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Genders and Sexualities in History

The Schism of ’68

EDITED BY ALANA HARRIS

Genders and Sexualities in History

Series Editors

John Arnold

King’s College

University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Sean Brady Birkbeck College

University of London London, UK

Joanna Bourke Birkbeck College

University of London London, UK

Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, accommodates and fosters new approaches to historical research in the felds of genders and sexualities. The series promotes world-class scholarship, which concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexualities, religions/religiosity, civil society, politics and war.

Historical studies of gender and sexuality have, until recently, been more or less disconnected felds. In recent years, historical analyses of genders and sexualities have synthesised, creating new departures in historiography. The additional connectedness of genders and sexualities with questions of religion, religiosity, development of civil societies, politics and the contexts of war and confict is refective of the movements in scholarship away from narrow history of science and scientifc thought, and history of legal processes approaches, that have dominated these paradigms until recently. The series brings together scholarship from Contemporary, Modern, Early Modern, Medieval, Classical and NonWestern History. The series provides a diachronic forum for scholarship that incorporates new approaches to genders and sexualities in history.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15000

Alana Harris Editor

The Schism of ’68

Catholicism, Contraception and Humanae Vitae in Europe, 1945–1975

Editor

Alana Harris

King’s College London London, UK

Genders and Sexualities in History

ISBN 978-3-319-70810-2 ISBN 978-3-319-70811-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70811-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961118

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Cover credit: Cover image used with kind permission of Paddy Summerfeld from The Oxford Pictures 1968–1978 (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2016)

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my parents, who married before the encyclical and lived and loved in its aftermath.

S erie S e ditor S ’ P reface

The Schism of ’68: Catholics, Contraception and ‘Humanae Vitae’ in Europe, 1945–1975 is a genuinely groundbreaking collection, where international and interdisciplinary new scholarship explores the relationship between Roman Catholicism and global developments in sexuality and women’s reproductive rights in the ‘radical 1960s’. The authors examine the ways in which ordinary Roman Catholic men and women, as well as the Vatican and the news media across Europe and the world, responded to the ‘sex problem’ presented by the development of the anovulant pill in the late 1950s and its rejection as an acceptable form of birth regulation through Pope Paul VI’s infamous encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. The collection brings together historians of gender, sexuality and modern Catholicism to discuss the differing reactions to and reception of the Humanae Vitae encyclical by Catholic laity and clergy, episcopacies, medical professionals and media outlets across Europe. In demonstrating how these debates, and the Roman Catholic Church’s important role within them, interacted with the social and sexual countercultures of the 1960s, the collection makes an essential contribution to a growing historiography of radical social change in the 1960s. It also provides new perspectives and approaches that enrich the historiography of sexuality, of gender, and of religion. In common with all volumes in the ‘Genders and Sexualities in History’ series, The Schism of ’68:

Catholics, Contraception and ‘Humanae Vitae’ in Europe, 1945–1975 presents a multifaceted and meticulously researched scholarly collection, and is a sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the past.

John Arnold

Joanna Bourke

Sean Brady

a cknowledgement S

This volume was conceived through a facetime conversation with Wannes Dupont (then residing in Antwerp) in late 2015. A mutual academic friend had suggested, in view of our shared research interests in religion and sexuality, that we would have a lot to talk about. We certainly did, and the result was a workshop in September 2016 held at King’s College London and attended by many of the contributors to this volume. Through Wannes’s long-standing role as co-chair of the Sexuality Network of the European Social Science History Conference, and co-organiser with me of this London workshop, I wish to acknowledge him formally as the driving force behind the identifcation of those with the necessary interest and expertise to participate in this anthology. I am incredibly grateful for his intellectual insights and support amidst the life transitions and professional changes he has negotiated during the past two years, which have seen him relocate between three academic institutions and multiple countries.

In facilitating the comparative conversations that form the basis of this volume, I thank the faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London who provided fnancial support for the workshop and travel expenses to bring the participants to the UK. Alongside those writing in this collection, there were a number of other presenters whose contribution I wish to recognize, including Jim Bjork, David Geiringer, Carmen Mangion, francisco Molina, Caroline Sägesser, Margaret Scull, Andrea Thomson, and Cécile Vanderpelen. for research support undergirding the introduction and my own chapter, thanks are given to Hannah Elias

and Maya Evans. Dagmar Herzog was a fabulous supporter and advocate in the complicated closing stages of this volume. finally, my love and thanks to the two men in my life who have lived through the twists and turns of the manuscript compilation process and are always encouraging, understanding and productively distracting—Timothy folkard and Sebastian Harris-folkard. Thanks darls.

