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From Socialist Worker, No. 87, 9 September 1968, pp. 2 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A GAP of centuries divides the archaic splendour of the Vatican and the overcrowded tenements of Kilburn, Notting Hill and North Kensington. The Pope speaks and millions of Roman Catholics – working-class Irish and South American peasants are told that artificial contraception is a mortal sin.
The encyclical has provided new hells – some private and intellectual for the parishioners of Father Weir at East Cheam and some public and very material for the crowded slum dwellers of North London.
Many were unwilling to discuss the issues with strangers but some were equally willing to pour out their own experiences and fears.
“The Holy Father obviously doesn’t understand our position”, said one young Irishwoman newly married and determined to plan her family. “We get about £13 per week after stoppages and a third of that goes on rent. How can we afford children now?”
She said she would not confess during mass while she was using the pill which was a matter of “private conscience’’
An older woman with six children who had been taking the pill said she was praying for guidance as she felt that to bring more children into an already overcrowded flat would be a sin in itself. The rhythm [lines of text missing] her and the prospect of more children and unwanted pregnancies was too much for her to face.
Another woman intervened to say that the Pope was undoubtedly right to uphold what had been the Church’s teaching on contraception. She was past childbearing and had married late.
I tried to contact the priests who work in the strongly Catholic areas, but they were rarely “available”. A few of the younger clergy shrugged their shoulders in resignation but the senior members of the faith had no doubts.
For them the ruling had clearly come as a relief. Asked about the problems of their poorer members they smiled at such gross materialism. “God will provide” was their slogan.
The large families, sleeping four or five in a room, condemned by the medieval ideas of Paul VI to increasing misery, seemed a devastating comment on Christian values. But many Catholics had clearly made up their own minds on the matter and were not going to face the unwanted pregnancies and reinforced hardships which the Encyclical demanded.
Many working-class? Catholics were withdrawing from the Church, not formally, but were [line of text missing] their own private compromises.
“I don’t see that it’s any of the Pope’s business,” said one defiant woman, “how many children we have as long as we bring them up Catholics.”
The four-storey tenements looked blankly down on the grimy children playing in the wrecks of abandoned cars. The Pope had said that no solution was acceptable “which does violence to man’s essential dignity.”
No socialist could disagree. Nor can any socialist fail to recognise that birth control is just one facet of making a better world. There is room for new low-cost housing, higher basic wages but the Encyclical does not make this any easier.
For the old, the Pope’s words are sufficient and will be obeyed, but for the young they will in the majority of cases be ignored. Prematurely aged working-class housewives working to bring up huge families in desperate circumstances would be the logical result of this doctrine which itself reduces, not reinforces, man’s essential dignity.
The middle class are split, some are in open revolt, others accept the Pope’s ruling for fear of questioning the faith itself. The working-class tends to ignore the ruling and increasingly uses the Church merely as a social convenience which [line of text missing] But for some there is a real agony of miscarriages, large and unmanageable families in an environment that has scarcely changed since the 19th century.
Catholicism in Britain has taken a heavy knock from which it will never recover. Those who revered both James Connolly and the Pope will begin to see the contradiction in being a revolutionary socialist while accepting the edicts of a feudal Italian regime cut off from the realities of 20th century society.
The intellectuals have risen in vocal opposition but the working-class opposition while less articulate, is just as strong. A minority will suffer immensely for their religion and the blindness of their leaders; but the majority will quietly plan their families and drift out of the Church.
This won’t in itself overcome the terrible social problems created by capitalism but it will make their solution easier when socialism comes.
Let the last word come from the wife of a labourer earning £14 a week of which £4 goes on rent:
“If the Pope had to bring up a family on this money in this hole he’d soon learn that sin isn’t trying to bring up a small family decently.”
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