"De usu imperfecto matrimonii". Il Sant'Uffizio e il controllo delle nascite

• Autores: Emmanuel Betta
• Localización: Quaderni storici, ISSN 0301-6307, Anno 49, Nº 145, 2014, págs. 141-182
• Idioma: italiano
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• Resumen

  • Between 1816 and 1930, when the encyclical Casti Connubii was issued, the Catholic Church defined its moral and disciplinary discourse on fertility control, whether decided privately by a couple or promoted by the intervention of pulic institutions. In this period, the Roman institutions devoted to moral and disciplinary matters - i.e. the Apostolic Penitentiary and the Congregation of the Holy Office - discussed doubts arisen from various parts of the world on the morality of birth control. Discussions about fertility and its control directly concerned larger doctrines about matrimony, prompting consideration of the basic character of marriage and the historical continuity of the Church's positions on sexuality and matrimonial morality. To address these questins, first the Penitentiary and later the Holy Office discussed the meaning of the sexual act in the bounds of matrimony, in the context of the dominium over the body of the spouse and the large economy of purposes to which matrimony was delicated. By using unpublished sources of the Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, this essay will analyze the regulatory pathway promoted by Roman institutions between 1816 and 1930 and its related dynamics. It will examine how the debate on issues concerning the sexual and reproductive body dimensions - e.g., contraceptive practices, Neo-Malthusianism, eugenics, population policies, bio-political matters - contributed to frame the Catholic discourse on marriage and its internal dynamics.