Foreword by Tracey Rowland Cardinal J. Francis Stafford has described 1968 as the Year of the Peirasmós (spiritual trial). It was not only a year of assassinations and student protest movements, of atrocities committed in the heat of guerrilla warfare, of hippies and psychedelic drugs. It was also the year when reactions to Pope Paul VI s last encyclical Humanae Vitae threatened to destroy the unity of the Church. The magnitude of the seismic pressures placed on the papacy and the priesthood after the July 29th release of the encyclical is evident in the following memoir of Cardinal Stafford: The summer of 1968 is a record of God s hottest hour. The memories are not forgotten; they are xi
xii foreword painful. They remain vivid like a tornado on the plains of Colorado. They inhabit the whirlwind where God s wrath dwells. In 1968 something terrible happened in the Church. Within the ministerial priesthood ruptures developed everywhere among friends which never healed. And the wounds continue to affect the whole Church. The dissent, together with the leaders manipulation of the anger they fomented, became a supreme test. It changed fundamental relationships within the Church. It was a Peirovsmo~ [Peirasmós] for many. Opposition to Humanae Vitae fostered a widespread culture of dissent. If one magisterial teaching could be rejected or read-down or declared to be a mere moral ideal then the teaching authority of the magisterium was in crisis. The unity of the Church was stretched to breaking point with different priests, bishops and even bishops conferences offering the laity a variety of interpretations and tax lawyer-style loopholes. Today the question of where did theologian X or Y stand in the first week of August 1968 is a little like the question which haunted French Catholics in the 1950s where did you stand on the Vichy regime of
foreword xiii Marshal Pétain? Were you for collaboration with the Nazis which meant fighting both the Communist and devoutly Catholic members of the Resistance? Or were you for resistance to the Nazis, which meant having Communists and other common criminals as your allies against devout Catholics who thought Nazis were preferable to Communists? The moral judgements that had to be made in 1968 (like 1940) were clearly not easy. Even St. John Paul II acknowledged that the way that Humanae Vitae was often defended by reference to biological explanations was not helpful, and Joseph Ratzinger remarked that the theological explanations given in the encyclical were slim. It took the papacy of St. John Paul II, with the development of his Catechesis on Human Love, to provide the judgments of Paul VI with some strong theological ballast. Even then, St. John Paul II had to create his own academy in 1981, the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, to teach the sacramental theology and theological anthropology at the base of his Catechesis on Human Love. His personal choice for first Director of the Institute, the saintly Carlo Caffarra, was publicly ridiculed for his defense of Humanae Vitae. Caffarra was consoled by receiving a letter from Sr. Lucia of Fatima, who affirmed his
xiv foreword judgments. She wrote that she understood from her various mystical experiences that the battle for the family and the sacrality of human life and sexual intimacy was to be the last great battle the satanic end game, as it were. To read The Encyclical Humanae Vitae: A Sign of Contradiction by Dietrich von Hildebrand some five decades later is similarly a very consoling experience. It bears testimony to the fact that even in the heat of this Peirasmós there was at least one Catholic married man who had the necessary spiritual and intellectual capital to make the right judgment call and explain it within the broader context of the Church s understanding of the sacrament of marriage and the work of the human conscience. It was the second time in his life he had made the right call in the midst of a moral crucible. Perhaps his 1930s battles against the Nazis, especially the establishment of his anti-nazi journal Der christliche Ständestaat, had prepared his soul for the ordeal of 1968. As one reads this reflection on Humanae Vitae one senses that Hildebrand had a connatural knowledge of his subject. There is nothing excruciatingly abstract 1. Cf. Dietrich von Hildebrand s memoir My Battle Against Hitler. (New York: Image Books, 2014).
foreword xv about his defense of the encyclical. There is no smart logic chopping as if something so complex could be reduced to the dimensions of a syllogism. There is no casuistry. Hildebrand supports Humanae Vitae because he believes that the sinfulness of artificial birth control is rooted in the arrogation of the right to separate the actualized love-union in marriage from a possible conception, to sever the wonderful, deeply mysterious connection instituted by God. In other words, those who practice contraception approach the mystery of creation with an irreverent attitude. For Hildebrand, contraception belongs to the same league of sins as suicide and euthanasia. In each case human persons act as if they, and not God, are the giver of life. No doubt if he were alive today, Hildebrand would add in vitro fertilization to the list of such irreverent practices. One of the reasons why I find this position so compelling is that it defends a high theology of marriage. It understands sacramentality as a real and not merely metaphorical or symbolic participation in the creative power of the Holy Trinity. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, acknowledged that once the Church of England allowed contraception, it no longer had a logical reason to
xvi foreword oppose homosexual practices. This is like saying, allow contraception and the idea that sexual intimacy is intrinsically linked to a sacramental participation in the creative powers of the Trinity flies out the window. Hildebrand, Paul VI, St John Paul II, Cardinal Caffarra and Benedict XVI all stood on the side of a high theology of marriage and were able to follow the logic to the conclusion that contraception = secularized sex. Some of my favorite passages in this work which illustrate the lucidity with which Hildebrand defended Humanae Vitae are the following: If sex were really nothing more than a biological instinct, such as thirst or hunger, it would be incomprehensible why the satisfaction of an instinct implanted in man s nature by God should be something immoral outside of marriage, especially if it led to procreation.... Instead of saying that the sinful satisfaction of sexual desire becomes legitimate through marriage, we should say that the sexual act, because it is destined to be the consummation of this sublime union and the fulfillment of spousal love, becomes sinful when desecrated by isolation.... The spiritual attitudes of man have a meaning
foreword xvii and a ratio in themselves, and they can never be treated as having their real significance independently of the person; they involve a person s intelligence and his freedom, his capacity to respond meaningfully, and not an impersonal, automatic finality, going over the person s head.... Conscience does not instruct us about whether something is morally good or evil; rather, this question must be answered before conscience can speak.... Conscience is the advocatus Dei, God s advocate, in the soul of man. It is somewhat sad and ironic that today many of the leaders in the field of natural family planning are not Catholic doctors but feminists who oppose the intervention of technology and chemicals in the field of sexual intimacy on the grounds that this is demeaning for women. The recent development of a fertility awareness app by a Swedish couple is an example of this kind of non-catholic leadership. Hildebrand would no doubt agree that the technology and chemicals are demeaning for women, but he would also think that they are demeaning for men too. It would be a great achievement if feminists and Catholics could join
xviii foreword forces to foster both better approaches to fertility awareness and better theology. This republication of Hildebrand s reflections on the most dramatic of encyclicals retains its currency, fifty years later, as an indispensable element of the better theology. Tracey Rowland holds the St. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Australia). From 2001 2017 she was the Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family (Melbourne session). She is also a member of the 9th International Theological Commission.