Rev. Ralph Wiltgen: The Rhine Flows Into the Tiber: A History of Vatican II

[Stone]

THE FOURTH SESSION
September 14 to December 8, 1965

MARRIAGE AND BIRTH CONTROL

One of the tasks before the Council was to re-examine Church legislation on mixed marriages and the prescribed form of marriage. Cardinal Dopfner of Munich called for major changes, but was opposed by Cardinal Spellman of New York, who was supported by over 100 United States bishops, by Archbishop Heenan, supported by all the bishops of England and Wales, by Archbishop Conway of Armagh, Ireland, who spoke for more than eighty bishops of various countries, and by Cardinal Gilroy of Sydney, Australia. All these prelates stressed the benefits derived from the existing legislation, and the harm that might result from the legislation favored by Cardinal Dopfner. Seeing his measure defeated on the Council floor, the Cardinal Moderator after one day’s debate called upon the Council to renounce its right to treat the matter any further, and instead to transmit it immediately to the Pope for appropriate action. The proposal was adopted, at the last business meeting of the third session (November 20, 1964), by a vote of 1592 to 427.

The desired decree, however, did not appear until after the Council, on March 18, 1966, and it was signed by Cardinal Ottaviani. It altered the legislation but not substantially, as Cardinal Dopfner had wished, and it was clearly a victory for the English-speaking bishops. Had they been as well organized throughout the Council as they were on this issue, the Second Vatican Council might have taken an altogether different course.

The doctrinal aspect of marriage was dealt with in the schema on the Church in the modern world, and came up for discussion during the third session. The Moderator, Cardinal Agagianian, announced on October 28, 1964, that some points” had been reserved for the Pope’s special commission on birth control. Those points were, in particular, the progesterone pill, as Archbishop John Dearden of Detroit officially announced on the following day and, in general, “the problem of birth control,” as Cardinal Suenens put it in an intervention a year later. The Council Fathers were free to submit observations on these “points” in writing, and were given the assurance that the Pope’s special commission would give them serious consideration.

On October 29, 1964, the debate opened on Article 21, “The Sanctity of Marriage and the Family.” Cardinal Leger of Montreal said that many theologians believed that the difficulties regarding the doctrine of marriage had their origin in an inadequate exposition of the purposes of marriage, lie advocated that fecundity should be called a duty pertaining to the state of matrimony as a whole, rather than to an individual act. “It is altogether necessary, he said, “for human conjugal love—I speak of human love, which therefore involves soul and body—to be presented as constituting a true purpose of marriage, as something good in itself, having its own needs and laws.”

He was pleased that the schema avoided applying the expressions “primary purpose” to procreation and “secondary purpose” to conjugal love. But the avoidance of words was of little use, he said, if afterwards the schema did not refer to conjugal love except as related to fecundity. The schema should affirm, he maintained, that the intimate marital union also had conjugal love as its true purpose, and that consequently the marriage act was “legitimate even when not directed toward procreation.”

Cardinal Suenens also spoke on the first day of debate, and outlined the doctrinal, ethical and scientific norms which, he said, should be kept in mind by the Pope’s special commission on birth control. That commission, he said, would have to “examine whether we have kept in perfect balance the various aspects of the Church’s doctrine on marriage.” Perhaps, he suggested, so much stress had been placed on the words of Scripture, Be fruitful and multiply," that gradually another phrase, which was also the word of God—“and the two become one flesh”—had been disregarded. Each was a central truth, said the Cardinal, and each was con¬
tained in Scripture. They should therefore serve to clarify one another. One of (he Cardinal’s many proposals was that Pope Paul should reveal the names of the members of his special commission, so that the entire People of God might be able to send them their views on marriage and birth control.

Cardinal Ottaviani spoke on the following day. “I am not pleased,” he said, “with the statement in the text that married couples may determine the number of children they are to have. Never has this been heard of in the Church.” He was the eleventh son in a family of twelve children, he said. “My father was a laborer, and the fear of having many children never entered my parents’ minds, because they trusted in Providence.” He concluded his brief statement by expressing his amazement “that yesterday in the Council it should have been said that there was doubt whether a correct stand had been taken hitherto on the principles governing marriage. Does this mean that the inerrancy of the Church will be called into question? Or was not the Holy Spirit with his Church in past centuries to illumine minds on this point of doctrine?”

Bishop Hervas y Benet of Ciudad Real, Spain, said that the schema spoke “little and much too timidly about supernatural faith and confidence in Divine Providence, about love and acceptance of the Cross, which ought to illumine Christian prudence. We are not here to compose a philosophical and hedonistic document, or one that is merely technical or scientific, but one that is Christian.” He said that the parents of large Christian families should be held in honor, and asked that those who had drafted the schema should keep this in mind in their revision. Nor should they pass over in silence “what the modern sciences of psychology and pedagogy had to say in praise and in favor of large families.” He received a warm round of applause.

Pope Paul VI was so distressed by Cardinal Suenens’ intervention of October 29 that he requested the Cardinal to come to see him. Some days later, on November 7, Cardinal Suenens interrupted the debate on the schema on the missions to deny publicly that he had questioned authentic Church teaching on marriage, and to state that all matters pertaining to the study conducted by the Pope’s special commission on birth control clearly “depended solely upon his supreme authority.”

Archbishop Adrianus Djajasepoetra of Djakarta, Indonesia, speaking on behalf of bishops from many nations, said in the Council hall on November 20, 1964, that the Council did not take adequate account of different cultures. Marriage, he felt, should be described as a sacred and human community of life instituted by God for the founding of a family. Conjugal love should not be given undue primacy, he said, because marriages often took place between persons who hardly knew each other, at the bidding of parents or relatives. In those cases, love was a gradual fruit of the marriage. It should be remembered, he said, that the founding of a new family and the continuation of a particular group was sometimes the primary intention in marriage.

