A bitter pill: American Catholics & contraception.

At its November 2003 meeting, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) endorsed the writing of what the New York Times described as "an easily understandable booklet" explaining why artificial contraception is always wrong. The project originated in the conference's committee for prolife activities and was explicitly linked to the church's campaign against abortion. More was presumably at issue, though, and not only because the teaching on contraception creates major credibility problems for church leaders in their efforts to shape abortion law and policy.

At the same meeting, the bishops also approved the text of a brochure opposing same-sex marriage. If procreation is not the primary end of the sexual act, as moral theologians once routinely maintained it is, on what grounds does one prohibit all but marital sex--or even limit marriage to heterosexual couples? As Jesuit moralist John C. Ford articulated the argument in 1959, with reference to a statement by a subcommittee of the World Council of Churches praising marital contraception: "The logical conclusion ... is that sex outside of marriage, and marriages between homosexuals should be permitted." The bishops appear willing to alienate many of the married laity, whose contraceptive practice differs hardly at all from that of other Americans, in order to shore up the Catholic case against same-sex unions.

It is not my purpose to debate the merits of homosexual marriage. I want instead to contest the bishops' seeming assumption that collectively reiterating the church's teaching on contraception will have only transitory negative effects on the laity. "The church teaches lots of things that we don't practice," Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput told a news conference, where he acknowledged that most Catholic couples routinely practice contraception. "The church's teaching on charity is ignored by virtually all of us also." Like growing numbers of his fellow bishops, Chaput is too young to have adult memories of the 1950s, when a majority of married Catholics were living, or trying to live, in accord with church teaching. Partly for this reason, he--along with many younger advocates of a harder line on contraception--simply underestimates the damage done to the church by Humanae vitae. Commonweal readers of a certain age will know what the married laity suffered and also know that, existentially speaking, being accused of grave evil in the course of marital sex is not the same as being accused of failures with regard to charity. But even older readers of Commonweal may not remember how much damage the debate over contraception did to the parish clergy.

Like Chaput, I am too young--though just barely--to have adult memories of the 1950s. I married in 1971, by which time the teaching on contraception was effectively a dead letter--ignored by a substantial majority of married Catholics and seldom enforced in the mostly deserted confessionals. Some five years ago, though, I embarked on a history of American Catholic pastoral practice with regard to contraception and the debate that eventually emerged over the teaching's legitimacy. I read widely in clerical journals, pastoral literature, popular Catholic magazines, and even pamphlets. I digested the teaching notes of moral theologians and the sermon manuscripts of mission preachers. Perhaps most important, I had access to numerous letters on the subject from married Catholics and from some priests, mainly dating from the mid-1960s. I also interviewed a number of priests, nearly all of whom had pastoral memories of the 1950s and many of the 1940s. Most of these men had been disappointed by Humanae vitae and were in that sense "liberals." Nearly all, though, were distressed--some deeply so--by the current climate with regard to sexual morality. So I wasn't interviewing a group of clerical Jacobins.

What did I learn from my immersion in what, for my three children, was exquisitely embarrassing subject matter? At least three things. First, as some but too few Catholics know, the "acute phase" of the Catholic struggle over contraception was relatively brief, extending from Casti connubii in 1930 until Humanae vitae in 1968. Almost that many years have elapsed since the struggle climaxed in the late 1960s. Second, the laity were simultaneously liberated by that struggle (for better or worse, marital contraception was the issue around which most adult Catholics came to a sense of moral autonomy) and deeply wounded by what they perceived as the hierarchy's indifference to their experience as spouses. The result, when coupled with subsequent developments, was for many Catholics a growing detachment from the church, at least in an institutional sense. Third, the debate over contraception had particularly deleterious consequences for the parish clergy. Let me deal with each of these assertions in turn, the first at some length and the latter two more briefly.

The oldest document I found in the course of my research dates from 1875: the teaching notes of a Passionist priest who was training neophyte mission preachers. "The abominable crime of Onan," Father Gaudienius Rossi informed his students, was "more common than many suspect" and should be "reprobated severely." But prior to the First World War, hardly any Passionist mission preachers spoke on the subject of contraception--if the surviving manuscript sermons in their archives are any guide. (Abortion was another story.) Although missions were usually preached before same-sex congregations, period conventions would not permit a frank discussion of birth control when unmarried persons were present. Only the Redemptorists, whose missions included a "state in life" sermon preached separately to the married and the single, seem regularly to have preached against contraception and in what for the times was fairly straightforward language. As for the parish clergy, they virtually never preached against contraception or abortion prior to the First World War. They were apparently cautious in the confessional too, seldom if ever questioning penitents about what continued to be called the sin of onanism. Nor was there yet a pamphlet literature on the subject, which most Catholic periodicals either left strictly alone or addressed in such opaque language that an unmotivated reader might entirely miss the point.

