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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 June 2018
This essay examines pressures and theological developments regarding sexuality and birth control within Anglicanism, as represented by statements from Lambeth Conferences and in discussions in the Church of England during the early to mid twentieth century, and notes some of the changes in ‘official’ position within US churches and especially The Episcopal Church. It offers comparison with the developments in moral theology within the Roman Catholic Church after 1930 and asks if, and by what means, the two Communions may come to agree on the specific issue of contraception.
2. Gustafson, James M., Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics (London: SCM Press, 1978), pp. 2-3 Google Scholar.
3. See Joyce, A.J., Richard Hooker and Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 239-240 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4. See the account of ascetical theology – closely associated with moral theology – in Anglicanism in McNeill, John T., A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951), pp. 218-246 Google Scholar.
See also J.L. Morgan, ‘A Sociological Analysis of Some Developments in the Moral Theology of the Church of England since 1900’, DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1976, ch. 2.
5. McCormick, Richard, The Critical Calling: Reflections on Moral Dilemmas since Vatican II (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1989), pp. 3-5 Google Scholar.
6. Life in Christ; An Agreed Statement by the Second Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (London and Vatican City, 1994), pp. 30-31.
7. The Lambeth Conferences 1867–1948 (London: SPCK, 1948), p. 295 (hereafter Lambeth Conferences); cf. the earlier comment of the Bishop of London, Winnington Ingram, an implacable foe of contraception who described it as ‘a gigantic evil ... practice which, if continued must eat away the heart and lifeblood of our country’ (The Times, London, 20 October 1905). A memorandum, The Misuse of Marriage, printed and circulated privately among the Bishops of the Church of England in 1914, gave allowance for family limitation by confining marital relations to the likely infertile periods of the month. This admitted, in principle and practice, the secondary purpose, as then understood, of sexual relations. It is claimed that the Memorandum had received the approval of the majority of English bishops. It was reprinted in The Declining Birth Rate (London: National Birth Rate Commission, 1916), pp. 63ff.
8. Lambeth Conferences, pp. 50-51.
9. Lambeth Conferences, p. 166.
10. Banks, J.A., Prosperity and Parenthood (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 5-6 Google Scholar. See also National Birth Rate Commission, The Declining Birth Rate: Its Causes and Effects (National Council for Public Morals: London, 1916), pp. 64-65 Google Scholar. The 1911 Census showed that the fertility rate for Anglican clergy was approximately 30 per cent below that of the population as a whole; 40 years earlier, it had been above the average.
11. An editorial in the church weekly, The Guardian, 18 July 1930, gave a conspectus of reasons for a change in teaching. See also the discussion post-Lambeth 1930 in David, A.A. and Furse, M.B., Marriage and Birth Control (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1931), pp. 21-22 Google Scholar.
12. As in her books Married Love (London: A.C. Fifield, 1918), and Wise Parenthood (London: A.C. Fifield, 1918).
13. The pamphlet was entitled A New Gospel to All Peoples. Dr Stopes, a Quaker, claimed that she had received a divine revelation charging her with commending birth control to the world.
14. The Morality of Birth Control and Kindred Sex Subjects: A Handbook of Moral Pathology, by a Priest of the Church of England (London: Bale and Co., 1924), p. xi. The book included multiple references to psychological literature, including the writings of Sigmund Freud.
15. The Morality of Birth Control, p. xiv.
16. Wright became the leading exponent of both birth control and of an open approach to women’s sexuality. Her work led to the foundation in the UK of the National Birth Control Association which later became the Family Planning Association. See Evans, Barbara, Freedom to Choose: The Life and Work of Helena Wright, Pioneer of Contraception (London: Bodley Head, 1984)Google Scholar.
17. Quoted in The Times, London, 8 April 1919. A writer in The Sunday Chronicle, 19 October 1919, later pilloried the Bishop, imagining him ‘walking majestically up the aisle of his cathedral ... with packets of child killing drugs bulging out of the end of each lawn sleeve’.
18. As reported in Birth Control News, October 1923.
19. Kirk, Kenneth, Conscience and its Problems (London: Longmans, 1927), p. 292 Google Scholar.
20. Bishop Gore felt so strongly on the matter that he later published a pamphlet Lambeth on Contraceptives (London, undated), which contained a strong attack on the decision. He joined the League of National Life, a largely Roman Catholic organization devoted to anti-birth control activities, founded by Halliday Sutherland, a Roman Catholic gynaecologist and fierce opponent of Marie Stopes, who had sued him for libel.
