A road map to the final week of the Synod on the Family

As the Synod winds down it might be apt to read the development of Paul VI's commission on the family. Father Bernard Haring, perhaps the greatest moral theologian of the 20th century was a peritus at Vatican II. His words on Humanae Vitae tell us much about the history of this question and how it developed into Humanae Vitae. "Influenced by a few Church Fathers, but above all thanks to the aftereffects of his Manichaean past, the great Augustine taught that marital relations were per se degrading, particularly when engaged in with passion. Intercourse was pardoned and rendered moral only by the express intention of creating new life. But this teaching scarcely affected the bulk of the laity or the pastoral care exercised by priests, since it was not a matter of Church discipline or public penance. Roughly speaking, we can say that up until a time after the Council of Trent, there was no general obligation to confess this “sin.” But beginning with the sixteenth century, all that began to change. Soon a rigoristic tendency came to the fore, vehemently insisting that any act of marital intercourse in which the transmission of life was impeded was a serious sin. Some rigorists held every sexual act to be sinful if it occurred at times or under circumstances in which conception was excluded. But this never became the common doctrine. In the eighteenth century, Saint Alphonsus emphatically taught that the marital act is good in itself, as long as it is the expression of love and/ or serves to promote fidelity. In his Moral Theology, Alphonsus wrote, “Actus conjugalis est ex sese bonus, et hoc est de fide,” or “The conjugal act is good in itself, and this is a matter of faith” (Book VI, treatise vi, n. 900). He added that the confessor should never initiate any discussion of the problem of coitus interruptus. Into our century, most Catholic confessors have taken this advice. And as for those who did not, the faithful could easily avoid them. This relatively peaceful situation in pastoral care was altered at a stroke by the encyclical Casti Connubii, issued by Pope Pius XI in 1930. Casti Connubii was written primarily to counter a declaration by the Anglican Church on responsible parenthood that did not categorically exclude artificial methods of contraception. The preparation of Casti Connubii was a lonely, mountaintop decision— and here we touch on the key problem with Humanae Vitae. Two consultants to the Holy Office, Father F. X. Hürth, S.J., and Father Arthur Veermersch, S.J., actually wrote the text of Casti Connubii. Pius XI toned the text down by stressing the importance of married love. But deliberate contraception was nonetheless declared a crime (crimen). I myself saw the catastrophic consequences of this at missions I preached in the years immediately after War World II. Hundreds of people came to me in confession after being denied absolution at an earlier mission in the 1930s for practicing contraception. They stood for hours outside my confessional once word had gotten around that Father Häring was very understanding on this critical point." Haring, Bernard (2013-05-27). Free and Faithful: My Life in the Catholic Church (Kindle Location 1435). Liguori Publications.