1 Introduction: The Summer of ’68—Beyond the Secularization Thesis 1

Alana Harris Part I To the Barricades

2 Humanae Vitae: Catholic Attitudes to Birth Control in the Netherlands and Transnational Church Politics, 1945–1975 23 Chris Dols and Maarten van den Bos

3 Of Human Love: Catholics Campaigning for Sexual Aggiornamento in Postwar Belgium 49 Wannes Dupont

4 ‘A Galileo-Crisis Not a Luther Crisis’? English Catholics’ Attitudes to Contraception 73

Alana Harris

Part II Episcopal Controversies

5 Religion and Contraception in Comparative Perspective—Switzerland, 1950–1970 99 Caroline Rusterholz

6 Attempted Disobedience: Humanae Vitae in West Germany and Austria 121 Katharina Ebner and Maria Mesner

Part III Christian Science and Catholic Conservatism

7 The Politics of Catholic Medicine: ‘The Pill’ and Humanae Vitae in Portugal 161 Tiago Pires Marques

8 Humanae Vitae, Birth Control and the Forgotten History of the Catholic Church in Poland 187 Agnieszka Kościańska

Part IV Covering the Controversy

9 A Kind of Reformation in Miniature: The Paradoxical Impact of Humanae Vitae in Italy 211 francesca Vassalle and Massimo faggioli

10 Love in the Time of El Generalísimo: Debates About the Pill in Spain Before and After Humanae Vitae 229 Agata Ignaciuk

11 Reactions to the Papal Encyclical Humanae Vitae: The French Conundrum 251 Martine Sevegrand

and

The Best News Ireland Ever Got? Humanae Vitae’s Reception on the Pope’s Green Island

Catholicism Behind the Iron Curtain: Czechoslovak and Hungarian Responses to Humanae Vitae

e ditor and c ontributor S

About the Editor

Alana Harris is a Lecturer in Modern British History at King’s College London. She is the author of Faith in the Family: A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism, 1945–1982 (2013) and has published numerous articles on the intersections of gender, sexuality, devotional cultures and material religion. She is currently researching the changing attitudes of English Catholics, and particularly medical practitioners, to contraception across the twentieth century.

Contributors

Maarten van den Bos is General Secretary of the Banning Association, a platform for debate on religion, politics, and modern society associated with the Dutch Labour Party. He has published extensively on the history of Dutch Catholicism, including Verlangen naar Vernieuwing. Nederlands katholicisme, 1953–2003 and a book on the history of the Dutch section of the international Catholic peace movement, Pax Christi: Mensen van goede wil. Pax Christi 1948–2013.

Chris Dols studied history in Nijmegen, Amsterdam, and Dundee (where he did his doctorate) and is an archivist at the Centre for the Heritage of Religious Life in the Netherlands. He has published extensively on religious transformations in the Dutch Catholic community.

Recent publications include Fact Factory. Sociological Expertise and Episcopal Decision Making in the Netherlands 1946–1975, and Pastoral Sociology in Western Europe, 1940–1970 (Leiden/Boston, co-edited with Herman Paul).

Wannes Dupont is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Yale-NUS College, having previously held a Cabeaux-Jacobs fellowship at the Belgian American Educational foundation (Yale) and at the Research foundation flanders (Antwerp). His recent publications address various aspects of the history of sexuality and biopolitics, including a chapter in Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe. Mobilizing Against Equality and co-authorship of Verzwegen Verlangen (Hidden Desires, 2017).

Katharina Ebner is a Research Associate at the Chair of Moral Theology at the University of Bonn. She is a Catholic theologian working on questions of religion, family, sexuality and gender in the twentieth century. Her doctoral thesis on religious references in parliamentary debates on homosexuality is currently in press.

