Free and responsible: Sexuality,pastoral,and the art of governance in Catholic Conjugal Centres (1953–1990)

Abstract

This article deals with a socio-historical enigma: the articulation of family planning – through dedicated centres – and catholicism. How come self-identified catholics ended up defending contraception and decriminalisation of abortion while the Catholic Church kept reminding that sexuality should be conjugal and reproductive? The article examines the process of creating a discursive and practical normativity allowing the use of contraception and abortion through a catholic ‘tool’, that is, the pastoral power at a time of secularisation. Borrowing the concept developed by Michel Foucault enables highlighting the ‘catholic governmentality’ regarding contraception and abortion, namely, the ‘responsible-freedom’.

Introduction

In 1978, Michel Foucault (2007) introduced his idea of pastoral as the inspiration for its concept of governmentality in Security, Territory, Population. The French philosopher saw in pastoral a form of power producing new modes of individualisation: pastoral, as a catholic service, oversees the life of the faithful empirically through different techniques. Erected as a concept by Michel Foucault, pastoral paved the way to the modern form of power he theorised, biopolitics. Pastoral indeed completes and clarifies the notion of ‘biopolitics’, for it is empirically both global – the herd, meaning in Foucault’s terms, the population – and individual – the ewe or the body in his words: it is a modern form of power oscillating between the control of everybody’s life and the subjugation of each (Skornicki, 2005: 46).

Foucault uses pastoral to understand the emergence and the genealogy of the modern State (Büttgen, 2007). I ¹ instead merge into an ‘institutional biopolitics’ (Memmi and Taïeb, 2009: 5), moving away from a global and systemic approach. I wish to see what it does on a local level when biopolitics is delegated to ‘practitioners’ (Memmi, 1996) who act as ‘judges of normality’ (Foucault, 1977). With ‘biopolitics’, ‘many empirical questions remain open: for example, the attitude of priests and the faithful may be far removed from the auspices of the “hierarchy”’ as acknowledged by Turina (2013: 147) in her work on Vatican biopolitics. Pastoral allows a focus on a practical, local level and on practitioners, whose function is to invest everyday life to assure norms are being followed – and sometimes, to transform them.

When Foucault developed his notion of pastoral as a form of power, Belgium was the scene of a practical experience of institutional biopolitics that took its roots in a pastoral service: the Catholic Conjugal Centres (CCC). Pastoral, both as a service and an art of governance, articulated planned parenthood and Catholicism in this original enterprise. Catholics have taken over birth regulation in other countries as well (Fradois, 2017), but except for López (2008), they never left the bosom of the catholic morals as such. These CCC tell a different narrative about the social changes of the 1960s–1970s: history of the ‘sexual revolution’ has mainly given room to feminists and ‘progressists’ forces. ² Catholicism, on the contrary, has been very often sent back to its opposition to the ‘sex revolution’. The analyses of these Belgian centres show from their creation onwards that they, and their counsellors, were caught up in a web of norms, trapped in a limbo between legal norms, moral ones, and the progressive changes in the society. Although they were not at the forefront of the legal combat, these CCC not only adapted to the sex revolution but took part in it. Their combat took the form of an everyday disciplinarisation of the bodies to produce a new form of sexual and reproductive subjectivity. This discipline did not follow the laws nor the moral guidelines of the Church but a new code of conduct created by the centres through ‘practitioners’ (the counsellors).

This article aims at showing how the centres, through their counsellors’ practices and discourses, created a subject producing a ‘good’ relation to sexuality and reproductive conduct, never mind laws and morals. How did these centres frame reproductive and sexual norms and practices at a time of transformation? What kind of subjectivities did those counsellors promote, and how? I will show how ‘pastoral’ was used as a tool to conduct sexual and reproductive conducts at a time of sexual and reproductive transformation in a specific organisation (CCC) with a specific ideology (identified as ‘catholic’) and consequently, following Büttgen (2007), that pastoral talks about a power dispositive rather than just a service linked to the history of religion.

Methodology

The research process lay on a ‘bottom-up’ approach revealed in the archival work and interviews with former counsellors. Video, private written documents from the CCC, brochures or master thesis from former counsellors consisted almost solely of reflections on sexual and reproductive norms and conducts. These archival documents helped to frame the chronology of this article: 1953 represents the foundation of the first CCC, when pastoral started to be an art of government rather than just a service. Even if the ‘art of pastoral’ keeps going today, the 1990 law ends this article for it recognised the work of the CCC and their original way to deal with abortion.

