Enforcing the Encyclical

Extract

The correspondence columns of the Catholic Press have carried frequent assertions of the duty of submitting to papal authority in the matter of contraception, and defences of the disciplinary measures taken against some priests to secure such submission. Few appear, however, to have raised any doubts about the justice of such exercises of authority, save those who have continued to deny the correctness of the papal teaching. My intention in this article is to conduct just such a scrutiny.

The claim of that traditional teaching on contraception which was upheld by the Pope’s Encyclical was, of course, that contraception is contrary to the natural law, that is, that it is capable of being recognized as intrinsically and unconditionally immoral on the basis of ethical principles which can be arrived at by anyone who believes in God, independently of any special revelation. But, while a supporter of the traditional teaching is thus committed to holding that there are cogent arguments to such a conclusion taking only general moral principles as their starting-point, it is hardly to be supposed that even the most fervent adherent of that view claims that it is possible to achieve certainty on the point on that basis alone. Considered from the standpoint of ethical theory, the question is an intricate and subordinate one, requiring for its satisfactory solution a much firmer basis of general principle than philosophers and theologians have yet succeeded in providing: by relying purely on moral reasoning from general principles, no one could be expected to arrive at a conclusion to which he attached more than a limited degree of probability, and especially so when the question has such grave practical consequences.