The Schism of ’68

Genders and Sexualities in History

Series Editors John Arnold King’s College University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Sean Brady Birkbeck College University of London London, UK

Joanna Bourke Birkbeck College University of London London, UK Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, accom- modates and fosters new approaches to historical research in the felds of genders and sexualities. The series promotes world-class scholarship, which concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexualities, religions/religiosity, civil society, politics and war. Historical studies of gender and sexuality have, until recently, been more or less disconnected felds. In recent years, historical analyses of genders and sexualities have synthesised, creating new departures in historiography. The additional connectedness of genders and sexualities with questions of religion, religiosity, development of civil societies, politics and the contexts of war and confict is refective of the movements in scholarship away from narrow history of science and scientifc thought, and history of legal processes approaches, that have dominated these paradigms until recently. The series brings together scholarship from Contemporary, Modern, Early Modern, Medieval, Classical and Non- Western History. The series provides a diachronic forum for scholarship that incorporates new approaches to genders and sexualities in history.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15000 Alana Harris Editor The Schism of ’68

Catholicism, Contraception and Humanae Vitae in Europe, 1945–1975 Editor Alana Harris King’s College London London, UK

Genders and Sexualities in History ISBN 978-3-319-70810-2 ISBN 978-3-319-70811-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70811-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961118

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Cover credit: Cover image used with kind permission of Paddy Summerfeld from The Oxford Pictures 1968–1978 (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2016)

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For my parents, who married before the encyclical and lived and loved in its aftermath. Series Editors’ Preface

The Schism of ’68: Catholics, Contraception and ‘Humanae Vitae’ in Europe, 1945–1975 is a genuinely groundbreaking collection, where international and interdisciplinary new scholarship explores the relation- ship between Roman Catholicism and global developments in sexuality and women’s reproductive rights in the ‘radical 1960s’. The authors examine the ways in which ordinary Roman Catholic men and women, as well as the Vatican and the news media across Europe and the world, responded to the ‘sex problem’ presented by the development of the anovulant pill in the late 1950s and its rejection as an acceptable form of birth regulation through Pope Paul VI’s infamous encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. The collection brings together historians of gender, sexuality and modern Catholicism to discuss the differing reactions to and reception of the Humanae Vitae encyclical by Catholic laity and clergy, episcopacies, medical professionals and media outlets across Europe. In demonstrating how these debates, and the Roman Catholic Church’s important role within them, interacted with the social and sexual coun- tercultures of the 1960s, the collection makes an essential contribution to a growing historiography of radical social change in the 1960s. It also provides new perspectives and approaches that enrich the historiog raphy of sexuality, of gender, and of religion. In common with all volumes in the ‘Genders and Sexualities in History’ series, The Schism of ’68:

vii viii Series Editors’ Preface

Catholics, Contraception and ‘Humanae Vitae’ in Europe, 1945–1975 presents a multifaceted and meticulously researched scholarly collection, and is a sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the past.

John Arnold Joanna Bourke Sean Brady Acknowledgements

This volume was conceived through a Facetime conversation with Wannes Dupont (then residing in Antwerp) in late 2015. A mutual academic friend had suggested, in view of our shared research interests in religion and sexuality, that we would have a lot to talk about. We cer- tainly did, and the result was a workshop in September 2016 held at King’s College London and attended by many of the contributors to this volume. Through Wannes’s long-standing role as co-chair of the Sexuality Network of the European Social Science History Conference, and co-organiser with me of this London workshop, I wish to acknowl- edge him formally as the driving force behind the identifcation of those with the necessary interest and expertise to participate in this anthology. I am incredibly grateful for his intellectual insights and support amidst the life transitions and professional changes he has negotiated during the past two years, which have seen him relocate between three academic institutions and multiple countries. In facilitating the comparative conversations that form the basis of this volume, I thank the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London who provided fnancial support for the workshop and travel expenses to bring the participants to the UK. Alongside those writing in this collection, there were a number of other presenters whose contribution I wish to recognize, including Jim Bjork, David Geiringer, Carmen Mangion, Francisco Molina, Caroline Sägesser, Margaret Scull, Andrea Thomson, and Cécile Vanderpelen. For research support undergirding the introduction and my own chapter, thanks are given to Hannah Elias

ix x Acknowledgements and Maya Evans. Dagmar Herzog was a fabulous supporter and advocate in the complicated closing stages of this volume. Finally, my love and thanks to the two men in my life who have lived through the twists and turns of the manuscript compilation process and are always encourag- ing, understanding and productively distracting—Timothy Folkard and Sebastian Harris-Folkard. Thanks darls. Contents

