VENERABILES FRATRES ET DILECTI FILII SALUTEM ET APOSTOLICAM BENEDICTIONEM
[E] Humanae vitae tradendae munus gravissimum, ex quo coniuges liberam et consciam Deo Creatori tribuunt operam, magnis semper ipsos affecit gaudiis, quae tamen aliquando non paucae difficultates et angustiae sunt secutae.
[E] Quod munus sustinere si omni tempore coniugum conscientiae arduas facessivit quaestiones, at recens humanae societatis cursus eiusmodi mutationes invexit, ut novae quaestiones sint exortae, quas Ecclesiae ignorare non liceat, utpote quae cum rebus conectantur, tantopere ad hominum vitam et felicitatem pertinentibus.
[E] Re enim vera inductae mutationes et magni momenti et varii generis sunt. Agitur in primis de aucto celeriter natorum numero, ob quem extimescunt plures, ne mundi hominum multitudines celerius crescant quam vitae opes, quae praesto sint, admittant, atque adeo tot familiae totque populi, ad progressum nitentes, etiam maioribus incommodis exinde angantur. Qua ex re ita sollicitari publicae Auctoritates facile possint, ut huiusmodi periculum vel acrioribus rationibus propulsare velint. Accedit quod, non tantum operarum et habitationum condiciones, sed etiam increbrescentes necessitates sive in re oeconomica sive in erudienda docendaque iuventute id genus vitae statum praestant, in quo saepe onerosum sit hodie grandiori liberorum numero apte consulere.
[E] Id quoque notatur, quodammodo mutatum esse sensum, praeterquam de mulieris persona deque eius munere in hominum societate, etiam de amoris coniugum pretio in matrimonio, deque actibus coniugum iudicandis, si hunc amorem spectemus.
[E] Denique illud praesertim animadvertendum est, hominem tam mirifice profecisse in naturae viribus cum moderandis cum ad rationem scite componendis, ut hanc moderationem ad totam suam vitam proferre conetur: hoc est, ad suum corpus, ad sui animi vires, ad vitam socialem, ad ipsasque leges propagationem vitae regentes.
[E] Ex quo rerum statu novae se erumpunt quaestiones. An, ratione habita sive vitae condicionum, quae nunc sunt, sive significationis, quam maritales amplexus quoad concordiam mutuamque fidelitatem coniugum habent, normas morales, quae hodie obtinent, recognoscere non conveniat, si praesertim reputetur, eas nonnisi per gravia incommoda, aliquando fortissimis viris digna, servari posse.
[E] An praeterea, principio totalitatis, quod appellant, in hac re adhibito, non liceat arbitrari consilium fecunditatis minus uberis, sed magis rationi consentaneae, posse actum, physice sterilitatem afferentem, in licitam providamque gignendae prolis moderationem vertere. An videlicet fas non sit opinari finem procreandae prolis potius ad totam coniugum vitam, quam ad singulos quosque eius actus pertinere. Quaerunt insuper num, ob suorum officiorum conscientiam, qua hodie magis homines fruuntur, tempus iam ipsis advenerit, quo tradendae vitae munus potius rationi et voluntati suae, quam certis sui corporis vicibus, sit tribuendum.
[E] Cuius certe generis quaestiones ab Ecclesiae Magisterio novam eamque altiorem considerationem postulabant circa principia moralis doctrinae de matrimonio, quae in lege naturali, divina Revelatione illustrata ditataque, nititur.
[E] Nemo sane christifidelium eat infitias, ad Ecclesiae Magisterium interpretationem legis moralis naturalis spectare. Haud namque dubium est -- ut saepenumero Decessores Nostri pronuntiaverunt [1] -- Christum Iesum, cum Petrum ceterosque Apostolos divinae potestatis suae participavisset, eosque ad omnes gentes praeceptis suis docendas misisset,[2] illos ipsos totius de moribus legis certos custodes interpretesque instituisse: hoc est, non solius legis evangelicae, sed etiam naturalis. Nam naturalis quoque lex voluntatem Dei declarat, cuius utique fidelis obtemperatio ad aeternam salutem est hominibus necessaria.[3]
[E] Hoc autem mandatum Ecclesia persecuta, omni tempore, sed recentiore aetate copiosius, sive de matrimonii natura, sive de recto coniugum iurium usu, sive de ipsorum officiis congrua dedit documenta.[4]
[E] Eiusdem vero muneris conscientia ducti, Coetum, a Decessore Nostro ven. rec. Ioanne XXIII mense Martio anni MDCCCCLXIII constitutum, probavimus atque amplificavimus, qui praeter multos viros, disciplinarum ad hanc rem attinentium studiosos, paria etiam coniugum complectebatur. Hic autem Coetus non eo solam spectabat, ut consilia sententiasque exquireret carta quaestiones, vitam coniugalem in primisque rectam progignendae prolis temperationem attingentes, sed exquisita insuper opportune referret, ut Ecclesiae Magisterium exspectationi, qua de hac re et christifideles et ceteri mundi homines tenerentur, apte responderet.[5]
[E] Quibus peritorum investigationibus acceptis, atque sententiis consiliisque a non paucis Fratribus Nostris in Episcopatu partim ad Nos sponte missis, partim a Nobis rogatis, licuit Nobis omnes multiplicis argumenti partes diligentius perpendere. Quam ob causam universis gratissimum animum Nostrum profitemur.
[E] Attamen conclusiones, ad quas Coetus pervenerat, a Nobis tales existimari non poterant, quae vim iudicii certi ac definiti prae se ferrent, quaeque Nos officio liberarent, tam gravis momenti quaestionem per Nosmetipsos consideratione expendendi; his vel etiam de causis, quod in Coetu plena sententiarum consensio de normis moralibus proponendis afuerat, quodque praesertim quaedam quaestionis dissolvendae viae rationesque exstiterant, a doctrina morali de matrimonio, a Magisterio Ecclesiae firma constantia proposita, discedentes.
[E] Quare, actis ad Nos missis accurate expensis, re diligentissime mente animoque excussa, assiduisque Deo admotis precibus, vi mandati, Nobis a Christo commissi, nunc gravibus huius generis quaestionibus responsum dare censemus.
[E] De propaganda prole quaestio, non secus atque quaelibet quaestio humanam vitam attingens, ultra particulares alias eiusdem generis rationes -- cuiusmodi eae sunt, quae biologicae aut psychologicae, demographicae aut sociologicae appellantur -- ita circumspicienda est, ut totum hominem, totumque, ad quod is vocatus est, munus complectatur, quod non tantum ad naturalia et terrena, sed etiam ad supernaturalia et aeterna pertinet. Quoniamque, qui multi artificiosas vias defendere conantur, quibus liberorum numerus coerceatur, iidem sive coniugalis amoris, sive paternitatis sui officii consciae requisita praetexunt, necesse idcirco est, duo haec gravia vitae matrimonialis elementa accurate definire atque illustrare. Quod sane facturi sumus, ea praecipue in memoriam redigentes, quae recens hac de re Concilium Vaticanum II, Constitutione pastorali edita a verbis «Gaudium et spes» incipiente, summa auctoritate exposuit.
[E] Iamvero coniugalis amor tunc nobis maxime veram suam naturam nobilitatemque ostendet, si illum, quasi a supremo quodam fonte, a Deo manare cogitaverimus, qui Caritas est,[6] quique Pater est, ex quo omnis paternitas in caelis et in terra nominatur.[7]
[E] Tantum igitur abest, ut matrimonium e casu quodam vel e caeco naturalium virium cursu nascatur, ut reapse illud sapienter providenterque Creator Deus ea mente instituerit, ut in hominibus suum amoris consilium efficeret. Quocirca per mutuam sui donationem, quae ipsorum propria est et exclusoria, coniuges illam persequuntur personarum communionem, qua se invicem perficiant, ut ad novorum viventium procreationem et educationem cum Deo operam socient.
[E] Sacro autem baptismate ablutis, matrimonium eiusmodi praeditum est dignitate, ut gratiae sacramentale signum exsistat, cum Christi et Ecclesiae coniunctionem designet.
[E] Quibus rebus in sua luce positis, perspicue et notae et necessitates coniugalis amoris propriae patent, quas maximi est ponderis iustis aestimare momentis.
[E] Est ante omnia amor plane humanus, hoc est sensibilis et spiritualis. Quare non agitur solum de mero vel naturae vel affectuum impetu, sed etiam ac praesertim de liberae voluntatis actu, eo scilicet tendente, ut per cotidianae vitae gaudia et dolores non modo perseveret, sed praeterea augeatur; ita nimirum ut coniuges veluti cor unum et anima una fiant, suamque humanam perfectionem una simul adipiscantur.
[E] Agitur deinde de amore pleno, id est de peculiari illa personalis amicitiae forma, in qua coniuges omnia magno animo inter se partiuntur, neque iniustas exceptiones admittunt, vel suis dumtaxat commodis student. Qui coniugem suum re vera amat, eum profecto non tantum ob id quod ab eo accipit, sed propter eum ipsum amat; idque libens facit, ut eum dono sui ditet.
[E] Ad hoc, coniugalis amor et fidelis et exclusorius est, usque ad vitae extremum; qualem scilicet sponsus et sponsa eo die cogitatione comprehenderunt, quo liberi planeque conscii matrimoniali se vinculo devinxerunt. Quae coniugum fidelitas etsi interdum habeat difficultates, nemini tamen asseverare licet, eam non esse possibilem, cum contra quovis tempore nobilis sit meritisque uber. Posita enim volventibus saeculis a tot coniugibus exempla non tantum probant, eam esse matrimonii naturae consentaneam, sed insuper ex ea, veluti e fonte, intimam diuturnamque felicitatem fluere.
[E] Hic denique amor fecundus est, quippe qui non totus in coniugum communione contineatur, sed eo etiam spectet ut pergat, novasque exsuscitet vitas. Matrimonium et amor coniugalis indole sua ad prolem procreandam et educandam ordinantur. Filii sane sunt praestantissimum matrimonii donum, et ad ipsorum parentum bonum maxime conferunt.[8]
[E] Quas ob causas amor coniugum ab ipsis exigit, ut munus suum probe noverint, paternitatem consciam attingens, quae, cum hodie optimo iure tantopere urgeatur, est idcirco recte intellegenda. Quapropter variis legitimisque rationibus inter se conexis ea consideretur oportet.
[E] Si primum biologicos processus reputamus, paternitas conscia significat cognitionem et observantiam munerum, ad eos attinentium; quoniam humana ratio in facultate vitae procreandae biologicas deprehendit leges, quae ad humanam personam pertinent.[9]
[E] Si deinde ad impulsus innatos et ad animi affectus spectamus, paternitas conscia necessariam declarat dominationem, quam ratio et voluntas in eosdem exerceant necesse est.
[E] Si postea ad condiciones physicas, oeconomicas, psychologicas et sociales respicimus, ii paternitate conscia fungi dicendi sunt, qui aut, prudenti consideratione magnoque animo ducti, statuunt numerosiores suscipere liberos, aut, seriis causis moralibusque praeceptis observatis, animum inducunt ut, vel ad certum vel ad incertum tempus, aliam filium non gignant.
[E] Porro ea, de qua loquimur, conscia paternitas praecipue aliam eamque intimam secum fert rationem, pertinentem ad ordinem moralem, quem obiectivum vocant, a Deoque statutum, cuius recta conscientia est vera interpres. Quapropter paternitatis consciae munus id postulat, ut coniuges sua officia erga Deum, erga seipsos, erga familiam, erga humanam societatem agnoscant, rerum bonorumque ordine recte servato.
[E] Ex quo fit, ut in tradendae vitae munere iis integrum non sit, se arbitratu suo gerere, quasi ipsis liceat vias honestas, quas sequantur, modo omnino proprio ac libero definire; cum, contra, opera sua ad consilium Dei Creatoris accommodare teneantur, quod hinc ipsa matrimonii eiusque actuum natura exprimit, hinc constans Ecclesiae doctrina declarat.[10]
[E] Hi actus, quibus coniuges intime et caste copulantur, et per quos vita humana propagatur, quemadmodum recens Concilium admonuit, honesti ac digna sunt[11]; iidemque legitimi esse non desinunt, etsi infecundi praevideantur propter causas a coniugum voluntate nequaquam manantes, cum non cesset eorum destinatio ad coniugum coniunctionem significandam roborandamque. Revera, ut usu noscitur, non ex unaquaque coniugali congressione nova exoritur vita. Deus enim naturales leges ac tempora fecunditatis ita sapienter disposuit, ut eadem iam per se ipsa generationes subsequentes intervallent. Verumtamen Ecclesia, dum homines commonet de observandis praeceptis legis naturalis, quam constanti sua doctrina interpretatur, id docet necessarium esse, ut quilibet matrimonii usus ad vitam humanam procreandam per se destinatus permaneat.[12]
[E] Huiusmodi doctrina, quae ab Ecclesiae Magisterio saepe exposita est, in nexu indissolubili nititur, a Deo statuto, quem homini sua sponte infringere non licet, inter significationem unitatis et significationem procreationis, quae ambae in actu coniugali insunt.
[E] Etenim propter intimam suam rationem, coniugii actus, dum maritum et uxorem artissimo sociat vinculo, eos idoneos etiam facit ad novam vitam gignendam, secundum leges in ipsa viri et mulieris natura inscriptas. Quodsi utraque eiusmodi essentialis ratio, unitatis videlicet et procreationis, servatur, usus matrimonii sensum mutui verique amoris suumque ordinem ad celsissimum paternitatis munus omnino retinet, ad quod homo vocatur. Putamus nostrae aetatis homines aptissimos esse ad perspiciendum, quam haec doctrina sit humanae rationi consentanea.