Most of the laity, of course, were aware that contraception was wrong. They knew in a general sense that the church opposed it and were conscious of the stigma attached to contraceptive devices, still illegal--if obtainable--in most American jurisdictions. But many Catholics were probably ignorant, perhaps in part for self-interested reasons, of the absolute nature of church teaching. Contraception, in other words, might be generally sinful but not in certain extreme circumstances. And large numbers of Catholics evidently believed that coitus interruptus was less gravely sinful than the use of "devices" like condoms or pessaries.

These erroneous views came under increasingly sustained attack by reform-minded priests in the late teens and the 1920s, when anti-birth control pamphlets began to appear in churches and the issue featured with growing frequency in the Catholic press. By the 1920s, every religious order that preached missions routinely inveighed against contraception in the course of its standard sermon program. By the latter half of the decade, contraception was occasionally mentioned from the Sunday pulpit--although usually in veiled language. The principal clerical journals carried articles that encouraged confessors to ask penitents about "sins against marriage" whenever the penitent gave cause for suspicion in this regard. Most parish priests, however, clung throughout the decade to older habits of reticence about marital sex, not only as preachers and confessors but also in the context of premarital interviews. So a good many Catholics apparently remained in what a gentle confessor might call "good faith" ignorance of the teaching.

The situation was fundamentally altered in 1930. The global depression which began in that year prompted change in a number of Protestant denominations, where tolerant silence on birth control gave way to cautious public endorsement of marital contraception. Partly in response to the Anglicans' "defection"--for so the matter appeared to Catholic leaders--Pope Pius XI issued Casti connubii, his encyclical on Christian marriage, in the waning days of 1930. That document provided a comprehensive synthesis of Catholic teaching against contraception and directed the clergy to enunciate this teaching in clear and uncompromising terms, especially in the confessional. The publicity attendant on the encyclical made it harder than ever for Catholics to plead ignorance. So did the increasingly heated secular politics of birth control, which were covered by an increasingly respectful press. Growing numbers of Catholics, moreover, faced confessors and preachers who felt obliged in conscience to enforce church teaching, even at the risk of uncomfortable frankness. Younger Catholics by 1930 had for the most part been habituated to regular reception of the sacraments; they were apt to have recourse to confession more frequently than their parents had done--as often as once a month and some even weekly. As such, they were arguably more likely to hear clerical instruction on sexual discipline and perhaps more vulnerable to increased scrupulosity, especially with regard to sexual sin.

American Catholics in the 1930s were a mostly workingclass population, on whom the Depression bore with particular ferocity. Not surprisingly, their birth rate declined precipitously in the early years of the 1930s, as did the national birth rate. One can hardly imagine more difficult circumstances in which to enforce a ban on contraception. Many laypeople simply ignored the ban, at least as reported by their priests. But the psychological costs of so doing could be terribly high, especially for women. Many priests suffered too, although they were not--like some members of the laity--disposed to doubt the teaching itself. Still, they were often torn between their obligation to enforce church teaching and compassion for the sufferings of their hardpressed parishioners. Some priests even worried that the teaching on birth control was generating the kind of anticlericalism among American Catholics that had hitherto been characteristic of Europe.

It was in this crisis-ridden context that news of the socalled rhythm method was first promulgated. The theory of a monthly sterile period in the female was not new--various nineteenth-century physicians had argued that such a period existed. But nineteenth-century theories were based on erroneous assumptions: most identified as the "safe period" precisely that time in the menstrual cycle when a woman is most likely to conceive. Thus few priests by the 1920s were commending "periodic continence" to their most troubled penitents, although it was licit for them to do so. Late in that decade, though, researchers achieved a more accurate understanding of the human ovulatory cycle, which raised new hopes for the effectiveness of rhythm. These discoveries--initially known only in scientific circles--were introduced to a broad American audience in 1932. That some priests publicly attributed these developments to a beneficent Providence suggests the extent of the pastoral problems by then attendant on the birth-control question.

