Patrick Coffin and contraception, you can believe the phone lines are full. Patrick
let's go straight to calls. Yep, sounds grand. Margot in Chicago, Illinois,
watching on Facebook, Margot, welcome to Catholic Answers Live. Hi Patrick. There
she is. Margo, we're happy to have you on the show.
Marguerito, this is very subtle stalking behavior, you know that? Welcome back, Patrick. Hey, Margot.
Thank you. Okay, so I kind of have a really long backstory that I could give where I could go on about, you
know, five minutes-- That's all right, we would we would cut you off, Margot, if you tried
it. How would it sound as a question, Margot? "I detect a question in there."
Yeah, so my question is that I know there's a bunch of bishops and priests who have in the past
shown some dissent on Humanae Vitae. I'm just wondering, like, how they can justify that,
giving that they have to take, you know, the vow of celibacy? So how
can they really be against anything to do with chastity?
You know, Patrick, Margot goes really to the heart of something here: the Church
is a hierarchical organization. In the first segment there, we both agreed that
this is a much-misunderstood teaching. Can we lay some of the blame here--or a
large portion of the blame--on the episcopacy and the presbyterate? Well, I
think it's easy to cast aspersions on our leaders; they have a lot coming at
them and they, in the main, are good, holy, wise men. In this particular case,
back starting in the mid '60s, especially after 1968 when Humanae Vitae was
released and rejected, the bishops around the world do seem to have entered into a
kind of a truce. They are willing to not discipline priests who publicly dissented;
they didn't seem to put any muscle behind defending or explaining it; and
they were also victims of a public relations campaign, inside and outside
the Church, against the teaching, which began, really,
from the early '60s, when the first birth control pill, called Enovid, was given
FDA approval in 1960. So the propaganda campaign was wall-to-wall
inside and outside the Church, that this new pill was somehow morally different
from condoms or jellies or spermicides or IUDs, and you only heard one side of
the story. So faithful voices were definitely the minority. Well, that is a
question that Paul VI had to answer, right, about the pill specifically: "Is it
in fact contraception?" Yes, that's one of the things
that he grappled with; and the Second Vatican Council punted on the question.
There's a reference in Gaudium et Spes, after--I believe it's number 48 of
Gaudium et Spes--there's a footnote saying, essentially: Catholics are not
free to dissent from the norms of Casti Connubi, which is the previous encyclical
in 1930 by Pius XI. So the teaching is in full force, so there was a period
of discernment where a natality--a so-called "birth control commission" which
was formed by now-St. John XXIII, had its membership expanded by soon-to-be
St. Paul VI. And, you know, Americans love the phrase "majority." We
love the sound of that word. And so when the majority report of that commission
was released--leaked illegally beforehand, to create more pressure on the Pope--it's
like, "How can the Pope stand up against his advisers?" Well welcome to the
hierarchical nature of the Church that you mentioned earlier, Chris. Our Lord
and Savior did not come up with truth by a nose-count. He works through the Holy
Spirit, through his his bishops in union with the Pope, and the Holy Spirit was
with Pope Paul VI. And even though, you know, we can look back in retrospect--
you know, maybe he should have issued Humanae Vitae
earlier, maybe it should have been full guns and all pistons; but you know, all
we can say is: he got it right, and he said some things there that were
prophetic in nature, things that were coming around the
band that he could not have foreknown. So back to Margot's question: all we can do
is continue to love and live this teaching in our own lives. At the parish
level, when pastors see how much joy that young couples have in seeing in their in
their fertility a great gift, and willing to
welcome new children, it has an effect on people. And I would argue that most
priests and bishops aren't dissenters; they're just afraid to touch it. They are
not sure what the reaction would be. So the number of people who have
activists, you know, who are willing to write a book against it or go into a
march, is very small. I think, Patrick that we're going to see this
change over the next decade, particularly with young men
being ordained now, and seminarians--I mean, I know that some thousand
seminarians get a copy of Catholic Answers magazine, and we just did an
issue on Humanae Vitae. And I know, as your book and books like it get more
and more in the hands of young men like this, I believe that we are going to see
a courageous and widespread defense of this teaching. I think you're right, Chris.
A lot of--you know, we're all victims of our time, and if you were trained in the
seminary from 1965 to, say, 1985,
then you're gonna be affected by the zeitgeist at the time. And that was, you know,
the Church had recalibrated her relationship to the world in the Second
Vatican Council, and many Catholics began to recalibrate their relationship with the
Church. And so you see this generational shift--I don't if you've
noticed this, Chris--but you'll find, like, a 23-year-old seminarian going to have a
cold beer with an 80-year-old priest because they're both deeply in love with
the tradition, and, you know, they're not fighting the
battles of of 60s and 70s feminism. So I think the new crop of priests
are seeing things through very different eyes, much greater openness to embrace
the whole high adventure of Catholic discipleship. A lot of cause for hope
there. And then the charge on the listeners here, all of us,
to pray. To pray for these priests, pray for the Church pray for these priests so
that they faithfully do defend this teaching. Thanks for your call very
much Margo, looking forward to seeing you in a couple of months at our conference
at the end of September.