To the archive material, I added interviews with 30 former counsellors working from the 1970s and found through a snowball sampling. Interviews allowed to provide a sociology of counsellors: they were in majority women and all catholic and married in their 30s when in duty (Crosetti, 2020). The interviews were also supposed to give information on the everyday practice of counselling. Yet, it was almost impossible for me to understand empirically, through interviews, what these counsellors did in the centres: they gave me few practical information (‘giving the pill’, ‘giving a phone number’, for example). In that sense, interviews can be frustrating. Nevertheless, this frustration helped to understand that what they did was talking and listening during consultations: everything was a matter of words, confessing and eliciting a confession.

What the centres and the counsellors had to say – their speech about sexuality and reproduction – matter, leading to a discursive analysis necessary to explain the centres’ political position (Crosetti, 2020). However, in this article, ‘speech’ is to be considered as the practice to study, rather than just the source of a discursive analysis: ‘speech’ as a technic to produce specific subjectivities is the result of the interviews, and this is how I will use them. What is crucial is not only what these counsellors said but what they tried to produce by saying it.

Pastoral service and the art of governance

A catholic population

Foucault (2007: 165) defines pastoral as the ‘(…) art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand, and manipulating men (…) collectively and individually throughout their life and at each moment of their existence’. The philosopher saw pastoral as a particular technology of power, differing from the sovereign power and using different tools to conduct the souls of both individuals and the collective.

Foucault first characterises pastoral as exercised on a ‘flock’ of people, the herd in a pastoral metaphor, rather than on a territory, as the sovereign power did. The CCC imbeds in this vision of the primacy of the herd, as the target of the CCC lies in their origins: catholic organisations. The CCC indeed took its roots in the solid Belgian catholic associative environment, the Catholic Action, overseeing catholics’ life from the cradle to the grave. From the mid-twentieth century, catholic initiatives from laypeople flourished regarding conjugal life, family, and sexuality. The first initiative took the form of a journal, the Family Pages (FP). ³ Created in 1938, this journal sowed the seed of organisations that would take over empirically the faithful’s family and marital problems as it aimed at ‘ensuring family’s full development and the diffusion of solutions’. ⁴ In order to ensure this ‘diffusion’, the journal created in 1947 a new section, the ‘letters-to-the-editors’, called ‘Between us’. ⁵ The editors in charge – laypersons – offered answers to catholic writers’ requests regarding very diverse matters, such as ‘Sexuality, the start of the conjugal life, spouses’ intimacy, physical harmony, Ogino, body temperature method, masturbation, women’s pleasure, infertility etc.’ (Falisse, 1987).

Facing the increasing demands of women, men, and couples, the magazine led to the foundation in the 1950s of a larger catholic field dealing with issues related to ‘conjugal life’. They created the first CCC in 1953 in order to embody the letters: editors transformed into counsellors while advice-seekers turned into consultants. The CCC spread in French-speaking Belgium quite rapidly (Crosetti, 2017): in 1974, seven other centres opened in the biggest cities of Wallonia and kept spreading until the 1990 with now 18 centres, known now as the Planning and Counselling Centres Federation (FCPC). Archives did not leave a trace of how many people and counsellors worked in the centres. With the spread of the CCC, a pastoral organisation, the National Centre for Family Pastoral/Educational Centre for Love and Family (CNPF/CEFA ⁶ ) took charge of the formation (biology, ‘moral’ and psychology courses were given) of the newly conjugal counsellors. The CNPF also represented the investment of the Church in those issues – the Church of Belgium was indeed very interested in the matter (Dupont, 2014; Vanderpelen, 2020) and endorsed the publications with the imprimatur. The CCC were a guidance service, a ‘link of a big chain: love guidance, groundwork to become an adult, formation on becoming a parent, conjugal reflection in psychological, spiritual, social and other perspectives’. ⁷ Linked with the Church, guided by chaplains who symbolised that link, yet initiated by laypersons, the CCC were a catholic service, as acknowledged by the chief editor of the FP: ‘The Family Pages are in the hands of laypersons genuinely animated by faith and by the desire to be the faithful sons of the Church’. ⁸ They fully embraced this identity and their target, as one of the first counsellors of the CCC wrote, ‘I think it is essential to introduce, in the FP, Christian solutions only! Let’s leave the ambiguity of trying to reach also the unbelievers! It is impossible to do both’. ⁹

The target of the FP is unequivocally the catholics, whether they are from Belgium or any French-speaking country where the journal was read, such as France, Switzerland, or Canada. The CNPF and the CCC had a more local implantation, as the idea behind such centres was to be close to the people. They offered ‘catholic solutions’ to marital problems and targeted the catholics – the ‘faithful’: in Foucault’s terms, the idea of the ‘flock’ – here, a catholic flock.

A beneficent power

Pastoral is not only defined by its target but also by the form of power it uses. It is indeed a ‘beneficent’ power as the duty of the ‘pastor’ is the ‘salvation’ of the herd. This salvation needs to be questioned empirically: how to ‘save the souls’ of the consultants indeed? Rather than salvation, the different proposed services aimed at guiding the consultants’ conjugal, sexual, and family life. In order to guide, the counsellors used a guideline. Where were the consultants guided towards?

