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The Lesser of Two Evils? Archbishop Philip Pocock, Vatican II, and the Birth Control Controversy
- University of Ottawa Press
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209 the lesser of two evils? archBishop philip pocock, vatican ii, and the Birth control controversy Peter Meehan, seneca College O n the afternoon of Wednesday, October 21, 1964, during the third session of the Second Vatican Council, Philip Pocock, the coadjutor archbishop of Toronto, was enjoying a rare moment of personal time. He was getting a haircut. He later recalled that tumultuous afternoon, sitting in the barbershop of the Hotel de la Ville on the Via Sistina, ten minutes from the Vatican: “That barbershop had a telephone in every chair. The telephone rang and it was for me. I was talking to some reporter in Toronto while the barber was clipping my hair around the back.”1 The call, from a reporter with The Toronto Star, wouldbring the mostshocking newsofPocock’slife: thathewasmaking headlines at home in Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, as the first Catholic prelate to support use of the birth control pill! Written by staff reporter Warren Gerrard, the article referenced confidential instructions given by Pocock at a clergy retreat at St. Augustine’s Seminary the previous June. It explained, in part, that when 1 The City, September 1978. 210 vatican ii their advice was sought in the confessional, Pocock had given Toronto priests permission to approve post-partum use of the pill for a period of sixteen to eighteen months in order for mothers to be able to regulate their menstrual cycles. Citing confirmation from the director of Toronto’s Catholic Information Centre, Paulist Father Frank Stone, who was, ironically, a licensed pharmacist, Gerrard heightened the drama of his story by quoting the remarks of Dr. Elliott Rivo, assistant to the Catholic inventor of “the pill,” Dr. John Rock. To Rivo’s knowledge the approval was the first ever given by a representative of the Church.2 Pocock was not the first Catholic bishop to enter the mounting public debate over artificial birth control. A year earlier William Bekkers, the bishop of Hertogenbosch, Holland, bluntly stated on national television that the problem required more intensive study, a position supported months later by a joint statement of his national bishops conference, agreeing that the Church “has no immediately appropriate answers ready that meet all situations.”3 However, the ensuing storm caused by Philip Pocock’s involvement in the debate over the pill in 1964, at the height of its controversy, adds a unique perspective to the Canadian Catholic historiography of the birth control debate in the 1960s. Understanding that the subject had been deliberately kept from the council’s agenda at the Pope’s discretion, scholarly attention has largely focused on “The Winnipeg Statement,” the 1968 pastoral directive of the Canadian bishops, prompted by the release of Pope Paul VI’s “birth control encyclical,” Humanae Vitae, the same year. Its focus on the need for Catholics to take recourse to their informed consciences in regard to artificial birth control reflected the disappointment of many Canadian bishops with the encyclical’s lack of sensitivity to a matter of their mounting pastoral concern. While Pocock has been acknowledged as a supporting player at the meeting of the Canadian Catholic Conference in August 1968 that produced the Winnipeg Statement,4 2 Globe and Mail, 20 October 1964, and Toronto Telegram, 20 October 1964. 3 Cited in Robert McClory, Turning Point: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Control Commission, and How Humanae Vitae Changed the Life of Patty Crowley and the Future of the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 27. 4 Michael W. and Douglas R. Letson, My Father’s Business: A Biography of His Eminence G. Emmett Cardinal Carter (Toronto: MacMillan of Canada, 1990), 106. [54.196.106.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:29 GMT) 211 peter meehan consideration has not been given as yet to his effort to render a pastoral solution to the question of artificial birth control four years before the release of Humanae Vitae. Off-handedly dismissing his in camera remarks at the time as “normal moral theology … I simply gave clergy a required clarification—required because of the newness of the pill,” Pocock’s entry into the birth control debate in 1964 reflected the essence of his desire that the council would offer “… the presentation of a new and more intelligible image of the Church to the world.”5 Unprepared for the tumult that would be raised in the aula later that fall, where birth control was not a topic of the council but very much a topic at...