A CASE OF DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT — John T. Noonan: jurist, historian, author, sage

Commonweal, Nov 17, 2000 by John T. McGreevy

Writing, as historian and friend Kevin Starr points out, "without the slightest suggestion of a writer's block," Noonan researched and drafted Contraception, a dense, elegantly written book of 533 pages, in two and one-half years. One law school colleague at the time, Thomas Shaffer, recalls Noonan arriving each day at the faculty lunch table "immersed in his research," eager to solicit opinions on medieval notions of courtly love or the purposes of marriage.

Harvard University Press published the first edition of Contraception in 1965. Written as excitement mounted during the first years of Vatican II, and as other seemingly permanent aspects of Catholic life underwent stunning change, the book struck an optimistic note. Beginning with the ancient Egyptians and ending in the contemporary United States, Noonan again traced a twisting doctrinal path, noting that any fair reading of the history could not "look at doctrinal development as an automatic unfolding of the divine will." After detailing the emancipation of women, the acknowledgment by many theologians that procreation need not serve as the single, primary end of sexual intercourse, and the widespread support for change expressed by married couples, priests, and bishops, he concluded that "it is a perennial mistake 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."

Contraception received enormous, flattering attention. (A young, and then conservative, Garry Wills flatly termed it "a classic.") As is well known, Pope Paul VI withdrew the topic of contraception from general consideration at Vatican II, and named a commission to consider the matter. As the commission assembled in Rome in early 1965, a torrent of publicity on birth control suggested the intensity of feeling on the subject. When Chicago's Patty Crowley, one of few the women on the commission, polled other Catholic women, she received a deluge of anguished letters detailing multiple, risky pregnancies and marriages strained by enforced abstinence during fertile periods.

Appointed to the papal commission because of his new-found expertise, Noonan began his first presentation to the commission with the observation that "the matter is open enough to deserve the attentive study of the church in light of new scientific, social, and historical understanding." Ford, perhaps the commission's most influential conservative, initially supported Noonan's appointment. After recognizing the implications of Contraception, however, Ford argued to friends that Noonan's work was "very one-sided, and says nothing of the essential points of difference between the cases of usury and contraception."

Working on the Roman schedule of a morning meeting, lunch, siesta, and a final session from 5 to 7 p.m., the commission met as a body, and then in smaller groups. Noonan now describes the meetings as open and honest, and regrets only that Paul VI was not invited to attend them. At the time, however, he privately expressed frustration with the conservative moral theologians, convinced that they took "texts out of their contexts and used them as some kind of absolute statement, fallen, as it were, from heaven."