birth control is nothing new, and the Church has always been against artificial birth control. All Christian denominations shared this belief until 1930, when the Anglican Church at the 1930 Lambeth Conference made the decision to allow married couples in limited circumstances to use modern forns of artificial birth control to plan their families. In response to this Pius XI wrote Castii Connubi which reinterated the Church’s constant teaching against artificial birth control. This encyclical reaffirmed the Church’s traditional teaching that the purpose of marriage, a holy sacrament instituted by God, not by man, is to join a man and a woman in both body and soul:
“Therefore the sacred partnership of true marriage is constituted both by the will of God and the will of man. From God comes the very institution of marriage, the ends for which it was instituted, the laws that govern it, the blessings that flow from it; while man, through generous surrender of his own person made to another for the whole span of life, becomes, with the help and cooperation of God, the author of each particular marriage, with the duties and blessings annexed thereto from divine institution.” (#9)
The natural result of the gift of self between the spouses is children , as God has ordained that people be “his helpers in the propagation of life” (#11), to raise up children to be members of the Church of Christ, and to be saints (#13). But marriage is also to perfect the spouses; indeed, this can be seen as the “chief reason and purpose of marriage (#24). Therefore, any attempt to frustrate these purposes of marriage is a “grave sin” (#56).
It is interesting that the faithful received this teaching without batting an eyelash.
In the late 50’s and early 60’s when the anovulant pill was developed, some Catholic moral theologians proposed that this was a different kind of birth control, and might be morally licit. After all, the pill merely altered a woman’s hormonal cycle. It wasn’t so obviously a barrier like a condom.
Moral theologians also proposed that the “principle of totality” could be used to justify using the pill, and that as long as the procreative purpose was served by the couple’s conjugal life as a whole, the procreative outcome of individual conjugal acts could be impeded on occasion for good reason.
These arguements were put forth by a commission that was started by John XXIII and continued by Paul VI to advise him on this issue.
As far as I know, Paul VI was pretty clear that brith control is intrinstically evil, and he never “struggled” with that. But he did have a clue that this teaching restated in a new encyclical may not go over well (he says as much in the encyclical).
He was assisted in writing Humanae Vitae by Karol Woytila. It is said that he read Woytila’s book Love and Responsibility while writing the encyclical.
George Weigal discusses this in his book on JPII (Witness to Hope) on pages 200-210 or something close to that.**