21. Lambeth Conferences, p. 196 (Report of Committee).
22. Lambeth Conferences, pp. 199-200.
23. The Church Times, 15 August 1930.
24. Chronicle of Canterbury Convocation, 13 November 1930, pp. 153-55.
25. Barry, F.R., The Relevance of Christianity (London: James Nisbet, 1932), p. 231 Google Scholar.
26. Pius XII, Casti Connubii, Encyclical of December 31, 1930. Text from Fremantle, Anne (ed.), The Papal Encyclicals in Historical Context (New York: New American Library, 1956), p. 239 Google Scholar.
27. See Dingle, Reginald J., Cardinal Bourne at Westminster (London: Burns, Oates and Co., 1934), p. 165 Google Scholar.
28. See Tobin, Kathleen A., The American Religious Debate over Birth Control, 1907–1937 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2001), p. 153 Google Scholar.
29. Tobin, The American Religious Debate, pp. 161-67.
30. The American Religious Debate, pp. 168-70.
31. Journal of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, 1931, p. 124. Bishop Matthews’ proposed motion was that the bishops ‘declare as their solemn judgement that the use of all unnatural means to limit the family is contrary to the principles of the Christian religion’.
32. Journal of the General Convention 1934, p. 292. The motion read ‘That we endorse the efforts now being made to secure for licensed physicians, hospitals and medical clinics, freedom to convey such information as is in accord with the highest principles of eugenics and a more wholesome family life, wherein parenthood may be undertaken with due respect for the health of mothers and the welfare of their children’. See also: Kennedy, David M., Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 166-169 Google Scholar.
33. New York Times, 21 October 1934. The report noted that ‘pious twaddle is scored’! The bitterness of this debate within the Convention was especially noticeable. During debate, the Bishop of Olympia (Huston) remarked that ‘We cannot find out the necessity for such action by looking through stained glass windows’. The Bishop of St Albans (Furse) had been invited to the Convention – presumably in a bid to counter arguments for approval of contraception.
34. Like Stopes and Wright, Sanger published a book on women’s sexuality: Happiness in Marriage (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926).
35. The Lambeth Conference, 1948 (London: SPCK, 1948), Part II, p. 34.
36. The Family in Contemporary Society: The Report of a Group Convened at the Behest of the Archbishop of Canterbury. With Appended Reports from the U.S.A., Canada, and India (London: SPCK, 1958), hereafter FICS, p. 4.
37. For example, ‘Birth Control Book Will Split Church’, Daily Sketch, 12 April 1958.
38. FICS, p. 23. There is a comprehensive analytical section, entitled ‘Some Theological Considerations’ (pp. 130-63) which considers most ethical views on birth control and the opinions of theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth, as well as considering in some depth approaches based on the casuistic tradition.
39. FICS, p. 150.
40. Sherwin Bailey, Derrick, The Mystery of Love and Marriage (London: SCM Press, 1952)Google Scholar, p. x. See also The Man-Woman Relationship in Christian Thought (London: Longmans, 1959). Sherwin Bailey’s later work was influential in the discussions of the UK Wolfenden Committee which recommended the decriminalizing of homosexual acts between consenting male adults.
41. The Lambeth Conference of 1958 (London: SPCK, 1958), Part ii, p. 142.
42. Lambeth Conference of 1958, Part 1, p. 52.
43. I.T. Ramsey, ‘Christian Ethics in the 1950’s and 1960’s’, Church Quarterly Review 2.iii (1970), p. 221.
44. Ramsey, ‘Christian Ethics’, p. 223.
45. Ramsey, ‘Christian Ethics’, p. 224.
46. G.R. Dunstan, The Artifice of Ethics (London: SCM Press, 1974), p. 48. I am grateful for friendship and past conversations with Canon Dunstan as well as the insights he gave me into the preparatory work on FICS.
