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No Prophecy. Pius' encyclical Casti Connubii may have been the apogee of the church's denunciation of birth control. Five years after it appeared, German Theologian Herbert Doms was tentatively proposing a personalist theology of marriage that gave primacy to love rather than childbearing. Although the Vatican at the time criticized Doms's theories, papal statements on marriage were soon to shift emphasis. Even as he denounced "the pill" as immoral in 1951, Pope Pius XII strongly affirmed the spiritual values of sex. "The conjugal act," he said, "is a personal action, which, according to the word of the Scriptures, effects the union 'in one flesh alone.' "
At the third session of the Vatican Council, three cardinals and a patriarch of the church openly acknowledged the agonies of conscience that the church's traditional teaching creates for millions of married Catholics. Pope Paul acknowledged it, too, as he beseeched a papal commission of experts to help him formulate a modern-day principle of Christian marriage. Although he does not prophesy what Pope Paul may ultimately decide, Noonan cautiously concludes that there is no valid reason why the church cannot move with the times. Already it has come a long way toward acceptance of the principle that other personal values can take primacy in marriage over childbearing, and has long since abandoned the medieval view that sexual intercourse during menstruation and pregnancy is a sin equal to that of contraception.
It is a perennial mistake, Noonan concludes, "to confuse repetition of old formulas with the living law of the church. The church, on its pilgrim's path, has grown in grace and wisdom." And, he suggests, will continue to grow.