The secular politics of birth control were such that by the 1930s the nation's bishops were almost immediately made uneasy by public discussion of rhythm among Catholics, since it seemed to sanction a form of birth control. In nearly all dioceses, by the mid-1930s priests were under orders not to preach on rhythm or mention it in the confessional, save to truly desperate married penitents. Diocesan papers were forbidden to carry ads for rhythm books and pamphlets. But if rhythm went "underground" at the time, it did not cease to play a role in Catholic pastoral practice. Indeed, it became increasingly central to that practice in the 1940s and 1950s. Yet not every priest gave an unreserved blessing to the practice of rhythm: as late as the early 1960s, there were those who regarded the method as permissible only in extreme circumstances. But most priests welcomed rhythm as at least a potential solution to a pressing pastoral problem. Men like these ensured that, regardless of the hierarchy's strictures, Catholics would be widely familiar with the method, if less sure of its efficacy than many of the clergy. Many of the same priests were freed, by virtue of their faith in rhythm, to embrace a positive view of marital sex--a subject on which a significant theological discourse was initiated in the 1930s. This initiative bore major fruit after World War II in such efforts as Cana Conference and the Christian Family Movement.

The Second World War and its aftermath brought further change, initially of a mostly positive sort. The pastoral burden with regard to birth control seems to have been lightened, at least to a degree. A recovered economy and a rising birth rate made it easier, certainly in the psychological order, for priests to insist on the teaching about artificial contraception. Still, birth control continued to be a major problem for confessors and a source of worry for those good pastors who knew that it kept a portion of the laity from regular reception of the sacraments. At the same time, the social disruptions attendant on World War II gave the teaching on contraception an enhanced legitimacy for nearly all priests and many of the more devout laity. It was not just the nation's bishops who were alarmed by increased divorce and the growing dominance of what looked to be a purely instrumental approach to the values governing sex. Moreover, by the 1940s Catholics were acutely conscious of standing alone in most of the nation's battles over law and sexual morality. (Those conservative Protestant leaders who agreed with Catholics on such questions were seldom disposed to cooperate publicly with a church that some still regarded as the Whore of Babylon.) For growing numbers of Catholics, the teaching on birth control came to stand for their church's unyielding defense of Christian morals in an increasingly pagan world. It had also emerged by this time as a kind of tribal marker--a proud if onerous badge of Catholic identity.

Developments like these were reinforced in the late 1940s by a culturewide romance with domesticity and a concurrent revival of religiosity across the confessional spectrum. They were also reinforced by a surge in enrollments at Catholic colleges, fueled probably in equal parts by the GI Bill and a rising tide of Catholic piety. In this altered national climate, young Catholics--especially the well educated--embarked with unprecedented enthusiasm on family founding, marrying earlier than their parents had done, and typically bearing more children. They also bore more children than other Americans of their generation, with the college educated--in flat contradiction of demographic precedent--producing on average the largest families of all. This Catholic version of postwar domesticity was suffused with religious meaning and intensity. Young Catholics in this generation were sometimes more ardent than their priests in defending the church's ban on contraception. Their example alone lent legitimacy to that ban and boosted morale among the clergy, for whom its enforcement was still burdensome. Devout young parents, presiding over their growing broods with apparent joy and serenity, preached more eloquently to the community that watched them than the most accomplished sermonizer could do.

Under the tranquil surface of postwar domesticity, however, tensions persisted with regard to contraception and eventually began to intensify. By marrying so early, young Catholics of this generation virtually ensured themselves maximal fertility. Even the most idealistic couples generally experienced financial and emotional strain after the birth of a fourth or fifth child, sometimes in as many years. College educated themselves in many cases, these parents expected no less for their children--at a time when the cost of college was escalating rapidly. Nor were these couples immune to the vastly enhanced cultural authority of a mostly Freudian psychology. Catholics might proudly cling to their own high standards with regard to marriage, but when those standards required the exercise of essentially celibate virtues--as they sooner or later did--it was harder and harder to square those standards with the culture's assumptions about sexuality and marital health.

The more devout, though, seem seldom or never to have had recourse to contraception: only 30 percent of Catholic wives admitted to such in a national study conducted in 1955. Many of the "dissenters," moreover, seem to have had troubled consciences. Birth control figured prominently in confessions heard at Christmas and especially Easter, as reported by many priests. Such confessions were often difficult for priests, who worried at length about "recidivism" with regard to birth control and were frequently vexed by hard cases. They were even more difficult for the laity. The shame attendant on confessing to sexual sin should not be underestimated, especially for penitents raised on preternaturally high standards with regard to purity. Questions of honesty entered in too: Could a penitent claim in good conscience to have a firm purpose of amendment when she knew how likely she was to resume the practice of contraception? Could a penitent profess genuine sorrow for something that he might not regard as intrinsically wrong? Issues like these, addressed from a lay perspective, were seldom aired publicly before 1963. But they simmered beneath the deceptively bright surface of postwar Catholic life, and do much to explain the anger that increasingly characterized the debate over birth control in the mid-to-late 1960s.