Massimo Faggioli is a Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. His publications in English include the books Sorting Out Catholicism. Brief History of the New Ecclesial Movements (2014); A Council for the Global Church. Receiving Vatican II in History (2015), and Catholicism and Citizenship: Political Cultures of the Church in the Twenty-First Century (2017).

Mary Heimann is Chair in Modern European History and Director of International Relations at Cardiff University in Wales. She is the author of Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed and Catholic Devotion in Victorian England

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published extensively on the histories of sexuality and religion in Europe and the United States, including Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (2011). Her most recent book is Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (2017), and she is currently working on a project entitled Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (forthcoming 2018).

Agata Ignaciuk obtained her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Granada, Spain and is a NCN PoLoNEZ 2—Marie Skłodowska-Curie CofUND fellow at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw and associate of the Department of the History of Science, University of Granada. She has recently published Anticoncepción, mujeres y género. La píldora en España y Polonia (1960–1980) (with Teresa ortiz-Gómez, 2016).

Agnieszka Kościańska received her Ph.D. (2007) and her habilitation (2015) in ethnology/cultural anthropology from the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw and a senior researcher in a HERA grant (Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing PreHIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures). Her new monograph is entitled To See a Moose. The History of Polish Sex Education from the First Lesson to the Internet (in Polish, 2017).

Tiago Pires Marques obtained his Ph.D. in History at the European University Institute (2007) and has been a fCT Investigator at the Centre for Social Studies (University of Coimbra) since 2014. His sociohistorical research sits at the intersections of the history of medicine, law and religion, and his latest co-edited publication is Género e interioridade na vida religiosa (2017).

Maria Mesner teaches history at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, heads the Kreisky-Archives and is a co-editor of Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (Austrian Journal for Historical Studies). Alongside various volumes on de-nazifcation and reproduction, she has authored two monographs on reproductive history and numerous articles on the contraceptive, gendered and political history of Austria (and the US).

Peter Murray is a Lecturer in Sociology at Maynooth University. His book Facilitating the Future? US Aid, European Integration and Irish Industrial Viability, 1948–73 was published in 2009, and he is the coauthor (with Maria feeney) of Church State and Social Science in Ireland: Knowledge Institutions and the Rebalancing of Power, 1937–73 (2016).

Caroline Rusterholz is SNSf Postdoc fellow and Associate Research fellow at Birkbeck University, London. Her research interests cover the

felds of the histories of Switzerland, Britain and france in the twentieth century. She is interested in the social history of medicine, the history of sexuality and reproduction, and the history of the family.

Martine Sevegrand is a historian. In 1994, she defended her doctoral thesis on french Catholics and birth control (1898–1968), later published as Les enfants du bon Dieu (1995). She has had a dozen books published, including edited letters sent to Abbé Viollet on sexual problems (1942–1943) and Vers une église sans prêtres. La crise du clergé séculier en France (1945–1978) (2005). She is an associate member of the CNRS research group on Societies, Religions and Secularism.

Gábor Szegedi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Masaryk University in Brno, working on expert knowledge and sexuality in Hungary under state socialism. Previously a research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, he holds a Ph.D. in Comparative History from the Central European University, Hungary.

Francesca Vassalle is a Doctoral Candidate in the History Department at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she is completing a dissertation on the history of contraception in post-fascist Italy from 1943 to 1978.

a bbreviation S

CA Catholic Action, defned by Pope Pius XI in 1927 as ‘the participation of the laity in the apostolate of the hierarchy’

CC Casti Connubi (of Chaste Wedlock), Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, 31 December 1930

GS Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Promulgated by Pope Paul VI, 7 December 1965

HV Humanae Vitae (of Human Life), Encyclical of Pope Paul VI, 25 July 1968

LG Lumen Gentium (Light of the Nations), Dogmatic Constitution in the Church, promulgated by Pope Paul VI, 21 November 1964