[E] Homines enim merito animadvertunt, usum matrimonii alteri coniugi impositum, nulla ratione habita eius status eiusque iustorum optatorum, non esse verum actum amoris, atque adeo iis adversari rebus, quas circa necessitudines inter coniuges moralis recte postulat ordo. Pariter, si rem considerent, fateantur oportet, actum amoris mutui, qui facultati vitam propagandi detrimento sit, quam Deus omnium Creator secundum peculiares leges in ea insculpsit, refragari tum divino consilio, ad cuius normam coniugium constitutum est, tum voluntati primi vitae humanae Auctoris. Quapropter cum quis dono Dei utitur, tollens, licet solum ex parte, significationem et finem doni ipsius, sive viri sive mulieris naturae repugnat eorumque intimae necessitudini, ac propterea etiam Dei consilio sanctaeque eius voluntati obnititur. Qui vero amoris coniugalis dono fruitur, leges conservans generationis, is non quidem dominum se confitetur fontium vitae, sed potius ministrum consilii a Creatore initi. Sicut enim homo, in universum, corporis sui non habet infinitam potestatem, ita etiam, et sane peculiari ratione, ne genitalium quidem virium qua talium, quoniam hae suapte natura ad vitam humanam progignendam spectant, cuius Deus principium est. «Etenim hominum vita pro sacra re est omnibus ducenda» -- commonebat Decessor Noster f. r. Ioannes XXIII -- «quippe quae, inde a suo exordio, Creatoris actionem Dei postulet».[13]
[E] Quare primariis hisce principiis humanae et christianae doctrinae de matrimonio nixi, iterum debemus edicere, omnino respuendam esse, ut legitimum modum numeri liberorum temperandi, directam generationis iam coeptae interruptionem, ac praesertim abortum directum, quamvis curationis causa factum.[14]
[E] Pariter, sicut Ecclesiae Magisterium pluries docuit, damnandum est seu viros seu mulieres directo sterilitate, vel perpetuo vel ad tempus, afficere.[15]
[E] Item quivis respuendus est actus, qui, cum coniugale commercium vel praevidetur vel efficitur vel ad suos naturales exitus ducit, id tamquam finem obtinendum aut viam adhibendam intendat, ut procreatio impediatur.[16]
[E] Neque vero, ad eos coniugales actus comprobandos ex industria fecunditate privatos, haec argumenta ut valida afferre licet: nempe, id malum eligendum esse, quod minus grave videatur; insuper eosdem actus in unum quoddam coalescere cum actibus fecundis iam antea positis vel postea ponendis, atque adeo horum unam atque parem moralem bonitatem participare. Verum enimvero, si malum morale tolerare, quod minus grave sit, interdum licet, ut aliquod maius vitetur malum vel aliquod praestantius bonum promoveatur,[17] numquam tamen licet, ne ob gravissimas quidem causas, facere mala ut eveniant bona [18]: videlicet in id voluntatem conferre, quod ex propria natura moralem ordinem transgrediatur, atque idcirco homine indignum sit iudicandum, quamvis eo consilio fiat, ut singulorum hominum, domesticorum convictuum, aut humanae societatis bona defendantur vel provehantur. Quapropter erret omnino, qui arbitretur coniugalem actum, sua fecunditate ex industria destitutum, ideoque intrinsece inhonestum, fecundis totius coniugum vitae congressionibus comprobari posse.
[E] Ecclesia autem illas medendi rationes haud illicitas existimat, quae ad morbos corporis curandos necessariae sunt, etiamsi exinde oriatur procreationis impedimentum, licet praevisum, dummodo ne hoc impedimentum ob quamlibet rationem directo intendatur.[19]
[E] Attamen, contra huiusmodi Ecclesiae doctrinam de coniugii moribus dirigendis, quidam nostris temporibus opponunt, ut supra animadvertimus (n. 3), rationi humanae ius ac munus esse, eas, quas irrationalis natura ipsi praebuerit, vires temperare easque referre ad assequendum finem hominis bono convenientem. Nunc enim nonnulli quaerunt: ad rem quod attinet, nonne rationi consentaneum est, in tot rerum adiunctis prolis generationem artificiose temperare, si hoc agendi modo familiae tranquillitati atque concordiae melius consulatur, et filiorum, qui iam nati sint, educandorum magis idoneae condiciones parentur? Huic quaestioni clara respondere oportet: scilicet Ecclesiam ante omnes primam esse in laudando atque commendando humani intellectus usu in opere, quod hominem, ratione praeditum, tam arte cum Creatore suo consociat; at ipsam affirmare, id peragendum esse, servato rerum ordine a Deo statuto.
[E] Si igitur iustae adsint causae generationes subsequentes intervallandi, quae a coniugum corporis vel animi condicionibus, aut ab externis rerum adiunctis proficiscantur, Ecclesia docet, tunc licere coniugibus sequi vices naturales, generandi facultatibus immanentes, in maritali commercio habendo iis dumtaxat temporibus, quae conceptione vacent, atque adeo nasciturae proli ita consulere, ut morum doctrina, quam modo exposuimus, haudquaquam laedatur.[20]
[E] Ecclesia sibi suaeque doctrinae constat, sive cum iudicat, coniugibus licere rationem habere temporum, quae fecunditate careant, sive cum usum earum rerum ut semper illicitum improbat, quae conceptioni directo officiant, etiamsi haec altera agendi ratio argumenta repetat, quae honesta et gravia videantur. Etenim hae duae causae inter se maxime discrepant: in priore, coniuges legitime facultate utuntur, sibi a natura data; in altera vero, iidem impediunt, quominus generationis ordo suos habeat naturae processus. Si infitiandum non est, coniuges in utroque casu mutua certaque consensione prolem ob probabiles rationes vitare velle, atque pro explorato habere liberos minime esse nascituros, attamen fatendum pariter est, in priore tantum casu fieri, ut ipsi coniuges se a maritali amplexu temporibus fecunditatem invehentibus abstinere valeant, quotiescumque ob iustas rationes liberorum procreatio optanda non sit; cum autem tempora conceptibus non apta redierint, fieri ut ipsi utantur commercio ad mutuum testandum amorem atque ad promissam sibi fidem servandam. Iidem sane, haec agentes, vere et omnino recti amoris testimonium praebent.
[E] Probi homines satius etiam sibi persuaderi possunt de veritate doctrinae, quam Ecclesia hac in re proponit, si mentem convertant ad ea, quae secutura sunt vias rationesque, ad natorum incrementa artificio coercenda adhibitas. In primis secum recogitent, quam lata et quam facilis via hac agendi ratione patefieri possit, sive ad coniugum infidelitatem, sive ad morum disciplinam passim enervandam. Neque diuturnus rerum usus necessarius est, ut quis compertam habeat humanam infirmitatem, atque intellegat, homines -- ac praesertim iuvenes, cupiditatibus tam obnoxios -- incitamentis indigere ad moralem legem servandam, ac nefas esse iisdem facilem praebere viam ad legem ipsam violandam. Id etiam reformidandum est, ne viri, hisce usibus conceptioni officientibus iam assueti, mulierum reverentiam obliviscantur, earumque corporis animique aequilibritate posthabita, easdem quoddam reddant instrumentum suae ipsorum cupiditati inserviens, nec iam eas ut consortes existiment, qual observantia et amore prosequi debeant.
[E] Denique diligenter perpendatur, quam periculosa potestas hoc modo iis publicae rei Moderatoribus concedatur, qui de legis moralis praeceptis minime sint solliciti. Numquis reprehendat supremos Civitatis Moderatores, qui ad totius suae Nationis componendas difficultates id usurpent, quod coniugibus tamquam licitum agnoscatur ad quandam familiae difficultatem dissolvendam? Quis prohibeat, quominus publicae Auctoritates viis concipiendae proli contrariis faveant, quas efficaciores esse duxerint, immo eas omnibus adhibendas praecipiant, quotiescumque id necessarium reputaverint? Ita sane fiat, ut homines, cum divinae legi insitas difficultates vitare percupiant, quas singuli, vel familiae, vel socialis convictus experiantur, publicarum Auctoritatum arbitrio potestatem permittant, sese in coniugum maxime proprium et intimum munus interponendi.
[E] Quare, nisi velimus ut procreandae vitae officium hominum arbitratui concedatur, necessario aliquos fines, quos ultra progredi non liceat, agnoscamus oportet illi potestati, quam homo in proprium corpus in eiusque naturalia munera habere potest; fines, dicimus, quas nemini, sive privato sive publica auctoritate praedito, violare licet. Qui limites non aliam ob causam statuuntur, quam ob reverentiam, quae toti humano corpori eiusque naturalibus muneribus debetur, secundum principia, quae supra memoravimus, et rectam intellegentiam principii totalitatis, ut aiunt, quod Decessor Noster v. m. Pius XII illustravit.[21]
[E] Praevideri potest, non omnes fortasse traditam huiusmodi doctrinam facile accepturos esse, cum nimis multae obstrepant voces, quae, recentioribus divulgationis instrumentis auctae, ab Ecclesiae voce discrepent. Ecclesia autem, cui mirum non est, se, haud secus ac divinum Conditorem suum, positam esse in signum cui contradicetur[22], non idcirco iniunctum sibi praetermittit officium, totam legem moralem, cum naturalem cum evangelicam, humiliter ac firmiter praedicandi.
[E] Cum Ecclesia utramque hanc legem non condiderit, eiusdem non arbitra, sed tantummodo custos atque interpres esse potest, eique numquam fas erit licitum declarare, quod revera illicitum est, cum id suapte natura germano hominis bono semper repugnet.
[E] Dum moralem coniugii legem integram servat, Ecclesia probe novit se adiutricem operam conferre ad verum civilem cultum inter homines instaurandum; ac praeterea hominem incitat, ne se officiis suis abdicet, technicis artibus sese committens; quo fit, ut ipsa coniugum dignitatem in tuto ponat. Hac agendi ratione Ecclesia, Divini Salvatoris exemplo et doctrinae inhaerens, ostendit se sincero generosoque amora prosequi homines, quos inde ab hoc terrestri itinere iuvare contendit, ut non secus atque filii vitam Dei viventis, omnium hominum Patris, participent.[23]
[E] Verba autem haec Nostra haud plane Ecclesiae, omnium gentium Matris ac Magistrae, cogitationes et sollicitudines exprimerent, nisi homines, antea ad Dei legem de coniugio servandam colendamque incitatos, in liberorum numero honeste ordinando etiam sustinerent inter ipsas asperas vitae condiciones, quibus domestici convictus ac nationes nostro hoc tempore premuntur. Ecclesia enim erga homines non aliter ac Divinus Redemptor se gerere potest: scilicet eorum infirmitatem cognoscit, miseratur turbas, peccatores excipit; facere autem non potest, quin legem doceat, quae reapse propria est vitae humanae ad suam germanam veritatem restitutae, atque a Dei Spiritu actae.[24]
[E] Ecclesiae doctrina de liberorum incremento recte ordinando, quae legem divinam ipsam promulgat, sine dubio multis talis videbitur, ut nonnisi difficulter, immo etiam nullo modo servari possit. At revera, sicut bona omnia quae sua nobilitate et utilitate praestant, haec lex a singulis hominibus, a familiis et ab hominum consortione firma proposita multosque labores postulat. Immo eadem servari nequit nisi opitulante Dei gratia, qua bona hominum voluntas fulcitur ac roboratur. Iis autem, qui rem diligenter perpendant, labores illi profecto videbuntur hominum dignitatem augere et humanae societati beneficia conferre.
[E] Recta autem et honesta nasciturae prolis ordinatio id primum a coniugibus postulat, ut vera vitae familiaeque bona penitus agnoscant et existiment, itemque sibi ac suis motibus perfecte moderari consuescant. Nihil profecto est dubii, quin naturae impetibus, rationis liberaeque voluntatis ope, imperare asceseos sit opus, ut nempe amoris significationes, coniugalis vitae propriae, cum recto ordine congruant; quod praesertim ad usum continentiae, certis temporis intervallis servandae, requiritur. Verum huiusmodi disciplina, unde coniugum castimonia elucet, adeo eorum amori non obest, ut maiore eundem humanitatis sensu perfundat. Quodsi huiusmodi disciplina assiduam virium intentionem exigit, salutari tamen eius virtute coniuges seipsos plene excolunt spiritualibusque bonis ditantur: ea enim domestico convictui amplos tranquillitatis ac pacis fructus affert, atque solvendis alius generis difficultatibus prodest; ea alterius coniugis curam et observantiam erga alterum fovet; coniuges in immodico sui amore depellendo, qui germanae repugnat caritati, adiuvat; eosdemque ad conscientiam munerum exsequendorum erigit. Ea denique parentibus intimam et efficaciorem auctoritatem ad liberos educandos confert, dum pueri et iuvenes, aetate procedentes, vera hominis bona congruenter putant, et mentis sensuumque vires placide et apte exercent.
[E] Hanc vero nacti opportunitatem, educatores, eosque omnes, quorum ius et officium est communi humanae consortionis bono prospicere, commonere volumus de necessitate eum rerum statum inducendi, qui colendae castitati faveat, ut scilicet germana libertas licentiam vincat, moralis ordinis normis plane servatis.
