Revisions in theology start inconspicuously enough—usually as footnote-laden articles in grey, learned journals with modest circulations. Future church historians may well date a profound change in Roman Catholic thinking on marriage from the current issue of a scholarly Belgian periodical called Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, There, the Rev. Louis Janssens, 56, a respected professor of moral theology at the University of Louvain, cautiously endorsed oral contraceptive pills as a legitimate means of family limitation for Catholic couples.
Catholic moralists in the U.S. reacted to the article as if Canon Janssens had nailed a 96th thesis to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. The Rev. Francis J. Connell, former dean of the School of Sacred Theology at Catholic University, said that the article was "absolutely contrary to the teaching of the church in this area." In a rebuttal of Janssens' thesis that was printed by many diocesan papers, Jesuit Father Edward Duff wrote that "no established Catholic theologian is on record as agreeing with him."
On record they may not be, but privately some of the keenest theological minds of Catholic Europe wholeheartedly agree with Janssens. Perhaps the most personally meaningful aspect of the worldwide contemporary renewal of the Roman Catholic Church is a new approach to the marital relationship that is being thought out in the seminaries and chanceries of Germany, France, Belgium and The Netherlands.
"Responsible Parenthood." From the time of St. Paul, who said, "It is better to marry than to burn" (meaning, with passion), Catholic teaching on marriage has implied that sexual pleasure was a reward that God gave to married couples for producing children. The canon law of the church describes the primary end of marriage as the procreation and education of children; the mutual love of husband and wife and what the code grimly refers to as "the allaying of concupiscence" are essential but secondary ends. Many a priest still preaches that a house-cramming brood is the goal.
Within the last three decades, however, the church has significantly qualified the more-is-better ideal in favor of "responsible parenthood." In a 1930 encyclical on marriage, Pope Pius XI declared that Catholic couples had every right to sexual intercourse during times of natural infertility. His successor, Pius XII, defended the right of parents to limit or space their children for medical, economic, eugenic or social reasons. But even as church leaders came to ac cept the idea of family limitation, they held out against mechanical and chemical means of achieving this goal, arguing that they violated natural law.