What Went Wrong With Vatican II: The Catholic Crisis Explained by McInerny Ralph M

Author:McInerny, Ralph M. [McInerny, Ralph M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
Published: 2011-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

Dissenting Theologians Misconstrue the Issue

Prominent Jesuit theologian John G. Milhaven spoke at the annual theological meeting at Woodstock College, whose theme that year was “The Church, American Style.” First, he enunciated a general principle: “A Catholic husband and wife have a responsibility to be docile to the Holy Father and obey him. But they also have a responsibility to each other and their children. 57 In other words, Humanae Vitae posed for them a significant moral problem that involved a conflict of obligations. On the one hand was the Catholic’s duty to attend respectfully to what the Pope and bishops had to say, to obey them; on the other hand was the duty to spouse and children.

Astute readers will have identified the error here already. The dissenting theologians had in fact created for Catholic couples and for Catholics in general quite a different conflict from the one Fr. Milhaven mentioned, and one that is much easier to resolve.

The Pope wrote that artificial contraception is never a licit means of securing the good of the children or the ends of marriage; Fr. Milhaven, on the other hand, asserted that artificial contraception could sometimes be a legitimate means of securing the good of children and the ends of marriage. Indeed, said Fr. Milhaven, Catholic couples might sometimes even be obliged to employ the contraceptive means that the Pope had declared morally wrong: “For example, a married couple who have had three children within four years and whose present income and nerves and love just about suffice to make a good, happy family of the five of them—such a couple could well be justified, despite the encyclical, to use contraceptives. In fact, they might even be obliged to.” 58

Fr. Milhaven gave this example as if he were reporting on a moral decision of a conscientious married couple. But, of course, in constructing the case, he was actually offering advice to married couples about moral decisions they might make in the future. He was providing them an allegedly professional and authoritative opinion and one that, as he knew, was in conflict with the one they would be given if they ever got around to reading Humanae Vitae. He even upped the ante by suggesting that they might be obliged to take the path he was blazing.

And here we reach the very core of the dispute between the dissenting theologians and the Pope—a dispute that most people misconstrued then and misconstrue even now. Fr. Milhaven may have felt he was appealing to the reasoned judgment of married couples, but what he was actually doing was giving them advice that they would accept, not because of the force or subtlety of his reasoning, which was most likely beyond them, but because of his credentials as a priest and as a professional theologian—indeed, as a professor of pastoral theology at Woodstock College.

Fr. Milhaven, then, was not pointing out a conflict between papal authority and Catholic consciences; he was creating a conflict between authorities: the authority of the

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