When you discussed the 40th anniversary of the 1968 watershed in history, you mentioned but did not dwell upon the Encyclical Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI published two years after the closure of Vatican II. Almost everybody agreed that it contained a magnificent meditation on the beauty of fruitful love, but many were disappointed by its rejection of all methods of artificial contraception. What are your views today on the matter?
Today the context in which the encyclical was issued has come to be well known. Context is always very important to establish the exact significance of any statement. At first Paul VI favoured the view of the majority of the committee of experts that had been appointed to study the matter. Their advice was that the practical decision should be left to the conscience of the couple. But he was asked by some theologians, including most notably, Cardinal Karol Wojtila: Would that not be contradicting the teaching of Pius XI in his 1928 encyclical Casti Connubii?
John XXIII is said to have described Giovanni Montini (Paul VI) as "the Hamlet of Milan" because of his psychological propensity to hesitate. He always saw the strength of the arguments on both sides of every question.
Two cardinals, holding opposite views, who spoke to the Pope at the time, have reported what he told them. To Cardinal Franz Koenig, the Pope said that although he agreed with the majority he was very afraid of breaching tradition. To Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, "the old fox of the Roman Curia", he said that he was most reluctant to depart from the Council's policy of not issuing condemnations.
Paul VI was deeply perplexed as to what to decide on the issue at hand but he felt compelled to speak. The Council had been asked not to discuss the question for it to be treated in a more suitable manner by the select group handpicked by the Pope himself. Now, the faithful were, two years later, expecting a pronouncement.
The Church's teaching had been consistently against the voluntary frustration of conception in the sexual act. But from as far back as the years 1957/58, a number of the most respectable Catholic moralists had begun to question this position. In particular they argued that the use of progesterones (the Pill) was permissible as they merely modified natural processes.
It may be worth recalling that these moralists included Jacques Maritain and the future cardinals Charles Journet and Georges Cottier. (All of them reversed their judgment after the encyclical).
At the same time many others, notably Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens at the Council, were questioning the way that had become conventional of interpreting 'natural law'.
They pointed out that nature was not fixed but in evolution. Actually, Thomas Aquinas himself had already asserted that the application of natural law could be different in changed historical circumstances.
Moreover, in the Council, Cardinal Paul-Émile Leger of Montreal had argued that it was not necessarily every act of sexual intercourse but conjugal life as a whole that had to be open to the generation of life. Patriarch Maximos IV of Antioch went even further, arousing a very hostile reaction from those who thought that no worse ill could happen than that the teaching of the Church should appear to be wobbly.
At this juncture, Mgr Carlo Colombo, by far the most influential theologian in Milan when I was a student there, advised his close friend, the Pope, to stop the discussion in the Council and reserve the decision to himself.
You were ordained priest by Cardinal Montini not too long before this time and you had long conversations with him. What are your impressions as to the Pope's real attitude?
It appears in his choice of the trio of Dominican and Franciscan friars, Philippe, Ciappi and Lio for the drafting of an encyclical. They were known to be against any concession on birth regulations. But it was only after receiving Cardinal Wojtila in audience that Pope Paul finally decided to sign the encyclical.
The Pope was dismayed at the reaction it provoked. Perhaps the most trenchant comment was made by the Dominican, later Cardinal, Yves Congar. He had laid the foundations of the theological account of the role of the laity in the Church in a masterly work on which the Council had built. He remarked that the reception by the faithful of the teaching given by Church authorities was of the utmost significance. Now the very impressive reaction to Humanae Vitae was a catastrophic fall in resort to the sacrament of Confession.
An even more incisive analysis came from the Jesuit, Michel de Certeau, whom I consider to have been the most insightful Catholic thinker of the last century, after Teilhard de Chardin. Basically, he showed that Humanae Vitae, or rather its non-reception by the mass of the faithful, marked a radical change in the meaning of what was generally called 'the spiritual power'. It used to be taken to refer to the Church as an institution that could issue excommunications, interdicts and anathemas. Instead the term only retained meaning insofar as it referred to a charismatic quasi-mystical force such as would eventually be displayed (although there could only have been prophetic intuition of it in 1968) by Pope John Paul II proving to be somewhat mysteriously the decisive factor in producing the first fatal crack in the edifice of the Soviet empire.
How relevant do you think is all this history to Malta today?
I suspect that nothing more than de Certeau's reflection explains the manner in which Archbishop Paul Cremona is tackling the question of divorce. Had de Certeau's point been understood, there would not have been the surprise expressed on both sides of the fence. Our Archbishop's stance reminds me, at least, very strongly of Paul VI.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.