Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 27, No. 4. 1964.
[introduction]
Recently a Catholic correspondent in a London weekly ended his letter to the editor by claiming that it was only a matter of time before the Church modified its teaching on contraception and allowed the use of the new contraceptive pill.
"The Church," he wrote, "has had to modify its attitudes and teaching in the light of scientific discoveries (Galileo, Evolution and Genesis, Freud, etc.) or even as a result of increased social consciousness (slavery, the death penalty, the nuclear bomb), and in good time she will be obliged to reinterpret the divine truths in the light of the population explosion." And, of course, as every schoolboy knows, very much the same view has also been advanced by Dr. John Rock in his recent book, "The Time Has Come".
A few years ago Catholics expressing these sorts of views would have been judged to be crackpots or worse, but it is a fact that they now, for good or bad, represent a fairly substantial body of Catholic opinion, even if it is still very much a minority opinion. I know personally of a number of educated Catholics who seriously think that the Church will in time relax its ban on contraception and allow, for instance, the use of Dr. Rock's pill.
And apart from these Catholics, there is a good number of others who are honestly bewildered and uncertain about the whole business of contraception. If the Dutch bishops do not feel sure about the morality of the pill, how can the lay sheep be confident of where they stand? Catholics, in fact, are almost the only Christians now who oppose contraception on strictly moral grounds, and they find themselves increasingly out on a limb with the great weight of public opinion against them.
More and more the Catholic position seems to the outsider to be an eccentric sectarian fetish rather like the vegetarianism of the Seventh Day Adventists or the refusal of blood transfusions by the Jehovah's Witnesses.