Catholicism is one of the last holdouts against contraception, abortion, euthanasia, sex outside of marriage, and more. The Church’s moral teachings ultimately protect people from heartache, illness, broken families, and, especially in the case of abortion, death.
And yet, these teachings have opponents even within the Catholic Church’s hierarchy.
Richard Doerflinger is one of the contributors to Lived Experience and the Search for Truth: Revisiting Catholic Sexual Morality, which argues against those who wish to change the Church’s moral teachings.
He shares his personal experience of how The Pill affected his wife physically and mentally, and how they came to follow the Church’s path, Natural Family Planning, instead.
Doerflinger explains how secular culture has turned to “expressive individualism” and subjectivism, where moral principals are whatever feels right for the individual.
This mindset causes problems, Doerflinger explains. Moral absolutes are absolute for a reason.
More about Richard Doerflinger: https://lozierinstitute.org/team-member/richard-doerflinger/
Chapters
00:00 The Church’s Stance on Sexual Morality
05:54 Cultural Shifts and Moral Absolutes
12:00 The Role of the Pontifical Academy for Life
20:09 Personal Experiences with Contraception and Marriage
34:34 The Impact of Expressive Individualism on Relationships
Transcript (Please note the transcript is auto-generated and contains errors)
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (00:00)
The Roman Catholic Church is one of the last holdouts against the sexual revolution. The Church maintains the traditional Christian prohibitions on contraception, abortion, sex outside of marriage, and marriage after divorce. The Ruth Institute proudly upholds this body of teachings as being both reasonable and humane, especially in comparison with the toxic sexual revolution. Sadly, this teaching, which is the common heritage of the entire Christian tradition,
has opponents even within the Catholic Church. But a courageous group of scholars is fighting back, updating the arguments and defending these important principles. Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Jennifer Robach-Morris, founder and president of the Ruth Institute, an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love. Today’s interview is part of our ongoing series of conversations with contributors to this important new volume.
Lived Experience and the Search for Truth, Revisiting Catholic Sexual Morality. This book provides a response to many of the arguments heard at the Synod in Rome in October 2024. Today, I’m delighted to have Richard Dorflinger, who will help us understand the Church’s teachings on artificial contraception and natural family planning. Richard is retired from the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities
the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. His 36-year career included debates over many of the issues covered in this book. He now lives with his wife Leanne in Washington State. He’s a fellow with the D. Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. And he’s an adjunct fellow with the National Catholic Bioethics Center. I know you’re going to be fascinated by this conversation.
Richard Doerflinger, welcome to the Dr. J Show.
Richard Doerflinger (02:12)
Thank you, it’s an honor to be here.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (02:14)
Well, great, Richard. So this is part of our conversation about this new volume, Lived Experience and the Search for Truth, which is in response to some things going on within the Catholic Church. Let’s start, before we dive right into this, give us a little bit about your professional background. Where did you spend your career, most of your career, and what were some of your primary responsibilities in that role?
Richard Doerflinger (02:39)
Well, my academic background was in philosophy and then theology. But 1980, I took a job doing legislative analysis on pro-life issues for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And I ended up ultimately expanding the work into educational materials on some of those moral issues as well for Catholics. And spent most of my time
looking at legislation, drafting letters for the bishops conference about them on abortion, euthanasia, embryo research, all kinds of things. And then drafting testimony and very often delivering the testimony. That was always fun because you never knew what kind of strange questions you were going to get from people who didn’t think you belonged there. ultimately, I spent
36 years there. This was supposed to be a one-year break from trying to get my doctoral dissertation done. That turned into 36 years because I was having such a good time. So, never did finish the doctorate. But I did feel as though I was able to put the moral principles I’d learned into practice in dealing with public policy. I called it Applied Moral Theology. It was Applied Moral Theology
in a busy train station where you don’t know where you’re supposed to be going and the train has just left, but it was applied moral theology. mean, things happen a lot more quickly in the federal government than in academia.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (04:18)
Well, yes, I was just going to say the way you put that brought to mind the fact that a lot of times we feel like we’re being bombarded with questions, you know, and it’s not like you’re taking an exam and you can sit there and, okay, there’s a correct answer at the back of the book because that’s not the nature of what you were asked to do. You you were asked to position the Catholic bishops in an ongoing conversation where you didn’t determine the terms of debate.
You didn’t determine the timing. Any of that stuff. You were in react mode a lot of the time.