The rest of the story is well known, particularly to older Catholics. Numerous factors made for change: a rising level of education, the positive teaching on marital sex endorsed by groups like the Cana Conference, worries about overpopulation, even the first faint stirrings of feminism. And then there was "the pill." First marketed in the United States in 1960, the pill raised potential difficulties for the standard Catholic argument against contraception, which turned on the "deordination" of a natural act by means of artificial barriers or the act's lack of completeness. Neither factor was relevant, strictly speaking, to the pill. Precisely for this reason, the pill provided an unprecedented opening for theological challenges to the traditional teaching. Dr. John Rock, the pill's Catholic codeveloper, was a pioneer in this regard, arguing in The Time Has Come (1963) for the pill's status as an acceptably "natural" mode of fertility control, analogous to the rhythm method. Rock's efforts as a theologian were generally derided. But more authoritative voices were soon being heard, likewise asserting the pill's fundamental difference from older methods of contraception. Led by the already venerable Bernard Haring and young Turks like the moral theologian Charles Curran, the resulting debate over marital sex had a far-reaching impact on priests as well as the married laity.

By 1964, the seemingly quiescent laity had acquired a public voice. Writing initially in lay-edited journals like Jubilee and Commonweal, highly educated members of the laity began to speak--tentatively at first and later with growing boldness--the language of experience with regard to Catholic doctrine on marriage. What to do when obedience to church teaching caused harm to one's marriage and palpable damage to one's children? Lay writers probed the dilemma with homely eloquence. Many were bitter veterans of the rhythm method, which they typically excoriated as destructive of marital happiness and of dubious value as a means of family planning. Even those who had once endorsed the church's stand on contraception as admirably countercultural, at least in the context of American hypermaterialism, now questioned that position. Given the global "population explosion" and the expanded educational needs of the young, both unprecedented phenomena, was it not suddenly possible to sin by having a child? And what about the highly educated woman--for American Catholics, at least, another unprecedented phenomenon--who longed both for children and her rightful share of the world's work?

The Catholic debate over contraception quickly migrated to the mainstream media. Probably the majority of lay Catholics followed it via television and mass-circulation magazines. The coverage in such venues was invariably sympathetic to the laity, whose sufferings at the hands of the church provoked a kind of incredulous horror on the part of many media commentators. Pundits also suggested that the teaching was bound to change, given the logic of the Second Vatican Council and the existence of a papally appointed commission on the regulation of fertility. The net effect was to raise expectations for such a change--expectations that in retrospect seem wildly inflated, given the tenor of papal statements on the subject, convoluted though these sometimes were. More damagingly, secular media commentary reinforced for Catholics something that many had already intuited--that their church's grave error on the birth-control front had been its refusal to speak the language of experience.

In the end, most Catholic laypeople solved the birth-control problem on their own. On the eve of Humanae vitae, promulgated in July 1968, a majority of Catholic couples in their childbearing years were already using forbidden means to limit the size of their families. Paul VI's encyclical prompted every such couple, and also those who were teetering on the brink of disobedience, to some hard thinking about church authority. Most concluded, and in remarkably short order, that at least on this intimate matter individual conscience reigned supreme. In that limited sense, the birth-control crisis was over--resolved, for all practical purposes, by the laity who had forced it in the first place. Lay rejection of the teaching on contraception actually accelerated in the wake of Humanae vitae, especially among the young. Fully 78 percent of Catholic married women aged twenty to twenty-four, according to a study done in 1970, were limiting their families by a means other than abstinence or rhythm. It would not be long before Catholic contraceptive practice differed hardly at all from that of other Americans.

But as every thoughtful Catholic knows, the birth-control crisis had tremendous fallout. If the laity were emancipated by Humanae vitae, as certain radical commentators had it, some were also embittered by its seeming rejection of the laity's public witness. Only a relative handful, in all likelihood, left the church as a direct result of the encyclical. Much larger numbers seem to have distanced themselves from the institutional church in a psychic sense. Even hitherto "core" Catholics became less regular in their attendance at Mass. Growing numbers went infrequently to confession, or even gave up on the sacrament entirely. (The decline in confession preceded the encyclical, but still had a great deal to do with contraception.) The collapse of confession meant that fewer and fewer Catholics had one-on-one contact with their priests, a problem exacerbated by a growing shortage of clergy.