The CCC wanted to offer ‘assistance on conjugal reflexion’. ¹⁰ The analysis of the FP showed compliance with the morality of the Catholic Church. In the first years of the magazine, the journal followed principles described in the papal encyclical (Pozzi, 2017). First encyclical on marriage and sexuality, ‘(…) the encyclical set a rigid doctrine about sexual conjugality, whose main characteristic was its Augustinian formulation of procreation as the first aim of marriage’ (Pozzi, 2017: 44; 2021). Pius XI indeed considered reproduction as the first aim of marriage. Love, mutual care, and sexuality were a secondary purpose of the sacrament, as the duty of couples was to grow and multiply. Reproduction only justified sexuality, making unlawful the use of contraception of any kind. Birth limitation went against chastity and contradicted the nature of marriage itself. The FP followed the lead of the encyclical in its articles. The authors considered family, conjugality, and sexuality based on the marital union, as did the encyclical: family is a distinct social unity, the foundation of the society. Therefore, sexual activity out of wedlock had no existence in the journal. As in the encyclical, the magazine reminded the authority of the husband over his wife (as marriage was only considered between a man and a woman in a heteronormative way) and children. Complementarity of men and women were the basis of conjugal life, having an ‘(…) equal dignity as persons but that this equal dignity is premised on and manifests in essential and complementary differences, physical, psychological and ontological’ (Case, 2016: 156). Women were supposed to be caring mothers, while men were expected to be authoritative fathers and husbands. Regarding contraception, the magazine offered a new perspective as from 1946: ‘In the best interest of the household, of the spouse and mother’s equilibrium, of the children’s education, a family ‘policy’ is to some extent advisable’. ¹¹ Birth regulation and the means to achieve it were not advertised as such but envisaged.

The very traditional vision of marriage, sexuality, and love evolved during the twentieth century, as society was also evolving (Dupont, 2014). Envisioning a ‘family policy’ modified slowly gender relationships among couples: equality, love, and pleasure came to be seen as positive acts when carried out within conjugality: ‘God wants sexual drive and sexual pleasure in order to accomplish his work, they are useful to couples, because they reinforce love’ (Falisse, 1946: 12). A family policy could also help overcome the ‘fear of fecundation’ (De Cordemois, 1953: 82), explaining why it became slowly accepted. The Pope himself recognised in 1951 regulation through ‘natural’ technique, such as the rhythm method (Noonan, 1965: 446). This method was perceived as chaste for it requires control over one’s body, contrary to the pill related to ‘pleasure on demand’. The journal advocated for a ‘thoughtful fecundity’: ‘Most of the time, (…) spouses desire fecundity but a thoughtful fecundity, adapted to their situation and life’s circumstances. It produces a more human decision, therefore a more moral one’ (Thielmans, 1963: 267). The FP was looking for ‘harmony’ (De Cordemois, 1953: 81), whether a sexual, emotional, or relational one. Harmony became an objective.

The FP tried to bring a new way of living catholic morals: through harmony. In what way could harmony be depicted as ‘beneficent’? By publishing multiple articles, the writers – theologians but mostly laypeople – tried to find justifications for the rules enacted by the Vatican, based on their own experiences as catholic couples, as one of the writers wrote: ‘Reflexion did not develop based on principles, but rather arose from life’ (De Locht, 1979: 14). Yet, the norms were not to be followed just for the purpose of being good Christians, but because it could bring something positive: sexual and relational harmony – although gender relationships were not questioned on a structural level. The rules aimed at something out of the rules themselves and directed only towards the beneficence of the couples. The writers did not guide for themselves but for the crowd they took care of. ‘Harmony’ as a catholic goal was the way to coat the norms and to give sense to a rule. The study of the journal shows that the norms were not prescribed (Masquelier and Vanderpelen, 2017). Instead, the journal developed a personalist view of the norms by encouraging the readers to follow them. The authors of the ‘letters-to-the-editors’ section used the readers’ requests and difficulties to reaffirm the norms, yet not in an authoritative manner. Contrary to sovereign power, pastoral is indeed a power over life that tries to encourage rather than repress. Personalism considered the values of the faithful and their progress towards the norms rather than their accordance with them. In other words, the faithful must be responsible enough to try to reach the norms. Intentionality prevailed over accordance.

The creation of the CCC reinforced the prevalence of the personalist view. Going away from the normative principles, the centres and their counsellors, while having the same sociological background as the redactors of the FP, focused on the consultants and their responsibility: ‘(…) we endeavour not to loom over big principles, to be of genuine help. But sometimes we worry about the solutions, and we do not feel at ease’. ¹² The solutions of the Church sometimes could not apply to people’s lives, and the counsellors had to help consultants differently. During the 1960s, the explicit reference to the catholic norms faded. The norms started to be discussed in the Church itself, for their certainty was more and more questioned, especially regarding sexual and reproductive norms. In Belgium, Cardinal Suenens chaired the first symposium on sexology at Leuven in 1959. This conference heralded a decade of discussion on contraception and abortion in the catholic world and positioned Suenens and the Church of Belgium as being ‘in research’ on those matters (Vanderpelen, 2020).

Individualisation of the collective

Pastoral governs a population. Yet, Foucault ‘gives rise to what he calls the “paradox of the shepherd” namely that because the pastor must care for the multiplicity as a whole while at the same time providing for the particular salvation of each’ (Schuilenburg and Peeters, 2018: 6). The paradox lies in the two levels of management of the souls. By taking care of each member of the population they guide, the shepherd deals with the population as a whole, and no one is left behind. In a word, pastoral is an individualising power.

The CCCs represented this individualisation. While the FP wanted to talk to everybody through its pages, the section ‘Between us’ and later on, the CCC started to talk to each and every writer or consultant. The answer to the issues brought up became individualised. In order to do so, the CNPF tried to understand empirically the reality of their consultants. In 1959, the FP published a French survey on the use of contraception by catholics. The survey’s conclusion showed that one out of three ‘households’ respected the Church prescription in terms of contraception, using the temperature methods. Therefore, the other two-thirds had ‘fraudulent’ practices: coitus interruptus, IUD, or even abortion (Le Moal, 1958). The CNPF was even eager to organise their own Belgian ‘catholic Kinsey survey’ ¹³ to know what their consultants’ and readers’ practices in terms of contraception were. Surveys are one of the specific devices of governmentality, as it allows to develop knowledge of a population. Foucault analysed it as a ‘life science’ or ‘souls science’ (Rabinow and Rose, 2003). These surveys blend in the individualisation of power as it is a ‘precise and meticulous accounting of the actions of each and all of [the pastor’s] charges in order to assure their salvation’ (Golder, 2007: 167). This ‘life science’ leads to an individualised service in the everyday life since ‘[t]he pastor must really take charge of and observe daily life in order to form a never-ending knowledge of the behaviour and conduct of the members of the flock he supervises’ (Foucault, 2007: 181). Individualisation explains how pastoral service is the foundation of a governmentality of people ‘in their everyday life’.

At an institution level, following the ‘institutional biopolitics’ developed previously, pastoral services founded in Belgium took over the everyday life of the ‘herd’ in a more and more detailed way. The CCC indeed allowed the consultants (mostly women, less frequently men or couples) to express their difficulties in their specificities, each of them could take an appointment to be counselled on intimate subjects (sexuality, pleasure, love, or reproductive issues). Contrary to the FP, the answer given by the counsellors was not addressed to all the readers but was at the consultants’ discretion. The often-short-term follow-up stopped when an individual solution was founded. The use of psychology, rather than the automatic referral to the catholic norms and morals, also changed the relationship to the self.

Pastoral, psychology, and the self

Intimacy and power relationship

Different techniques historically employed by the catholic institution used to prompt the faithful to produce discourses on their intimacy: ‘institutionalised confession’, direction of conscience, ‘letters-to-the-editors’ or to moralists. Catholicism has consistently urged the laity to talk. Foucault saw in confession ‘(…) a political function: to subject the individual by requiring him to survey the moving sands of his own “truth”’ (Landry, 2009: 122). The French philosopher saw the political aspect of the regime of truth as opposed to a very psychological perspective of the self that perceived it ‘as an identity to uncover or as a psychology to decipher’ (Landry, 2009: 123). He contrariwise identified it as ‘the politics of ourselves’ (Foucault, 1993: 182). The philosopher sought to achieve a genealogy of the regime of truth to understand what kind of political regime of the self is prioritised. In other words, a genealogy of techniques used to direct the conduct of people and, therefore, impact their subjectivities – what he tries to demonstrate in Confessions of the Flesh (Foucault, 2021). His genealogy starts with studying the Epicureans and the Stoics in Ancient Greece before focusing on catholicism to highlight its specific ‘regime of truth’. In the same line as Foucault, I wish to understand the specificity of counselling as a technique of the self. I question the intentions behind the different techniques of unveiling the self from the beginning of the FP to the creation and development of the CCC, as did Foucault for a longer time.

The creation of the sacramental confession was the first attempt to examine the morality of the faithful. This sacrament requires a particular mechanism of the mind from those who confess to the confessor: ‘operating on oneself a constant examination’ (Landry, 2022: 55). In this sacrament, Hahn (1986: 57) sees a development of individualisation of the self. The direction of conscience developed in the Modern age provided the same discourse mechanism. In this relationship between a confessor and a faithful, the epistolary exchange requires speaking for the self – the ‘true’ self. The relationship between the director of conscience and the writer differed from the confession. Confession is a sacrament, which direction of conscience is not. The goal of those two techniques of confession differs: one is to obtain absolution, while the second one is more of moral guidance. Muller (2019: 18) sees in the direction of conscience a ‘practice of the self’ and a space of freedom: the correspondence between a priest and (mostly) women is about the latter’s intimate thoughts, requires self-reflection and to speak the truth. Therefore, direction of conscience is a moment to oneself, a ‘room of one’s own’ taking the form of a process of self-reflection.

Virginia Woolf’s feminist reference cannot hide that the direction of conscience occurred in a power relationship, and so is institutionalised confession. These women did not write for themselves but to a director of conscience considered an expert of catholic morals able to take care of their souls. Direction of conscience aimed at deepening one’s faith. Hence, the director wished to guide and give the writers a direction: closer to the catholic morals. The priest receiving the confession of the faithful was also part of a power relationship as the sacrament offered absolution through him. Confession is an institutional relationship with a clear goal: those who confess, and therefore verbalise their misconducts, confess to an ‘expert’ – the priest – who will grant remission because he is qualified. Confession works because the priest is in a situation where he can give remission. The ‘expert’ judges through confession, appreciates the confession, and intervenes because he represents the institution of the Church (Foucault, 1979). Those who confess therefore expect something from the priest. Confession contains these two operations of self-reflection and abandonment in an unequal relationship. Confession and direction of conscience, as pastoral techniques, therefore combine ‘(…) disciplinary and subjectifying forms of power. On the one hand, the pastor is a “relay” of surveillance and discipline; on the other, the pastor promotes self-reflexive, self-governing subjects’ (Martin and Waring, 2018: 1298).

These techniques indeed require an unveiling of the self to someone else: they all involve a narrative of the self. However, they all are private and individualised. The publication of the letters from the direction of conscience in the nineteenth century changed the privacy inherent to these techniques and the privacy of the issues raised. The creation of the ‘letters-to-the-editors’ section of the FP was part of the publicity of intimacy: discourses of laypersons became accessible. Even under pseudonymisation, these discourses offered a legitimation of intimate issues, as every reader could identify with it. The creation of the section, and later on of the CCC, modified the power relationship between the ‘expert’ and the consultants. In the ‘letters-to-the-editors’ section, the experience of laypersons in a (straight) relationship prevails over the expertise of theologians or priests. The latter were consulted in direction and confession because of their expertise and as representatives of the official doctrine of the Church. On the contrary, the authors of the FP and of its section were consulted as catholics supposedly experiencing the same issues. These authors became experts of ‘conjugality’ and ‘validated’ the issues of laypersons. The suspicion towards the priests regarding their competence in intimacy (‘I then turned to a confessor who did not enlighten me at all, on the contrary’ wrote a woman to justify why she contacted the FP (Masquelier and Vanderpelen, 2017: 55–56)) symbolises the preference for horizontal relationships.

The answer to the issues submitted also differed from direction and confession. While the priests and moralists were the guarantors of the catholic doctrine and norms, the laypersons engaged in the FP did not directly remind the catholic norms. Instead, they value morals of intention, namely, the pathway to the norm: what counted was the intention to reach the norms rather than its mandatory fulfilment. Consequently, the responsibility of the individuals or couples gained importance, as the writers promoted ‘self-validated’ faith, explaining that there are no norms, as highlighted by Masquelier and Vanderpelen (2017: 63). This process is not about ‘confessing’ but rather to educate to know how to handle conjugal or sexual life. What matters in morals of intention is the will to control oneself without regard to the institutional discourse. In practice, the norms become internalised (Simon, 2002), a process that developed during the 1970s with the spread of the CCC.

Secularisation, psychology, and overflow of catholic practices

In the mid-twentieth century, sexuality and intimacy became a public issue. What is commonly referred to as the ‘sexual revolution’ changed how sexuality, conjugality, and reproductive norms were perceived (Dupont, 2014). Catholicism had its own ‘68’: most catholics expected a loosening of the doctrine as they were experiencing trouble with the morals on the matter. Yet, the papal document Humanae Vitae reminded that contraception and abortion could not be lawful, although most catholics, leading to the ‘schism of 1968’ in many countries (Harris, 2018), even among the catholic hierarchy (Sévegrand, 2008).

Secularism has been the common way to explain the distance of the faithful from the Church (Dobbelaere, 1981). Foucault’s work gives another perspective: by looking at pastoral, the French philosopher never merged into a secularist conception of the Church–State relationship. Foucault indeed never noticed a disappearance of catholicism, which secularism usually highlights. On the contrary, he identifies ‘(…) an intensification of the religious pastorate in its spiritual forms’ rather than ‘a diminution of religious pastoralism’ (Foucault, 2007: 229). According to him, catholic techniques ‘invest the field of political sovereignty’ (Golder, 2007: 168). Foucault considered instead the Church as a way to frame people’s life through techniques (pastoral) that overflew their original domain. Therefore, the philosopher saw a conjunction between the political and the religious, leading him to identify an ‘historico-practical theological grounds of modern state power’ (Golder, 2007: 159) rather than a process of secularisation. I wish to use this approach at the institutional level of the CCC. The ‘schism of 68’ experienced by the counsellors did not create a distance with pastoral as a technology of power. The CCC and the counsellors did not switch to mechanical tools to frame contraception and abortion, as the lay planned parenthood centres did. Despite taking distance from the Church on reproductive norms, they remained faithful to pastoral power.

This power changed direction: psychology became increasingly important in the centres as the formation of the counsellors professionalised. Psychology and pastoral power are close. Champion (2013: 163) argues that

religious and psychology occupy the same territories, that of the definitions of the human being, that of the affects that can overflow from the body, that of the suffering of the soul or the spirit and the care to be given to them, that of the moral rules, especially in matters of sexuality and family relations. ¹⁴

In other words, psychology becomes a secular care of the souls, and the counsellors the ‘new clerks’. In that sense, pastoral ‘overflew’ in the CCC: the beneficent power switched from taking care of the souls in a catholic way to psychological care of the souls, using words in any case. The counsellors’ training laid on the ‘client-centered therapy’ (Rogers, 1951) developed by the US psychologist Carl Rogers. The latter considered that ‘individuals have in themselves vast resources for self-understanding and for altering their self-concepts, basic attitudes, and self-directed behavior (…)’ (Rogers, 1980: 115). The CCC merged into this approach for it gave the consultants the responsibility to find their solution and avoid ‘disempowerment during the processes of helping’ (Temaner-Brodley, 2008: 18). Catholicism as an objective to fulfil faded away, as ‘for the time being you lay aside the views and values you hold for yourself in order to enter another’s world without prejudice’ (Rogers, 1980: 143), a perspective the counsellors shared with me during the interviews. Catholicism became a consultation object, as acknowledged by one of the first counsellors:

In our centres, the same problem [birth regulation] is, for a large number of households, mostly religious, morals or philosophical (…) [T]hey need to be assisted in learning to become more mindful of themselves, so they can decide for themselves freely and take responsibility for their choices. (Verhaegen, 1964: 46–47)

Psychology highlights how the management of the souls leaves the realm of the sacred and becomes the object of secular expertise. Despite secularisation, the CCC remained in the ‘pastoral power’ by using ‘catholic techniques’: the beneficent and individualised power on a population. Moreover, the CCC kept following their lines: governing through speech. In this sense, catholicism ‘overflew’. What were the consequences of these techniques for the CCC and the management of abortion and contraception?

Free and responsible

The most responsible choice

In 1973, Dr Peers was arrested for practising abortion (Boute, 2015). The political climate led to the 1923 law decriminalising information on contraception (Viller, 2013). Contraception and ‘responsible parenthood’ gained legitimacy in Belgium. The CCC took part in information on contraception ‘(…) while respecting differences and without leaving our specific contribution in the shade’, ¹⁵ that is, in the line of the FP: through the publications of the counsellors’ training institution, the CCC conveyed positive values towards family. Contraception was serving family values in line with the values of harmony: ‘Contraception, if it is part of a couple’s dialogue, is a positive act’. ¹⁶ As soon as contraception became accepted, the CCC did not concentrate on the method but rather on the responsibility to give birth, a couples’ prerogative. The CEFA explained, ‘Contraceptive education is in fact education to life’s positive responsibility’. ¹⁷ Contraception was indeed associated with responsibility to give life rather than sexual freedom, as highlighted by Fannin (2012: 273): ‘(…) the “freedom” to choose is accompanied by greater responsibility for one’s choices’. In the CCC’s terms, the president of the CCC referred to it as ‘responsible freedom’, a guideline for the counsellors’ work (De Locht, 1972: 3). The notion of responsibility comes with control, explained Memmi (2003b: 652): ‘Terms such as birth “control,” “planned parenthood,” and “family planning” have become so commonplace that we have forgotten how strongly they convey the ideal of control in the area of procreation’. The CCC actively participated in the association between contraception, responsibility, and control. Their target was couples. Empirically, the desire to create a dialogue and harmony among couples collided on gender relationships and women ended up being in charge of contraception, the most ‘responsible’ person. They could choose among different contraceptives, the pill included, as the CCC did not follow the Church on the ban of the pill. On the contrary, the pill was perceived as the most efficient way to avoid unwanted pregnancies and, therefore, the most responsible means. If women could choose their contraceptive means (‘find the most appropriate method for your case’ ¹⁸ ), the freedom to choose was conditioned by the most rational choice, the one that would lead to the norm of responsibility. Therefore, the CCC considered that contraception was not a purely technical means: it had political consequences that needed to be controlled.

