When the Vatican reaffirmed its anti-contraceptive bias within Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1967, it triggered the formation of an escalating wave of principled dissent, as educated laypeople and dissident clergy began to reject Vatican authority on this and related issues of reproductive and sexual ethics.

Founded in 1974 after the US Supreme Court decriminalised abortion (Roe v Wade), Catholics for a Free Choice is a now transnational organisation of Catholics who affirm Catholic feminist and liberal scholarship in defence of women’s reproductive rights, LGBT issues and the urgent need to prevent the escalation of HIV/AIDS in Southern and Central Africa and elsewhere.

In CFFC’s new report, Truth and Consequence: A Look Behind the Vatican’s Ban on Contrraception (2008), CFFC provides an objective look at the history of Humane Vitae over the last four decades, demonstrating that Catholic theological and lay opinion has been far from unified over issues of contraception and HIV/AIDS/STI prevention over that period. Indeed, Pope John XXIII established a Papal Birth Control Commission in 1963, most of whose members voted to rescind the ban, but which was ignored by his successor, Pope Paul VI.

In western societies, most liberal and working class Catholics simply ignored it, and used barrier contraception or the pill, anyway. Prominent German and US Catholic theologians dissented sharply from Humanae Vitae, and one long-term result was the decline of church attendance amongst Catholics in their twenties and thirties. Faculty at several US Catholic universities also dissented.

Unfortunately, the election of Poland’s Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II led to a crackdown against critics of Humane Vitae. John Paul II dismissed respected US Catholic theologian Charles Curran from his Catholic University teaching post for precisely that reason in 1986. He reiterated his opinion that Humanae Vitae reflected ‘infallible’ papal teaching over reproductive and sexual health in 1983 and 1988. Worse still, the Vatican and local Catholic hierarchies then tried to interfere with family planning, HIV/AIDS and STI prevention at the United Nations, and in Latin America and Southern Africa, as well as the United States (due to the latter’s abnormally high church attendance levels).

While Latin America’s rising standards of living and increasingly educated populace ultimately frustrated such initiatives, even attempts to stifle the use of emergency contraception as rape prevention prophylaxis.

Vatican efforts ironically led to the establishment of Latin American CFFC and clergy reform organisations, Southern and Central Africa have been less fortunate. In those cases, local Catholic Bishops have spread misinformation and actively lobbied social conservative, authoritarian governing regimes for support. However, now, even individual US, French and South African Catholic bishops have publically questioned whether or not HIV/AIDS should be treated as a public health emergency where prophylaxis is, indeed, life-affirming. At the United Nations, the Vatican has been conspicuously less successful, despite its co-ordination of lobbying efforts with fundamentalist Protestants and Muslim social conservatives.

The launch of Truth and Consequences has also been accompanied by an Open Letter to Pope Benedict XVI, and includes signatories from CFFC, Catholic Latin American reproductive rights groups, US and French Catholic LGBT organisations, clergy reform and women’s ordination groups.
Strongly recommended:

Catholics for a Free Choice: Truth and Consequences: A  Look Behind the Vatican’s Ban on Contraception (2008):

http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/topics/reform/documents/TruthConsequencesFINAL.pdf