Richard Doerflinger (04:53)
Yeah, occasionally we got to actually help promote positive legislation, conscience rights for pro-life healthcare professionals, efforts to give more support for alternatives to abortion in the government’s health programs. But a lot of the time was spent having to oppose things that we thought were.
making the situation worse on respect for this activity of human life.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (05:24)
Yeah, yeah. So you and I are both contributors to this volume on lived experience. And I’d be very interested in your perspective, just given the background that you’ve just described. Tell our Ruth Institute followers a little bit about why this volume is necessary. What are the things that have happened recently that made a group of academics think, gee whiz, we got to do something? Just give people a little bit of that backstory, if you would.
Richard Doerflinger (05:54)
Yeah, let me first a word about the culture in general, because secular culture is just completely imbued with what’s been called expressive individualism. All moral principles are abstractions that don’t really necessarily affect my life. My life is about my desires, my aspirations, my effort to express and to create myself really. And this is one reason why you have the whole transgender movement.
emerging as a natural consequence. But in the church as well, after the pontificates of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict, who very much emphasized the existence of moral absolutes, that there are some acts that are intrinsically evil. There seems to have been a great move during Pope Francis’s pontificate.
not necessarily by Pope Francis himself, though he does talk about a new paradigm, but a new turn toward a subjectivist approach to morality, a situation ethics. I remember going to a talk once by Joseph Fletcher, who wrote the book Situation Ethics. This was in the 1980s. By that time, he was a keynote speaker at the Hemlock Society’s convention promoting euthanasia.
he described himself that that’s a he started as an Episcopalian priest, I think. But by the 1980s, he said he was an atheist theologian. But now you have these ideas, getting into Catholic discussions as perhaps the way to make ourselves more appealing to a newer generation. And I belong to the Pontifical Academy for Life and that Academy
put out a book a couple of years ago called theological ethics of life that was very much at least a number of the articles in it were very much promoting this subjectivist approach that so you have exceptions to all of the things that we thought were moral absolutes. So there was a turn towards looking to lived experience, subjective lived experience as a source of moral norms.
in many cases, setting aside the traditional moral norms. And I felt there really needs to be a response to that.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (08:31)
Well, before we go any further with that, tell people a little bit about the Pontifical Academy for Life, because they are a significant player in this whole back and forth conversation. there’s been, well, unless you’re deeply involved in Catholic inside baseball, you won’t understand what that academy was set up to be and what it has become and why it’s important. So give people little background about that, Rich.
Richard Doerflinger (08:57)
Sure. Pontifical Academy for Life was started by Pope John Paul II. Its first president was the great pro-life geneticist, Jerome Lejeune, who discovered the gene that causes Down syndrome. And he spent the whole rest of his life, after he discovered it, fighting against the effort to eliminate, to abort, children with that disease. But…
It is it was founded that it’s one of a number of advisory bodies to the Vatican. And while the others are more academic in the sense of you have a Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, but this was a Pontifical Academy for life. Its task was to put, you know, good minds to work.
talking together about ways to advance the church’s witness to the sanctity of human life from beginning to end. In recent years, it has, I think, departed from that vision, though the bylaws remain essentially the same. That is still the job, in theory, of the Academy. But they’ve been naming members who are in favor of abortion. They have been
going into a number of different issues that are much more diffuse in terms of healthcare and so on, things that I would have thought were the task of other Vatican bodies, frankly. And more and more interventions, talks, articles by members attacking traditional Catholic morality.
When the Dobbs decision was handed down, reversing Roe v. Wade, one of the members who teaches at Loyola in, I think it’s Loyola Marymount in California, he organized a panel of three faculty, including himself, in which all three of them denounced the decision, saying it was a path to a totalitarian society because we were gonna lose this wonderful freedom.
Three days later, he was promoted in the Pontifical Academy for Life to being on being a ordinary member instead of a corresponding member, which means he gets to be more in charge of the direction of the Academy. Wow. I think it has gone into some directions that were very much not the incentive of John Paul the second. And since Pope Francis signed the latest version of the bylaws, which
reaffirm its vision. I don’t think in tune with what Pope Francis has signed either.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (12:00)
But the way it’s been done is not by, as you say, changing the bylaws or anything like that. It’s been done strictly through personnel. It’s been personnel appointments. Some people were removed, other people were included, some people are promoted, some people are demoted. And that’s the way it has been done. And just to be clear for everyone, the Catholic teaching about the infallibility of the Pope does not include his
Personnel appointments. No one has ever said that the Pope is beyond criticism for whom he appoints to various positions. So one of the consequences of the change in personnel has been new documents that have been issued by the Pontifical Academy for Life that you never would have expected under the Benedict Pontificate, for example, which is where you were appointed. So tell people a little bit about the… There’s a document that really precipitated our response here.
