Fidelity: What are the criteria for liberal Catholicism? People have said, for example, acceptance of Humanae Vitae is the earmark of a conservative Catholic or a traditional Catholic or a Roman Catholic. How do you feel about that?
Michael Novak:I don't think in terms of laying down one or two liberal tests. On that score I thought then and I think now that the Catholic teaching, the current Catholic teaching, on contraceptives is a mistake....Pope John Paul II has a splended little book on responsible love, a splendid little book which is, I think, nonetheless wrong on marital love. ...
F:In 1968 Pope Paul VI sketched out a scenario for the West -- saying that contraception would lead to abortion and abortion would lead to infanticide and euthanasia and so on . Do you think that that has happened? Do you think that that is a valid argument?
MN:Yes and no. All of these things have been coming together for a long time. Long before 1964. And it is true that they tend to come as a complex. That is the 'yes' part of it. But, no they need not. Each of those issues deserves to be considered in its own context and for its own merit.
F: But globally it seems that the things go together.
MN: They do and they don't. [Huh?!! So the fact that nearly every country that introduces contraception soon legalizes abortion is an optical illusion? A chance peculiarity of our time? My rant.] There has been infanticide long before there was contraception. Infanticide is a normal practice of many cultures of the world. Horrible as it is, and abortion too. Abortion may or may not go along with contraception....
F:But you are in a sense picking and choosing among Catholic doctrines.
MN:That's much too arbitrary. I'm not picking and choosing at all [I love it when they tell you they aren't doing what they manifestly are doing -- my rant]. I'm thinking in a sustained and systematic way, and there are some places where I think that the humanistic experience, has taught us more than our community has yet publicly recognized. The Catholic Church marches through history burning its martyrs on every street corner and declaring them saints twenty-five years later. Somebody has to go out there and do the work first. Intellectuals are characteristically at war with the magisterium of their time and thirty or forty years later the magisterium learns from them. That's a normal dialectic. If you are a part of the church you have to be a part of its avante garde too and some of the things you say will be wrong and some of them will be right. That's for the community as a whole to wheedle out. But you'be got to be faithful to your own intellect. Otherwise there's no chance at all.
The interview was done in the early 80's. I got it from the anthology, The Best of Fidelity: Volume I -- The First Three Years, pgs 30-35, Ultramontane Associates, 1984.
With Catholics like Michael Novak, who needs anti-Catholics?