Pontifcal Commission Pontifcal Commission on Population, family and Birth, established by Pope John XXIII, and expanded by Pope Paul VI (1963–66)

l i S t of f igure S

fig. 2.1 Cardinal Alfrink and Pope Paul VI, in an ironic hippy vision of other unlikely peacemakers, and to the tune of the Beatles’ 1967 hit. Published in Elsevier Magazine, 8 August 1970 (Reproduced with kind permission of KDC–KLiB Nijmegen)

fig. 4.1 John Ryan, ‘Drawing it fne’ cartoon: ‘Encyclical? What encyclical?’ Catholic Herald, 2 August 1968, p. 1 (Reproduced with kind permission of Isabel Ryan)

fig. 6.1 Members of the ‘Catholic opposition’ in their editorial offce during the Katholikentag in Essen (1968). Pictured are editorial staff Ralf Driver, Gottfried Neuen, Willi Ingenhoven, and a visitor (Reproduced with kind permission of fotosammlung Hans Lachmann, Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland, Düsseldorf)

fig. 6.2 The protest banner ‘sich beugen und zeugen’ (submit and procreate) displayed during a panel discussion at the Katholikentag in Essen (1968) (Reproduced with kind permission of fotosammlung Hans Lachmann, Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland, Düsseldorf)

fig. 7.1 Cover of a satire by Jose Vilhena on the reception of the pill in Portugal within various social settings (Reproduced with kind permission of Luis Vilhena’s estate)

40

81

127

133

173

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Summer of ’68—Beyond the Secularization Thesis

Alana Harris

In 1960, a year before the introduction of Searle’s contraceptive pill ‘Conovid’ to the British market,1 the married layman, Taunton schoolmaster and co-founder of the annual ‘Catholic People’s Weeks’ (frst held at Wadham College, oxford in 1945) published Sex and the Christian. 2 Produced within the Burns and oates ‘faith and fact’ series, this scholarly but highly accessible pamphlet advocated a Christian approach to sex3 and the ‘formation of a solid doctrine of sexuality based on the facts of revelation and of science’.4 As Trevett opined in the opening pages:

We have had enough of Sunday piety and the Christian-shut-up-in-thecastle mentality. We cannot go on forever trying to reconcile papal encyclicals on marriage with the Hollywood code by which most of our friends more or less live. … Mere pious exhortation, mere negative warnings are useless against this sort of barrage. We must look for weapons in a better armoury. Peter Maurin never tired of calling on Catholics, clerical and laity, to bring out what he would not surely call, were he alive, the ‘nuclear’ forces of the Church’s doctrine. only truth can shatter falsehood, only the dynamic force of revelation can bring all that is genuine and good in the

A. Harris (*)

King’s College London, London, UK

e-mail: alana.harris@kcl.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018

A. Harris (ed.), The Schism of ’68, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70811-9_1

modern desire for a human and humane approach to love and sex into the great creative and redemptive synthesis which our Lord has achieved for our race. If this book can give a few pointers to this living spring of doctrine, it will have served its purpose.5

In chapters surveying sources as diverse as the Kinsey report and the work of Jung, coupled with sacramental theology and justifed with the quip that ‘the patron of the Christian sexologist is not the ostrich’,6 Trevett was representative of a reforming strand of progressive theologians, confessors, doctors, psychologists and educated laity in Britain, but most particularly on the Continent, seeking to present ‘Catholic truth in the scientifc age’. As Trevett surmised:

The sex problem is one of the most acute of our time; it offers the Christian a great opportunity. He must not think he has answered every question by quoting Canon Law. Law is no substitute for theology, still less for love.7

This volume surveys the ways in which ordinary Catholic men and women, as well as the Vatican and the news media across Europe and the world, responded to the intensifcation of the ‘sex problem’ presented by the development of the anovulant pill in the late 1950s and its rejection as a licit form of birth regulation through Pope Paul VI’s infamous encyclical Humanae Vitae (HV) on 25 July 1968. That Reginald Trevett’s call for the prioritization of the experiences of the laity over male celibates continued to speak years later into this febrile debate—despite the author’s clear rejection of artifcial barrier contraception and cautious sanction of the Knaus-ogino or ‘rhythm method’8—is hinted at by the photograph on the front cover of this edited collection. Taken in the oxford University Parks in the Summer of 1968 by Paddy Summerfeld, then a young man wrestling (as many within his generation) with the implications and actualities of the ‘sexual revolution’ and the socioeconomic changes wrought by affuence,9 the young woman sunbathing, reading and musing is evocative of the many enquiring Christians in the 1960s whose loyal dissent led to an irreparable rift in the church. It is their attempts to reconcile their faith with, as Trevett called it, ‘the “sexual climate” of our times’,10 and their anguished engagement with and interrogation of the papal prohibition, which form the subject of this book.

