By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Humanae Vitae turned 55 this July, but the controversy surrounding it began long before its promulgation in 1968. And there, once again, we find the University of Notre Dame and its president, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, at the center of the story.
On Laetare Sunday, March 20, 1966, Fr. Hesburgh conferred the University’s Laetare Medal on Patty and Pat Crowley, a Catholic couple from Chicago who had founded the Christian Family Movement (CFM) in 1949.
The Medal, which Notre Dame describes as “The Most Prestigious Award Given to American Catholics,” has been conferred on various luminaries since 1883. Among past awardees are John F. Kennedy, Ed Muskie, Tip O’Neill, Joe Biden, and Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr.
The Crowleys had done great work. CFM’s network of families “participating in the apostolic mission of the hierarchy” comprised thousands of groups in the U.S. and abroad. In October 1957, Pope Pius XII had awarded the Crowleys the Pro Ecclesia and Pontifice Medal, the highest honor conferred on the laity, during the World Congress of the Laity in Rome.
Why did Fr. Hesburgh choose 1966 as the year to confer the award on the Crowleys?
For the rest of the story, we turn to another Laetare Medal winner, George Shuster. Shuster, who graduated from Notre Dame in 1915, was honored shortly after he arrived at Notre Dame in 1960 to work directly with Fr. Hesburgh. He had served as president of Hunter College in New York for twenty years, and he knew everybody who was anybody in the fields of finance and education.
Among those whom Shuster knew well was John D. Rockefeller III, who had founded the Population Council in 1952. There, he had gathered a community of secular magnates who were bent on controlling burgeoning populations, especially in the Third World.
It wasn’t long before they recognized that the Catholic Church presented the most dangerous obstacle to their agenda.
So, it is no surprise that, shortly after he arrived at Notre Dame, Shuster introduced Rockefeller to Fr. Hesburgh. Ample new funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations soon followed, and somehow, Rockefeller persuaded Fr. Hesburgh to sponsor a series of secret meetings of the Population Council and Planned Parenthood on the Notre Dame campus. The events were coordinated by Fr. John A. O’Brien, chairman of the Theology Department.
I might mention that, while “change was in the wind” at Notre Dame at the time — it was the sixties, after all — those meetings were indeed secret. I was an undergraduate at the time, and if word had gotten out that Planned Parenthood was welcome on campus, all Hell would have broken loose, loud enough to force the operation to shut down, secrecy and all.
But word didn’t get out. However crass this foul penetration might have been, a smiling George Shuster seemed to make it all happen naturally. After all, he was on intimate terms with two worlds: that of elite education and that of elite finance.
And Fr. Ted Hesburgh needed them both.
Contraception: The Commission Demands Permission
Just six months after the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion voted in July 1930 to allow contraception, Pope Pius XI issued Casti Connubii, his encyclical affirming the Church’s timeless teaching on marriage, family, and children.
With the introduction of “The Pill” in the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII felt compelled to address the issue anew. Shortly before he died in 1963, he created the Pontifical Commission for the Study of Population, Family, and Births. In 1964, Pope Paul VI revived the Commission, eventually expanding its membership to some seventy members by the time it held its last session that lasted from April through July of 1966.
Among the Commission’s few lay members were Pat and Patty Crowley.
That session lasted for weeks, due to the differences that arose as the Commission’s final report was being drafted. Defenders of Casti Connubii were few, and Mrs. Crowley didn’t like them. One of them, Fr. Marcelino Zalba, she described as “sour and negative — he saw contraception as intrinsically evil from the start and he would not budge an inch.”
Apparently frustrated by one of his interventions, she responded, “Fr. Zalba, do you really believe God has carried out all your orders?”
As the representative of an organization comprising thousands of Catholic laity, Patty Crowley had an air of authority. When she strongly advocated Church acceptance of contraception by the Commission’s members, she cited the strong support for the change among the CFM members she had surveyed.
Fr. Hesburgh undoubtedly supported Crowley strongly, but he was also looking beyond the particulars of contraception to the Commission majority’s rebellion against timeless Catholic teaching — and Rome.
In those days, dissidents often referred to the truths of the Magisterium as “Rome,” or even “those old men in Rome.”
“The Spirit of Vatican Two” was in full swing, and “Rome” was in the way. But the Sexual Revolution was also in full swing, and by the late 1960s, millions of women in the United States were using the pill. Among them, one assumes, were a good number of Catholics — a datum that suggested to dissidents that contraception might be the perfect weapon in their war against the Magisterium.
Rebellion Meets Reality
So it wasn’t the issue, but the argument, that bode ill for Notre Dame’s future — and ours.
On June 23, 1966, the final version of the Commission’s majority was issued. Patty Crowley’s biographer, Robert McClory, summarizes it succinctly:
“It said the world and human understanding of the world had changed, that the Magisterium was in evolution, that every marital act need not be open to procreation — all couched in language reminiscent of Vatican Il, supporting responsible parenthood and respect for the Church.”
Put plainly, the document was a brief for metaphysical, anthropological, and moral rebellion. And when it was delivered to Pope Paul VI in July, its supporters went home, smugly convinced that His Holiness would approve.
Patty Crowley was the symbol of that “faithful” rebellion that would open the door to a brighter Catholic future in tune with the times, and the 1966 Laetare Medal Award was Fr. Hesburgh’s public proclamation of support for her position.
And Fr. Hesburgh had reason to see a brighter future for Notre Dame as well. In 1966 he was appointed to the Executive Committee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and, as historian Donald Critchlow reports, he “arranged a highly confidential meeting between Rockefeller and Pope Paul VI to discuss the world population issue.”
Confident that Notre Dame could finally be freed from those “old men in Rome,” in 1967 Fr. Hesburgh and dozens of Catholic university presidents adopted the Land O’Lakes Declaration, unmooring the concept of the Catholic university from its foundation in the Faith and send it careening into the maelstrom of modernity.
And the result?
Notre Dame Professor Alfred Freddoso spells it out in his introduction to the masterful analysis presented by Charles Rice in What Happened to Notre Dame (St. Augustine Press, 2009):
“It is a university as universities go these days, and it is in some obvious sense Catholic. What it is not — and has not been since I have been here — is a Catholic university, i.e., an institution of higher learning where the Catholic faith pervades and enriches, and is itself enriched by, the intellectual life on campus. What it is instead is a national private university that is more open to (or, at worst, more tolerant of) Catholic faith and practice than any other national private university I know of. Or, as I like to put it in a less formal idiom, Notre Dame today is something like a public school in a Catholic neighborhood.
But that’s only half of the story. A year after Land O’Lakes, when Pope Paul VI promulgated Humanae Vitae, Fr. Hesburgh and Patty Crowley were astonished.
More on that next week.
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