The deafening silence of dissent: Humanae Vitae after Forty years

The deafening silence of dissent
Humanae Vitae insists that the Church’s writ runs as far as the marital bedroom, but many married couples have disagreed. The ensuing breakdown in communication between Church and society has cost both dear


What kind of Church has the Catholic Church become in the last 40 years since Humane Vitae was published? To focus only on its rejection of artificial birth control would be to do the encyclical a disservice. For it is not without its understanding of love and acknowledges the unitive purpose of sexual intercourse.

The encyclical was published at a time when Victorian prudery had been undermined by dramatic social changes in postwar Britain – and in Europe – and literature and film offered radically different ideas about the nature of sexual love from the conventions of Christianity. Humanae Vitae acknowledged how changes in society affect marriage and family life. It refreshingly recognises the “new understanding of the dignity of woman and her place in society”.

The encyclical insisted that there must be no division between the unitive and procreative aspect of sexual intercourse. The alternatives were abstinence or natural family planning, restricting sex to the infertile periods of a woman’s cycle. Its critics argue, of course, that the very fact that women have this infertile period suggests that for a woman at least nature makes a division between the unitive and procreative aspects of sex.

One of the greatest ironies of the last 40 years is that the pressures on couples now seem to have reversed. For many of them, the difficulty is not avoiding pregnancy but getting pregnant at all. Research suggests that professional couples are often too exhausted for lovemaking during their most fertile years so that procreative sex is the problem today. The interest in the natural cycle of a woman is to often track her fertility in order to conceive. Pharmacy shelves are filled with kits to analyse ovulation. Even natural family planning practitioners are often asked to help people conceive, rather than help avoid pregnancy. They do so by encouraging a more holistic approach to life, helping people find ways of dealing with stress, the most insidious cause of damage to the contemporary relationship.

Does this therefore make Humanae Vitae prophetic, given the sexual dysfunctioning of society? The theologian Tina Beattie has argued the opposite – that in fact “Humanae Vitae has had a disastrous effect on the Church’s capacity to influence the public sphere with respect to sexual morality”. It damaged the authority of the Church for many loyal and faithful Catholics, she says, and also gave those outside the Church reason for ignoring it. While it is not the role of the Church to bend to the will of society, it clearly has a role to play in dialogue with the world. Both are losing from this breakdown in communication.


Read here the full article by Catharine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet