‘Humanae Vitae’ sets moral tone desperately needed
July 25 marks the 40th anniversary of “Humanae Vitae,” the encyclical that rightly earned Pope Paul VI his designation as a prophet — that is, a person to whom God entrusts a message for others that is often not well-received. In 1968, with the sexual revolution in full swing and in the face of enormous pressure (including from some bishops and cardinals) to change the church’s teaching, Pope Paul VI sought the counsel of the Holy Spirit and reaffirmed the moral norm designating contraception as a serious evil.
It is almost hard to believe that only 40 years earlier, all major Christian denominations held to this same teaching, which had been the moral norm for centuries. Luther and Calvin, for example, both condemned the use of contraception. It was not until the Anglican Lambeth Conference in 1930 that the first major deviation from this teaching took place.
Those who take the time to actually read “Humanae Vitae” (available online at www.vatican.va) are often surprised and persuaded by the well-reasoned case that Pope Paul VI presents as to why “each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.”
The pope set this moral norm in the context of a concise but beautiful description of the essential characteristics of married love. These characteristics of married love — that it be fully human, (and therefore freely chosen), total, faithful and fruitful — are expressed in a singular way in the marital act. Sexual intercourse is intended by God to be the most profound sign of the free, total, faithful and fruitful gift of self that a man and woman make to one another in marriage. It also makes possible a unique communion with God, who is not only love, but the Lord and giver of life.
This is a radical view, vastly different from the culture’s conception of sex as little more than a recreational activity. In a recent issue of America magazine, Jennifer Fulwiler recounts how her journey from “pro-choice atheist” to “pro-life Catholic” reached its critical moment when she discovered the reason behind the church’s teaching against contraception: “I had always assumed that (they) were outdated notions, even a thinly disguised attempt to oppress the faithful. What I found, however, was that these teachings expressed a fundamentally different understanding of sex. And once I discovered this, I never saw the world the same way again.”
The essential evil of contraception is that it intentionally closes the couple to the possibility of communion with God as the Lord and giver of life, and in so doing, closes them to the possibility of authentic communion with each other.
Pope Paul VI was also prophetic in that he foresaw the serious consequences that would follow if contraception became widely available. First, he predicted that contraception would open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. One only need consider in passing the prevalence of adultery, divorce, cohabitation, abortion, STDs, promiscuity and pornography to realize that this prediction has indeed come to pass.
Secondly, the pope warned that men might forget the reverence due to a woman, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, and reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires. What we have discovered in the past 40 years about the harmful side effects of the pill, the most popular form of reversible birth control which was recently classified by the World Health Organization as a Group 1 carcinogen, certainly lends credence to this prediction.
Thirdly, the Holy Father raised the specter that governments might impose the use of contraceptives on their populations as a way to solve social problems. This prediction has certainly come true in various countries, especially in China whose “one-child” policy is enforced through coercive contraception, sterilization and even abortion.
Modern natural family planning methods offer married couples a scientifically based, morally acceptable way to regulate conception based on observation and interpretation of the biomarkers of fertility in a woman’s body. The church promotes natural family planning because, unlike contraception, it respects the twin purposes of love-giving and life-giving, which God has joined together in sexual union. What Christ once said about marriage, “Humanae Vitae” said about the marital act: Let no one separate what God has joined. |
