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  • Four Reflections on “Pastoral Approaches”1

Editor’s Note: This year marks the 50th anniversary of the promulgation of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae (1968), which affirmed and upheld traditional church teachings on birth control and marital sexuality. The encyclical was shaped by the work of the Papal Birth Control Commission, which submitted four documents to the pope for his consideration, most famously a majority report recommending change in church teaching on contraception and a minority report that advised against change. The commission also submitted the lesser-known document, “Pastoral Approaches,” which echoed many of the findings of the majority report but discussed them in a more pastoral vein. In this forum, American Catholic Studies invited four prominent scholars—both theologians and historians—to revisit “Pastoral Approaches” and offer their reflections on the document and the broader legacy of Humanae Vitae. We reprint the text of “Pastoral Approaches” here:

Today, as throughout the course of her history, the church wishes to remain the institution divinely established to lead men to their salvation in Jesus Christ, through the different states of life to which they have been called. Of these, marriage is the one to which the greater part of mankind is destined, and in which it lives. It is the church’s task to defend and promote the holiness of this state of life in fidelity to the principles of the gospel.

No one can be ignorant of the guidance she has lavished on all, emphasizing the greatness of the institution of marriage, which is, on earth, a sign of that other fruitful union sealed on the Cross between Christ and the church (cf. Eph. 3, 23–32). No one can fail to be aware of her efforts to make this doctrine inform her way of life, efforts which give rise to institutions appropriate to the needs of the times, so as to help humanity toward the evangelical ideal of the Christian family.

Without going back beyond more recent times, we can recall that Leo XIII, anxious to demonstrate the Christian teaching to the modern world in a positive way, published his encyclical on marriage, Arcanum. A few decades later, faced with a world in which the stability and unity of the family were being threatened by various forms of [End Page 1] legislation, in which formerly prosperous nations seemed to be losing their grip and sliding toward death, Pius XI forcefully recalled the great benefits of marriage understood in a Christian way: children, conjugal fidelity, the holiness of the sacrament.

Pius XII not only upheld the whole of this teaching, particularly during the war years which caused such suffering to families, frequently endangering their very existence, but in certain documents he showed the deepening of the doctrine that had come about in the meantime and clarified the various ends of the marriage union.

All this teaching, it must be stressed with joy, has, in many countries, produced lay and Christian family movements which have contributed very powerfully to a deeper understanding of marriage and the demands of the marriage union. It has also stimulated pastors and layman, theologians, doctors and psychologists to undertake a more vigorous observance of the laws that must govern the family, and of the meaning and value of human sexuality. At the same time the conscience of married couples has been faced with a different situation: no longer the threat of nations slowly disappearing through a lack of generosity toward life, but the difficulties provided both by the accelerated pace of human development and by other important social factors, such as people’s increased mobility in search of work to support themselves, the massive concentration of populations in towns where the living space vital to families is more strictly limited, or, finally, the social advancement of women.

It was this development of reflection and of experience of family life lived most generously by an ever increasing number of Christian couples, and also livelier appreciation of the dignity of the human person, of the sense of his free and personal responsibility for carrying out God’s plan for humanity, that led the Fathers of the council to reaffirm strongly the stability and holiness of...

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