Without doubt, the papal encyclical that has had the most effect on my life is Paul VI’s Humanae vitae. I wish it weren’t so. I remember, with atypical clarity, the day the encyclical was published in 1968. It was a hot July day in New York, and as I read the Times account and then excerpts from the encyclical itself, I felt as if I were being caught hold of by something akin to Jacob’s angel. I knew instinctively that I had come up against something mysterious, something that was going to prove as intrusive, unrelenting, and, I feared rightly, ultimately maiming as Jacob’s nemesis. And so it has been. 

At the time, I had just completed my tenth year in the seminary and had three more to go before ordination. It wasn’t as if ordination were a foregone conclusion, however. I wasn’t entirely clear on either the best way to try to live the gospel, or whether I was a fit candidate for a life of celibacy. In the end, it was these personal questions, not Humanae vitae, that led to my leaving the seminary. Nonetheless, it was on first reading the encyclical that I knew t probably could not continue on to ordination because I could not officially represent such a teaching. 

Leaving the seminary a year later proved to be the easy part. It was only later, as a husband, that the real wrestling began. For while my wife, Kathleen, and I didn’t and don’t subscribe to the encyclical’ s reasoning on the immorality of artificial birth control, over the last twenty years we have tried, in faith, to abide by the papal teaching. I say “in faith” because I don’t think there is any other logic for explaining why we try to live by a teaching we cannot otherwise adequately explain or defend. When we were going through marriage preparations, the priest—who, it turned out, left the priesthood not long afterward to marry—dismissed the encyclical and instructed us that it was entirely up to us and to our consciences to determine the moral weight Humanae vitae would have in our lives. But we soon found that his nonchalance didn’t really fit our own questions. It was not that we lived on a diet of papal bulls. We were not unfamiliar with civil disobedience, questioned the pope’s explanations of biology, were aware of pressing demographic and feminist concerns, and both had some measure of theological schooling. But even though we felt the encyclical’s logic was faulty, we came to sense a trust for its teachings rather than those of our peripatetic priest. The pope had made a telling point in writing that “the pastors of the church enjoy a special light of the Holy Spirit in teaching the truth. And this, rather than the arguments they put forward, is why you are bound to such obedience” (italics added). 

For me—and this has a lot more to do with intuition than with logic—Paul VI got the explanations and the details wrong, but he got the heart of the matter—about the sacredness, responsibility for, and beauty of sexuality—right. He has proven to be prophetic, and tragically so, concerning respect for life and the desacralization of sex. Still, if a prophet, he was a Cassandra whose warnings only helped make the final state of matters worse than they had been before. That the other “pastors” of the church—not to mention a legion of conscientious moral theologians—were divided (and still are) on the morality of artificial birth control is, for me, a convincing argument that a less rigorous interpretation of the encyclical’s moral prohibitions is entirely legitimate. (I am inclined to agree with the rabbinic concept that “restrictions imposed upon the populace that the majority cannot endure are not to be levied.”) And then there is still the almost embarrassing but inescapable conclusion that those who had formalized the encyclical were hardly rabbis with wives. The pope and his secretaries didn’t have a clue as to what it is actually like to sleep with one’s spouse each night; not an inkling as to what constitutes what might be called the “eucharistic” elements of marriage. 

For my part, I think the teaching of Vatican II (see, Gaudium et spes, nos. 47-52) is not only useful but superior to that of Humanae vitae. We should emphasize it and go on. Still, Humanae vitae is not without a degree of beauty and substance, and not without some power to challenge and move consciences. It spelled out something of the costliness of a certain form of discipleship, and pointed out correctly the Catholic understanding that all sexual acts, whether in private and between whomever, have an effect on the whole community. It said something necessary about chasteness, modesty, the ends of marriage, and the ability to “die to oneself,” all of which bespeak genuine religion and have something to do with how we will come to see the face of God (Matt. 5:8). 

In commenting on the Orthodox Jewish observance of niddah—the traditional laws of family purity, which include a significant period each month of sexual abstinence on the part of married couples—Blu Greenberg (On Women and Judaism) writes that among Orthodox Jews the practice of niddah remains relatively intact today. “And although we cannot understand it by means of logic, it [the discipline imposed by niddah] obviously serves a deep human need.” But traditional Jewish observance has endured—at least among a minority of Jews—becanse it has been able to adapt. According to Greenberg, Judaism has been able to do so because it “interprets and reflects reality, not just tradition.” 

For our part, Kathleen and I are still wrestling with the “angel” Humanae vitae thrust into our lives. Looking back—and forward—we still hope that one day the church’s pastors will learn some of the modesty and the flexibility of their rabbinic counterparts. To place burdens too heavy on the shoulders of others, after all, has merited divine censure.