This edited collection brings together historians of gender, sexuality and modern Catholicism to discuss the differing reactions to and reception of the HV encyclical by Catholic laity and clergy, episcopacies, medical professionals and media outlets across Europe. It situates the Vatican’s highly controversial determination that the use of ‘artifcial’ contraception by Catholics is ‘intrinsically wrong’11 within the longer trajectory of debates about ‘birth control’ and the role of sex within companionate marriage emerging since the Second World War. In demonstrating how these debates, and the Catholic church’s important role within them, interacted with the social and sexual countercultures of the 1960s, it seeks to make an essential contribution to a growing historiography exploring ‘around ’68’. It also aims to contextualize and illuminate a lived history of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and its afterlife, so often written from a predominantly theological perspective, by exploring the gendered, material and metaphysical grounds for heated opposition to and reinterpretation of the Vatican ruling. Common to these historiographical interventions is a focussed interrogation of the ‘secularization thesis’ as a descriptive and explanatory paradigm,12 explored through the comparative perspective of fourteen European case studies. The composite picture of this geographically expansive and thematically broad enquiry illuminates the complex and divergent ways in which evolving mentalities about marriage, sexuality and reproduction, as well as conservative reactions (including HV itself and its interlocutors), had long histories, resonated with particular national circumstances, and were relayed through transnational networks of activists and intellectuals. The attempts by liberal, progressive Catholics to marry the insights of science, sociology and psychology with church teachings and sacramental theology culminated, ultimately, in an irreconcilable rent within the church, reinforced by the swing towards moral conservatism throughout Europe in the decade that followed. This was intensifed through the ‘cultural wars’ which played out through the papacy of John Paul II and his ‘theology of the body’ that Herzog discusses in the Afterword. on the cusp of the fftieth anniversary of HV, these theological tensions remain unresolved, as the recent comments of Pope francis demonstrate.13 Yet for those Catholics who remained within the church after the furore, at least 78% of whom today support the use of contraceptives,14 they have found their own solutions and ethical resolutions in living and loving after the encyclical.

Setting the Scene to the SPiritual criSiS of ’68: vatican ii and the Pontifical commiSSion

The Second Vatican Council, the twenty-frst ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic church, was announced by Pope John XXIII on 25 January 1959 and convened, after four years of preparation, on 11 october 1962. Differing from previous Councils held to combat heresy or hone doctrinal propositions, this gathering in Rome of about 2500 bishops from around the world was centred on a programme that the Pope defned as aggiornamento (updating). In his opening address, the Pope denounced those ‘prophets of doom’ continually warning that the modern world is ‘full of prevarication and ruin’.15 Instead, he insisted that at the heart of the conciliar agenda was ‘Christ … ever resplendent as the centre of history and life’ and that ‘by bringing herself up to date where required, and by wisely organizing mutual cooperation, the Church will make individuals, families and peoples really turn their minds to heavenly things.’16

The Council ran over four sessions until 8 December 1965, the last three sessions under the leadership of Pope Paul VI, and ratifed sixteen documents immensely affecting most areas of the Catholic church’s selfdefnition and identity. one of the foremost religious chroniclers of the Council, Giuseppe Alberigo, has evaluated the Council’s signifcance as ‘the most important event in the history of the Roman Catholic church since the Protestant Reformation’.17 The Council’s pronouncements on biblical scholarship; the sanction given to Mass in the vernacular; the nature of the church and the pivotal part played by the laity; and the encouragement given to ecumenism and interreligious dialogue are important components justifying such an assessment. for present puroses, however, beyond the so-called spirit of the Council and expectations of reform that it generated,18 two conciliar documents were mobilized, particularly within the heated debates explored within this volume. The frst, the twinned and still contentious concepts of conciliarism and collegiality, stemmed from the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church [Lumen Gentium (LG), 21 November 1964]. This document implicitly held that there are checks on papal power through the greater authority of a council of bishops over one bishop (even the Bishop of Rome) and that the Pope governs the church in collaboration with the bishops of local churches, respecting their proper authority and autonomy.19 Into this context, the substance of what the Second Vatican Council had to

say about ‘fostering the nobility of marriage and the family’20 within the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World [Gaudium et Spes (GS), 7 December 1965] emerged as a pivotal touchstone in seeking to interpret Paul VI’s encyclical three years later.21 Controversy then, as now, turned on paragraphs §47–52,22 and in particular §50, which eschewed discussion of the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ ends of marriage, bypassing the 1930 encyclical Casti Connunbii’s (CC) adjudication that the conjugal act was intrinsically tied to procreation, with unitive love a subsidiary good23 and women subservient to their husbands.24