Perhaps most troubling, increasing numbers of Catholics came to assume that forming one's conscience on sexual matters was an essentially private endeavor. The celibate clergy were inevitably, if unfairly, discredited as authorities on sexual morality by the advent of Humanae vitae. And since most retreated into silence in the wake of the encyclical, many priests inadvertently compounded their marginal status as moral arbiters. The same might be said of their bishops. Shortly after the promulgation of Humanae vitae, almost no Catholic leaders were talking publicly about contraception--not bishops, not parish priests, not even moral theologians. The married laity were on their own, or so the silence seemed to say.

Silence on contraception inevitably led to an even greater silence--this one around the subject of sexual morality generally. At a time of almost breathtaking change in sexual values and behavior, church leaders had little to offer beyond what theologian Gerard Sloyan has called "prohibitions without explanations." Among the laity, the paralysis of leadership further eroded an already weakened sense of connectedness to the institutional church. Numerous factors were at play, of course. With Catholics no longer a "ghettoized" population, they were vulnerable as never before to America's individualist ethos and its growing climate of suspicion toward institutional authority. But nothing was as devastating to the church's credibility as Humanae vitae and the paralysis it generated. No religious leadership can afford to be seen by large numbers of its putative flock as irrelevant to their most immediate moral dilemmas.

The leadership vacuum took its heaviest toll on parish priests. They had begun the decade of the 1960s in an apparent state of robust confidence, especially with regard to sexual morality--the issue around which the lion's share of confessions then centered. None of the priests I interviewed remembers doubting the teaching on contraception prior to the council, save occasional private regrets about the teaching's rigidity. Period literature suggests that this was true of American priests generally. Most looked to refinements of the rhythm method to solve the problems they regularly confronted as confessors. Nearly all were proud of having been gentle confessors, even with "recidivist" penitents. None anticipated that birth control would soon erupt as the single most divisive issue in the church. Nor did they expect a debate over celibacy, an issue with obvious relevance to the looming debate over contraception.

Once that debate was joined, it led to a marked diminution of confidence and even moral authority for growing numbers of priests. It was lay experience, after all, that ultimately set the moral agenda with regard to birth control. A celibate clergy seemed more and more irrelevant to the debate, not only in the eyes of the liberal laity but in those of many priests themselves. Growing numbers of priests, indeed, found it hard to square their celibacy with the positive theology of marital sex that increasingly framed the debate. Did the celibate's moral witness not suffer by comparison to the other-centeredness of married love? Was the very ideal of celibacy not premised on a truncated, even damaging, view of the psyche? Young priests in particular were more and more troubled by such doubts.

Difficulties in the confessional intensified the problem. It was not just that penitents were fewer in number, a trend that was evident by 1966. More painful was one's inability to give firm guidance to the many penitents who still asked, and now sometimes argued, about church teaching on contraception. By the mid-1960s, that teaching looked to many priests to be in a genuine state of doubt, although most bishops were instructing their clergy to uphold it. In the circumstances, many priests believed they could go no further than telling their more assertive penitents to follow their consciences.

Humanae vitae thus had the effect, particularly for younger men, of exacerbating an already corrosive crisis of priestly morale and identity. Roughly half of American priests, according to a 1969 survey, disagreed with the encyclical's conclusions. But relatively few were willing to make their disagreement public, either for fear of a punitive bishop or reluctance to put a tolerant ordinary on the spot. Given the period's romance with authenticity, it was almost inevitable that many such men should feel a bit cowardly, and even dishonest. They might feel superfluous, too, faced with a mostly empty confessional and a laity seemingly at home with its newly won moral independence. Coupled with a flood of resignations from the priesthood and sharply diminished seminary enrollments, the situation was terribly damaging to clerical morale. By the late 1960s, growing numbers of men were doubting the meaning, and not simply the efficacy, of their lives as priests.

