Response to Archbishop Leonard Wall.

(The following observations are by Father Leonard Kennedy, c.s.b.)

Winnipeg--It is surprising that Archbishop Leonard Wall has recently defended the Winnipeg Statement in a brief pastoral letter in his Archdiocesan Catholic News, entitled Moral Truth and Life. The Archbishop tells us that the Canadian bishops met in Winnipeg in 1968 to "enlighten the minds and move the hearts of the faithful." But it was Pope Paul VI who enlightened the minds and tried to move the hearts of the faithful to observe God's law of life and love. The Winnipeg Statement dimmed that light and turned the hearts of the faithful away from the truth, with tragic consequences.

Archbishop Wall implies that Pope Paul VI approved the Winnipeg Statement. I suggest a reading of Msgr. Vincent Foy's 1997 booklet Did Pope Paul Approve the Winnipeg Statement. A Search for Truth. [1] When all the evidence is weighed it is clear that the message of the Holy Father through the Secretary of State was no more than a diplomatic acknowledgment. The same Secretary of State, Cardinal Cicognani, sent an open letter to Msgr. Foy, through the Apostolic Delegate and Archbishop Pocock of Toronto, expressing his personal thanks and that of the Holy Father for a critique severely criticizing the Winnipeg Statement.

It is claimed that at Winnipeg the Canadian bishops declared their support for the teaching of Humanae vitae. Archbishop Wall says: "Their explicit stated position stands: 'We are in accord with the teaching of the Holy Father' (#2)." However, the full text is: "We are in accord with the teaching of the Holy Father concerning the dignity of married life and the necessity of a truly Christian relationship between conjugal love and responsible parenthood" (#2). Where the support for the teaching of Humanae vitae? It did not exist.

In 1968, the bishops deliberately refrained from endorsing the Church's teaching against contraception because, as Bishop Alexander Carter, President of the Conference of Canadian Catholic Bishops at that time, said, "it was something of an identity crisis. For the first time we faced the necessity of making a statement which many felt could not be a simple Amen, a total and formal endorsement of the encyclical. We had to reckon with the fact of widespread dissent from some points of his [the Pope's] teaching among the Catholic faithful, priests, theologians, and probably certain of our own number."

Fr. Edward Sheridan, S.J., a peritus at the Winnipeg meeting, gave an accurate assessment when he said: "The Statement contained no general profession of assent to the whole teaching of Of Human Life [Humanae vitae], and nothing that could be interpreted as adding the local authority of the Canadian Hierarchy to that of the encyclical in general." [2]

Conscience

Archbishop Wall gives us, as does the Winnipeg Statement, a confusing and erroneous description of the role of conscience in the matter of contraception. He quotes a pastoral norm from the 1997 Vademecum for Confessors of the Pontifical Council for the Family which says that it is preferable to let penitents remain in good faith in cases of error due to subjectively invincible ignorance. Yet he does not explain how any Catholics can be in subjectively invincible ignorance concerning the Church's teaching against contraception.

By definition ignorance is invincible only when it cannot be gotten rid of by reasonable diligence commensurate with the importance of the matter. A casual investigation would show that today it is no longer possible to have doubts about the authoritative doctrine of the Church concerning Humanae Vitae and the unacceptability of dissent. [3] Pope John Paul II said, in addressing a conference on Natural Family Planning: "What is taught by the Church on contraception does not belong to material freely debatable among theologians." [4]

The Church's doctrine on the relation of conscience to contraception is given to us clearly and succinctly in Vatican II. We are told that the spouses have the obligation to inform their consciences and conform them to the Church's teaching authority. [5]

The present Holy Father said in a general audience on August 17, 1983: "It is not enough to say we must always follow our conscience. Each one of us must form a right conscience, one that seeks to know the truth as revealed to us by God according to his wise and loving plan."

The sad truth is that the Canadian bishops at Winnipeg sought to provide Catholics with an "out" from God's law. This is plain from a statement of Cardinal Emmett Carter, a principal author of the Winnipeg Statement. He said: "We were trying to create a situation where Catholics would not feel that they were alienated from the Church although in the issue of birth control they could not follow the teaching of the Pope." [6]

To say that Catholics cannot observe the prohibition against contraception is to deny the sufficiency of grace, an error infallibly condemned by the Council of Trent (session 6, ch. 11).

Notes:

(1.) Available from the Ethics Information Centre, 53 Dundas St. E., Suite 308, Toronto, ON, M5B 1C6.

(2.) "Canadian Bishops on Of Human Life," America, Oct. 19, 1968, p. 349.

(3.) L'Osservatore Romano, Nov. 28, 1984.

(4.) Ibid., June 6, 1987.

(5.) The Church in the Modern World, #51. See also Humanae Vitae, #10.

(6.) My Father's Business: A Biography of His Eminence G. Emmett Cardinal Carter (MacMillan of Canada, 1990), p. 107.