The discussion of birth control within this section of GS, collected under the heading ‘some problems of special urgency’, was concise, circumspect, even cryptic in its exhortation to ‘responsible parenthood’. Confned to one sentence, it held: ‘sons of the Church may not undertake methods of birth control which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law’.25 This statement was necessarily conditional and circumscribed as John XXIII had established, following the questions raised at the Council in 1963, a separate commission to discuss the issue. Initially a secret gathering of six European laymen, it met in Louvain in october 1963 for reasons explored more fully in Dupont’s chapter.26 What would become the Pontifcal Commission on Population, family and Birth (hereafter the Pontifcal Commission) was expanded under the aegis of Paul VI to include 72 members from fve continents, encompassing theologians, physicians and psychologists, demographers, economists and sociologists, as well as married laity and an executive committee of 16 bishops.27 The intricacies of the Pontifcal Commission’s deliberations between 1964 and 1966 have been authoritatively reconstructed by Time magazine correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser, who contemporaneously covered the happenings in Rome28 and later penned The Encyclical That Never Was (1985). His eminently readable history, drawing upon participant interviews as well as archival sources, explained the process behind the formation of the Commission’s fnal report (never published, but leaked to the media in the spring of 1967)‚29 which recommended that ‘the regulation of contraception appears necessary for many couples who wish to achieve a responsible, open and reasonable parenthood’30 and that the use of contraceptives or ‘artifcial intervention’ (adjudged against the criteria of ‘generous’ and ‘responsible fruitfulness’) is a natural extension of the calculated sterile period sanctioned by Pope Pius XII.31 As 64 of the 69 voting members approved this document, it became known as

the ‘Majority Report’, and its sensationalized, global circulation in April 1967 raised expectations of liberalization of the church’s teaching. This was despite the demurrer of Commission member John ford SJ who, with the assistance of Thomistic philosopher Germain Grisez, drafted a dissenting working paper signed by three other theologian priests (including its President and head of the Curia, Cardinal ottaviani, and the papal theologian Bishop Colombo).32 What became known as the ‘Minority Report’ formed the basis of the ‘Magisterium’s reply’ in the shape of HV, issued a year later and disregarding the informed deliberations and express recommendations of the experts within the Pontifcal Commission. In strident terms, and with question marks surrounding its status as infallible teaching, the encyclical held that in accordance with natural law ‘each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life’ (§11), that use of any form of birth control other than the ‘infertile period’ was unlawful (§14), and that the consequences of artifcial birth control are ‘marital infdelity and a general lowering of moral standards’ (§17).

Given the nature of the Second Vatican Council as an epochal, global mass media event, and the combustive issues considered by the Pontifcal Commission which touched upon the intimate lives of billions of Catholics around the world, it is not surprising that both events have generated a formidable literature in multiple languages.33 Nevertheless, as Cummings, Matovina and orsi have recently observed, debates about the Council’s ‘meanings, and more broadly its role in modern Catholicism and in global history, have largely proceeded via close theological study of its authoritative documents’.34 Evaluating the changes effected in this period of exhilarating reform and dizzying renewal, and the role of HV as a lightning rod for debates then (and now) about biopolitics and the legacies of the 1960s,35 most of the existing literature is intensely polarized and personally invested in evaluations of ‘rupture’ or ‘continuity’ within a theological hermeneutic seeking to explain the fortunes of Catholicism in the subsequent decades.36 This collection, by using a comparative methodology which probes the particular, national histories of the reception of the Council, reactions to the encyclical, and longer-term developments in the socioeconomic and sexological framings of marriage, family, and sexuality, seeks to offer a way through this interpretative impasse. In clusters of chapters around the themes of overt, politicized activism; the differing