47. Kirk, , Conscience and its Problems (London: Longmans, 3rd edn, 1948), p. 70 Google Scholar.
48. Kirk, Conscience, p. 81.
49. Kirk, Conscience, p. 85.
50. Kirk, Conscience, pp. 293-94.
51. Kirk, Kenneth, Some Principles of Moral Theology (London: Longmans, 1920), pp. 176-201 Google Scholar, esp. p. 179.
52. This phrase was used by the Episcopalian theologian Harmon Smith who examined some of the same material discussed here: Smith, Harmon L., ‘Contraception and Natural Law: A Half Century of Anglican Moral Reflection’, in Paul Elmen (ed.), The Anglican Moral Choice (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1980), pp. 198-200 Google Scholar.
53. Noonan, J.T., Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (New York: New American Library, 1976), pp. 293-297 Google Scholar, 396-408. Noonan’s work was regarded by some, at the time of the Papal Commission, as being potentially subversive of traditional teachings on contraception – providing a brief for the view that teaching could change.
54. Dupré, Louis, Catholics and Contraception: A New Appraisal (Baltimore, MD: Helicon, 1964) p. 86 Google Scholar.
55. Humanae Vitae, s. 12.
56. The Lambeth Conference of 1968 (London: SPCK, 1968), Resolution 22.
57. See Richard McCormick, ‘L’Affaire Curran’ in The Critical Calling, pp. 123-36, and also the wide-ranging review of his own and others’ reactions to the controversy in ‘“Humanae Vitae” 25 Years Later’, America Magazine, 17 July 1993. It is a pleasure to recall my friendship with Fr McCormick. A fine treatment of these matters within the US Catholic church is provided by Massa SJ, Mark S., American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See especially ch. 3, ‘Humane Vitae in the United States’, pp. 29-48 and ch. 4, ‘The Charles Curran Affair’, pp. 49-74. On the developments in Catholic moral theology see the overview in Keenan SJ, James F., A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century: From Confessing Sins to Liberating Consciences (London and New York: Continuum, 2010)Google Scholar, especially chs. 6 and 7. The introduction of an historicist perspective – which owed much to Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan – is credited by Keenan as helping the turn away from a strict classicist viewpoint, based on a form of natural law, which generally assumed unchanging teaching (pp. 113-16).
58. Mahoney, John, The Making of Moral theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 259, 301 Google Scholar.
59. See the sociological study of laity in England, Hornsby Smith, Michael P., Roman Catholic Beliefs in England: Customary Catholicism and Transformations of Religious Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 168-177 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
In the USA, sociologist and priest Fr Andrew Greeley demonstrated over many decades the gap between official teaching and lay practice regarding contraception. See Massa, American Catholic Revolution, pp. 72-73.
60. Sarah MacDonald, ‘Scholars Call for End to Church Ban on Artificial Contraception’, The Tablet, London, 24 September 2016.
61. Curran, Charles E., Tensions in Moral Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 83 Google Scholar.
62. Ford SJ, John C. and Grisez, Germaine, ‘Contraception and the Infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium’, Theological Studies 39 (1978), pp. 258-312 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Keenan, A History of Catholic Moral Theology, pp. 111-26.
63. International Theological Commission, Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church (Rome, 2014)Google Scholar.
64. Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church, para. 49.
65. Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church, para. 137.
66. Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the International Theological Commission on the occasion of its Annual Plenary Assembly, 2012.
67. See the articles reproduced in part 2 of Curran, Charles E. and Fullam, Lisa A. (ed.), The Sensus Fidelium and Moral Theology: Readings in Moral Theology, No. 18 (New York: Paulist Press, 2017)Google Scholar, especially Giussepe Angelini,‘The Sensus Fidelium and Moral Discernment’, pp. 234-36; Todd A. Salzmann and Michael G. Lawler, ‘Experience and Moral Theology: Reflections on Humane Vitae Forty Years Later’, pp. 257-79; Thomas Knieps-Port Le Roi, ‘Church Teaching on Marriage and Family – A Matter of Sensus Fidelium?’, with a response by Serena Nocetti, pp. 280-97.
68. Ecclesiology and Moral Discernment: Seeking a Unified Moral Witness (The Anglican–Roman Catholic Theological Consultation in the USA, 2014), p. 65.
69. Note the comment of Michael Root on importance of agreement on specific rules and practices: ‘Ethics and Ecumenical Dialogue: A Survey and Analysis’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 45.3 (2010), p. 369.
70. On this see Sedgwick, Timothy, ‘Exploring the Great Divide: Sex, Ethics and Ecumenism’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 45.3 (2010), p. 420 Google Scholar.