Partly it’s a document from the Pontifical Academy for Life, but also what’s happening in the synod on synodality and so on and so forth. So give people a little bit of perspective about what the Academy for Life came out with and why it’s significant.
Richard Doerflinger (13:11)
And this book a couple of years ago about the theological ethics of life that was published by the Academy. And as far as I know, was the whole seminar that produced it was and the book itself had nothing to do with the knowledge or consent of most of the rank and file members. This was an inner circle. They invited outside speakers as well.
And they put together this body of work that I think undermines a great deal of the Catholic moral tradition on moral absolutes, on moral norms. And interestingly, the two English language articles I read that were most difficult, know, posed the most difficulties in that regard actually cited Vatican II.
or at least the spirit of Vatican too. They didn’t do much to quote anything in the Second Vatican Council that supported what they were saying. And they totally ignored the great document Gaudium et Spes on the church in the modern world that had an entire list of crimes against life that are always wrong and poisoned society, beginning with abortion and euthanasia. And
And in the part of the document about marriage said we have to develop our moral norms in tune with the objective nature of the human person and his acts. Well, that’s against subjectivism, but here you have Pontifical Academy for Life promoting a very subjectivist idea of morality based on what
your past experience tells you would be the good thing for you to do.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (15:11)
And so it’s interesting that they had to go back to Vatican II. They had to jump over the magisterial documents of the John Paul pontificate, where he very clearly talks about moral absolutes, very clearly talks about the gospel of life, between Veritatis Spunder and the gospel of life. They couldn’t use any of that. That’s what they’re trying to undermine, I suppose. Is that too strong to say that way?
Richard Doerflinger (15:41)
I don’t think it is because the three great declarations of the gospel of life, evangelical and vitae were about the the grave and innate moral evil of abortion, euthanasia and any direct killing of the innocent. People asked, are these infallible pronouncements by the pope? And I think the consensus that developed were
These were not infallible definitions by the Pope, but they were formal recognitions by the Pope that these teachings had been made infallible over a long period of time from being taught by all the bishops over a very long period of time. He had actually consulted every bishop in the world on these statements before he made them.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (16:31)
Is that right? No, that is so interesting to me, and I will tell you why. Because we’re struggling so much with this question of what is the infallible magisterium. I think Catholics and non-Catholics alike want to say, sometimes act as if they think it’s the pope and only the pope. And what you’re saying is John Paul didn’t view it that way. And, you know, actually looking back at some of the earlier things, the Declaration, the Immaculate Conception.
was exactly that. The pope consulted everybody before he said, yep, this is what we’ve always taught. It was more a declaration of something that was already there and understood by everyone. So the magisterium, you tell me if I’m saying this correctly, Rich, because this is a really important point to be clear about. The magisterium includes papal pronouncements, but it is bigger than the pope. The pope by himself doesn’t create the magisterium. Is that correct?
Richard Doerflinger (17:30)
yes, it is. in fact, each bishop has his own mandate, his own charism as a successor of the apostles to teach that universal teaching in his own diocese and contributes to the magisterium of the world church. it’s I mean, you know, there’s a lot of talk recent years about synodality.
If synodality means the bishops are getting together and consulting with each other, that’s been going on a very long time, basically since the early church. the and in fact, the number of bishops that John Paul II consulted with on those teachings on life was far broader than the number of bishops that are now in the synod meeting at Rome. and the veritat of splendor, splendor of the truth.
couldn’t have been clearer. A major goal of that document was to rebut charges that there are no moral absolutes, that there are no things that you can’t make exceptions to based on the greater good that you think can come of it down the road from the consequences. Some people call it consequentialism. It was a direct response to that. And it said it is unacceptable in the eyes of church teaching.
