IV

“Pastoral Approaches” is the last of four documents emanating from the fifth and final session in 1966 of the Pontifical Commission for the Study of Population, Family, and Births, popularly known as the “Papal Birth Control Commission.” New to this session were sixteen cardinals and bishops, all but three from Europe or North America, who had been designated by Pope Paul VI as the Commission’s sole voting members. As Catholics of a certain age will surely remember, a majority of those bishops voted in June 1966 to endorse a change in the church’s teaching on marital contraception. While a Christian marriage had by definition to be open to children, the bishops’ so-called “majority report” maintained, each act of marital love-making did not. That report was apparently regarded by some of its supporters as too technical and perhaps too long to be wholly appropriate for pastoral purposes. Hence the genesis of “Pastoral Approaches,” drafted under the supervision of French Archbishop Claude Dupuy and presented to the pope as a preface to the Commission’s final report.

“Pastoral Approaches” mainly argues that the Commission’s recommendation with regard to contraception represents not a change in church teaching but authentic development of doctrine. But who was the intended audience? Perhaps the bishops feared backlash from the numerous Catholic couples who had suffered from faithful adherence to the teaching. (“Pastoral Approaches,” however, does not appear as prefatory material to the version of the Commission’s report published in April 1967 in the National Catholic Reporter.) Perhaps it was meant to reassure the pope, whose acceptance of the Commission’s recommendation could not be assumed, although most of its members were initially hopeful. Perhaps the document’s audience also included the men who had voted in its support, all of whom had changed their views on marital contraception in, at most, the space of two or three years. Britain’s Cardinal John Heenan and India’s Cardinal Valerian Gracias, both of whom voted with the majority, had begun their service on the Commission as defenders of the status quo.

Credit for this remarkable change belongs mainly to the Catholic laity, from whom the episcopal office normally provides protection. Bishops seldom hear lay confessions. Nor do they normally interact with the laity, its female members in particular, on any but ceremonial occasions. But inspired by the Vatican Council and the zeitgeist it reflected, dissenting lay voices began to be raised on the subject of marital contraception—voices sufficiently ubiquitous by 1965 that no bishop could fail to hear them. Those voices spoke with particular bitterness about the rhythm method, which—along with abstinence— was the only mode of family planning permitted by the church. Recent developments in reproductive biology had led to alleged improvements in the effectiveness of rhythm and most bishops assumed that further improvements would bring an end to Catholic problems when it came to family limitation. What a shock, in the circumstances, to learn from the laity that rhythm, quite apart from its unreliability, was destructive of marital happiness.

The atmosphere was such that three married couples, and incidentally the first women, were appointed late in 1964 to a greatly expanded Papal Commission, a once small and secret body whose existence was now widely known. Their presence had an electric effect on the Commission’s subsequent discussions, including those of the bishops whose appointments dated from 1966. (Particular credit should go to the wives, whose testimony was notably candid and personal.) “I am quite sure that relief must be brought to Catholic couples,” as Cardinal Heenan told his probably startled confreres at the final session, which he had entered as a devout conservative, “and I cannot bring myself to accept that the thermometer and the calendar are a good way of keeping men and women from mortal sin.”¹⁹ His words could have been lifted from the commission’s lay participants.

Lay dissent was more than verbal: as of 1965, according to a national fertility survey, roughly half of American Catholic wives in their child-bearing years had used or were using a method of family limitation other than abstinence or...