Until relatively recently, dominant narratives of sexual change in post-war Europe have tended to either ignore religious institutions, or relegate them to a secondary role. The Catholic Church has been commonly characterised as the antagonist in a story of sixties sexual revolution – the Pope’s controversial encyclical Humanae Vitae rejected calls to liberalise the Church’s prohibition of contraception, and with this, seemingly rejected the stream of sex-positive modernity. Alana Harris’ edited collection, gathering case studies from across Europe, offers both an explanation for and antidote to these secularising narratives. It looks beyond and beneath Humanae Vitae to explore the way ‘ordinary’ Catholics, clergy men, medical representatives, state officials and the media responded to the particular ‘sex problems’ posed to Catholics by the introduction of the Pill. The book marks a conscious attempt to recover Catholicism’s ‘progressive moment’ from the dustbin of history. The cultural memory of Catholicism in the 1960s is, understandably, dominated by ‘orthodox’ and conservative voices. In drawing attention to the debates, discussion and spectrum of progressive ideas present within the Catholic community, this collection makes important contributions to the histories of modern Catholicism, religious change and post-war culture more broadly.
The book’s eye-catching front cover, featuring Paddy Summerfield’s photo of a reclining, bikini-clad young woman reading the book ‘Sex and the Christian’, sets the tone for what is an attentively researched and highly readable collection. As Harris’ introductory chapter makes clear, the varying styles, methods and source materials allow for a rich mosaic of Catholic beliefs and practices to emerge. Wannes Dupont’s chapter on lay and clerical attitudes to birth control in Belgium identifies Humanae Vitae as a watershed for Catholicism. For Dupont, the encyclical fostered the commonly held view that religious conviction and sexual pleasure are mutually exclusive by necessity. His interpretation of Humanae Vitae’s significance tacitly brings into focus a question which runs throughout the collection: was the Catholic ‘crisis of authority’ brought about by Humanae Vitae itself, or did Humanae Vitae bring to light a pre-existing decline? In her chapter on the Catholic experience in Switzerland, Caroline Rusterholz suggests that Humanae Vitae did not cause the schism, but shone a light on an established disjuncture between orthodox teachings and the contraceptive behaviour of the laity. Chapters on Catholic communities in the Netherlands, West Germany and Austria, England, Portugal, Poland, Italy, Spain, France, Ireland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary paint a colourful picture of the complex and contingent nature of Catholic change in a tumultuous decade.
Dagmar Herzog sprinkles some celebrity into the collection by providing the afterword. Herzog offers a better review of the collection than I ever could, pulling out the methodological insights and empirical benefits of a cross-European comparative perspective. It is at this point that the interconnectivity of the national case studies become apparent. It is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the structure of the collection that the relationship between different national contexts can be slightly obscured in the individual chapters. The mass-mediated, late-modern setting of this Papal pronouncement meant that its reception was shaped by geographical localities in historically unprecedented ways. Nevertheless, the book offers some important lessons and frameworks for a project which could work on a global scale. Comparing the varied European responses to Humanae Vitae with those in South and North America, Africa, and Asia would be an ambitious but timely undertaking.
Harris and Herzog’s bookending chapters do a great job of drawing out the wider significance of the research contained within the collection. While Harris positions the book as a challenge to linear teleologies surrounding ‘modernity’, ‘secularisation’, and ‘sexual liberation’, Herzog points to the spiritual and emotional consequences of Humanae Vitae for the Catholic community, as well as the intellectual basis of the encyclical itself. She shows us how Pope Paul VI shrewdly drew on anticolonial and quasi-feminist arguments to articulate his particular vision of contraceptive morality and conjugal love, a vision which ultimately was not shared by large swathes of his Church.
Doubtless there will be those who clamour for more sympathetic depictions of Humanae Vitae to feature in the collection, in an attempt to offer something of a balance-sheet. But there is already a body of theological and sociological literature that does this, and the contributors’ analysis is even-handed and rigorous. Thiago Pires Marques’ chapter on the mediating role of medical professionals in Portugal, for example, urges us, in a manner borrowing from Foucauldian theory, to move away from the lens of ‘repression’ when making sense of Humanae Vitae. For Marques, Catholic debates about the morality of birth control need to be understood in the context of State politics around public health and Portugal’s wider social history. In this chapter and many others, Catholicism is situated within rather than outside the seismic developments of secular society, developments including the emergence of biopolitics, shifting codes of sexual morality and changing conceptions of authority. With the fifty-year anniversary of Humanae Vitae prompting a revival of discussions about the Catholic Church’s position on sex, gender and the body, this book broadens our understanding of how ‘liberal’ ideas intersected with religious beliefs at a moment of profound agitation.
