Humanae Vitae - A Witness to Christ's Faithfulness
As the 39th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae approaches, a new study by the Pew Research Center informs us that a significant sampling of Americans considers children to be eighth in importance on a list of nine “Components of Marital Success.”
According to the study, “Sharing household chores” (3rd), “Good housing” (5th) and “Shared tastes and interests” (7th) all rank higher in importance to a marriage than having children. This is a fairly radical shift. As recently as 1990, a similar study had shown that children were much higher up on the priority list for couples in America.
The missing link between marriage and children
What is happening here? It should be natural to link a successful marriage and children. The Catechism of the Catholic Church simply points out what was once obvious when it teaches (#2366), “Fecundity is a gift, an end of marriage, for conjugal love naturally tends to be fruitful. A child does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment.” Sadly, the average person, less and less, assumes this natural link between marriage and children.
Humanae Vitae did not explicitly predict that the logical link between marriage and children would unravel in the late 20th century. But Paul VI gave grounds for understanding this unraveling with his four remarkable predictions. In section 17, he claimed that widespread acceptance of contraception would:
1. Cause an increase in marital infidelity;
2. Result in a general lowering of morality, especially affecting the young;
3. Reduce men’s respect for women, who would be treated more commonly as objects; and
4. Risk giving power to government officials who would impose contraceptive methods on entire groups of their citizens.
Can these predictions now be disputed? Have we not seen precisely these foreshadowed disasters come to pass? Have not our young people inherited a culture immersed in the contraceptive mentality and the unnatural disconnect between sexual behavior and children? Have not China, the United Nations, and even our own government in the 1990s used contraception to manipulate nations and peoples? The argument for Humanae Vitae’s prophetic accuracy has become self-evident.
Witnesses from other faiths
A person does not have to be Catholic to understand the truth of this teaching. Natural law and common sense have sufficed to make this clear to many well-known non-Catholics. Well before Pope Paul VI published his prophetic document the great Hindu humanist Mohandas Gandhi, who led the 20th century liberation of India through nonviolent action, said, “If [contraceptive] methods become the order of the day, nothing but moral degradation can be the result… As it is, man has sufficiently degraded woman for his lust, and contraception, no matter how well meaning the advocates may be, will still further degrade her.”
American President Theodore Roosevelt, a Protestant, spoke even more strongly, calling contraception “the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.”
Many early American feminists, such as the first woman physician in the United States, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, opposed contraception even as they opposed affronts to the equal dignity of married women by their husbands. It was clear to them that contraception was an assault on the dignity of women and that the relationship between men and women would only be degraded by its widespread use.
In Humanae Vitae (#11), the Church holds that “each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.” Is this teaching simply an inability to keep up with the changing morals of our times? Or is it the Church standing strong against these times’ confusion and mistakes?
Humanae Vitae’s converts
The fallout of the sexual revolution has many thoughtful people searching and asking what has gone wrong. Not a few of our young people discerning a call to the priesthood or religious life find precisely in the Church’s unwavering teaching on the meaning of sexuality something meaningful and attractive. For them it is a confirmation that this indeed is the Church about which Jesus Himself said (Mt 16:18), “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
There are also many prominent converts.
Scott Hahn, once a Presbyterian minister with prejudices against the Church, is now a passionate Catholic scholar and apologist. God worked through his wife, Kimberly, who in college joined a discussion group on contraception. There she discovered the fact that up until 1930 all Christian denominations unanimously condemned the use of contraception — and defended their positions biblically. Her studies, shared with Scott, moved him to investigate this matter further. Particularly persuasive to him was that Scripture refers to the marital act of intercourse as a spiritual, not merely physical, reality.
Malcolm Muggeridge, the famous British author and journalist, who after an admittedly Bohemian past became Catholic in 1982, said, “It was the Catholic Church’s firm stand against contraception and abortion which finally made me decide to become a Catholic… The Church’s stand is absolutely correct. It is to its eternal honor that it opposed contraception… I think, historically, people will say it was a very gallant effort to prevent a moral disaster.” (“Confessions of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim,” p. 140)
Natural Family Planning: ‘Keeping it real’
In July of each year, we celebrate Natural Family Planning week in our country. It is an occasion to thank God for our Church’s teaching on marriage and family and a time for the many couples who practice NFP to tell others how blessed they have been in understanding their fertility in this medically sound way, and how it fosters real joy and a sense of freedom in their marriages.
This freedom is a true freedom, rooted in persons’ ability to acquire the virtue of marital chastity. As some couples tell me, NFP literally “keeps it real.” The integrity of the body and of the marital embrace, and the link between marriage and children are all kept intact.
Such witnessing from couples may seem paradoxical, since NFP of necessity requires sacrifice. Periodic abstinence is part of the NFP program, if a couple has responsibly decided to avoid pregnancy. But the freeing nature of sacrifice is no surprise to followers of Christ, who promises us a share in His cross and a share in His risen life.
Copyright 2007 The Catholic Sun.
This item 7679 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