The control was not only a ‘regulation’ to improve harmony in the family. This control came from the responsibility to avoid abortions. Since the pill was seen as the most effective way to avoid abortion and was accessible, abortion had an aura of ‘failure’: ‘Abortion reveals a lack of dialogue. In this sense, it is a failure’, ¹⁹ explains the CNPF/CEFA. In other words, abortion reveals ‘a poorly “controlled,” poorly “planned” desire for a child’ (Memmi, 2003b: 652). The failure is based on the failure of contraception. The CCC perceived contraception as a ‘preventive’ means of abortion. Nevertheless, the CCC and their counsellors called for decriminalisation of abortion, as the only way for women to make a free choice is to have the choice. Decriminalising would allow ‘(…) fecundity to become a genuine responsible-freedom’. ²⁰ Moreover, the CCC recognises ‘(…) the elementary freedom of all beings to dispose of themselves’. ²¹ Abortion was perceived by the CCC as a ‘curative’ means when one is facing an unwanted pregnancy. However, empirically, the CCC never practised abortion for moral reasons. They relied on the lay planned parenthood, practicing it as from 1975 and on politically engaged gynaecologists, to whom they referred women in need. They instead positioned themselves as ‘host structures’, ²² welcoming women to help them ‘clarify’ their demands (Gérard, 1991: 6). As a former counsellor wrote in 1986, planned parenthood centres should not be ‘reduced to a “pill dispenser.” There is at the centre a desire to address the person in his/her totality’ (Meuret, 1986: 31).

Addressing the person through counsellors reveals the importance of words to govern abortion and reproductive norms. In the centres, discourses have an ‘investigative and educative power. This socially constructed instrument was to become an essential condition, later, for the exploration and cultivation of the “real truth” about the subject – psychological and political’ (Asad, 1993: 121). Although the CCC did not practise abortions as their lay counterpart, they tried to produce a subject controlling their reproductive behaviours. In order to do so, they used interviews – what was empirically a ‘host structure’. Interviews were a moment to be the relay of a ‘good’ relationship to reproductive norms.

Governing through speech

During an interview, one of the former counsellors told me she received at her debut a phone call from a woman in need of an abortion:

She insisted ‘Give me an address!’. So, I gave the address on the phone. There was a counsellor with me in the same room (…) She told me: ‘You know, we do not give addresses on the phone’, which I did not know.

The counsellor thought she was helping a woman who knew what she wanted: an abortion. Yet, the other counsellor called her to order: before giving any information on abortion, it was mandatory to interview women as it is a ‘difficult decision’ to make, full of ambivalence, explaining the importance of a preliminary interview. In these preliminary interviews, women are being asked to talk about ‘almost nothing’ (Memmi, 2003a: 8): do they take some sort of contraceptive? How do they feel about having an abortion? Are there any reasons why they want to abort? Regarding abortion in France, Memmi (2003b: 648) explains,

This ‘almost nothing’ refers to a certain way of governing social behaviour through speech. It involves stating, at the request of the physician, a few good reasons for the desired medical intervention. ‘In other words, it involves presenting, in a consensual manner, arguments upon which the patient and physician can agree’.

In the Belgian CCC, the process differs, as they do not practise abortion. Women do not have to give ‘good reasons’ to a physician, and counsellors cannot really prevent them from having an abortion – even if they can hinder its access. However, they are perceived as holders of decision-making power, the ‘key agent’ to have an abortion when information about abortion went only through the centres. Speech became confession, where women were asked reflexivity on their reproductive and contraceptive practices: they had to say what their practises were. Therefore, they had ‘to become an object to oneself’ (Foucault, 2017: 288). This relationship produces two consequences: ‘On the one hand, the pastor is a “relay” of surveillance and discipline; on the other, the pastor promotes self-reflexive, self-governing subjects’ (Martin and Waring, 2018: 1298). These surveillance and self-reflection are concomitant. The counsellors monitored reproductive practices by promoting self-reflection through speech: ‘Speech in this context is a dialogical process by which the self makes (or fails to make) itself in a disciplined way’ (Asad, 1993: 144). Women, in counselling, are indeed asked to become an active subject of their reproductive choice, as the foundation of Rogers’ thinking where consultations aim at producing a subject through speeches. In this regard, the counsellors did not give sanctions but rather worked towards the idea of freedom and autonomy. Counsellors embraced an identity of ‘pastor’, that is, agent of a new technology of the self, verifying the success of this new mode of administration of the reproductive norm.

