A recent intervention by the Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, OP, was both unremarkable and, paradoxically, significant. In a letter to the Prime Minister on August 20th, co-signed by the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Glenn Davies, and the Greek Orthodox Primate, Archbishop Makarios, Archbishop Fisher suggested that the projected use of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine might cause a crisis of conscience for some potential recipients because cell lines derived from a 1973 aborted foetus were involved in its production.
This intervention was unremarkable because it was all too predictable. Archbishop Fisher, more inclined to find fault with and to condemn modern scientific developments than to welcome and encourage them. But the intervention was, nonetheless, significant because it was of a piece with a series of stances which the Vatican authorities have adopted over the past fifty years. These stances, pitting the Church over against the world, represent a retreat from the hopes and aspirations expressed in that most progressive decree of the Second Vatican Council: 'Gaudium et Spes: The Church in the Modern World'. Whereas the Vatican II document sought to engage with, and to respect, the autonomy of the modern world and its science, only too many of the Vatican’s official statements over the past fifty years have effectively resiled from that commitment.
It is no secret, of course, that the Vatican II decree was a step too far even for some of the more progressive theologians advising the bishops at the Council, notably among them, Joseph Ratzinger. Although the assembled bishops did approve the decree, there were rumblings even at the Council, and these have reverberated over the years especially among the more conservative elements in the Church. Joseph Ratzinger, too, was to become in time the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and the custodian of doctrinal ‘orthodoxy’. Some commentators have remarked that not only did Ratzinger distance himself at the time from 'Gaudium et Spes', but also that the student riots of 1968 and the general unrest that accompanied them reinforced his fears that hitherto unquestioned absolute principles were under sustained attack from rampant progressivism. Hence his retreat from the more liberal theology of his earlier years.
Contraception
The first test for the Church was the debate over artificial contraception. Pope Paul VI withdrew the issue from discussion at the Second Vatican Council but subsequently appointed two committees to investigate the arguments. The first committee was composed