This month marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), the landmark encyclical of Pope Paul VI reaffirming the Church’s position against artificial contraception.
The so-called sexual revolution, now well into its 40s, has given us a lousy hangover from the past four decades of recklessness and immorality. Birth control always has been a thorny issue, and the advent of “the pill” in the early 1960s heightened the intensity of the discussion. Not only did it offer families an easier means to regulate births but it also aided the countercultural revolution by providing a means for sex on demand and seemingly did away without the consequences. Forty years after the publication of Humanae Vitae we see that there are in fact grave moral, spiritual, and physical costs to a life devoted to the cult of the body.
In his letter the Pope Paul VI reiterated traditional Church teaching, “a teaching which is based on the natural law as illuminated and enriched by Divine Revelation:”
Each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life,” the Holy Father wrote. “[It] is the most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator. It has always been a source of great joy to them, even though it sometimes entails many difficulties and hardships.
What is interesting about Humanae Vitae is that a majority of the theologians consulted on this encyclical before it was published disagreed with the pope. As a whole they could come to no clear consensus on artificial means to prevent pregnancies. They felt that the Church’s position on birth control must be categorized as “evolutionary,” like the Church’s view on intercourse itself.
Early Christian writers believed sex in marriage was justifiable only for procreative purposes. Eventually, of course, the stricture was loosed; hence the assertion by theologians that the stricture against birth control could be similarly loosed. What was the difference?
It is a development for the Church to come to the understanding that the unitive nature of the sexual act along with its procreative nature, as the Catechism says, “achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life.” This development is based on the recognition that God himself established the “connection… between the unitive significance and the procreative significance” and that they “are both inherent to the marriage act.” Once this recognition has been made, the conclusion that “man on his own initiative may not break” this connection follows logically (see CCC 2366). We see in that development of doctrine exactly the kind of organic wholeness of thought that John Henry Cardinal Newman identified as a feature of genuine development of doctrine.
But the claims of the moral theologians of the majority report did not meet that test of organic development; instead their claims really were a capitulation to what was happening in the world at the time: moral and social deterioration. Advances in the science of artificial birth control had man heady with his power to control the beginning of life. As Pope Paul recognized man was “playing God,” with men and women deciding when life should start — soon they would progress logically to deciding when it would end, for both the culture of death and the civilization of life have their own internal and inexorable logic. Part and parcel of the logic of birth control was abortion and though it may be harder to see the connection, euthanasia — all are “intrinsic evils.” All are born of the desire to control life.
In retrospect, what made Paul’s encyclical so brilliant is that, despite opposition, he published Humanae Vitae, not simply because it affirmed the Church’s view on the sanctity of life, but also because it was an exercise of papal authority. To have caved into the liberal mindset sweeping the world — and some blocks of the Magisterium — would have meant that the Successor to Peter was second-guessing the Divine inspiration afforded his office.
Since its publication, reflection by the faithful has even more strongly confirmed that society is rightly ordered only when we understand that God is in control, and when we understand and support the privileged vocation of married life. When a couple receives the sacrament of matrimony they vow to “accept children lovingly from God.” That doesn’t mean when they decide it’s convenient. It means trusting that when and if God deigns to bless them with children they will be ready and able — financially or otherwise. It means the loving maintenance of marital chastity. “Married love, therefore, requires of husband and wife the full awareness of their obligations in the matter of responsible parenthood,” Pope Paul wrote. In matrimony the spouses accept responsibility for the results of each and every marriage act — so that they bring to it a sense of sacred responsibility and self-sacrificial participation in the work of God that no contracepting couple can imagine.
God remains the author of life and through his servant Paul He made clear that life alone is his to give — and to take. But the forces that opposed Humanae Vitae forty years ago have not dried up and blown away, withered though they may be by now. That is why as a seminarian, I write frankly about my love for this teaching — but anonymously. God willing, I shall continue my formation and sometime in the not-too-distant future be free to stand before a congregation of God’s people and teach them the beauty of Humanae Vitae.
You faithful people of God who have wondered where the priests are who will speak these things, please know that the John Paul II priests, the Theology of the Body priests, who are also the Pope Paul VI and Humanae Vitae priests are here and increasing. Pray for me that I shall join their ranks.