[E] Quidquid ergo hodie in socialis, ut aiunt, communicationis instrumentis sensus commovet dissolutosque mores alit, pariterque quaevis scribendi obscenitas turpiumque spectaculorum forma palam atque uno ore iis omnibus improbanda sunt viris, qui tum civilis cultus provehendi, tum praecipuorum animi bonorum tuendorum sollicitudine tenentur. Perperam enim huiusmodi pravitates quis probare conetur, causas ex artibus doctrinisque quaerens,[25] vel argumenta sumens ex libertate, quam forte hac in provincia publicae Auctoritates permittant.
[E] Ita igitur Nationum Rectores alloqui placet, quippe quibus potissimum onus boni communis tutandi iniunctum sit, liceatque tantopere ad bonos tuendos mores conferre: ne umquam patiantur honestos corruere mores suorum populorum; prohibeant omnino, ne per leges in familiam, quae primaria est particula Civitatis, ii usus incedant, qui naturali et divinae legi adversentur. Alia enim via civilis Auctoritas quaestionem de multitudinis incremento dissolvere et potest et debet: videlicet providas familiis leges ferendo populosque tam sapienter educando, ut sive morum lex sive civium libertas in tuto collocentur.
[E] Equidem probe novimus, quantum haec causa difficultatis afferat publicae rei Moderatoribus, in iis praesertim Civitatibus quae ad progressum nituntur. Atque Nos, iustas, quibus afficiuntur, curas perspicientes, Encyclicas Litteras edidimus, quibus Populorum Progressio est index. Sed nunc una cum Decessore Nostro ven. rec. Ioanne XXIII haec verba iteramus:
eas quaestiones ... dissolvi oportere, ut neque vias homo neque rationes sequatur, a sua dignitate aversas; quales ii tradere non verentur, qui hominem ipsum eiusque vitam ad materiam omni ex parte referendos esse opinantur. Hanc quaestionem sic tantummodo dissolvi posse censemus, si rerum oeconomicarum et socialium progressiones cum singolorum civium tum universae humanae societatis servent et augeant veri nominis bona.[26]Neque profecto sine gravi iniuria fiat, si divinae Providentiae id tribuatur, quod, contra, proficisci videtur a minus sapienti reipublicae gubernandae ratione, vel a tenuiore quodam socialis iustitiae sensu, vel a bonorum copia sui commodi causa congesta, vel denique a socordi neglegentia in laboribus oneribusque suscipiendis, quibus populus omnesque eius filii ad amplius vivendi genus evehantur.[27] Utinam universae Auctoritates, quas penes res est -- quemadmodum earum quaedam tam egregie iam faciunt -- incepta ac nisus excitatis viribus renovent! Neque remittat studium mutua communicandi auxilia inter omnes magnae hominum familiae partes: hanc prope infinitam provinciam patere putamus, in qua maxima Instituta, ad plures nationes pertinentia, suam operam ponant.
[E] Nunc autem Nostrae cohortationis verbis viros scientiarum studiosos prosequi libet, qui multum bono matrimonii et familiae, pacique conscientiarum inservire possunt, si collatis studiis diversas condiciones, honestae ordinationi procreationis humanae faventes, penitius elucidare conentur.[28] Id enim in primis exoptandum est -- quod antea fuit Pii XII votum -- ut medica ars ad honeste temperandae prolis satis certum fundamentum statuere valeat, quod in perspectis naturalibus vicibus consistat.[29] Ita quidem docti homines, ii praesertim qui catholico nomine censentur, sua data opera res plane se habere ostendent, ut Ecclesia docet, nempe veram contradictionem inter divinas leges vitae transmittendae et germani amoris coniugalis fovendi adesse non posse.[30]
[E] Nunc vero Nostra oratio peculiari modo ad filios Nostros convertitur, ad eos praesertim, quos Deus in matrimonii statu ad sibi serviendum vocat. Ecclesia enim, dum inviolabiles divinae legis condiciones tradit, salutem nuntiat viasque gratiae per sacramenta reserat, unde homo nova efficitur creatura, quae in caritate germanaque libertate superno sui Creatoris et Salvatoris consilio respondeat suaveque etiam Christi iugum sentiat.[31]
[E] Eius igitur voci modeste obsecuti, christiani coniuges meminerint, suam vocationem ad vitam christianam, e baptismate exortam, sacramento Matrimonii amplius et explicatam et confirmatam esse. Eodem namque ipsi roborantur et veluti consecrantur, ut fideliter munia sua exsequantur, vocationem ad expletam sui formam perficiant, christianumque testimonium, ut eos addecet, coram mundo edant.[32] Tale enim munus Dominus iisdem committit, ut hominibus patefaciant illius legis sanctitatem itemque suavitatem, qua mutuus eorum amor cum adiutrice opera ab ipsis data amori Dei, humanae vitae auctoris, arte coniungitur.
[E] Nullo sane modo hic reticere volumus difficultates, interdum graves, in quas christianorum coniugum vita incurrit: nam iis, ut unicuique nostrum, angusta porta, et arta via est, quae ducit ad vitam.[33] Attamen huiusce spe vitae tamquam clarissima luce eorum iter collustretur, dum forti contendunt animo, ut sobrie et iuste et pie vivant in hoc saeculo[34], plane noscentes praeterire figuram huius mundi.[35]
[E] Quapropter coniuges destinatos sibi labores libenter suscipiant, cum fide tum ea spe roborati, quae non confundit: quia caritas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum Sanctum, qui datus est nobis[36]; assidua deinde prece divinum auxilium implorent atque praesertim e perenni Eucharistiae fonte gratiam et caritatem hauriant. Si autem peccatis adhuc retineantur, ne concidant animo, sed humiles et constantes ad Dei misericordiam confugiant, quam abunde Paenitentiae sacramentum dilargitur. Huiusmodi profecto ratione ad coniugalis vitae perfectionem pervenire poterunt, quam Apostolus his verbis exponit:
Viri diligite uxores vestras, sicut et Christus dilexit Ecclesiam (...) Ita et viri debent diligere uxores suas ut corpora sua. Qui suam uxorem diligit, seipsum diligit. Nemo enim umquam carnem suam odio habuit: sed nutrit, et fovet eam, sicut et Christus Ecclesiam (...) Sacramentum hoc magnum est, ego autem dico in Christo et in Ecclesia. Verumtamen et vos singuli, unusquisque uxorem suam sicut seipsum diligat: uxor autem timeat virum suum.[37]
[E] Eorum autem fructuum, qui maturescunt si acri animi intentione lex divina custoditur, praestantissimus sane colligitur, cum ipsi coniuges haud raro alios quoque experientiae suae participes facere cupiunt. Inde fit, ut ipsa laicorum vocationis amplitudine novum quoddam ac perinsigne apostolatus genus comprehendatur, quo pares paribus inserviunt: tum enim ipsi coniuges apostolicum pro ceteris coniugibus munus obeunt, quibus sese duces praebent. Quod profecto inter tot christiani apostolatus formas opportunissimum hodie esse videtur.[38]
[E] Egregiam pariter reverentiam praestamus medicis artisque salutaris ministris, qui, in suo quisque munere exsequendo, ea quae ab ipsis praecipua christianae vocationis ratio postulat, potius quam humanam quamlibet utilitatem, servare student. Constantes igitur perseverent in proposito iis semper consiliis favendi, quae et fidei et rectae rationi adhaerescant, eoque contendant, ut iisdem in peculiari suo coetu assensionem et observantiam concilient. Praetereaque id tamquam proprium artis suae munus habeant, necessariam huiusce difficilioris provinciae doctrinam sibi plane comparare, ut nempe sententiam exquirentibus coniugibus recta dare consilia iustamque ostendere viam possint, quae iure ac merito ab ipsis postulentur.
[E] Vos autem, dilecti Filii sacerdotes, qui pro sacro, quo fungimini, munere sive singulorum hominum sive familiarum consultores ac spirituales duces agitis, magna Nos pleni fiducia compellamus. Vestrum namque praecipuumque officium est -- vos praesertim alloquimur, qui moralem theologiam traditis -- Ecclesiae de matrimonio doctrinam integre aperteque proponere. Vos primi in ministerio vestro perfungendo exemplum sinceri obsequii edite, quod interius exteriusque ecclesiastico Magisterio tribuendum est. Etenim nostis tali vos obsequio devinciri non potius illis de causis, quae allatae sunt, quam ob Sancti Spiritus lumen, quo praecipue Ecclesiae Pastores in explananda veritate fruuntur.[39] Neque vos fugit, summi esse momenti, ad animorum pacem populique christiani unitatem servandam, ut in re morali ita in re dogmatica, omnes Ecclesiae Magisterio parere eodemque uti sermone. Quamobrem, sollicitiora verba magni Apostoli Pauli usurpantes, toto vos pectore iterum appellamus:
Obsecro ... vos fratres per nomen Domini nostri Iesu Christi: ut idipsum dicatis omnes, et non sint in vobis schismata: sitis autem perfecti in eodem sensu, et in eadem sententia.[40]
[E] Porro si nihil de salutari Christi doctrina demittere praecellens quoddam caritatis erga animos genus est, at idem semper cum tolerantia atque caritate coniungatur oportet, quarum ipse Redemptor, cum hominibus et colloquens et agens, exempla prodidit. Is enim, cum venisset non ad iudicandum, sed ad salvandum mundum[41], acerbe quidem severus in peccata, sed patiens ac misericors in peccatores fuit.
[E] Suis igitur difficultatibus afflictati, coniuges in sermone et in corde sacerdotis expressam veluti imaginem vocis et amoris nostri Redemptoris inveniant.
[E] Fiduciae autem pleni loquamini, dilecti Filii, pro certo habentes, Sanctum Dei Spiritum, dum adest Magisterio rectam proferenti doctrinam, intus corda fidelium illustrare eosque ad assentiendum invitare. Coniuges vero necessariam precandi viam edocete, apteque instituite, ut saepius magna cum fide ad Eucharistiae et Paenitentiae sacramenta accedant, neque umquam pro sua infirmitate animos demittant.
[E] Sed nunc, Encyclicas hasce Litteras concludentes, ad vos, dilecti ac venerabiles in episcopali munere Fratres, quibuscum curas de spirituali bono Populi Dei artius participamus, mentem Nostram reverenter amanterque convertimus. Etenim vos omnes instanti hac petitione invitamus, ut vestris praeeuntes sacerdotibus, sacri ministerii adiutoribus, vestrisque fidelibus, omni studio nullaque mora in matrimonii tutelam in eiusque sanctitudinem asserendam incumbatis, quo magis usque coniugalis vita humanam christianamque sui perfectionem assequatur. Id vero muneris tamquam maximum opus et onus, in praesenti vobis commissum, habetote. Nam, ut plane nostis, idem munus certam pastoralis ministerii ordinationem postulat, quae ad omnes humanae industriae provincias, nempe ad res oeconomicas, bonas doctrinas, socialesque rationes pertinet: quae omnia si magis simulque progredientur, tum non solum tolerabilior, sed et facilior itemque laetior vita parentum ac liberorum in intimo familiarum sinu evadet, atque fraterna uberior caritate veraque pace tutior fiet convictus in hominum societate, sancte servato consilio, quod Deus de mundo mente concepit.
[E] Vos, venerabiles Fratres, vos dilectissimi Filii, vosque omnes bonae voluntatis homines, ad grande profecto opus et educationis et progressionis atque caritatis Nos nunc advocamus, firmissima freti Ecclesiae doctrina, quam Petri Successor, una cum catholici episcopatus Fratribus, fideliter custodit atque interpretatur. Quod magnum revera opus, ut persuasissimum Nobis habemus, tum mundi tum Ecclesiae bono cedit, siquidem homo ad veram felicitatem, quam totis sui animi viribus affectat, pervenire nequit, nisi leges observat, a summo Deo in ipsius natura insculptas, quae sunt prudenter amanterque colendae. Tanto igitur operi, nec non vobis omnibus ac potissimum coniugibus, a Deo sanctissimo et misericordissimo supernarum copiam gratiarum imploramus, quarum pignus Apostolicam Nostram Benedictionem libenter vobis impertimus.
Datum Romae, apud Sanctum Petrum, die XXV mensis Iulii, in festo S. Iacobi Apostoli, anno MCMLXVIII, Pontificatus Nostri sexto.
PAULUS PP. VI
[1] Cfr. Pii IX, Litt. Enc. Qui pluribus : Pii IX P. M. Acta, 1, pp. 9-10; S. Pii X, Litt. Enc. Singulari quadam: A.A.S. IV (1912) p. 658; Pii XI, Litt. Enc. Casti Connubii: A.A.S. XXII (1930) pp. 579-581; Pii XII, Alloc. Magnificate Dominum, ad Episcopos totius catholici orbis: A.A.S. XLVI (1954) pp. 671-672; Ioannis XXIII, Litt Enc. Mater et Magistra: A.A. S. LIII (1961) p. 457.
[2] Cfr. Matth. 28, 18-20 [Et accedens Iesus locutus est eis dicens: «Data est mihi omnis potestas in caelo et in terra. Euntes ergo docete omnes gentes, baptizantes eos in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti docentes eos servare omnia, quaecumque mandavi vobis. Et ecce ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi».]
[3] Cfr. Matth. 7, 21 [Non omnis, qui dicit mihi: «Domine, Domine», intrabit in regnum caelorum, sed qui facit voluntatem Patris mei, qui in caelis est.]