1 Introduction: The Summer of ’68—Beyond the Secularization Thesis 1 Alana Harris

Part I To the Barricades

2 Humanae Vitae: Catholic Attitudes to Birth Control in the Netherlands and Transnational Church Politics, 1945–1975 23 Chris Dols and Maarten van den Bos

3 Of Human Love: Catholics Campaigning for Sexual Aggiornamento in Postwar Belgium 49 Wannes Dupont

4 ‘A Galileo-Crisis Not a Luther Crisis’? English Catholics’ Attitudes to Contraception 73 Alana Harris

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Part II Episcopal Controversies

5 Religion and Contraception in Comparative Perspective—Switzerland, 1950–1970 99 Caroline Rusterholz

6 Attempted Disobedience: Humanae Vitae in West Germany and Austria 121 Katharina Ebner and Maria Mesner

Part III Christian Science and Catholic Conservatism

7 The Politics of Catholic Medicine: ‘The Pill’ and Humanae Vitae in Portugal 161 Tiago Pires Marques

8 Humanae Vitae, Birth Control and the Forgotten History of the Catholic Church in Poland 187 Agnieszka Kościańska

Part IV Covering the Controversy

9 A Kind of Reformation in Miniature: The Paradoxical Impact of Humanae Vitae in Italy 211 Francesca Vassalle and Massimo Faggioli

10 Love in the Time of El Generalísimo: Debates About the Pill in Spain Before and After Humanae Vitae 229 Agata Ignaciuk

11 Reactions to the Papal Encyclical Humanae Vitae: The French Conundrum 251 Martine Sevegrand CoNTENTS xiii

Part V Church, State and Contraception

12 The Best News Ireland Ever Got? Humanae Vitae’s Reception on the Pope’s Green Island 275 Peter Murray

13 Catholicism Behind the Iron Curtain: Czechoslovak and Hungarian Responses to Humanae Vitae 303 Mary Heimann and Gábor Szegedi

14 Afterword—Looking for Love 349 Dagmar Herzog

Index 365 Editor and Contributors

About the Editor

Alana Harris is a Lecturer in Modern British History at King’s College London. She is the author of Faith in the Family: A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism, 1945–1982 (2013) and has published numerous articles on the intersections of gender, sexuality, devotional cultures and material religion. She is currently researching the changing attitudes of English Catholics, and particularly medical practitioners, to contraception across the twentieth century.

Contributors

Maarten van den Bos is General Secretary of the Banning Association, a platform for debate on religion, politics, and modern society associ- ated with the Dutch Labour Party. He has published extensively on the history of Dutch Catholicism, including Verlangen naar Vernieuwing. Nederlands katholicisme, 1953–2003 and a book on the history of the Dutch section of the international Catholic peace movement, Pax Christi: Mensen van goede wil. Pax Christi 1948–2013. Chris Dols studied history in Nijmegen, Amsterdam, and Dundee (where he did his doctorate) and is an archivist at the Centre for the Heritage of Religious Life in the Netherlands. He has published extensively on religious transformations in the Dutch Catholic community.

xv xvi Editor and Contributors

Recent publications include Fact Factory. Sociological Expertise and Episcopal Decision Making in the Netherlands 1946–1975, and Pastoral Sociology in Western Europe, 1940–1970 (Leiden/Boston, co-edited with Herman Paul). Wannes Dupont is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Yale-NUS College, having previously held a Cabeaux-Jacobs Fellowship at the Belgian American Educational Foundation (Yale) and at the Research Foundation Flanders (Antwerp). His recent publications address various aspects of the history of sexuality and biopolitics, including a chapter in Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe. Mobilizing Against Equality and co-authorship of Verzwegen Verlangen (Hidden Desires, 2017). Katharina Ebner is a Research Associate at the Chair of Moral Theology at the University of Bonn. She is a Catholic theologian working on questions of religion, family, sexuality and gender in the twentieth century. Her doctoral thesis on religious references in parliamentary debates on homosexuality is currently in press. Massimo Faggioli is a Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. His publications in English include the books Sorting Out Catholicism. Brief History of the New Ecclesial Movements (2014); A Council for the Global Church. Receiving Vatican II in History (2015), and Catholicism and Citizenship: Political Cultures of the Church in the Twenty-First Century (2017). Mary Heimann is Chair in Modern European History and Director of International Relations at Cardiff University in Wales. She is the author of Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed and Catholic Devotion in Victorian England. Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published extensively on the histories of sexuality and religion in Europe and the United States, including Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (2011). Her most recent book is Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (2017), and she is currently working on a project entitled Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (forthcoming 2018). Editor and ContributoRS xvii