Humanae vitae might best be understood as having terminated a necessary and, in fact, long-delayed conversation within the church. What is sex for? What is the nature of marriage? We need answers to these questions today no less urgently than in the 1960s. We know that reverence for life must lie at the heart of an authentically Christian sexual ethic. But what does this mean on a crowded planet, where women rightly claim equality, and reproductive technologies are evolving with bewildering rapidity? For a brief few years in the mid-1960s, American Catholics did indeed talk about these problems as a church. True, the conversation was sometimes awkward and even painful. Necessary conversations often are, especially when they center simultaneously on sex and authority. Too much anger attended the conversation's latter stages, a reflection in part of a souring national mood. But it was a genuine conversation nonetheless, to which many Catholics--priests as well as laity--brought their most intimate concerns and experiences.

When this conversation was abruptly terminated, the effect was to isolate its various parties and exacerbate their suspicions of one another. Most of the laity simply claimed the realm of sexual decision making as peculiarly their own, relieved on one level by clerical silence, but resentful of it too. I am not the only Catholic parent to have felt abandoned by the church as I steered my offspring through the churning seas of adolescence after the "sexual revolution." The bishops, for their part, mostly retreated behind high administrative walls, venturesome for a time about social justice but oddly disconnected about sex. The result has been a now-pervasive tendency for the laity to regard their bishops as not only remote but even dishonest, at least on the sexual front--a problem that preceded the current sexual-abuse scandals and contributed to the laity's outrage over the behavior of bishops.

For priests, the abrupt termination of the conversation was especially isolating. Their status as moral authorities was disastrously undermined, as we have just seen. And their own pressing issues with regard to sex--mandatory celibacy, first and foremost--were essentially swept aside. The priests I interviewed bore frequent, if sometimes inadvertent, witness to the frustrations thereby generated. A surprising number were eager to talk to me, despite the delicate nature of my subject matter. Some actually spoke in terms of unfinished business--or a truncated conversation, if you will. Others, after first asserting that they did not remember much about pastoral practice in the distant 1950s, were subsequently moved to detailed recollections of their long-ago private wrestling with the birth-control problem. Perhaps most important, nearly all evinced distress at what they saw as the church's present-day impotence about sexual morality. Rather like the laity, many of these men felt abandoned by the church--fumbling as finite individuals with the hard problems of contemporary sexuality, wondering what words to speak to the seemingly alien young.

That the priests I interviewed were so admirable made their distress especially hard to contemplate. They were obviously a self-selected group, given my subject matter and mode of locating interviewees. Typically I asked priest-colleagues or the interviewees themselves for the names of likely prospects. I did not strive for geographic balance, given my limited research budget. The majority came from the upper Midwest, where progressive currents in Catholicism have long been particularly strong. At the same time, these were men who had stayed in the priesthood, even as many of their confreres were leaving. And few gave voice to radical views, whether on theology or politics.

What were they like--my self-selected population of priest-interviewees? To a man, my informants were gracious and intelligent; nearly all were widely read; most were psychologically acute. They exhibited a splendid sense of humor too, usually of the dry variety. With one or two exceptions, they were deeply pastoral in orientation--immersed in the lives of their far too numerous parishioners, defining their priesthood in terms of service. Even those who were officially retired were still actively involved in parish ministry--happy, in many instances, to have surrendered the administrative burdens of a pastorate for a life wholly centered on liturgy, Christian education, and various parish activities. But for all their energy and commitment, the priests I spoke with were often uncertain about the efficacy of their ministry and deeply unhappy about their relations with authority in the church.

It has been a great comfort for me to think of them in these dispiriting days. Yet I have often wondered about their current mood. Do they feel even more estranged from their bishops? Even more uncertain about their role in the lives of many of the laity, perhaps especially the young? On both counts, I suspect the answer is yes. All the more reason, then, not to present them--as an episcopal fait accompli--with "an easily understandable booklet" explaining why contraception is always wrong. Priests like these deserve better. So does the laity.

RELATED ARTICLE: October, Last Sail

Among the last boats in the harbor, ours
seems glad for human company: you board,
and El Poeta rocks you lovingly.
I watch you from the pebbled beach, unsure.
But soon enough we're sailing out, the day
unpromising and cold; the air is gray,
the sun a milky yellow pearl inside
an oyster's opalescent shell. We round
the great curved sandy point, the open sea
monotonously green, while back on shore
the distant oranges and browns explain
the ancients' understanding of the earth's
emotions: anger mixed with mourning, loss
so vast that only god could suffer it.
I look to you for comfort, but your eyes
prefer how the horizon never ends.

Rafael Campo

Leslie Woodcock Tentler is professor of history at The Catholic University of America. Her Catholics and Contraception: An American History will be published in the fall by Cornell University Press.