[4] Cfr. Catech. Rom. Conc. Trid., p. II, c. VIII ; Leonis XIII, Litt. Enc. Arcanum acta Leonis XIII, II (1880) pp. 26-29; Pii XI, Litt. Enc. Divini Illius Magistri: A.A. S. XXII (1930) pp. 58-61; Litt. Enc. Casti Connubii: A.A.S. XXII (1930) pp. 545-546; Pii XII, Alloc. ad Societatem Italicam Medico-biologicam a S. Luca : Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di S. S. Pio XII, VI, pp. 191-192; Alloc. iis quae interfuerunt Conventui Societatis Catholicae Italicae inter Obstetr ices : A. A. S. XLIII (1951) pp. 835-854; ad Conventum Societatis, quam Fronte della Famiglia appellant, et ad Consociationem familiarum fecundarum: A. A. S. XLIII (1951) pp. 857-859; ad VII Conventum Societatis inter omnes gentes de Haematologia: A. A. S. L (1958) pp. 734-735; Ioannis XXIII, Litt. Enc. Mater et Magistra: A. A. S. LIII (1961) pp. 446-447; Conc. Vat. II, Const. past. Gaudium et spes, nn. 47-52: A. A. S. LVIII (1966) pp. 1067-1074; Codex Iuris Canonici, cc. 1067; 1068, § 1; 1076, § § 1-2.
[5] Cfr. Pauli VI, Alloc. ad sacrum Cardinalium Collegium: A. A. S. LVI (1964) p. 588; ad Coetum cognoscentium quaestiones de multitudine, de familia deque nativitate : A. A. S. LVII (1965) p. 388; ad Conventum Societatis Italicae de Obstetricia deque Gynecologia A.A.S. LVIII (1966) p. 1168.
[6] Cfr. 1 Io. 4, 8 [Qui non diligit, non cognovit Deum, quoniam Deus caritas est.]
[7] Eph. 3, 14-15 [Huius rei gratia flecto genua mea ad Patrem, ex quo omnis paternitas in caelis et in terra nominatur]
[8] Conc. Vat. II, Const. past. Gaudium et spes, n. 50: A.A.S. LVIII (1966) pp. 1070-1072.
[9] Cfr. S. Thom., Sum. Theol. I-II, q. 94, a. 2.
[10] Cfr. Conc. Vat. II, Const. past. Gaudium et spes, nn. 50-51: A. A.S. LVIII (1966) pp. 1070-1073.
[11] Cfr. ibid., n. 49: A. A. S. LVIII (1966) p. 1070.
[12] Cfr. Pii XI, Litt. Enc. Casti Connubii: A. A. S. XXII (1930) p. 560; Pii XII, Alloc. iis quae interfuerunt Conventui Societatis Catholicae Italicae inter Obstetrices: A. A. S. XLIII (1951) p. 843.
[13] Litt. Enc. Mater et Magistra: A.A. S. LIII (1961) p. 447.
[14] Cfr. Catech. Rom. Conc. Trid., p. II, c. VIII; Pii XI, Litt. Enc. Casti Connubii: A.A.S. XXII (1930) pp. 562-564 ; Pii XII, Alloc. ad Societatem Italicam medico-biologicam a S. Luca : Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di S. S. Pio XII, VI, pp. 191-192; iis quae interfuerunt Conventui Societatis Catholicae Italicae inter Obstetrices : A. A. S. XLIII (1951) pp. 842-843; iis qui interfuerunt Conventui Societatis, quam Fronte della Famiglia appellant, et ad Consociationem Familiarum Fecundarum: A. A. S. XLIII (1961) pp. 857-859; Ioannis XXIII, Litt. Enc. Pacem in terris: A. A. S. LV (1963) pp. 259-260; Conc. Vat. II, Const. past. Gaudium et spes, n. 51: A. A. S. LVIII (1966) p. 1072.
[15] Cfr. Pii XI, Litt Enc. Casti Connubii: A. A. S. XXII (1930) p. 565; Decr. S. Off. datum die 22 m. Febr. a. 1940: A. A. S. XXXII (1940) p. 73; Pii XII, Alloc. iis quae interfuerunt Conventui Societatis Catholicae Italicae inter Obstetrices: A. A. S. XLIII (1951) pp. 843-844 ; ad VII Conventum Societatis inter omnes gentes de Haematologia: A. A. S. L (1958) pp. 734-735.
[16] Cfr. Catech. Rom. Conc. Trid., p. II, c. VIII; Pii XI, Litt. Enc. Casti Connubii: A. A. S. XXII (1930) pp. 559-561; Pii XII, Alloc. iis quae interfuerunt Conventui Societatis Catholicae Italicae inter Obstetrices: A. A. S. XLIII (1951) p. 843; ad VII Conventum Societatis inter omnes gentes de Haematologia : A. A. S. L (1958) pp. 734-735; Ioannis XXIII, Litt. Enc. Mater et Magistra: A. A. S. LIII (1961) p. 447.
[17] Cfr. Pii XII, Alloc. iis qui interfuerunt V Conventui nationali Italico Societatis Iurisconsultorum catholicorum: A. A. S. XLV (1953) pp. 798-799.
[18] Cfr. Rom. 3, 8 [Et non, sicut blasphemamur, et sicut aiunt quidam nos dicere: «Faciamus mala, ut veniant bona?» Quorum damnatio iusta est.]
[19] Cfr. Pii XII, Alloc. iis qui interfuerunt XXVI Conventui a Sodalitate Italica de Urologia indicto: A. A. S. XLV (1953) pp. 674-675; ad VII Conventum Societatis inter omnes gentes de Haematologia: A.A.S. L (1958) pp. 734-735.
[20] Cfr. XII, Alloc. iis quae interfuerunt Conventui Societatis Catholicae Italicae inter Obstetrices : A. A.S. XLII I (1951) p. 846.
[21] Cfr. Alloc. iis qui interfuerunt XXVI Conventui a Sodalitate Italica de Urologia indicto : A. A. S. XLV (1953) pp. 674-675 ; Moderatoribus ac Sociis Sodalitatis Italicae oblatorum «corneae» et Unionis Italicae Caecorum: A.A.S. XLVIII (1956) pp. 461-462.
[22] Lc. 2, 34-35 [Et benedixit illis Simeon et dixit ad Mariam matrem eius: «Ecce positus est hic in ruinam et resurrectionem multorum in Israel et in signum, cui contradicetur -- et tuam ipsius animam pertransiet gladius -- ut revelentur ex multis cordibus cogitationes».]
[23] Cfr. Pauli VI, Litt. Enc. Populorum Progressio: A.A. S. LIX (1967) p. 268.
[24] Cfr. Rom. 8 [Nihil ergo nunc damnationis est his, qui sunt in Christo Iesu; lex enim Spiritus vitae in Christo Iesu liberavit te a lege peccati et mortis. ... Qui autem in carne sunt, Deo placere non possunt. ... Vos autem in carne non estis sed in Spiritu ... Non enim accepistis spiritum servitutis iterum in timorem, sed accepistis Spiritum adoptionis filiorum, in quo clamamus: «Abba, Pater!». ... Ipse Spiritus testimonium reddit una cum spiritu nostro, quod sumus filii Dei. ... Scimus autem quoniam diligentibus Deum omnia cooperantur in bonum ... Quis nos separabit a caritate Christi? Tribulatio an angustia an persecutio an fames an nuditas an periculum an gladius? ... Certus sum enim quia neque mors neque vita neque angeli neque principatus neque instantia neque futura neque virtutes neque altitudo neque profundum neque alia quaelibet creatura poterit nos separare a caritate Dei, quae est in Christo Iesu Domino nostro.]
[25] Cfr. Conc. Vat. II, Decr. Inter mirifica, nn. 6-7: A.A.S. LVI (1964) p. 147.
[26] Litt. Enc. Mater et Magistra: A.A.S. LIII (1961) p. 447.
[27] Cfr. Litt. Enc. Populorum Progressio, nn. 48-55: A. A. S. LIX (1967) pp. 281-284.
[28] Conc. Vat. II, Const. past. Gaudium et spes, n. 52: A. A. S. LVIII (1966) p. 1074.
[29] Alloc. ad Conventum Societatis, quam Fronte della Famiglia appellant, et ad Consociationem Familiarum Fecundarum: A. A. S. XLIII (1951) p. 859.
[30] Conc. Vat. II, Const. past. Gaudium et spes, n. 51: A. A.S. LVIII (1966) p. 1072.
[31] Cfr. Matth. 11, 30 [Iugum enim meum suave, et onus meum leve est]
[32] Cfr. Conc. Vat. II, Const. past. Gaudium et spes, n. 48: A.A. S. LVIII (1966) pp. 1067-1069; Const. dogm. Lumen gentium, n. 35: A.A.S. LVII (1965) pp. 40-41.
[33] Matth. 7, 14 [quam angusta porta et arta via, quae ducit ad vitam, et pauci sunt, qui inveniunt eam!]; cfr. Hebr. 12, 11.
[34] Cfr. Tit. 2, 11-12 [Apparuit enim gratia Dei salutaris omnibus hominibus erudiens nos, ut abnegantes impietatem et saecularia desideria sobrie et iuste et pie vivamus in hoc saeculo, exspectantes beatam spem et adventum gloriae magni Dei et salvatoris nostri Iesu Christi;]
[35] Cfr. 1 Cor. 7 , 29-31 [Hoc itaque dico, fratres, tempus breviatum est; reliquum est, ut et qui habent uxores, tamquam non habentes sint, ... et qui utuntur hoc mundo, tamquam non abutentes; praeterit enim figura huius mundi.]
[36] Rom. 5, 5 [spes autem non confundit, quia caritas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum Sanctum, qui datus est nobis]
[37] Eph. 5, 25, 28-29, 32-33 [Viri, diligite uxores, sicut et Christus dilexit ecclesiam et seipsum tradidit pro ea ... Ita et viri debent diligere uxores suas ut corpora sua. Qui suam uxorem diligit, seipsum diligit; nemo enim umquam carnem suam odio habuit, sed nutrit et fovet eam sicut et Christus ecclesiam, ... Mysterium hoc magnum est; ego autem dico de Christo et ecclesia! Verumtamen et vos singuli unusquisque suam uxorem sicut seipsum diligat; uxor autem timeat virum.]
[38] Cfr. Conc. Vat. II, Const. dogm. Lumen gentium, nn. 35 et 41: A. A. S. LVII (1965) pp. 40-45; Const. past. Gaudium et spes, nn. 48-49: A. A. S. LVIII (1966) pp. 1067-1070; Decr. Apostolicam actuositatem, n. 11: A. A. S. LVIII (1966) pp. 847-849.
[39] Cfr. Conc Vat. II, Const. dogm. Lumen gentium, n. 25: A.A.S. LVII (1965) pp. 29-31.
[40] 1 Cor. 1, 10 [Obsecro autem vos, fratres, per nomen Domini nostri Iesu Christi, ut idipsum dicatis omnes, et non sint in vobis schismata, sitis autem perfecti in eodem sensu et in eadem sententia.]
[41] Cfr. Io. 3, 17 [Non enim misit Deus Filium in mundum, ut iudicet mundum, sed ut salvetur mundus per ipsum.]
© Copyright 1968 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana
Honored Brothers and Dear Sons, Health and Apostolic Benediction.
[L] The transmission of human life is a 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.
[L] The fulfillment of this duty has always posed problems to the conscience of married people, but the recent course of human society and the concomitant changes have provoked new questions. The Church cannot ignore these questions, for they concern matters intimately connected with the life and happiness of human beings.
[L] The changes that have taken place are of considerable importance and varied in nature. In the first place there is the rapid increase in population which has made many fear that world population is going to grow faster than available resources, with the consequence that many families and developing countries would be faced with greater hardships. This can easily induce public authorities to be tempted to take even harsher measures to avert this danger. There is also the fact that not only working and housing conditions but the greater demands made both in the economic and educational field pose a living situation in which it is frequently difficult these days to provide properly for a large family.
[L] Also noteworthy is a new understanding of the dignity of woman and her place in society, of the value of conjugal love in marriage and the relationship of conjugal acts to this love.
[L] But the most remarkable development of all is to be seen in man's stupendous progress in the domination and rational organization of the forces of nature to the point that he is endeavoring to extend this control over every aspect of his own life -- over his body, over his mind and emotions, over his social life, and even over the laws that regulate the transmission of life.
[L] This new state of things gives rise to new questions. Granted the conditions of life today and taking into account the relevance of married love to the harmony and mutual fidelity of husband and wife, would it not be right to review the moral norms in force till now, especially when it is felt that these can be observed only with the gravest difficulty, sometimes only by heroic effort?
[L] Moreover, if one were to apply here the so-called principle of totality, could it not be accepted that the intention to have a less prolific but more rationally planned family might transform an action which renders natural processes infertile into a licit and provident control of birth? Could it not be admitted, in other words, that procreative finality applies to the totality of married life rather than to each single act? A further question is whether, because people are more conscious today of their responsibilities, the time has not come when the transmission of life should be regulated by their intelligence and will rather than through the specific rhythms of their own bodies.
[L] This kind of question requires from the teaching authority of the Church a new and deeper reflection on the principles of the moral teaching on marriage -- a teaching which is based on the natural law as illuminated and enriched by divine Revelation.