After the third session, the schema was so thoroughly revised that it had to be debated once again. Auxiliary Bishop Kazimierz Majdanski of Wloclawek, speaking on September 29, 1965, at the fourth session, on behalf of the bishops of Poland, said that the modern world “abhors the bloodshed of war, but looks with indifference on the destruction of unborn human life.” Pointing out that the number of abortions annually exceeded the total number of persons killed in World War II, he called for a solemn declaration by the Council on the absolute inviolability of all innocent human life, asking that those practicing abortion be denounced as guilty of homicide.

Another revision was prepared as soon as the debate ended, and was distributed on November 12. This new version could be interpreted as leaving it to the spouses to decide whether or not to use artificial contraceptives to limit the size of their families, provided their ultimate aim was the fostering of conjugal love.

The schema containing this doctrine now totaled 152 pages, and was distributed to the Council Fathers in two sections on Friday and Saturday, November 12 and 13. Thirty-three ballots were to be taken the following Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. With so many momentous issues at stake in this schema, the Council Fathers perhaps should have spent the weekend examining the revised text. Instead, 500 of them left for Florence on chartered buses shortly after midday on Saturday, November 13, for an all-expenses-paid weekend to celebrate the Seventh Centenary of the Birth of Dante, Italy’s renowned poet. Late Sunday night, they returned to Rome and early Monday morning they began voting, some of them frankly admitting that they had had no time to examine the text.

The chapter on marriage as a whole was approved by the general assembly by 1596 votes to 72, and 484 affirmative votes with qualifications.

The subcommission which processed the qualifications on this chapter ignored any major amendments, stating that these would substantially alter a text which had already received more than the required two-thirds majority.

On November 25, Pope Paul took action and through his Secretary of State sent four special amendments on the marriage section to the joint commission. Each commission member was given a copy, but beforehand the periti were asked to leave the room. Tension immediately mounted and Cardinal Leger sprang to his feet in angry protest. When some doubt arose as to the binding character of the amendments, the members were informed by another letter on the following day that they were not free to reject the amendments, but only to determine their phrasing. That day the tension was somewhat relieved when the periti were once again al¬
lowed to attend the meeting.

The first of these amendments called for the insertion of the two words “artificial contraceptives” among the “deformations” detracting from the dignity of conjugal love and family life, like polygamy, divorce, and free love. At the same time, the Pope called for a precise footnote reference to the two pages in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical, Casti Connubii, where the use of artificial contraceptives was condemned. The commission excused itself from introducing “artificial contraceptives,” used instead “illicit practices against human generation,” and omitted the reference to Casti Connubii.

The second called for the deletion of the word “also” from the statement that the procreation of children was “also” a purpose of marriage, because in the context this word made it appear that procreation was a secondary purpose of marriage, and conjugal love a primary purpose. This was the opposite of the Church’s traditional teaching, and the Council had pledged itself to avoid this controversy. The amendment also called for the insertion of the following sentence: “Children are the supreme gift of marriage and contribute very substantially to the welfare of their parents.” The commission adopted both suggestions.

The third called for the substitution of the words “it is not lawful” for the words “should not” in the prohibition to “sons of the Church” to use methods of regulating procreation “which have been or may be found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church.” A footnote was to be added here, calling attention both to Casti Connubii and to Pius XII’s allocution to midwives, which reiterated the teaching of that encyclical, stating that the prescription against artificial contraceptives was derived from “natural and divine law.”

The joint commission adopted this third amendment in substance, but failed to refer to the statements of Popes Pius XI and XII as the “two most outstanding documents on this subject,” as Pope Paul wished. It further added a reference of its own, the allocution of Pope Paul VI to the College of Cardinals on June 23, 1964, in which he had given the cardinals a progress report on the work of his special commission on birth control. “Let us now state with all frankness,” he had said at the time, “that we do not yet have a sufficient motive for considering as outdated—and therefore as not binding—the norms laid down by Pope Pius XII in this matter; therefore they must be considered as binding, at least as long as we do not feel obliged in conscience to modify them. . . . And it seems opportune to recommend that no one, for the present, should take it upon himself to make any pronouncement at variance with the norm in force.” By citing this allocution of Pope Paul, the joint commission—and subsequently the entire Council—implicitly confirmed the traditional teaching of the Church in this matter.

The fourth and final amendment proposed by Pope Paul referred to the temptation to married couples to use artificial contraceptives, and even abortion. It called for the insertion of a sentence to the effect that, in order that the spouses might overcome such temptations, it was “altogether necessary that they sincerely practice conjugal chastity.” This amendment was retained in substance, but was inserted in another part of the text.

According to the Pope’s directives, the amended text was submitted to him before being sent to the printer.

On December 3, 1965, the final revision of the schema was distributed to the Council Fathers. At once there was much agitation behind the scenes because the joint commission, contrary to Pope Paul’s wish, had failed to indicate in a footnote the specific pages of Casti Connubii where artificial contraceptives were condemned. Before the voting started on December 4, a special announcement was made on instructions from the Pope. The Council Fathers were asked to note that the page references in one of the footnotes had been omitted, and that, in voting on the text, they must understand that they were voting on that footnote as well, together with the specific page references. They were also informed that the page references would be indicated in the official text which would be presented for the final and formal vote on December 7.

The chapter on marriage and the family was adopted by 2047 votes to 155 on December 4, and the schema as a whole was formally adopted at the public session on December 7 by a vote of 2309 to 75. It was then promulgated by Pope Paul VI.