Humanae Vitae at 40

     Michael P. reminds us that this year we observe the 40^th anniversary of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae.  This encyclical reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s teaching that the unitive and procreative elements of sexual intercourse between husband and wife can not be separated; therefore, artificial methods of controlling births are illicit. 

     It is my understanding that Protestants and Catholics were united in their opposition to artificial birth control until the Anglicans created an exception in the 1930’s for married couples who had very grave reasons for wanting to prevent pregnancy.  Within two or three generations, Protestants had largely forgotten that they ever had this in common with Catholics and many lay Catholics were ignoring their Church’s teaching.

     For me, the central questions are these:  Were the Protestant churches and many of the rank and file in the Catholic Church correct?  Did this new understanding (especially after the technological changes that gave us the pill) of human sexuality and relationships correspond more closely to our human nature than the old understanding?  Was the Magisterium of the Catholic Church merely behind the times, holding on to the past without any sound basis?  Or, had humanity forgotten things that should not have been forgotten?  Did the old teaching, which was preserved by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, hold truths about the human person, human sexuality, and human relationships that should not have been discarded?

     As a late Baby-boomer (born 1960) growing up in a college town, I witnessed much of the upheaval of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, I came of age in a time of great confusion in society and fluidity in the Church, and I got married at a young age in 1981.  In short, these questions were not theoretical for me but very real and concrete as I (we) struggled to understand and follow the Church’s teaching on contraception.

     I must admit that the understanding came very slowly.  Archbishop Chaput’s pastoral letter ten years ago on the 30^th anniversary greatly helped.  A more complete understanding came only in the last few years, and here I have to credit my children who encouraged me to read Karol Wojtyla’s groundbreaking work Love and Responsibility and his later work (as John Paul the Great) Man and Woman He Created Them:  A Theology of the Body.  (As an aside, to those of you who mistakenly think that the Catholic Church is prudish in matters sexual, take a peek at the bottom of page 272 of Love and Responsibility).  What a great joy that it was my children who brought me to a fuller understanding of the Church’s beautiful teaching on marriage and human sexuality. 

     To conclude this post, I turn to Archbishop Chaput’s pastoral letter of a decade ago, On Human Life.  The beginning paragraphs are reproduced below:

“Dear brothers and sisters in the Lord,

1.  Thirty years ago this week, Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), which reaffirmed the Church's constant teaching on the regulation of births.  It is certainly the most misunderstood papal intervention of this century.  It was the spark which led to three decades of doubt and dissent among many Catholics, especially in the developed countries.  With the passage of time, however, it has also proven prophetic.  It teaches the truth.  My purpose in this pastoral letter, therefore, is simple.  I believe the message of Humanae Vitae is not a burden but a joy.  I believe this encyclical offers a key to deeper, richer marriages.  And so what I seek from the family of our local Church is not just a respectful nod toward a document which critics dismiss as irrelevant, but an active and sustained effort to study Humanae Vitae; to teach it faithfully in our parishes; and to encourage our married couples to live it.
 
 

I.  THE WORLD SINCE 1968

2.  Sooner or later, every pastor counsels someone struggling with an addiction.  Usually the problem is alcohol or drugs.  And usually the scenario is the same.  The addict will acknowledge the problem but claim to be powerless against it.  Or, alternately, the addict will deny having any problem at all, even if the addiction is destroying his or her health and wrecking job and family.  No matter how much sense the pastor makes; no matter how true and persuasive his arguments; and no matter how life-threatening the situation, the addict simply cannot understand -- or cannot act on -- the counsel.  The addiction, like a thick pane of glass, divides the addict from anything or anyone that might help.

3.  One way to understand the history of Humanae Vitae is to examine the past three decades through this metaphor of addiction.  I believe the developed world finds this encyclical so hard to accept not because of any defect in Paul VI's reasoning, but because of the addictions and contradictions it has inflicted upon itself, exactly as the Holy Father warned.

4.  In presenting his encyclical, Paul VI cautioned against four main problems (HV 17) that would arise if Church teaching on the regulation of births was ignored.  First, he warned that the widespread use of contraception would lead to "conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality."  Exactly this has happened.  Few would deny that the rates of abortion, divorce, family breakdown, wife and child abuse, venereal disease and out of wedlock births have all massively increased since the mid-1960s.
 
Obviously, the birth control pill has not been the only factor in this unraveling.  But it has played a major role.  In fact, the cultural revolution since 1968, driven at least in part by transformed attitudes toward sex, would not have been possible or sustainable without easy access to reliable contraception.  In this, Paul VI was right.

5.  Second, he also warned that man would lose respect for woman and "no longer [care] for her physical and psychological equilibrium," to the point that he would consider her "as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion."  In other words, according to the Pope, contraception might be marketed as liberating for women, but the real "beneficiaries" of birth control pills and devices would be men.  Three decades later, exactly as Paul VI suggested, contraception has released males -- to a historically unprecedented degree -- from responsibility for their sexual aggression.  In the process, one of the stranger ironies of the contraception debate of the past generation has been this: Many feminists have attacked the Catholic Church for her alleged disregard of women, but the Church in Humanae Vitae identified and rejected sexual exploitation of women years before that message entered the cultural  mainstream.  Again, Paul VI was right.

6.  Third, the Holy Father also warned that widespread use of contraception would place a "dangerous weapon . . . in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies."  As we have since discovered, eugenics didn't disappear with Nazi racial theories in 1945. Population control policies are now an accepted part of nearly every foreign aid discussion.  The massive export of contraceptives, abortion and sterilization by the developed world to developing countries -- frequently as a prerequisite for aid dollars and often in direct contradiction to local moral traditions -- is a thinly disguised form of population warfare and cultural re-engineering.  Again, Paul VI was right.

7.  Fourth, Pope Paul warned that contraception would mislead human beings into thinking they had unlimited dominion over their own bodies, relentlessly turning the human person into the object of his or her own intrusive power.  Herein lies another irony: In fleeing into the false freedom provided by contraception and abortion, an exaggerated feminism has actively colluded in women's dehumanization.  A man and a woman participate uniquely in the glory of God by their ability to co-create new life with Him.  At the heart of contraception, however, is the assumption that fertility is an infection which must be attacked and controlled, exactly as antibiotics attack bacteria.  In this attitude, one can also see the organic link between contraception and abortion.  If fertility can be misrepresented as an infection to be attacked, so too can new life. In either case, a defining element of woman's identity -- her potential for bearing new life -- is recast as a weakness requiring vigilant distrust and "treatment."  Woman becomes the object of the tools she relies on to ensure her own liberation and defense, while man takes no share of the burden.  Once again, Paul VI was right.

8.  From the Holy Father's final point, much more has flowed:  In vitro fertilization, cloning, genetic manipulation and embryo experimentation are all descendants of contraceptive technology.  In fact, we have drastically and naively underestimated the effects of technology not only on external society, but on our own interior human identity.  As author Neil Postman has observed, technological change is not additive but ecological.  A significant new technology does not "add" something to a society; it changes everything -- just as a drop of red dye does not remain discrete in a glass of water, but colors and changes every single molecule of the liquid.

Contraceptive technology, precisely because of its impact on sexual intimacy, has subverted our understanding of the purpose of sexuality, fertility and marriage itself. It has detached them from the natural, organic identity of the human person and disrupted the ecology of human relationships.  It has scrambled our vocabulary of love, just as pride scrambled the vocabulary of Babel.”