By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Humanae Vitae, Pope St. John Paul’s beautiful encyclical on marriage, the family, and children, was promulgated 55 years ago last week.
Fifty-five years ago this week, all Hell broke loose.
The encyclical “precipitated a crisis of authority of unprecedented proportions within the Catholic Church in the United States,” writes Fr. Peter Mitchell in his riveting account of “the 1968 revolution in American Catholic education” (The Coup at Catholic University [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015]).
Mitchell’s account offers an indispensable background to one of the most important events in recent Catholic history.
While the Population Council was becoming comfortably ensconced next to George Shuster’s office at Notre Dame’s Memorial Library, the sexual revolution was literally tearing The Catholic University of America (CUA) apart.
On April 15, 1967, the Commission on Birth Control’s report to the Holy Father was leaked to the leftist press. Two days later, CUA’s Board of Trustees informed Fr. Charles Curran, an outspoken advocate of artificial contraception, that his contract would not be renewed. A defiant Curran worked with The Washington Post to go public with his battle against the Magisterium.
The media immediately canonized him.
“Little did the trustees foresee the ferocity of the protest that their decision would have,” writes historian Donald Critchlow, “when 2,000 students, joined by the faculty, went out on strike.”
After a week of chaos, CUA’s board caved. Curran stayed.
But the word was out. Raymond Fowerbaugh, assistant to the president of CUA, joined the Catholic college presidents’ meeting at Land O’Lakes three months later. They were undoubtedly horrified when he recounted CUA’s tumultuous rebellion against the Magisterium and the hierarchy in April. After hearing his horror stories, they realized that the crisis would be coming soon to colleges and universities nationwide.
It had taken a strike and a week of chaos for Catholic U’s rebels to win their battle. Fr. Hesburgh and his colleagues didn’t want to see endless reruns on their campuses. They threw up their hands, threw in the towel, and issued their Declaration of Independence from Holy Mother Church.
With the issue settled for the universities, the revolution was on a roll. A rebellious CUA faculty, cheered on by a virulently anti-Catholic media, had successfully declared the independence of Catholic theology, not only from CUA’s Board of Trustees, but from the Magisterium and, ultimately, from the Catholic Church herself.
Catholic U’s theology faculty had won. But why only theology? Land O’Lakes went for broke: Every campus would become a Magisterium-free zone.
The last line of the Declaration reads: “The Catholic University of the future will be a true modern university but specifically Catholic and provide profound and creative ways for the service of society and the people of God.”
Truth in Advertising: They wanted it both ways. “We want the Catholic label, but we don’t have to be Catholic.”
The Battle Of 1968
The revolution didn’t stop at the universities. On July 30, 1968, five days after the encyclical appeared, Fr. Curran — now a tenured CUA professor — joined his colleagues in publishing a “Statement of Dissent.”
Curran worked with The Washington Post to spread the word, and the statement quickly gained hundreds of signatories from all over the country. It acknowledged a “distinct role” for the hierarchical Magisterium within the Church, but as theologians, they didn’t want any part of it.
You don’t have to be Humpty Dumpty to watch the bouncing ball: Both Land O’Lakes’ “specifically Catholic” and Curran’s “distinct role for the Magisterium” were platitudes that simply shoved the hierarchy and the Magisterium into the bottom drawer, to be trotted out only in marketing campaigns fine-tuned to appeal to pre-identified orthodox donors.
One aspect of the CUA battle has staying power. Isn’t it contradictory to be “Catholic” and yet “independent” from the Catholic Church?
Dr. Germain Grisez highlighted this issue when CUA’s Board of Trustees asked for his recommendations. Grisez, a brilliant philosopher, had served on Pope Paul’s Birth Control Commission the year before. Among his recommendations were several options:
“Doing nothing: In the short run, at least, this is the cheapest and easiest course.”
“Doing something: ‘Nothing in Catholic theology can justify the present sort of dissent. This dissent is an offense against the Catholic doctrine. The offense must be rectified. Failure to act means that the Catholic Church in America is sponsoring an outright rejection of papal teaching’.”
They did fail to act, and, as Fr. Mitchell explains, the position of the dissenting faculty “was simply post-conciliar theology put into practice: the ‘Magisterium of the Theologians’ had superseded and replaced the Magisterium of the bishops.”
Not only for Catholic higher education, but everywhere.
What? Notre Dame Again?
Yes, this takes us back to Notre Dame. In July 1968, our old friend Fr. John A. O’Brien, who had welcomed Planned Parenthood and the Population Council to the campus years before, still chaired Notre Dame’s Theology Department. When Humanae Vitae was promulgated, O’Brien led a nationwide revolt against Humanae Vitae.
But such efforts need real money — so O’Brien went to Hugh Moore, an elite radical population controller who had just sold his company, Dixie Cup, for big bucks.
Curran was only a young professor; O’Brien chaired the Theology Department.
Were Notre Dame’s trustees outraged when its Theology Department chairman fomented dissent and public criticism of the Holy Father?
Sorry, wrong number.
In 1973, “Fr. John A. O’Brien, a popularizer of church renewal before the Second Vatican Council, was the first priest to receive the Laetare Medal — The most prestigious award given to American Catholics,” reads Notre Dame’s website.
And Fr. Curran?
On September 17, 1985, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, informed Fr. Curran that he could no longer teach Catholic theology in the name of the Church. After teaching at several non-Catholic institutions, he was granted tenure and an endowed chair at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“God’s Hottest Hour”
On the fortieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae’s promulgation, J. Francis Cardinal Stafford, the major penitentiary of the Apostolic Penitentiary in Rome, spoke of his experience as a young priest in the Diocese of Baltimore in the summer of 1968.
“It was the year of the bad war, of complex innocence that sanctified the shedding of blood. English historian Paul Johnson dubs 1968 as the year of ‘America’s Suicide Attempt.’ It included the Tet offensive in Vietnam with its tsunami-like effects in American life and politics, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, Tenn.; the tumult in American cities on Palm Sunday weekend; and the June assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Southern California. It was also the year in which Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical letter on transmitting human life, Humanae Vitae. He met immediate, premeditated, and unprecedented opposition from some American theologians and pastors. By any measure 1968 was a bitter cup.
“The summer of 1968 is a record of God’s hottest hour. The memories are not forgotten; they are painful. They remain vivid like a tornado in the plains of Colorado. They inhabit the whirlwind where God’s wrath dwells. In 1968 something terrible happened in the Church. Within the ministerial priesthood ruptures developed everywhere among friends which never healed. And the wounds continue to affect the whole Church. The dissent, together with the leaders’ manipulation of the anger they fomented, became a supreme test. It changed fundamental relationships within the Church. It was a trial for many.
“ ‘Lead us not into temptation’ is the sixth petition of the Our Father,” Cardinal Stafford writes. “The Greek word used in this passage for ‘temptation,’ means a trial or test.”
For the Catholic Church, it still does.
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