Agata Ignaciuk obtained her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Granada, Spain and is a NCN POLONEZ 2—Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND fellow at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw and associate of the Department of the History of Science, University of Granada. She has recently published Anticoncepción, mujeres y género. La píldora en España y Polonia (1960–1980) (with Teresa Ortiz-Gómez, 2016). Agnieszka Kościańska received her Ph.D. (2007) and her habilita- tion (2015) in ethnology/cultural anthropology from the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw and a sen- ior researcher in a HERA grant (Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre- HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures). Her new monograph is entitled To See a Moose. The History of Polish Sex Education from the First Lesson to the Internet (in Polish, 2017). Tiago Pires Marques obtained his Ph.D. in History at the European University Institute (2007) and has been a FCT Investigator at the Centre for Social Studies (University of Coimbra) since 2014. His socio- historical research sits at the intersections of the history of medicine, law and religion, and his latest co-edited publication is Género e interioridade na vida religiosa (2017). Maria Mesner teaches history at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, heads the Kreisky-Archives and is a co-editor of Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (Austrian Journal for Historical Studies). Alongside various volumes on de-nazifcation and reproduction, she has authored two monographs on reproductive history and numerous articles on the contraceptive, gendered and political history of Austria (and the US). Peter Murray is a Lecturer in Sociology at Maynooth University. His book Facilitating the Future? US Aid, European Integration and Irish Industrial Viability, 1948–73 was published in 2009, and he is the co- author (with Maria Feeney) of Church State and Social Science in Ireland: Knowledge Institutions and the Rebalancing of Power, 1937–73 (2016). Caroline Rusterholz is SNSF Postdoc Fellow and Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck University, London. Her research interests cover the xviii Editor and Contributors felds of the histories of Switzerland, Britain and France in the twentieth century. She is interested in the social history of medicine, the history of sexuality and reproduction, and the history of the family. Martine Sevegrand is a historian. In 1994, she defended her doctoral thesis on French Catholics and birth control (1898–1968), later published as Les enfants du bon Dieu (1995). She has had a dozen books published, including edited letters sent to Abbé Viollet on sexual prob- lems (1942–1943) and Vers une église sans prêtres. La crise du clergé sécu- lier en France (1945–1978) (2005). She is an associate member of the CNRS research group on Societies, Religions and Secularism. Gábor Szegedi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Masaryk University in Brno, working on expert knowledge and sexuality in Hungary under state socialism. Previously a research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, he holds a Ph.D. in Comparative History from the Central European University, Hungary. Francesca Vassalle is a Doctoral Candidate in the History Department at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she is com- pleting a dissertation on the history of contraception in post-fascist Italy from 1943 to 1978. Abbreviations

CA Catholic Action, defned by Pope Pius XI in 1927 as ‘the participation of the laity in the apostolate of the hierarchy’ CC Casti Connubi (Of Chaste Wedlock), Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, 31 December 1930 GS Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Promulgated by Pope Paul VI, 7 December 1965 HV Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), Encyclical of Pope Paul VI, 25 July 1968 LG Lumen Gentium (Light of the Nations), Dogmatic Constitution in the Church, promulgated by Pope Paul VI, 21 November 1964 Pontifcal Commission Pontifcal Commission on Population, Family and Birth, established by Pope John XXIII, and expanded by Pope Paul VI (1963–66)

xix List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Cardinal Alfrink and Pope Paul VI, in an ironic hippy vision of other unlikely peacemakers, and to the tune of the Beatles’ 1967 hit. Published in Elsevier Magazine, 8 August 1970 (Reproduced with kind permission of KDC–KLiB Nijmegen) 40 Fig. 4.1 John Ryan, ‘Drawing it fne’ cartoon: ‘Encyclical? What encyclical?’ Catholic Herald, 2 August 1968, p. 1 (Reproduced with kind permission of Isabel Ryan) 81 Fig. 6.1 Members of the ‘Catholic Opposition’ in their editorial offce during the Katholikentag in Essen (1968). Pictured are editorial staff Ralf Driver, Gottfried Neuen, Willi Ingenhoven, and a visitor (Reproduced with kind permission of Fotosammlung Hans Lachmann, Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland, Düsseldorf) 127 Fig. 6.2 The protest banner ‘sich beugen und zeugen’ (submit and procreate) displayed during a panel discussion at the Katholikentag in Essen (1968) (Reproduced with kind permission of Fotosammlung Hans Lachmann, Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland, Düsseldorf) 133 Fig. 7.1 Cover of a satire by Jose Vilhena on the reception of the pill in Portugal within various social settings (Reproduced with kind permission of Luis Vilhena’s estate) 173

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