[L] No member of the faithful could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her magisterium to interpret the natural moral law. It is in fact indisputable, as Our predecessors have many times declared[1], that Jesus Christ, when He communicated His divine power to Peter and the other Apostles and sent them to teach all nations His commandments[2], constituted them as the authentic guardians and interpreters of the whole moral law, not only, that is, of the law of the Gospel but also of the natural law. For the natural law, too, declares the will of God, and its faithful observance is necessary for men's eternal salvation. [3]
[L] In carrying out this mandate, the Church has always issued appropriate documents on the nature of marriage, the correct use of conjugal rights, and the duties of spouses. These documents have been more copious in recent times. [4]
[L] The consciousness of the same responsibility induced Us to confirm and expand the commission set up by Our predecessor Pope John XXIII, of happy memory, in March, 1963. This commission included married couples as well as many experts in the various fields pertinent to these questions. Its task was to examine views and opinions concerning married life, and especially on the correct regulation of births; and it was also to provide the teaching authority of the Church with such evidence as would enable it to give an apt reply in this matter, which not only the faithful but also the rest of the world were waiting for. [5]
[L] When the evidence of the experts had been received, as well as the opinions and advice of a considerable number of Our brethren in the episcopate -- some of whom sent their views spontaneously, while others were requested by Us to do so -- We were in a position to weigh with more precision all the aspects of this complex subject. Hence We are deeply grateful to all those concerned.
[L] However, the conclusions arrived at by the commission could not be considered by Us as definitive and absolutely certain, dispensing Us from the duty of examining personally this serious question. This was all the more necessary because, within the commission itself, there was not complete agreement concerning the moral norms to be proposed, and especially because certain approaches and criteria for a solution to this question had emerged which were at variance with the moral doctrine on marriage constantly taught by the magisterium of the Church.
[L] Consequently, now that We have sifted carefully the evidence sent to Us and intently studied the whole matter, as well as prayed constantly to God, We, by virtue of the mandate entrusted to Us by Christ, intend to give Our reply to this series of grave questions.
[L] The question of human procreation, like every other question which touches human life, involves more than the limited aspects specific to such disciplines as biology, psychology, demography or sociology. It is the whole man and the whole mission to which he is called that must be considered: both its natural, earthly aspects and its supernatural, eternal aspects. And since in the attempt to justify artificial methods of birth control many appeal to the demands of married love or of responsible parenthood, these two important realities of married life must be accurately defined and analyzed. This is what We mean to do, with special reference to what the Second Vatican Council taught with the highest authority in its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today.
[L] Married love particularly reveals its true nature and nobility when we realize that it takes its origin from God, who "is love," [6] the Father "from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named." [7]
[L] Marriage, then, is far from being the effect of chance or the result of the blind evolution of natural forces. It is in reality the wise and provident institution of God the Creator, whose purpose was to effect in man His loving design. As a consequence, husband and wife, through that mutual gift of themselves, which is specific and exclusive to them alone, develop that union of two persons in which they perfect one another, cooperating with God in the generation and rearing of new lives.
[L] The marriage of those who have been baptized is, in addition, invested with the dignity of a sacramental sign of grace, for it represents the union of Christ and His Church.
[L] In the light of these facts the characteristic features and exigencies of married love are clearly indicated, and it is of the highest importance to evaluate them exactly.
[L] This love is above all fully human, a compound of sense and spirit. It is not, then, merely a question of natural instinct or emotional drive. It is also, and above all, an act of the free will, whose trust is such that it is meant not only to survive the joys and sorrows of daily life, but also to grow, so that husband and wife become in a way one heart and one soul, and together attain their human fulfillment.
[L] It is a love which is total -- that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner's own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.
[L] Married love is also faithful and exclusive of all other, and this until death. This is how husband and wife understood it on the day on which, fully aware of what they were doing, they freely vowed themselves to one another in marriage. Though this fidelity of husband and wife sometimes presents difficulties, no one has the right to assert that it is impossible; it is, on the contrary, always honorable and meritorious. The example of countless married couples proves not only that fidelity is in accord with the nature of marriage, but also that it is the source of profound and enduring happiness.
[L] Finally, this love is fecund. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being. "Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents' welfare." [8]
[L] Married love, therefore, requires of husband and wife the full awareness of their obligations in the matter of responsible parenthood, which today, rightly enough, is much insisted upon, but which at the same time should be rightly understood. Thus, we do well to consider responsible parenthood in the light of its varied legitimate and interrelated aspects.
[L] With regard to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means an awareness of, and respect for, their proper functions. In the procreative faculty the human mind discerns biological laws that apply to the human person. [9]
[L] With regard to man's innate drives and emotions, responsible parenthood means that man's reason and will must exert control over them.
[L] With regard to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised by those who prudently and generously decide to have more children, and by those who, for serious reasons and with due respect to moral precepts, decide not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time.
[L] Responsible parenthood, as we use the term here, has one further essential aspect of paramount importance. It concerns the objective moral order which was established by God, and of which a right conscience is the true interpreter. In a word, the exercise of responsible parenthood requires that husband and wife, keeping a right order of priorities, recognize their own duties toward God, themselves, their families and human society.
[L] From this it follows that they are not free to act as they choose in the service of transmitting life, as if it were wholly up to them to decide what is the right course to follow. On the contrary, they are bound to ensure that what they do corresponds to the will of God the Creator. The very nature of marriage and its use makes His will clear, while the constant teaching of the Church spells it out. [10]
[L] The sexual activity, in which husband and wife are intimately and chastely united with one another, through which human life is transmitted, is, as the recent Council recalled, "noble and worthy.'' [11] It does not, moreover, cease to be legitimate even when, for reasons independent of their will, it is foreseen to be infertile. For its natural adaptation to the expression and strengthening of the union of husband and wife is not thereby suppressed. The fact is, as experience shows, that new life is not the result of each and every act of sexual intercourse. God has wisely ordered laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced through the inherent operation of these laws. The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. [12]
[L] This particular doctrine, often expounded by the magisterium of the Church, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.
[L] The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life -- and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called. We believe that our contemporaries are particularly capable of seeing that this teaching is in harmony with human reason.
[L] Men rightly observe that a conjugal act imposed on one's partner without regard to his or her condition or personal and reasonable wishes in the matter, is no true act of love, and therefore offends the moral order in its particular application to the intimate relationship of husband and wife. If they further reflect, they must also recognize that an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life. Hence to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the plan of God and His holy will. But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source. "Human life is sacred -- all men must recognize that fact," Our predecessor Pope John XXIII recalled. "From its very inception it reveals the creating hand of God." [13]
[L] Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. [14]
[L] Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. [15]
[L] Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation -- whether as an end or as a means. [16]
[L] Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good," it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it [18] -- in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.
[L] On the other hand, the Church does not consider at all illicit the use of those therapeutic means necessary to cure bodily diseases, even if a foreseeable impediment to procreation should result there from -- provided such impediment is not directly intended for any motive whatsoever. [19]
[L] Now as We noted earlier (no. 3), some people today raise the objection against this particular doctrine of the Church concerning the moral laws governing marriage, that human intelligence has both the right and responsibility to control those forces of irrational nature which come within its ambit and to direct them toward ends beneficial to man. Others ask on the same point whether it is not reasonable in so many cases to use artificial birth control if by so doing the harmony and peace of a family are better served and more suitable conditions are provided for the education of children already born. To this question We must give a clear reply. The Church is the first to praise and commend the application of human intelligence to an activity in which a rational creature such as man is so closely associated with his Creator. But she affirms that this must be done within the limits of the order of reality established by God.
[L] If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained. [20]
[L] Neither the Church nor her doctrine is inconsistent when she considers it lawful for married people to take advantage of the infertile period but condemns as always unlawful the use of means which directly prevent conception, even when the reasons given for the later practice may appear to be upright and serious. In reality, these two cases are completely different. In the former the married couple rightly use a faculty provided them by nature. In the later they obstruct the natural development of the generative process. It cannot be denied that in each case the married couple, for acceptable reasons, are both perfectly clear in their intention to avoid children and wish to make sure that none will result. But it is equally true that it is exclusively in the former case that husband and wife are ready to abstain from intercourse during the fertile period as often as for reasonable motives the birth of another child is not desirable. And when the infertile period recurs, they use their married intimacy to express their mutual love and safeguard their fidelity toward one another. In doing this they certainly give proof of a true and authentic love.
[L] Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings -- and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation -- need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.
[L] Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.
[L] Consequently, unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions -- limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions, in the light of the principles We stated earlier, and in accordance with a correct understanding of the "principle of totality" enunciated by Our predecessor Pope Pius XII. [21]
[L] It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. There is too much clamorous outcry against the voice of the Church, and this is intensified by modern means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a "sign of contradiction." [22] She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.
[L] Since the Church did not make either of these laws, she cannot be their arbiter -- only their guardian and interpreter. It could never be right for her to declare lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its very nature, is always opposed to the true good of man.
[L] In preserving intact the whole moral law of marriage, the Church is convinced that she is contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization. She urges man not to betray his personal responsibilities by putting all his faith in technical expedients. In this way she defends the dignity of husband and wife. This course of action shows that the Church, loyal to the example and teaching of the divine Savior, is sincere and unselfish in her regard for men whom she strives to help even now during this earthly pilgrimage "to share God's life as sons of the living God, the Father of all men." [23]
[L] Our words would not be an adequate expression of the thought and solicitude of the Church, Mother and Teacher of all peoples, if, after having recalled men to the observance and respect of the divine law regarding matrimony, they did not also support mankind in the honest regulation of birth amid the difficult conditions which today afflict families and peoples. The Church, in fact, cannot act differently toward men than did the Redeemer. She knows their weaknesses, she has compassion on the multitude, she welcomes sinners. But at the same time she cannot do otherwise than teach the law. For it is in fact the law of human life restored to its native truth and guided by the Spirit of God. [24]
[L] The teaching of the Church regarding the proper regulation of birth is a promulgation of the law of God Himself. And yet there is no doubt that to many it will appear not merely difficult but even impossible to observe. Now it is true that like all good things which are outstanding for their nobility and for the benefits which they confer on men, so this law demands from individual men and women, from families and from human society, a resolute purpose and great endurance. Indeed it cannot be observed unless God comes to their help with the grace by which the goodwill of men is sustained and strengthened. But to those who consider this matter diligently it will indeed be evident that this endurance enhances man's dignity and confers benefits on human society.
[L] The right and lawful ordering of birth demands, first of all, that spouses fully recognize and value the true blessings of family life and that they acquire complete mastery over themselves and their emotions. For if with the aid of reason and of free will they are to control their natural drives, there can be no doubt at all of the need for self-denial. Only then will the expression of love, essential to married life, conform to right order. This is especially clear in the practice of periodic continence. Self-discipline of this kind is a shining witness to the chastity of husband and wife and, far from being a hindrance to their love of one another, transforms it by giving it a more truly human character. And if this self-discipline does demand that they persevere in their purpose and efforts, it has at the same time the salutary effect of enabling husband and wife to develop to their personalities and to be enriched with spiritual blessings. For it brings to family life abundant fruits of tranquility and peace. It helps in solving difficulties of other kinds. It fosters in husband and wife thoughtfulness and loving consideration for one another. It helps them to repel inordinate self-love, which is the opposite of charity. It arouses in them a consciousness of their responsibilities. And finally, it confers upon parents a deeper and more effective influence in the education of their children. As their children grow up, they develop a right sense of values and achieve a serene and harmonious use of their mental and physical powers.
[L] We take this opportunity to address those who are engaged in education and all those whose right and duty it is to provide for the common good of human society. We would call their attention to the need to create an atmosphere favorable to the growth of chastity so that true liberty may prevail over license and the norms of the moral law may be fully safeguarded.
[L] Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men's baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit. It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture [25] or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities.
[L] And now We wish to speak to rulers of nations. To you most of all is committed the responsibility of safeguarding the common good. You can contribute so much to the preservation of morals. We beg of you, never allow the morals of your peoples to be undermined. The family is the primary unit in the state; do not tolerate any legislation which would introduce into the family those practices which are opposed to the natural law of God. For there are other ways by which a government can and should solve the population problem -- that is to say by enacting laws which will assist families and by educating the people wisely so that the moral law and the freedom of the citizens are both safeguarded.
[L] We are fully aware of the difficulties confronting the public authorities in this matter, especially in the developing countries. In fact, We had in mind the justifiable anxieties which weigh upon them when We published Our encyclical letter Populorum Progressio. But now We join Our voice to that of Our predecessor John XXIII of venerable memory, and We make Our own his words:
No statement of the problem and no solution to it is acceptable which does violence to man's essential dignity; those who propose such solutions base them on an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and his life. The only possible solution to this question is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society, and which respects and promotes true human values. [26]No one can, without being grossly unfair, make divine Providence responsible for what clearly seems to be the result of misguided governmental policies, of an insufficient sense of social justice, of a selfish accumulation of material goods, and finally of a culpable failure to undertake those initiatives and responsibilities which would raise the standard of living of peoples and their children. [27] If only all governments which were able would do what some are already doing so nobly, and bestir themselves to renew their efforts and their undertakings! There must be no relaxation in the programs of mutual aid between all the branches of the great human family. Here We believe an almost limitless field lies open for the activities of the great international institutions.
