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tentative tone as something of a loophole or a sign of things to come.
     
    While the purpose of the expanded Papal Commission has never been made crystal clear, as it grew under Paul VI’s watchful eye, some of its members became virtual celebrities when portions of their deliberations were leaked to the press in 1966. Blood was in the water. Most among the vaunted Commission voted for change. Four years of whisper campaigns and fawning media coverage of the Commission’s (selectively) confidential activities were never far from the news wires.
     
    While no one believes Paul VI was a closet dissenter who finally buckled under “curial pressure,” there is some evidence that he wanted the fullest possible answer to the question of the birth control pill, which was given FDA approval in 1960. Professor Germain Grisez assisted John Ford, SJ, a member of the Commission who stood with the Church. “[Pope] Paul also thought there might be something about the pill that was different,” Grisez told an interviewer in 2003. “And, if there was, he wanted to find out about it, because he felt the Church couldn’t ask something that God doesn’t require of them.” 9
     
    While widely respected, Paul VI did not elicit the kind of spontaneous affection from the public that Pope John XXIII did with his ample girth and cherubic grin. Nor did he command the august bearing of a Pius XI or a Pius XII, neither of whom had any known allergies to confrontation. Pope Paul’s work of overseeing three quarters of the Second Vatican Council got him labeled too conservative for the progressives, too progressive for the old guard. By temperament, Paul VI was more Prince Hamlet than King Lear.
     
    Agitation for change came drop by drop, sometimes from unexpectedly high places in the Church. Pope Paul continued to wrestle with his response. In a private meeting with Archbishop Sheen, the Pope confided to the famous U.S. prelate that when he (Paul VI) rested his head on his pillow at night, he felt as though it were made of thorns. 10 During his General Audience on July 31, 1968, at the end of his four-year study period, Paul VI admitted that he “trembled before alternatives,” and never felt the burden of his high office more keenly in his entire papacy.
     

Bad Opening Night
    The Commission’s Majority Report, as it’s colloquially known, argued for a change in the two-thousand-year-old teaching. The arguments are similar to that of the Anglican Lambeth Conference in 1930. To say that flappers have a lot in common with hippies is to put too fine a point on it. But both groups, old Anglican bishops and new Catholic theologians, took corresponding pains to insist that birth control is to be used only in exceptional cases—and only in marriage—and that such use would not, could not, should not, lead to any social problems like promiscuity or marital breakdown. 11
     
    Two years went by after the leak. Pope Paul continued to deliberate, ever bombarded by an unremitting pressure to capitulate to the whisper of the world to consider the Pill morally neutral or even good.
     
    When the encyclical was finally released on July 25, 1968, Paul VI inexplicably chose Monsignor Ferdinando Lambruschini to announce it at a press conference. A moral theologian at Lateran University, Monsignor Lambruschini voted for change at the final meeting of the Papal Commission. 12 During the press conference, he promptly announced that the encyclical was “not infallible,” and his subsequent nuances did little to undo the conclusions drawn by the press.
     
    Never in history has a papal document of thirty-one succinct paragraphs set off such a maelstrom. The print on the paper was still warm when a Vietnam War-style protest was held on the steps of Catholic University in Washington, DC, to denounce it. Well-organized theological elites in America issued statements and signature rolls dismissing the encyclical. Humanae Vitae was even lampooned on TV’s