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

Abstract

By European standards, Ireland in 1968 was a country of extraordinary religiosity with long-standing legal bans on the sale of contraceptives and on birth control propaganda. But by the time of Humanae Vitae’s promulgation, contraceptive usage had diffused to a significant extent. The national leadership of the Catholic church avoided widespread purgative action but only at the cost of alienating a conservative, as well as a liberal, element of its laity. Among doctors and other cognate Catholic professionals the encyclical lacked credibility from the outset, and disregard for its teaching gradually spread across the spectrum of the social classes. Because State law enshrined church teaching, HV in Ireland served as a prelude to long, and in some respects unfinished, wars over family and sexuality issues.