[L] Our next appeal is to men of science. These can "considerably advance the welfare of marriage and the family and also peace of conscience, if by pooling their efforts they strive to elucidate more thoroughly the conditions favorable to a proper regulation of births." [28] It is supremely desirable, and this was also the mind of Pius XII, that medical science should by the study of natural rhythms succeed in determining a sufficiently secure basis for the chaste limitation of offspring. [29] In this way scientists, especially those who are Catholics, will by their research establish the truth of the Church's claim that "there can be no contradiction between two divine laws -- that which governs the transmitting of life and that which governs the fostering of married love." [30]
[L] And now We turn in a special way to Our own sons and daughters, to those most of all whom God calls to serve Him in the state of marriage. While the Church does indeed hand on to her children the inviolable conditions laid down by God's law, she is also the herald of salvation and through the sacraments she flings wide open the channels of grace through which man is made a new creature responding in charity and true freedom to the design of his Creator and Savior, experiencing too the sweetness of the yoke of Christ. [31]
[L] In humble obedience then to her voice, let Christian husbands and wives be mindful of their vocation to the Christian life, a vocation which, deriving from their Baptism, has been confirmed anew and made more explicit by the Sacrament of Matrimony. For by this sacrament they are strengthened and, one might almost say, consecrated to the faithful fulfillment of their duties. Thus will they realize to the full their calling and bear witness as becomes them, to Christ before the world. [32] For the Lord has entrusted to them the task of making visible to men and women the holiness and joy of the law which united inseparably their love for one another and the cooperation they give to God's love, God who is the Author of human life.
[L] We have no wish at all to pass over in silence the difficulties, at times very great, which beset the lives of Christian married couples. For them, as indeed for every one of us, "the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life." [33] Nevertheless it is precisely the hope of that life which, like a brightly burning torch, lights up their journey, as, strong in spirit, they strive to live "sober, upright and godly lives in this world," [34] knowing for sure that "the form of this world is passing away." [35]
[L] For this reason husbands and wives should take up the burden appointed to them, willingly, in the strength of faith and of that hope which "does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. [36] Then let them implore the help of God with unremitting prayer and, most of all, let them draw grace and charity from that unfailing fount which is the Eucharist. If, however, sin still exercises its hold over them, they are not to lose heart. Rather must they, humble and persevering, have recourse to the mercy of God, abundantly bestowed in the Sacrament of Penance. In this way, for sure, they will be able to reach that perfection of married life which the Apostle sets out in these words:
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church. . . Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church. . . This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church; however, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.[37]
[L] Among the fruits that ripen if the law of God be resolutely obeyed, the most precious is certainly this, that married couples themselves will often desire to communicate their own experience to others. Thus it comes about that in the fullness of the lay vocation will be included a novel and outstanding form of the apostolate by which, like ministering to like, married couples themselves by the leadership they offer will become apostles to other married couples. And surely among all the forms of the Christian apostolate it is hard to think of one more opportune for the present time. [38]
[L] Likewise we hold in the highest esteem those doctors and members of the nursing profession who, in the exercise of their calling, endeavor to fulfill the demands of their Christian vocation before any merely human interest. Let them therefore continue constant in their resolution always to support those lines of action which accord with faith and with right reason. And let them strive to win agreement and support for these policies among their professional colleagues. Moreover, they should regard it as an essential part of their skill to make themselves fully proficient in this difficult field of medical knowledge. For then, when married couples ask for their advice, they may be in a position to give them right counsel and to point them in the proper direction. Married couples have a right to expect this much from them.
[L] And now, beloved sons, you who are priests, you who in virtue of your sacred office act as counselors and spiritual leaders both of individual men and women and of families -- We turn to you filled with great confidence. For it is your principal duty -- We are speaking especially to you who teach moral theology -- to spell out clearly and completely the Church's teaching on marriage. In the performance of your ministry you must be the first to give an example of that sincere obedience, inward as well as outward, which is due to the magisterium of the Church. For, as you know, the pastors of the Church enjoy a special light of the Holy Spirit in teaching the truth. [39] And this, rather than the arguments they put forward, is why you are bound to such obedience. Nor will it escape you that if men's peace of soul and the unity of the Christian people are to be preserved, then it is of the utmost importance that in moral as well as in dogmatic theology all should obey the magisterium of the Church and should speak as with one voice. Therefore We make Our own the anxious words of the great Apostle Paul and with all Our heart We renew Our appeal to you:
I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.[40]
[L] Now it is an outstanding manifestation of charity toward souls to omit nothing from the saving doctrine of Christ; but this must always be joined with tolerance and charity, as Christ Himself showed in His conversations and dealings with men. For when He came, not to judge, but to save the world[41], was He not bitterly severe toward sin, but patient and abounding in mercy toward sinners?
[L] Husbands and wives, therefore, when deeply distressed by reason of the difficulties of their life, must find stamped in the heart and voice of their priest the likeness of the voice and the love of our Redeemer.
[L] So speak with full confidence, beloved sons, convinced that while the Holy Spirit of God is present to the magisterium proclaiming sound doctrine, He also illumines from within the hearts of the faithful and invites their assent. Teach married couples the necessary way of prayer and prepare them to approach more often with great faith the Sacraments of the Eucharist and of Penance. Let them never lose heart because of their weakness.
[L] And now as We come to the end of this encyclical letter, We turn Our mind to you, reverently and lovingly, beloved and venerable brothers in the episcopate, with whom We share more closely the care of the spiritual good of the People of God. For We invite all of you, We implore you, to give a lead to your priests who assist you in the sacred ministry, and to the faithful of your dioceses, and to devote yourselves with all zeal and without delay to safeguarding the holiness of marriage, in order to guide married life to its full human and Christian perfection. Consider this mission as one of your most urgent responsibilities at the present time. As you well know, it calls for concerted pastoral action in every field of human diligence, economic, cultural and social. If simultaneous progress is made in these various fields, then the intimate life of parents and children in the family will be rendered not only more tolerable, but easier and more joyful. And life together in human society will be enriched with fraternal charity and made more stable with true peace when God's design which He conceived for the world is faithfully followed.
[L] Venerable brothers, beloved sons, all men of good will, great indeed is the work of education, of progress and of charity to which We now summon all of you. And this We do relying on the unshakable teaching of the Church, which teaching Peter's successor together with his brothers in the Catholic episcopate faithfully guards and interprets. And We are convinced that this truly great work will bring blessings both on the world and on the Church. For man cannot attain that true happiness for which he yearns with all the strength of his spirit, unless he keeps the laws which the Most High God has engraved in his very nature. These laws must be wisely and lovingly observed. On this great work, on all of you and especially on married couples, We implore from the God of all holiness and pity an abundance of heavenly grace as a pledge of which We gladly bestow Our apostolic blessing.
Given at St. Peter's, Rome, on the 25th day of July, the feast of St. James the Apostle, in the year 1968, the sixth of Our pontificate.
PAUL VI
LATIN TEXT: Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 60 (1968), 481-503.
ENGLISH TRANSLATION: The Pope Speaks, 13 (Fall. 1969), 329-46.
[1] See Pius IX, encyc. letter Qui pluribus: Pii IX P.M. Acta, 1, pp. 9-10; St. Pius X encyc. letter Singulari quadam: AAS 4 (1912), 658; Pius XI, encyc. letter Casti connubii: AAS 22 (1930), 579-581; Pius XII, address Magnificate Dominum to the episcopate of the Catholic World: AAS 46 (1954), 671-672; John XXIII, encyc. letter Mater et Magistra: AAS 53 (1961), 457.
[2] See Mt 28. 18-20 [Then Jesus approached and said to them, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."]
[3] See Mt 7. 21 [Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.]
[4] See Council of Trent Roman Catechism, Part II, ch. 8; Leo XIII, encyc. letter Arcanum: Acta Leonis XIII, 2 (1880), 26-29; Pius XI, encyc. letter Divini illius Magistri: AAS 22 (1930), 58-61; encyc. letter Casti connubii: AAS 22 (1930), 545-546; Pius XII, Address to Italian Medico-Biological Union of St. Luke: Discorsi e radiomessaggi di Pio XII, VI, 191-192; to Italian Association of Catholic Midwives: AAS 43 (1951), 835-854; to the association known as the Family Campaign, and other family associations: AAS 43 (1951), 857-859; to 7th congress of International Society of Hematology: AAS 50 (1958), 734-735 [TPS VI, 394-395]; John XXIII, encyc. letter Mater et Magistra: AAS 53 (1961), 446-447 [TPS VII, 330-331]; Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, nos. 47-52: AAS 58 (1966), 1067-1074 [TPS XI, 289-295]; Code of Canon Law, canons 1067, 1068 §1, canon 1076, §§1-2.
[5] See Paul VI, Address to Sacred College of Cardinals: AAS 56 (1964), 588 [TPS IX, 355-356]; to Commission for the Study of Problems of Population, Family and Birth: AAS 57 (1965), 388 [TPS X, 225]; to National Congress of the Italian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology: AAS 58 (1966), 1168 [TPS XI, 401-403].
[6] See 1 Jn 4. 8 [Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.]
[7] Eph 3. 15 [For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named]
[8] Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, no. 50: AAS 58 (1966), 1070-1072 [TPS XI, 292-293].
[9] See St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 94, art. 2.
[10] See Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, nos . 50- 5 1: AAS 58 ( 1 966) 1070-1073 [TPS XI, 292-293].
[11] See ibid., no. 49: AAS 58 (1966), 1070 [TPS XI, 291-292].
[12] See Pius XI. encyc. letter Casti connubii: AAS 22 (1930), 560; Pius XII, Address to Midwives: AAS 43 (1951), 843.
[13] See encyc. letter Mater et Magistra: AAS 53 (1961), 447 [TPS VII, 331].
[14] See Council of Trent Roman Catechism, Part II, ch. 8; Pius XI, encyc. letter Casti connubii: AAS 22 (1930), 562-564; Pius XII, Address to Medico-Biological Union of St. Luke: Discorsi e radiomessaggi, VI, 191-192; Address to Midwives: AAS 43 (1951), 842-843; Address to Family Campaign and other family associations: AAS 43 (1951), 857-859; John XXIII, encyc. letter Pacem in terris: AAS 55 (1963), 259-260 [TPS IX, 15-16]; Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, no. 51: AAS 58 (1966), 1072 [TPS XI, 293].
[15] See Pius XI, encyc. letter Casti connubii: AAS 22 (1930), 565; Decree of the Holy Office, Feb. 22, 1940: AAS 32 (1940), 73; Pius XII, Address to Midwives: AAS 43 (1951), 843-844; to the Society of Hematology: AAS 50 (1958), 734-735 [TPS VI, 394-395].
[16] See Council of Trent Roman Catechism, Part II, ch. 8; Pius XI, encyc. letter Casti connubii: AAS 22 (1930), 559-561; Pius XII, Address to Midwives: AAS 43 (1951), 843; to the Society of Hematology: AAS 50 (1958), 734-735 [TPS VI, 394-395]; John XXIII, encyc. letter Mater et Magistra: AAS 53 (1961), 447 [TPS VII, 331].
[17] See Pius XII, Address to National Congress of Italian Society of the Union of Catholic Jurists: AAS 45 (1953), 798-799 [TPS I, 67-69].
[18] See Rom 3. 8 [And why not say -- as we are accused and as some claim we say -- that we should do evil that good may come of it? Their penalty is what they deserve.]
[19] See Pius XII, Address to 26th Congress of Italian Association of Urology: AAS 45 (1953), 674-675; to Society of Hematology: AAS 50 (1958), 734-735 [TPS VI, 394-395].
[20] See Pius XII, Address to Midwives: AAS 43 (1951), 846.
[21] See Pius XII, Address to Association of Urology: AAS 45 (1953), 674-675; to leaders and members of Italian Association of Cornea Donors and Italian Association for the Blind: AAS 48 (1956), 461-462 [TPS III, 200-201].
[22] Lk 2. 34-35 [[A]nd Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, "Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted (and you yourself a sword will pierce) so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed."]
[23] See Paul Vl, encyc. letter Populorum progressio: AAS 59 (1967), 268 [TPS XII, 151].
[24] See Rom 8 [Hence, now there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed you from the law of sin and death. ... and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. ... But you are not in the flesh; on the contrary, you are in the spirit, ... For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, "Abba, Father!" ... The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, ... We know that all things work for good for those who love God, ... What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? ... For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, 9 nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.]
[25] See Second Vatican Council, Decree on the Media of Social Communication, nos. 6-7: AAS 56 (1964), 147 [TPS IX, 340-341].
[26] Encyc. letter Mater et Magistra: AAS 53 (1961), 447 [TPS VII, 331].
[27] See encyc. letter Populorum progressio, nos. 48-55: AAS 59 (1967), 281-284 [TPS XII, 160-162].
[28] Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, no. 52: AAS 58 (1966), 1074 [TPS XI, 294].
[29] Address to Family Campaign and other family associations: AAS 43 (1951), 859.
[30] Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, no. 51: AAS 58 (1966), 1072 [TPS XI, 293].
[31] See Mt 11. 30 [For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.]
[32] See Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, no. 48: AAS 58 (1966), 1067-1069 [TPS XI,290-291]; Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, no. 35: AAS 57 (1965), 40-41 [TPS X, 382-383].
[33] Mt 7. 14 [How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few.]; see Heb 12. 11 [At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.]
[34] See Ti 2. 12 [For the grace of God has appeared, saving all and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age]
[35] See 1 Cor 7. 29-31 [I tell you, brothers, the time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having them, those weeping as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing, those buying as not owning, those using the world as not using it fully. For the world in its present form is passing away.]
[36] Rom 5. 5 [[A]nd hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us.]
[37] Eph 5. 25, 28-29, 32-33 [Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her ... So (also) husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, ... This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church. In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.]
[38] See Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, nos. 35, 41: AAS 57 (1965), 40-45 [TPS X, 382-383, 386-387; Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, nos. 48-49: AAS 58 (1966),1067-1070 [TPS XI, 290-292]; Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, no. 11: AAS 58 (1966), 847-849 [TPS XI, 128-129].
[39] See Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, no. 25: AAS 57 (1965), 29-31 [TPS X, 375-376].
[40] 1 Cor 1. 10 [ urge you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree in what you say, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and in the same purpose.]