So to see this whole debate from the ninth, you know, began in the 1960s, 1970s, not sure that came out of dissent from Pope Paul VI encyclical on contraception, Humanae Vitae, to see it revived 50 years later as though it’s a new paradigm rather than an old dissenting position that everybody thought or most people thought had been put to rest.
is rather frustrating. It’s not about moving forward. Now we’re stuck back 50 years ago again, having to explain why that is an impoverished view of moral norms. They’re norms because they command us, not because we make up them.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (19:40)
That is well said, Richard. That is really well said. And that’s the idea that is so alien to the modern mind, that we believe, we want to think that if we make it up ourselves, that that’s going to somehow be superior because it’s going to take into account my personal circumstances, yada, yada, yada. But the truth is, the truth is there is a reality out there. There is something real. And the more we conform ourselves to it,
happier we’re going to be. This is what the Church has always taught. This is what, I mean, even, you know, like Aristotle taught that, right? I mean, a lot of wise pagans, noble pagans understand that to be true. And so that brings us to the point of this volume, right? I mean, I think we’ve now given people enough background to see what’s going on in the Church that requires some kind of response. So, as I understood my role in this
book because I’m not a theologian. never worked for a bishop. You know, I don’t have the kind of background that you guys have. I’ve got the social science evidence that convinces me 100 % that the church’s teaching is correct, that people are happier, better off, we flourish. If we do what the church tells us to do, you know, just only have sex with the person you’re married to just for starters, you know, that would solve a lot of problems, you know, even, you know, when you put it like that, people are
Well, oh, OK. I guess I admit that would solve problems, I don’t want to.
Richard Doerflinger (21:13)
I was reading the other day and I had I had not paid attention to this statistic for a while. The 80 percent of abortions in the United States are among unmarried women.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (21:24)
Oh, it’s more than 80. I’m pretty sure it’s more than 80. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more.
Richard Doerflinger (21:29)
Yeah. And, you know, this person was saying, maybe the first thing we need to do to to reduce abortions is to try to rebuild a marriage culture and talking about that kind of love that is commitment as well, commitment to your beloved and commitment to any children you may produce together. And, you know, you wouldn’t need so many debates about laws if you had that culture.
Changing.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (21:59)
Exactly. Exactly. let’s talk. So that brings us full circle to your specific contribution, your essay that’s in this volume. Tell people a little bit about the topic of your essay and the experience that led you to write that particular chapter.
Richard Doerflinger (22:24)
Yeah, I felt our our experience was relevant because we did not accept or understand the church’s teaching on contraception when we got married at all. Even though, well, I’ve been I’ve been studying theology, but it was at University of Chicago where the Divinity School was sort of on liberal Protestant territory for the most part. And
We got married at the university Catholic student chapel, so there was no formal parish as such. think our marriage preparation consisted of walking around the block with a young priest there who was a graduate student as well. And he made sure that we loved each other and in general were open to children and that was enough. So my wife went to the student health clinic before we got married and asked them about
methods for delaying having children since we were both starving students, had hardly had a penny between us and came back with the most popular form of the birth control pill at that time. The pill made her feel upset and kind of bloated and she lost interest in sex, which does prevent pregnancy, but it’s not
what we had in mind.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (23:58)
And you understand this is a very common experience, by the way. mean, this is a symptoms.
Richard Doerflinger (24:04)
Yeah, we up learning that this is not unusual. So anyway, was right. And I started feeling guilty of it. You I am endangering the health of my wife, who I’m supposed to be showing great love for. And you don’t do that to people you love. Later, we tried Barry methods, and we felt uncomfortable with those as well. You know, here we are becoming
one flesh and we’re shielding ourselves from each other. It just, it felt wrong. That was just sort of an instinctive reaction that this is far from ideal. Ultimately, I transferred to Catholic University of America for my theological or my doctoral work because I wanted to learn more about specifically Catholic theology. Ironically, my first, my very first class at Catholic University was taught by
Father Charlie Curran, who was the champion of US dissent against Iman Avite.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (25:11)
May I ask what year was that that you started at Catholic U?
Richard Doerflinger (25:14)
That would be 1978.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (25:20)
Okay, so you started in 1978, Humana Vitae, just to get this in people’s mind, came out in 1968. The Catholic world, particularly Catholics in America, have been resisting, dissenting, lot of controversy around that. And you were young married couple when that was going down. And so here you are in the classroom of the most famous dissenter in America,
and trying to sort a young married man trying to sort this out. Go ahead.