Abortion became a privileged access to contraceptive monitoring during interviews with women asking for a termination of pregnancy. This CCC’s government of reproduction ‘configures the individual woman as an active agent with respect to birth, endowed with the ethical responsibility for decision making in all areas of reproduction’ (Fannin, 2012: 283). More than the active part taken by women, the counsellors emphasised the individual responsibility to choose terms of contraception. According to them, responsible and rational choice regarding reproductive practices allows them to avoid coming to planned parenthood or requesting an abortion again. The CCC helped make this rational choice by spreading sex education. In terms of contraception, it means that the counsellors explained the importance of contraception, stressing the importance to find a method that ‘suits the couple’, as if all methods were equal. The most responsible choice remained the pill for its greater efficiency, which the counsellors emphasised during the interviews with women. During an interview I conducted with one of them, he (one of the few men counsellors) insisted,

The idea behind it was to have responsible contraception. And so, the stories of temperatures, etc… We were promoting the pill. And other means as well. De Locht [NDLR: the president of the CCC], in fact, said, ‘Either we do it, or we don’t. And if we do it, we do it seriously. And if you do it seriously, you take a frank way’.

‘A frank way’ refers to the pill.

Counsellors promoted responsibility in order to create a new reproductive norm. Behind responsibility lies the intention to educate, through interviews, on how to govern oneself. This discipline of the self promoted a normative configuration ‘contraceptive pill avoids abortion’ and produced particular subjectivities, those of individuals – women – capable of controlling and regulating their reproduction. This discipline is founded on surveillance of surveillances from the counsellors seeking to find out through speeches how and why self-regulation did not work in order to remedy this failure. It leads to a self-surveillance and act at the level of the individuals:

Disciplinary technologies are particularly effective forms of social control because they take hold of individuals at the level of their bodies, gestures, desires and habits to create individuals who are attached to and, thus, the unwitting agents of their own subjection. (Armstrong, 2003)

Politics does not work through sanction but work ‘from within’ (Lebeer and Moriau, 2010). The CCC’s institutional biopolitics produced a sexual subject that can be free but must be responsible, that is, the ability of individuals to think for themselves as long as it fits the new framework. This subjectivation through responsibility also explains, on a macro level, how the CCC, while originating from catholicism, defended abortion and helped women, to a certain extent, to have access to it.

Conclusion

In 1983, the CEFA and the CCC pointed out the specificity of their position in Belgium regarding planned parenthood:

Counsellors found themselves caught between the contradictory positions of those who ordered them, in the name of religious ethics, to dissuade women from having abortions, and others who, on the contrary, reproached them for not taking a clear enough stand in favour of the decriminalisation of abortion. ²³

Catholic Planned Parenthood Centres are indeed quite enigmatic. While the latter’s lay or feminist counterparts called for sexual and reproductive autonomy, the Church valued ‘conjugal harmony’, as the analysis of the early days of the FP demonstrated it. Therefore, catholicism has often been depicted as an opponent of the ‘sexual revolution’. The Belgian case nuances the history of sexual revolution.

By using the notion of ‘pastoral’ applied to a catholic pastoral service in charge of conjugal and sexual matters, I tried to show that the CCC, while originating from catholicism, not only adapted to the sexual revolution but also took part in it, navigating through seemingly contradictory norms and realities. ‘Pastoral power’ allows a ‘conjunction of the political and the religious’ (Golder, 2007: 169), useful when working on catholics at a time of secularisation: pastoral power remained and served the process of individualisation of sexuality occurring at the time. The concept allows to show the specificity of the CCC in their management of the bodies and souls and contradicts the idea of a ‘unified regime of truth’ (Martin and Waring, 2018: 1305): the centres provide one way of governing sexuality, through speeches. Government through speeches is the hallmark of the CCC, emphasising the importance of self-control through ‘responsibility’. The ‘preliminary interviews’ were a moment of surveillance of this control. In seeking to establish a new mode of government of reproductive bodies, the counsellors established a new government of the self. The normative configuration ‘sex education-contraception-abortion’ is how the counsellors have rationalised practices that were illegal in Belgium and unlawful in the catholic world. They did not call for total freedom but rather a rational, responsible use of this liberty they nevertheless defend at a political level.

While this article has a clear local focus, the notion of pastoral as an art of governance resonates at another level. Francis, in Amoris Laetitia²⁴, did not do anything other than defending a ‘pastoral’ vision of the Church. He rejected disciplinary powers (‘Nor it is helpful to try to impose rules by sheer authority’) and suggested instead education and support (‘We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them’) that gives room for individuals. He enjoined to be a ‘pastor’ (a word he uses often in the Apostolical Exhortation on love in the family) and reveals the importance of religious governmentality to understand how catholicism attempts to refrain their ‘exculturation’ (Hervieu-Léger, 2003) in a secularised society.