Contraception and the Infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium

I A WORK published in 1963, one of the present authors and another collaborator considered the question whether the received Catholic teaching on contraception had been proposed infallibly. In summing up theological opinion to 1962, they said the teaching that contraception is intrinsically and gravely immoral is "at least definable doctrine." In using this expression, they did not intend to create a new category between infallibility and noninfallibility. Rather, by the words "at least definable doctrine" they intended to embrace the judgments of various groups of theologians. One group held that Pius XI defined the doctrine ex cathedra in Casti connubii; a second group held that he only reaffirmed there a teaching already proposed infallibly by the ordinary magisterium; a third group made various comments which seemed compatible with the view that the received teaching could be defined. Like the second group, the collaborators in the 1963 publication judged that the received Catholic teaching on contraception had been infallibly proposed by the ordinary magisterium. This judgment was based on available evidence indicating that a world-wide survey of Catholic bishops would have shown that they all accepted and taught the received teaching. In this same study its coauthors pointed out that Pius XI and Pius XII did not propose a new teaching on contraception but repeated a teaching reaching back through the centuries. Even those Anglicans who supported the approval of contraception in 1930 admitted the existence of a long Christian tradition, although they denied the power of this tradition to bind the judgment of Christians today. The coauthors argued that one could show that the tradition is normative for Catholics by considering 1 John C. Ford, S.J., and Gerald Kelly, S.J., Contemporary Moral Theology 2: Marriage Questions (Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1964) 263-71. 2 Ibid. 271. 3 Charles E. Curran, Robert E. Hunt, and the "Subject Professors" with John F. Hunt and Terrence R. Connelly, Dissent in and for the Church: Theologians and Humanae vitae (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969) 177, misunderstood the intent in this way.