but also intersecting responses of national episcopacies; the importance of Catholic doctors; and the dialogue between faith, medicine and the social sciences, a rich and textured mosaic emerges that illustrates the dynamism and creativity of progressive opinion within Catholic Europe across the post-war period. Crucial players in shaping and refecting this variegated response were the media, and varying church–State relations, spanning from the communist East and social democratic nations, through to the resilient authoritarian regimes of Mediterranean Europe. The case studies commissioned, many offering the frst sustained discussion of these issues, offer close-grained, experiential histories of the church in all its transnational and relational complexity. Its aim, taking up the challenge that Dagmar Herzog set nearly a decade ago, is to ‘integrate histories of sex and religion’37 and use ‘each unique national case …to see the others in a new light and to challenge the prevailing explanatory frameworks’.38 Each chapter provides an overview of the place of Catholicism in that national setting, alongside a brief survey of its sexual landscape after the Second World War and into the 1960s. Most explore the ways in which national episcopacies, and key theological commentators, managed the thwarted expectations of the faithful in the wake of July ’68, yet they also offer, where possible, path-breaking insights into the reactions of the laity— through correspondence, concerted resistance campaigns, combative publications, scholarly interventions and media coverage. Admittedly, these perspectives may often be those of an educated, articulate and self-confdent middle class, competing with (or complementing) the arcane theological abstractions of ‘natural law’ and adjudications about the ex cathedra status of the document by a clerical elite. Nevertheless, most chapters also offer glimpses of the ‘ordinary person in the pew’ (or leaving the ecclesial threshold), be they correspondents writing in halting English and poor grammar to the Archbishop of Westminster or the views of Roman working-class mothers recorded by sex reformer Maria Luisa Zardini De Marchi. In other chapters, we see contemporaneous Catholic debates conjoined (or quarantined) from the political tumult on the streets, be that in Paris or in Prague. HV represented a ‘spiritual’ crisis or ‘religious’ reformation in a year of revolutions across the Continent, but the cleavages within the church that it revealed were of long-standing gestation, and its aftershocks continue to play into the present.

narrating the SixtieS: Secularization and the Sexual revolution

In his most recent, magisterial and comparative survey of European Catholic activists seeking to transform society in accordance with the precepts of the Second Vatican Council, and as a complement to his earlier The Spirit of ’68 volume,39 Gerd-Rainer Horn has noted the propensity of historians of the 1960s and 1970s to narrate the social and cultural transformations of these decades as ‘virtually exclusive secular affairs’.40 His explanation for this oversight, indeed the marked historiographical silence, is that ‘today’s historians mostly hail from the secular Left and thus have neither the ideological arsenal of tools nor the relevant political background and interest to discover a religious undercurrent of radical change which appeared to go against the grain.’41 This observation is certainly true of the frst wave of sustained scholarship about the 1960s, epitomized by Arthur Marwick who confned discussion of religion to a mere three pages,42 and concluded that ‘it has to be stated that throughout the sixties the Catholic Church tended to operate as a centre of opposition to all the great movements aiming towards greater freedom for ordinary human beings’.43 Yet more recent histories of the 1960s continue, for the most part, to ignore the role played by religious actors in the utopian activism, synchronic social movements and sexual reconfgurations of the period,44 focussing instead on questions of periodization and Eurocentrism.45 Mark Donnelly, for example, in his revisionist history of the sixties gave but two pages to the religious transformations of the period,46 concentrating on structural changes such as the ‘laws on personal morality [and] levels of Christian church attendance’ whilst conversely concluding that although some individuals were ‘swinging’, ‘millions more saw little difference in the ways that they experienced or imagined their daily lives’.47 A notable exception is found in Gerard DeGroot’s The 60s Unplugged where, within a chapter entitled ‘Wilted fowers’, he described the deliberations of Pope Paul VI and reactions to HV, with a focus on the contrast between Latin America’s embrace of the prohibition on birth control as a counter to American neo-imperialist family planning agendas supplanting developmental aid.48 This secularist agenda also characterized much of the historiography surrounding contraception and sexuality in the post-World War II period, such as Hera Cook’s The Long Sexual Revolution, which situates its sole reference to HV 49 in an unwavering characterization of

