A fanatic has been defined as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. By this definition Joan Chittister is a fanatic. A Benedictine sister teaching at Cambridge University, for decades she has been a leader among feminist nuns. It is no surprise that, after all these years, she can’t dismount from the anti-Humanae Vitae hobby horse. She sees everything in terms of that pivotal document. All unhappiness in the Church stems from Pope Paul VI’s reaffirmation of the traditional Christian teaching on marital love. Do we have a lack of vocations? Humanae Vitae is to blame. Do we have divisions within the Church? Humanae Vitae caused them. Do people leave the Church in droves? Humanae Vitae is the culprit.
Chittister’s insistence on the baneful effects of the encyclical showed up in the February 28 issue of the National Catholic Reporter, which carried an interview she had with an almost-forgotten figure, Charles Davis. He was an English Jesuit who left the editorship of Clergy Review, left his order, left the Church—and quickly got married. For a brief time in the 1960s, mainly before but also immediately after his defection, he was a hero to Catholic dissidents, but by leaving the Church he faded from view. He no longer could claim to speak as a Catholic or for Catholics, and the media dropped him. He taught in Canada for two decades and then retired and returned to England.
In profiling Davis, Chittister reports that he “left the priesthood in response to Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical banning contraceptives.” In a sidebar she adds that Humanae Vitae “seemed a central although not exclusive factor in Davis’s decision.” But there’s a problem with the chronology. Davis left the priesthood in 1966. As Chittister reports, “in his 1967 book, A Question of Conscience, he explained his decision and his difficulties with the Catholic church.” But Humanae Vitae didn’t appear until 1968, two years after Davis left and a year after his book was published.
Perhaps Chittister wants us to think that Davis was remarkably prescient, seeing in advance that the Pope would come down on the “wrong” side of the issue? Good try, but that explanation won’t do. Even through the spring of 1968 liberal Catholics were thinking that Pope Paul would overturn the old teaching. After all, the commission he appointed to investigate contraception came out in favor of a change in the doctrine, and the Pope was known to be liberal at least in politics. Yet he surprised religious liberals by failing to follow their script. Yet he surprised religious liberals by failing to follow their script. In the subsequent decades this has bothered them no end. They have become fixated on Humanae Vitae. You almost expect them to blame the eruption of Mount St. Helens on it.
There’s no getting around two facts: First, Charles Davis’s 1966 apostasy had nothing at all to do with an encyclical that wouldn’t even be written for two years. Second, Joan Chittister needs a vacation.