SILENT DISSENTER : Jacques Maritain on contraception - twentieth-century French Catholic theologian

Commonweal, May 18, 2001 by Bernard Doering

Two weeks later, on December 2, Journet wrote to Maritain: "Jacques, for this terrible question of eugenics, I'm afraid that as a support for you I'm rather unsteady on my own feet. What I wanted to say is that since moralists say that everything is saved if the conjugal act can be accomplished to all appearances, they should have no objection to hormonal injections. Will they then argue that this is a case of mutilation? They do so in the case where Fallopian tubes are tied...So they consider mutilation in a functional sense....I have always had a problem admitting (though I do so by authority) an essential difference between the Ogino method and contraceptive precautions. It seems to me they are hypnotized by the physical. So an injection becomes an objection that vexes the moralists" (III, 986).

This is the last reference to the problem of birth control in the first three volumes of the correspondence. These letters were exchanged twenty to thirty years before the firestorm occasioned by Humanae vitae. A footnote appended to Maritain's note "Apropos of Birth Control," which I cited above, tells us that in 1968 Paul VI's encyclical letter concerning responsible parenthood would lead Journet and Maritain to take up once again the troubling question of birth control and to comment on the controversy it stirred up within and without the church. These letters are to appear in volume VI, and are unlikely to be made public for several years.

Why did two respected thinkers who were clearly preoccupied with the church's position on human sexuality remain silent on this important question? Both of them were certainly ready to speak openly on controversial political and social questions; both were in trouble because of positions they took publicly on the church and democracy and on the Spanish Civil War.

There were serious indications that Maritain's Integral Humanism was about to be placed on the Index. In 1936, he had received a letter from Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., urging him to provide firmer assurances to his critics in Rome who saw in Maritain, as Garrigou wrote, "a tendency all of whose dire consequences they are anxious to point out" (II, 579a). Garrigou-Lagrange continued: "I beg of you, give them firmer assurances, so that all the good you have done may not be compromised. The Spanish bishops were not at all pleased with what you said at Santander [that is, in a series of lectures that became Integral Humanism]. They must have written about this to the secretary of state [Cardinal Pacelli]. In my opinion you are venturing out on a terrain you do not know enough about, and you bring with you habits of thinking that no longer have any place in the present contingencies...I beseech you all the more strongly to follow my suggestions because those in high places have asked me to tell you not to lean toward the left, as you give the impression of doing."

Maritain then wrote to Journet: "On the part of Rome, I sense there are enormous misunderstandings. It is through the church that they are trying to strike me. (Why have I always felt apprehensive about Cardinal Pacelli, about whose "sanctity" many persons bragged on their return from Rome.) [It was Pacelli, the future Pius XII, who in person told Maritain to limit himself strictly to speculative philosophy.] It is not I alone who will be the target of their attack, it is all sorts of germinations of life and of good movements among a great number of souls, it is all the good that I was hoping for which will be ruined. It goes without saying, I know very well, that we must be ready to be ground down, and that this is undoubtedly the means by which in mysterious ways things advance. What bothers me is how these things are carried out. If this is the way things have to be done, then let them be done well. Think about this my very dear friend and tell me what to do. During the summer we will see what reactions my book will produce. If it is put on the Index, what should I do?...Naturally there is the duty of submission to the church. But we have other duties, toward the truth and toward souls, that must be reconciled with that submission" (II, 579).