religion as an inherently and unrelentingly repressive force and the pill as a medical-technological innovation that revolutionized women’s lives overnight,50 opened up the possibility of female sexual pleasure, and liberated them from the tyranny of unfettered childbirth.51 Daniela Danna’s chapter in Gert Hekma’s A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Modern Age similarly characterized the role of the churches as defensive of the ancien régime, and in a brief discussion of HV she drew attention to Dutch Catholic exceptionalism in a portrait of otherwise concerted resistance to female emancipation.52 National surveys of the sexual cultures of twentieth-century Europe have tended to pay slightly more attention to the intersections of newer sexual technologies and cultural mores with the strictures of Catholic teaching. Well before the ‘religious turn’ in histories of gender diagnosed by Morgan and de Groot in 2013,53 editors Edner, Hall, and Hekma included extended discussion of the position of the Catholic church on sexology, birth control and queer sexuality in their Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories. 54 Perhaps the most consistent call for integration and interrogation of sexual and religious cultures has come from Dagmar Herzog, not only within her seminal Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History55 but also in more recent work identifying the need to move beyond a ‘paradigm of liberalization’ to recognize the ‘many ambivalences and confusions the sexual revolution caused from its inception’, not only within national contexts but also between and within churches.56

This myopia is particularly marked within the latest scholarship surrounding 1968, which neglects a religious optic in its exploration of revolutionary phenomena beyond a Western paradigm57 and is marked by a preoccupation with issues of memory and legacy.58 Even frazier and Cohen’s stimulating Gender and Sexuality in 1968, with its call to explore the ‘multiple dimensions of sixties struggles [by expanding] the notion of who and what constituted …political struggles, protagonists and politics’, seems oblivious to the potential of religious actors and theological protesters as candidates for such an extended remit.59 Studies of ’68 with their genesis in oral histories seem to overcome this oversight in part, such as Ronald frazer’s longstanding 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt, 60 complemented and considerably extended by a recent transnational, collaborative project based in oxford which drew from the oral histories of 500 former activists across fourteen countries. Synthesized in the edited volume Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt, 61 which included an

entire chapter on ‘faith’,62 its survey of experiments with worker priests and base communities in france, Spain, Italy and Hungary, alongside the contributions of Catholic trade unions to iconic ’68 protests such as the Lip watch factory strike, led these authors to conclude that ‘rejecting the path of secularism, religious activists found powerful ways to tie protest to belief.’63 They concluded: ‘the sheer scale of this religious rebellion challenges us to rethink “1968” as an inherently secular moment of transformation.’64 However‚ despite that volume’s discussion of the Second Vatican Council, shifting understandings of family and clerical celibacy, and a separate chapter on gender and sexuality,65 HV is not mentioned once.

What is striking in all these examinations of student militancy and revolutionary activities in the sixties, even in those that do adopt a study of the transformation of Catholicism as their focus, is the paucity of specifc analysis of HV and the reticence of authors to integrate the dissension focussed by the encyclical into wider studies of the agendas of ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ Catholics. from James Hitchcock’s near-contemporaneous assessment of The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, in which there are merely three passing references within an otherwise lucid exploration of post-conciliar reform agendas,66 to the cursory treatment in Jay Corrin’s excellent study of a ‘Catholic New Left’ in Catholic Progressives in England After Vatican II, 67 there remains a telling lacuna within Horn’s The Spirit of Vatican II, despite his calls for a reappraised ‘spiritual 60s’.68 Common to these narratives is a celebration of a period of theological and political forescence, followed by disillusionment and declension, and an identifcation of the ‘political’ in strictly structural, materialist and often male terms. This emphasis clearly overlooks the ways in which the widespread and much more inclusive protests by ordinary women and men against HV could complement, complicate and in some instances diversify the strategies and activities of leftist militants, from the protest meetings of the Katholikentag described (and illustrated) in Ebner’s and Mesner’s chapter, to the inherent challenge posed to the fascist regimes of the Iberian peninsula by any post-conciliar activity. Yet beyond such unequivocally political manifestations, this volume contends that these attempts to reconfgure ‘the personal’ within offcial Catholic teachings on love, marriage, family planning and intimate relationships, are inherently ‘political’ if conceptualized through a New Left and later WLM ideological rendering. These protests therefore challenge a narrow