, Belgium and The Netherlands.

"Responsible Parenthood." From the time of St. Paul, who said, "It is better to marry than to burn" (meaning, with passion), Catholic teaching on marriage has implied that sexual pleasure was a reward that God gave to married couples for producing children. The canon law of the church describes the primary end of marriage as the procreation and education of children; the mutual love of husband and wife and what the code grimly refers to as "the allaying of concupiscence" are essential but secondary ends. Many a priest still preaches that a house-cramming brood is the goal.

Within the last three decades, however, the church has significantly qualified the more-is-better ideal in favor of "responsible parenthood." In a 1930 encyclical on marriage, Pope Pius XI declared that Catholic couples had every right to sexual intercourse during times of natural infertility. His successor, Pius XII, defended the right of parents to limit or space their children for medical, economic, eugenic or social reasons. But even as church leaders came to ac cept the idea of family limitation, they held out against mechanical and chemical means of achieving this goal, arguing that they violated natural law.

By its God-given nature, the reasoning goes, the sexual act is intended to produce children. The rhythm method, which first gained world-wide publicity in the early '30s, was eventually approved by the church because it does not directly interfere with the procreative purpose of sex, whereas any barrier put between the sperm and the ovum frustrates the natural design of the act. Equally sinful is sterilization, and when Pius XII, speaking to a group of hematologists in 1958, outlawed the oral steroid pills (TIME, March 20) when used as contraceptives, it was on the ground that they temporarily sterilize the female reproductive system.

Bad Joke. The argument makes little sense to most Protestants, who generally regard birth-control methods as morally neutral and the motive for using them all-important. Many lay Catholics also find the church's reasoning fallacious, and Pollster Lou Harris reported in February that by a 3-to-2 margin a sampling of U.S. Catholics wanted to see a change in their church's attitude toward birth control. Rhythm, they argue, is unreliable and moreover, its complement of thermometers, charts and calendar watching makes any theological defense of the method as "natural" seem like a bad semantic joke.

Many bishops and priests admit that there is some discrepancy between their teaching on birth control and the actual practice of Catholic couples. "It is the single most important cause for defection from the sacraments among the younger generation of German Catholics," says Theologian Werner Scholl-gen of Bonn University. U.S. bishops and priests have yet to give much attention to the problem, but Dutch Bishop Willem Bekkers of 's Hertogenbosch says: "If I see people in church not receiving the Eucharist, and I know they are the kind of people who should be, then I say this is reason for reconsidering the entire question."

Nature Can Change. The theological reconsideration currently being carried out by progressive European moralists begins with a rethinking of natural law as applied to marriage questions. Nature, they say, evolves in the encounter of men and institutions with the forces of history. Thus, the nature of marriage can change--from the polygamy practiced by the Hebrews with divine approval to the monogamous union now blessed by the church.

Instead of referring to primary (procreative) and secondary (concupiscent) ends in marriage, one theologian argues that the highest value is the "interpersonal relationship between man and wife," and that the purely biological is the lowest. Although the integrity of the sexual relationship depends upon the "harmonious presence" of all the values, a lower one--such as man's duty to help propagate the race--could be excluded temporarily for the sake of a higher one. This theologian believes that the contraceptive pills, like rhythm, do not interfere with the sacred char acter of the marital act, although mechanical birth-control devices may.

Other moralists have joined Canon Janssens in publicly discussing this "personalist" approach to marriage. In the Dutch journal Tijdschrift voor Theo-logie, Dominican Father Willem van der Marck contends that pills do not constitute a temporary sterilization, as Pius had claimed, but merely postpone ovulation; the ova remain in the ovaries ready for future fertilization. And Auxiliary Bishop Josef Reuss of Mainz, in a German theological quarterly, argued that some couples might have "grave reason" to interfere with the biological process of sex--not in the actual performance of intercourse, but in "anticipation" of a future sexual act.

Theory & Practice. This new European approach to birth control has here and there gone from theory to practice. In some parishes, couples who use the pill receive the sacraments with assurances from confessors that they are acting rightly. And in the predominantly Roman Catholic town of Oss in The Netherlands, the country's largest pharmaceutical firm manufactures an oral steroid pill similar to the U.S.-made Enovid. About 90% of the company's 2,000 employees are Catholics, and sales of the pill in the Catholic south of Holland reportedly rose 40% last year.

Moreover, virtually all theologians admit that women can use hormones to regulate the menstrual cycle. Some also grant that the pills could be used by nuns in danger of rape (as in the Congo), by unmarried women who need to postpone menstruation until after a sporting event, by nursing mothers to reinforce the natural sterility that most women possess during lactation.

Thus the doors may be opening to further refinement and discussion by scholars, and perhaps even to some future modification of Pius XII's condemnation. The moralists believe that there is an exact parallel between the church's stand on birth control now and the attitude of the medieval church toward usury--which was condemned as a violation of the natural law until economists showed that taking interest on money was not exploitation but a productive good. And even in conservative Rome, there are men who will listen to further argument: Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, secretary of the Holy Office, recently counseled Pope Paul to stay out of the question and let the theologians pursue their insights.

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