[41] See Jn 3. 17 [For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.]
That Humanae Vitae and related Catholic teachings about sexual morality are laughingstocks in all the best places is not exactly news. Even in the benighted precincts of believers, where information from the outside world is known to travel exceedingly slowly, everybody grasps that this is one doctrine the world loves to hate. During Benedict XVI’s April visit to the United States, hardly a story in the secular press failed to mention the teachings of Humanae Vitae, usually alongside adjectives like “divisive” and “controversial” and “outdated.” In fact, if there’s anything on earth that unites the Church’s adversaries -- all of them except for the Muslims, anyway -- the teaching against contraception is probably it.
To many people, both today and when the encyclical was promulgated on July 25, 1968, the notion simply defies understanding. Consenting adults, told not to use birth control? Preposterous. Third World parents deprived access to contraception and abortion? Positively criminal. A ban on condoms when there’s a risk of contracting AIDS? Beneath contempt.
“The execration of the world,” in philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe’s phrase, was what Paul VI incurred with that document -- to which the years since 1968 have added plenty of just plain ridicule. Hasn’t everyone heard Monty Python’s send-up song “Every Sperm Is Sacred”? Or heard the jokes? “You no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules.” And “What do you call the rhythm method? Vatican roulette.” And “What do you call a woman who uses the rhythm method? Mommy.”
As everyone also knows, it’s not only the Church’s self-declared adversaries who go in for this sort of sport. So, too, do many American and European Catholics -- specifically, the ones often called dissenting or cafeteria Catholics, and who more accurately might be dubbed the “Catholic Otherwise Faithful.” I may be Catholic, but I’m not a maniac about it, runs their unofficial subtext -- meaning: I’m happy to take credit for enlightened Catholic positions on the death penalty/social justice/civil rights, but of course I don’t believe in those archaic teachings about divorce/homosexuality/and above all birth control.
Thus FOX News host Sean Hannity, for example, describes himself to viewers as a “good” and “devout” Catholic -- one who happens to believe, as he has also said on the air, that “contraception is good.” He was challenged on his show in 2007 by Father Tom Euteneuer of Human Life International, who observed that such a position emanating from a public figure technically fulfilled the requirements for something called heresy. And Hannity reacted as many others have when stopped in the cafeteria line. He objected that the issue of contraception was “superfluous” compared to others; he asked what right the priest had to tell him what to do (“judge not lest you be judged,” Hannity instructed); and he expressed shock at the thought that anyone might deprive him of taking Communion just because he was deciding for himself what it means to be Catholic.
And so we have a microcosm of the current fate of Humanae Vitae and all it represents in the American Church -- and, for that matter, in what is left of the advanced Western one, too. With each passing year, it seems safe to assume, fewer priests can be found to explain the teaching, fewer parishioners to obey it, and fewer educated people to avoid rolling their eyes at the idea that anyone in 2008 could possibly be so antiquarian as to hold any opinion about contraceptive sex -- any, that is, other than its full-throttle celebration as the chief liberation of our time.
And in just that apparent consensus about the ridiculousness of it all, amid all those ashes scattered over a Christian teaching stretching back two millennia, arises a fascinating and in fact exceedingly amusing modern morality tale -- amusing, at least, to those who take their humor dark.
“He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh,” the Psalmist promises, specifically in a passage about enjoying vindication over one’s adversaries. If that is so, then the racket on this fortieth anniversary must be prodigious. Four decades later, not only have the document’s signature predictions been ratified in empirical force, but they have been ratified as few predictions ever are: in ways its authors could not possibly have foreseen, including by information that did not exist when the document was written, by scholars and others with no interest whatever in its teaching, and indeed even inadvertently, and in more ways than one, by many proud public adversaries of the Church.
Forty years later, there are more than enough ironies, both secular and religious, to make one swear there’s a humorist in heaven.
Let’s begin by meditating upon what might be called the first of the secular ironies now evident: Humanae Vitae’s specific predictions about what the world would look like if artificial contraception became widespread. The encyclical warned of four resulting trends: a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.
In the years since Humanae Vitae’s appearance, numerous distinguished Catholic thinkers have argued, using a variety of evidence, that each of these predictions has been borne out by the social facts. One thinks, for example, of Monsignor George A. Kelly in his 1978 “Bitter Pill the Catholic Community Swallowed” and of the many contributions of Janet E. Smith, including Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later and the edited volume Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader.
And therein lies an irony within an irony. Although it is largely Catholic thinkers who have connected the latest empirical evidence to the defense of Humanae Vitae’s predictions, during those same forty years most of the experts actually producing the empirical evidence have been social scientists operating in the secular realm. As sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox emphasized in a 2005 essay: “The leading scholars who have tackled these topics are not Christians, and most of them are not political or social conservatives. They are, rather, honest social scientists willing to follow the data wherever it may lead.”
Consider, as Wilcox does, the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof. In a well-known 1996 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Akerlof explained in the language of modern economics why the sexual revolution -- contrary to common prediction, especially prediction by those in and out of the Church who wanted the teaching on birth control changed -- had led to an increase in both illegitimacy and abortion. In another work published in the Economic Journal ten years ago, he traced the empirical connections between the decrease in marriage and married fatherhood for men -- both clear consequences of the contraceptive revolution -- and the simultaneous increase in behaviors to which single men appear more prone: substance abuse, incarceration, and arrests, to name just three.
Along the way, Akerlof found a strong connection between the diminishment of marriage on the one hand and the rise in poverty and social pathology on the other. He explained his findings in nontechnical terms in Slate magazine: “Although doubt will always remain about what causes a change in social custom, the technology-shock theory does fit the facts. The new reproductive technology was adopted quickly, and on a massive scale. Marital and fertility patterns changed with similar drama, at about the same time.”
To these examples of secular social science confirming what Catholic thinkers had predicted, one might add many more demonstrating the negative effects on children and society. The groundbreaking work that Daniel Patrick Moynihan did in 1965, on the black family, is an example -- along with the critical research of psychologist Judith Wallerstein over several decades on the impact of divorce on children; Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s well-known work on the outcomes of single parenthood for children; Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur’s seminal book, Growing Up with a Single Parent; and David Blankenhorn’s Fatherless America, another lengthy summarization of the bad empirical news about family breakup.
Numerous other books followed this path of analyzing the benefits of marriage, including James Q. Wilson’s The Marriage Problem, Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s The Case for Marriage, Kay Hymowitz’s Marriage and Caste in America, and Elizabeth Marquardt’s recent Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. To this list could be added many more examples of how the data have grown and grown to support the proposition that the sexual revolution has been resulting in disaster for large swaths of the country -- a proposition further honed by whole decades of examination of the relation between public welfare and family dysfunction (particularly in the pages of the decidedly not-Catholic Public Interest magazine). Still other seminal works have observed that private actions, notably post-revolution sexual habits, were having massive public consequences; Charles Murray’s Losing Ground and Francis Fukuyama’s The Great Disruption come especially to mind.
All this is to say that, beginning just before the appearance of Humanae Vitae, an academic and intellectual rethinking began that can no longer be ignored -- one whose accumulation of empirical evidence points to the deleterious effects of the sexual revolution on many adults and children. And even in the occasional effort to draw a happy face on current trends, there is no glossing over what are still historically high rates of family breakup and unwed motherhood. For example, in “Crime, Drugs, Welfare -- and Other Good News,” a recent and somewhat contrarian article in Commentary, Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin applauded the fact that various measures of social disaster and dysfunction seem to be improving from previous lows, including, among others, violent crime and property crime, and teen alcohol and tobacco use. Even they had to note that “some of the most vital social indicators of all -- those regarding the condition and strength of the American family -- have so far refused to turn upward.”
In sum, although a few apologists such as Stephanie Coontz still insist otherwise, just about everyone else in possession of the evidence acknowledges that the sexual revolution has weakened family ties, and that family ties (the presence of a biologically related mother and father in the home) have turned out to be important indicators of child well-being -- and more, that the broken home is not just a problem for individuals but also for society. Some scholars, moreover, further link these problems to the contraceptive revolution itself.
Consider the work of maverick sociobiologist Lionel Tiger. Hardly a cat’s-paw of the pope -- he describes religion as “a toxic issue” -- Tiger has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of the sexual revolution to today’s unique problems. The Decline of Males, his 1999 book, was particularly controversial among feminists for its argument that female contraceptives had altered the balance between the sexes in disturbing new ways (especially by taking from men any say in whether they could have children).
Equally eyebrow-raising is his linking of contraception to the breakdown of families, female impoverishment, trouble in the relationship between the sexes, and single motherhood. Tiger has further argued -- as Humanae Vitae did not explicitly, though other works of Catholic theology have -- for a causal link between contraception and abortion, stating outright that “with effective contraception controlled by women, there are still more abortions than ever. . . . Contraception causes abortion.”
Who could deny that the predictions of Humanae Vitae and, by extension, of Catholic moral theology have been ratified with data and arguments that did not even exist in 1968? But now comes the question that just keeps on giving. Has this dramatic reappraisal of the empirically known universe led to any secular reappraisals, however grudging, that Paul VI may have gotten something right after all? The answer is manifestly that it has not. And this is only the beginning of the dissonance that surrounds us in 2008.
Just as empirical evidence has proved that the sexual revolution has had disastrous effects on children and families, so the past forty years have destroyed the mantle called “science” that Humanae Vitae’s detractors once wrapped round themselves. In particular, the doomsday population science so popular and influential during the era in which Humanae Vitae appeared has been repeatedly demolished.
Born from Thomas Robert Malthus’ famous late-eighteenth-century Essay on Population, this was the novel view that humanity itself amounted to a kind of scourge or pollution whose pressure on fellow members would lead to catastrophe. Though rooted in other times and places, Malthusianism of one particular variety was fully in bloom in America by the early 1960s. In fact, Humanae Vitae appeared two months before the most successful popularization of Malthusian thinking yet, Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb -- which opened with the words: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
If, as George Weigel has suggested, 1968 was absolutely the worst moment for Humanae Vitae to appear, it could not have been a better one for Ehrlich to advance his apocalyptic thesis. An entomologist who specialized in butterflies, Ehrlich found an American public, including a generation of Catholics, extraordinarily receptive to his direst thoughts about humanity.
This was the wave that The Population Bomb caught on its way to becoming one of the bestsellers of recent times. Of course, many people with no metaphysics whatsoever were drawn to Ehrlich’s doom-mongering. But for restless Catholics, in particular, the overpopulation scare was attractive -- for if overpopulation were the problem, the solution was obvious: Tell the Church to lift the ban on birth control.
It is less than coincidental that the high-mindedness of saving the planet dovetailed perfectly with a more self-interested outcome, the freer pursuit of sexuality via the Pill. Dissenting Catholics had special reasons to stress the “science of overpopulation,” and so they did. In the name of a higher morality, their argument went, birth control could be defended as the lesser of two evils (a position argued by the dissenter Charles Curran, among others).
Less than half a century later, these preoccupations with overwhelming birth rates appear as pseudo-scientific as phrenology. Actually, that may be unfair to phrenology. For the overpopulation literature has not only been abandoned by thinkers for more improved science; it has actually been so thoroughly proved false that today’s cutting-edge theory worries about precisely the opposite: a “dearth birth” that is “graying” the advanced world.
In fact, so discredited has the overpopulation science become that this year Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly could publish Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population and garner a starred review in Publishers Weekly -- all in service of what is probably the single best demolition of the population arguments that some hoped would undermine church teaching. This is all the more satisfying a ratification because Connelly is so conscientious in establishing his own personal antagonism toward the Catholic Church (at one point asserting without even a footnote that natural family planning “still fails most couples who try it”).
Fatal Misconception is decisive proof that the spectacle of overpopulation, which was used to browbeat the Vatican in the name of science, was a grotesque error all along. First, Connelly argues, the population-control movement was wrong as a matter of fact: “The two strongest claims population controllers make for their long-term historical contribution” are “that they raised Asia out of poverty and helped keep our planet habitable.” Both of these, he demonstrates, are false.
Even more devastating is Connelly’s demolition of the claim to moral high ground that the overpopulation alarmists made. For population science was not only failing to help people, Connelly argues, but also actively harming some of them -- and in a way that summoned some of the baser episodes of recent historical memory:
The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people’s interests better than they knew it themselves. . . . The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the “unfit,” or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them. It appealed to people with power because, with the spread of emancipatory movements, it began to appear easier and more profitable to control populations than to control territory. That is why opponents were essentially correct in viewing it as another chapter in the unfinished business of imperialism.
The forty years since Humanae Vitae appeared have also vindicated the encyclical’s fear that governments would use the new contraceptive technology coercively. The outstanding example, of course, is the Chinese government’s long-running “one-child policy,” replete with forced abortions, public trackings of menstrual cycles, family flight, increased female infanticide, sterilization, and other assaults too numerous even to begin cataloguing here -- in fact, so numerous that they are now widely, if often grudgingly, acknowledged as wrongs even by international human-rights bureaucracies. Lesser-known examples include the Indian government’s foray into coercive use of contraception in the “emergency” of 1976 and 1977, and the Indonesian government’s practice in the 1970s and 1980s of the bullying implantation of IUDs and Norplant.
Should governments come to “regard this as necessary,” Humanae Vitae warned, “they may even impose their use on everyone.” As with the unintended affirmation by social science, will anyone within the ranks of the population revisionists now give credit where credit is due?