Richard Doerflinger (25:52)
Yeah, and I don’t think in the class contraception was ever talked about, though many of the other students were big fans of Charlie Curran because of his descent. And when I gave out my own views on some other issues, they looked a little askance at me. But fortunately, Father Curran himself always graded me on how well I argued, not whether I agreed with him, which was all to the good. But I also got to meet William E. May.
who was one of the great lay theologians defending the church’s teaching against contraception. And I got to have many, I never took a course from him, but I got to have a lot of conversations with him. And later he and I were both in a seminar taught by Professor Jermaine Grise, who was in the process of writing his magnum opus on Catholic moral theology. In fact, every class we were going through a different chapter of it.
and giving advice, a lot of which he thought was not that helpful, but, you know, was fun to be part of the project. And they, of course, were both very, very articulate and very open about the why the church teaching is needed. The. So this began to give me these new ideas about.
what we’re doing, but it was all very unformed in my mind when we walked one day into the Newman bookstore, which is the Catholic bookstore near Catholic University, or was no longer exists, alas. And my wife found this book called A Cooperative Natural Method of Birth Control by Margaret Knopfziger. Now, Margaret Knopfziger was not a Catholic. She was kind of a hippie.
She was living on a commune called the Farm in Tennessee, and they were all very organic. And they were using natural family planning because that was the way that did not poison your body or mess up your relationship with artificial methods. But it was a very, very simple and candid and sometimes humorous presentation of this.
And my wife, who had started as a biology major in college, she was just fascinated by all these descriptions about how the reproductive system works. She started charting. We had both started as science majors, so we had plenty of graph paper. And one day she said, well, I mean, I’m past my fertile time.
really? And we never looked back. know, unprotected sex was a new experience for us. We didn’t want to protect each other anymore.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (28:58)
Now I get you. I get what you’re saying. She said we don’t need any barriers because I’m past my fertile time. We don’t need the barriers. We don’t need the barriers. That’s what you’re saying.
Richard Doerflinger (29:07)
Yes, we, so we started our new marital history and we never really looked back. mean, there were times when it was difficult. There were times when, you know, for various reasons, you know, somebody’s traveling business or family obligations or somebody’s feeling ill or, you know, my wife would already have
had a child or is about to have a child or is recovering from having a child. We ended up having four children, none of whom were really a big surprise. You know, I like to say that, well, they were all planned, but in some cases, the planning only took a minute or so.
We’re capable of having another child. Why don’t we take a chance? But what impressed us was that it’s so much more human a way to look at your procreative life and your sexual lives than with contraception, because if you do say, well, mean, there’s a chance
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (30:05)
So.
Richard Doerflinger (30:28)
of having a child. And you say, well, okay, that is a very different context from saying, that pill didn’t work or that barrier slipped or that thing broke. It’s you know, physical thing. It’s not your act. It’s this material object that failed you. And then you’re tempted to.
finish the job if a pregnancy does occur. And one thing I discovered through my research working for the bishops conference was that well over half of women who were having an abortion had been using a contraceptive method at the time that they during the month that they became pregnant. The other thing I learned, and this was something that came from my work for the bishops, because in the 1990s you had a whole debate in Congress about
reducing abortions, what were your do’s abortions? And some people were saying, well, let’s, let’s step up contraceptive programs, even to a higher pitch than they’ve been before. And they’d always been heavily funded. And I decided to look into what the, you know, this is the social science part of it. What happens when people pass new, broader, more sweeping contraceptive programs?
Do they reduce abortions? And I ended up doing a fact sheet with a couple of dozen references, concluding that they don’t reduce abortions in a number of cases. They have increased abortions. The contraceptives have given people a false sense of security, made them more open to more casual sex, and therefore opened them up to the possibility of a pregnancy that they don’t know what to do about because
there, the act that created that child was so anonymous and, and so meaningless to them in a way. So it’s, it was a big wake up call for me because even as a, even as a social, phenomenon, contraception doesn’t work. It, certainly at reduced thing, the number of abortions.
And that’s something that John Paul II mentioned in his encyclical on the gospel of life as well. People think it’s going to prevent it, but it can be very many times a road toward it. You had this technical thing that was supposed to prevent this, but as a backup to contraceptive failure, you have this other technical thing that will solve the problem you didn’t think you were supposed to have.
I’ve done some writing in the past about this whole worldview of expressive individualism, that every one of us is just sort of a individual. Well, it’s really, it’s very Nietzschean, you know, it’s the will to power. I express myself, I can create myself, making my identity by the way that I work out what I want to do. And that is so destructive on so many levels.
And I think that the marriage culture, the idea of actually committing yourself to another person, that that is freeing. It frees you from all the consequences of uncommitted sex that so many women have had to experience. A mother has the instinct of protecting her child at every stage. We have been trying to suppress that over the recent
Decades of developments on this is what your individual.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (34:27)
you
back next week for part two of my interview with Richard Dorflinger.
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About the Ruth Institute
The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.
Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
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