A Jesuit companion phones to tell me to check the last issue of the Jesuit theological magazine ‘Selecciones de Teología’, published by all Jesuit theologates in Spain, and see a certain page. I search and find there a lovely anecdote from a man I knew well, the Jesuit father Marcelino Zalba, who taught me in my youth and died last year at the age of 100. He had been a member of the famous commission pope Paul VI personally appointed to study the case of the pill. Could artificial contraceptives be used or not? The commission answered, by a majority of 14 to 4, that they could be used. Father Zalba was one of the four against, and in fact the pope listened to the four dissenters instead of listening to the fourteen in favour. And he forbade the pill. The person telling the anecdote is another great moral theologian of those times, father Bernard Häring:

‘That was the big question, and father Zalba rose to give his opinion. He said it vigorously, and I understood it was a case of real anguish for him, a very good person who was faced with a very serious issue. He said in a loud voice: “If we now allow the use of the pill and other artificial contraceptives, what will happen to the millions of persons we have sent to hell till the present date?”

Ms Crowley, that charming and gentle American lady, answered him: “Father Zalba, are you sure God obeyed all the orders you gave him?”’
(Quoted in Selecciones de Teología, Julio-Septiembre 2009, Vol. 48, 191, p. 196)

In the same issue of the magazine another theologian, Andrés Torres Queiruga, is quoted on this theme:

‘The heroic resistance of the Church to maintain in all its rigour moral norms that even a large number of faithful and of theologians consider outdated and at times inhuman, is creating a situation which it will not be exaggerated to describe as disastrous.’ (Ib. p. 228)