A Ten-Year Overview

Last april the New York Times reported on a national fertility study, conducted by Princeton University, properly noting the “massive defection from traditional church teachings on birth control.” The Times story then prattled on about “the assimilation of Catholics into the mainstream of American life” and ended up by proclaiming “the power of the demographic melting pot.” Several months later, in July, at the University of San Francisco, a week-long symposium commemorating the tenth anniversary of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae brought together journalists, biologists, theologians, physicians, clergy, and laity to do battle with the sort of potted clichés and general-store sociology that have marked the public discussion of birth control and Humanae Vitae these past ten years.

The first evening Malcolm Muggeridge delivered a highly charged keynote address, in which the separation of eroticism from procreation was movingly and convincingly condemned. Then James Hitchcock, a St. Louis University historian, presented a paper effectively indicting both the secular and the Catholic press for slanted coverage of the birth-control controversy. Hitchcock dealt only with the period between Vatican II and the encyclical, and he concluded, “By 1966, it seems fair to say that the propaganda battle over birth control had already been lost in the United States.” A fairly thorough survey of the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and other popular periodicals between 1963 and 1968 showed a ham-handed approach in favor of birth control. In particular, they gave “lavish attention to any Catholic who took a public stand even slightly at odds with official Church teaching.” The “trend” of the cracking Catholic monolith had been spotted by the secular press. By the end of 1967, a year before Humanae Vitae, “the most influential secular and religious journals in the United States now all favored a change in the traditional doctrine.”

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Michael C. Brown

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Last april the New York Times reported on a national fertility study, conducted by Princeton University, properly noting the “massive defection from traditional church teachings on birth control.” The Times story then prattled on about “the assimilation of Catholics into the mainstream of American life” and ended up by proclaiming “the power of the demographic melting pot.” Several months later, in July, at the University of San Francisco, a week-long symposium commemorating the tenth anniversary of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae brought together journalists, biologists, theologians, physicians, clergy, and laity to do battle with the sort of potted clichés and general-store sociology that have marked the public discussion of birth control and Humanae Vitae these past ten years.

The first evening Malcolm Muggeridge delivered a highly charged keynote address, in which the separation of eroticism from procreation was movingly and convincingly condemned. Then James Hitchcock, a St. Louis University historian, presented a paper effectively indicting both the secular and the Catholic press for slanted coverage of the birth-control controversy. Hitchcock dealt only with the period between Vatican II and the encyclical, and he concluded, “By 1966, it seems fair to say that the propaganda battle over birth control had already been lost in the United States.” A fairly thorough survey of the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and other popular periodicals between 1963 and 1968 showed a ham-handed approach in favor of birth control. In particular, they gave “lavish attention to any Catholic who took a public stand even slightly at odds with official Church teaching.” The “trend” of the cracking Catholic monolith had been spotted by the secular press. By the end of 1967, a year before Humanae Vitae, “the most influential secular and religious journals in the United States now all favored a change in the traditional doctrine.”