THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Catholic Church was very much in favor of contraception and family planning.

We begin at Notre Dame in 1966. Faculty members formed a group to advocate for government funding of family planning programs and advertised a statement of support in Catholic publications. They received over 500 signatures in under a month from Catholic clergy, nuns, lawyers, doctors, and faculty members at Catholic universities, including the deans of Notre Dame and Santa Clara’s law schools. The Notre Dame professor chairing the committee told the New York Times the group wished to emphasize that “in a pluralistic society, some legislation may be desirable even though it may not be in accord with the moral principles of a minority of the society’s members.”...

Let’s return to Notre Dame. From 1963 to 1967 Notre Dame held an annual “Conference on Population.” The conference, organized with the help of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was intended from its inception to be a forum to develop a more liberal Catholic position on contraception. In 1965, thirty-seven scholars who attended the conference sent a statement to the Pope that declared “[t]here is dependable evidence that contraception is not intrinsically immoral, and that therefore there are certain circumstances in which it may be permitted or indeed even recommended.” Notre Dame’s President, Father Theodore Hesburgh, later got his friend John D. Rockefeller a secret meeting with the Pope to discuss the problem of overpopulation...

A 1967 Times article, “150 Fordham Women Petition for a Class on Birth Control” shows that Fordham students sharing their adventures in contraceptive access activism with the Gray Lady is nothing new. One of the Times’ follow-up articles on the topic, “Fordham to Give Seminars on Sex,” indicates that what has changed since 1967 is the responsiveness and boldness of the University administration.

The Fordham dean of students explained to the Times in 1967 that the sexual education program would “include frank discussions of methods of conception and contraception” and was permissible because “the morality of contraceptives does not enter into the discussion.” The University even agreed to the students’ request for a physician at the health center who could answer questions about birth control.

All this happened about the time that the Vatican reactionaries suffocated Pope John Paul I and got their Polish reactionary bishop installed in his place. Since then the Church has been on a downward spiral away from the teachings of Christ and into the foul Pit of Reactionary Conservatism. And with the College of Cardinals stacked with their kind it won't end soon.