Perhaps the most mocked of Humanae Vitae’s predictions was its claim that separating sex from procreation would deform relations between the sexes and “open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards.” Today, when advertisements for sex scream from every billboard and webpage, and every teen idol is sooner or later revealed topless or worse online, some might wonder what further proof could possibly be offered.
But to leave matters there would be to miss something important. The critical point is, one might say, not so much the proof as the pudding it’s in. And it would be hard to get more ironic than having these particular predictions of Humanae Vitae vindicated by perhaps the most unlikely -- to say nothing of unwilling -- witness of all: modern feminism.
Yet that is exactly what has happened since 1968. From Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem to Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer on up through Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf, feminist literature has been a remarkably consistent and uninterrupted cacophony of grievance, recrimination, and sexual discontent. In that forty-year record, we find, as nowhere else, personal testimony of what the sexual revolution has done to womankind.
Consider just what we have been told by the endless books on the topic over the years. If feminists married and had children, they lamented it. If they failed to marry or have children, they lamented that, too. If they worked outside the home and also tended their children, they complained about how hard that was. If they worked outside the home and didn’t tend their children, they excoriated anyone who thought they should. And running through all this literature is a more or less constant invective about the unreliability and disrespect of men.
The signature metaphors of feminism say everything we need to know about how happy liberation has been making these women: the suburban home as concentration camp, men as rapists, children as intolerable burdens, fetuses as parasites, and so on. These are the sounds of liberation? Even the vaunted right to abortion, both claimed and exercised at extraordinary rates, did not seem to mitigate the misery of millions of these women after the sexual revolution.
Coming full circle, feminist and Vanity Fair contributor Leslie Bennetts recently published a book urging women to protect themselves financially and otherwise from dependence on men, including from men deserting them later in life. Mothers cannot afford to stay home with their children, she argues, because they cannot trust their men not to leave them. (One of her subjects calls desertion and divorce “the slaughter of the lambs.”) Like-minded feminist Linda Hirschman penned a ferocious and widely read manifesto in 2005 urging, among other bitter “solutions,” that women protect themselves by adopting -- in effect -- a voluntary one-child policy. (She argued that a second child often necessitates a move to the suburbs, which puts the office and work-friendly conveniences further away).
Beneath all the pathos, the subtext remains the same: Woman’s chief adversary is Unreliable Man, who does not understand her sexual and romantic needs and who walks off time and again at the first sashay of a younger thing. What are all these but the generic cries of a woman who thinks that men are “disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium” and “no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection”?
Perhaps the most compelling case made for traditional marriage lately was not on the cover of, say, Catholic World Report but in the devoutly secular Atlantic. The 2008 article “Marry Him!” by Lori Gottlieb -- a single mother who conceived her only child with donor sperm rather than miss out on motherhood as she has on marriage -- is a frank and excruciatingly personal look into some of the sexual revolution’s lonelier venues, including the creation of children by anonymous or absent sperm donors, the utter corrosiveness of taking a consumerist approach to romance, and the miserable effects of advancing age on one’s sexual marketability.
Gottlieb writes as one who played by all the feminist rules, only to realize too late that she’d been had. Beneath the zippy language, the article runs on an engine of mourning. Admitting how much she covets the husbands of her friends, if only for the wistful relief of having someone else help with the childcare, Gottlieb advises: “Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option.”
To these and other examples of how feminist-minded writers have become inadvertent witnesses for the prosecution of the sexual revolution, we might add recent public reflection on the Pill’s bastard child, ubiquitous pornography.
“The onslaught of porn,” one social observer wrote, “is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as ‘porn-worthy.’” Further, “sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity. . . . If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.” And perhaps most shocking of all, this -- which with just a little tweaking could easily have appeared in Humanae Vitae itself: “The power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time.”
This was not some religious antiquarian. It was Naomi Wolf -- Third Wave feminist and author of such works as The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities, which are apparently dedicated to proving that women can tomcat, too. Yet she is now just one of many out there giving testimony, unconscious though it may be, to some of the funny things that happened after the Pill freed everybody from sexual slavery once and for all.
That there is no auxiliary literature of grievance for men -- who, for the most part, just don’t seem to feel they have as much to grieve about in this new world order -- is something else that Humanae Vitae and a few other retrograde types saw coming in the wake of the revolution. As the saying goes, and as many people did not stop to ask at the time, cui bono? Forty years later, the evidence is in. As Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver observed on Humanae Vitae’s thirtieth anniversary in 1998, “Contraception has released males -- to a historically unprecedented degree -- from responsibility for their sexual aggression.” Will any feminist who by 2008 disagrees with that statement please stand up?
The adversaries of Humanae Vitae also could not have foreseen one important historical development that in retrospect would appear to undermine their demands that the Catholic Church change with the times: the widespread Protestant collapse, particularly the continuing implosion of the Episcopal Church and the other branches of Anglicanism. It is about as clear as any historical chain can get that this implosion is a direct consequence of the famous Lambeth Conference in 1930, at which the Anglicans abandoned the longstanding Christian position on contraception. If a church cannot tell its flock “what to do with my body,” as the saying goes, with regard to contraception, then other uses of that body will quickly prove to be similarly off-limits to ecclesiastical authority.
It makes perfect if unfortunate sense, then, that the Anglicans are today imploding over the issue of homosexuality. To quote Anscombe again:
If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here -- not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can’t be the mere pattern of bodily behavior in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. I am not saying: if you think contraception all right you will do these other things; not at all. The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard. But I am saying: you will have no solid reason against these things. You will have no answer to someone who proclaims as many do that they are good too. You cannot point to the known fact that Christianity drew people out of the pagan world, always saying no to these things. Because, if you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition.
By giving benediction in 1930 to its married heterosexual members purposely seeking sterile sex, the Anglican Church lost, bit by bit, any authority to tell her other members -- married or unmarried, homosexual or heterosexual -- not to do the same. To put the point another way, once heterosexuals start claiming the right to act as homosexuals, it would not be long before homosexuals start claiming the rights of heterosexuals.
Thus in a bizarre but real sense did Lambeth’s attempt to show compassion to married heterosexuals inadvertently give rise to the modern gay-rights movement -- and consequently, to the issues that have divided their church ever since. It is hard to believe that anyone seeking a similar change in Catholic teaching on the subject would want the Catholic Church to follow suit into the moral and theological confusion at the center of today’s Anglican Church -- yet such is the purposeful ignorance of so many who oppose Rome on birth control that they refuse to connect these cautionary historical dots.
The years since Humanae Vitae have seen something else that neither traditionalist nor dissenting Catholics could have seen coming, one other development shedding retrospective credit on the Church: a serious reappraisal of Christian sexuality from Protestants outside the liberal orbit.
Thus, for instance, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, observed in First Things in 1998 that “in an ironic turn, American evangelicals are rethinking birth control even as a majority of the nation’s Roman Catholics indicate a rejection of their Church’s teaching.” Later, when interviewed in a 2006 article in the New York Times Sunday magazine about current religious thinking on artificial contraception, Mohler elaborated: “I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the Pill. . . . The entire horizon of the sexual act changes. I think there can be no question that the Pill gave incredible license to everything from adultery and affairs to premarital sex and within marriage to a separation of the sex act and procreation.”
Mohler also observed that this legacy of damage was affecting the younger generation of evangelicals. “I detect a huge shift. Students on our campus are intensely concerned. Not a week goes by that I do not get contacted by pastors about the issue. There are active debates going on. It’s one of the things that may serve to divide evangelicalism.” Part of that division includes Quiverfull, the anti-contraception Protestant movement now thought to number in the tens of thousands that further prohibits (as the Catholic Church does not) natural family planning or any other conscious interference with conception. Such second thoughts among evangelicals are the premise of a 2002 book titled Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Re-Thinks Contraception.
As a corollary to this rethinking by Protestants, experience seems to have taught a similar lesson to at least some young Catholics -- the generation to grow up under divorce, widespread contraception, fatherless households, and all the other emancipatory fallout. As Naomi Schaefer Riley noted in the Wall Street Journal about events this year at Notre Dame: “About thirty students walked out of The Vagina Monologues in protest after the first scene. And people familiar with the university are not surprised that it was the kids, not the grownups, who registered the strongest objections. The students are probably the most religious part of the Notre Dame. . . . . Younger Catholics tend to be among the more conservative ones.” It is hard to imagine that something like the traditionalist Anscombe Society at Princeton University, started in 2004, could have been founded in 1968.
One thing making traditionalists of these young Americans, at least according to some of them, is the fact of their having grown up in a world characterized by abortion on demand. And that brings us to yet another irony worth contemplating on this fortieth anniversary: what widespread rejection of Humanae Vitae has done to the character of American Catholicism.
As with the other ironies, it helps here to have a soft spot for absurdity. In their simultaneous desire to jettison the distasteful parts of Catholicism and keep the more palatable ones, American Catholics have done something novel and truly amusing: They have created a specific catalogue of complaints that resembles nothing so much as a Catholic version of the orphan with chutzpah.
Thus many Catholics complain about the dearth of priests, all the while ignoring their own responsibility for that outcome -- the fact that few have children in numbers large enough to send one son to the priesthood while the others marry and carry on the family name. They mourn the closing of Catholic churches and schools -- never mind that whole parishes, claiming the rights of individual conscience, have contracepted themselves out of existence. They point to the priest sex scandals as proof positive that chastity is too much to ask of people -- completely ignoring that it was the randy absence of chastity that created the scandals in the first place.
In fact, the disgrace of contemporary American Catholicism -- the many recent scandals involving priests and underage boys -- is traceable to the collusion between a large Catholic laity that wanted a different birth-control doctrine, on the one hand, and a new generation of priests cutting themselves a different kind of slack, on the other. “I won’t tattle on my gay priest if you’ll give me absolution for contraception” seems to have been the unspoken deal in many parishes since Humanae Vitae.
A more obedient laity might have wondered aloud about the fact that a significant number of priests post-Vatican II seemed more or less openly gay. A more obedient clergy might have noticed that plenty of Catholics using artificial contraception were also taking Communion. It is hard to believe that either new development -- the widespread open rebellion against church sexual teachings by the laity, or the concomitant quiet rebellion against church sexual teachings by a significant number of priests -- could have existed without the other.
During Benedict’s recent visit to the United States, one heard a thousand times the insistence that Humanae Vitae somehow sparked a rebellion or was something new under the sun. As Peter Steinfels once put the over-familiar party line, “The pope’s 1968 encyclical and the furor it created continue to polarize the American church.” On this account, everything was somehow fine until Paul VI refused to bend with the times -- at which point all hell broke loose.
Of course, all that Paul VI did, as Anscombe among many other unapologetic Catholics then and since have pointed out, was reiterate what just about everyone in the history of Christendom had ever said on the subject. In asking Catholics to be more like contraceptive-accepting Protestants, critics have been forgetting what Christian theologians across centuries had to say about contraception until practically the day before yesterday.
It was, in a word, No. Exactly one hundred years ago, for example, the Lambeth Conference of 1908 affirmed its opposition to artificial contraception in words harsher than anything appearing in Humanae Vitae: “demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare.” In another historical twist that must have someone laughing somewhere, pronouncements of the founding fathers of Protestantism make the Catholic traditionalists of 1968 look positively diffident. Martin Luther in a commentary on Genesis declared contraception to be worse than incest or adultery. John Calvin called it an “unforgivable crime.” This unanimity was not abandoned until the year 1930, when the Anglicans voted to allow married couples to use birth control in extreme cases, and one denomination after another over the years came to follow suit.
Seen in the light of actual Christian tradition, the question is not after all why the Catholic Church refused to collapse on the point. It is rather why just about everyone else in the Judeo-Christian tradition did. Whatever the answer, the Catholic Church took, and continues to take, the public fall for causing a collapse -- when actually it was the only one not collapsing.
From time to time since 1968, some of the Catholics who accepted “the only doctrine that had ever appeared as the teaching of the Church on these things,” in Anscombe’s words, have puzzled over why, exactly, Humanae Vitae has been so poorly received by the rest of the world. Surely part of it is timing, as George Weigel observed. Others have cited an implacably secular media and the absence of a national pulpit for Catholics as contributing factors. Still others have floated the idea that John Paul II’s theology of the body, an elaborate and highly positive explication of Christian moral teaching, might have taken some of the sting out of Humanae Vitae and better won the obedience of the flock.
At the end of the day, though, it is hard to believe that the fundamental force behind the execration by the world amounts to a phrase here and there in Humanae Vitae -- or in Augustine, or in Thomas Aquinas, or in anywhere else in the long history of Christian teaching on the subject. More likely, the fundamental issue is rather what Archbishop Chaput explained ten years ago: “If Paul VI was right about so many of the consequences deriving from contraception, it is because he was right about contraception itself.”
This is exactly the connection few people in 2008 want to make, because contraceptive sex -- as commentators from all over, religious or not, agree -- is the fundamental social fact of our time. And the fierce and widespread desire to keep it so is responsible for a great many perverse outcomes. Despite an empirical record that is unmistakably on Paul VI’s side by now, there is extraordinary resistance to crediting Catholic moral teaching with having been right about anything, no matter how detailed the record.
Considering the human spectacle today, forty years after the document whose widespread rejection reportedly broke Paul VI’s heart, one can’t help but wonder how he might have felt if he had glimpsed only a fraction of the evidence now available -- whether any of it might have provoked just the smallest wry smile.
After all, it would take a heart of stone not to find at least some of what’s now out there funny as hell. There is the ongoing empirical vindication in one arena after another of the most unwanted, ignored, and ubiquitously mocked global teaching of the past fifty years. There is the fact that the Pill, which was supposed to erase all consequences of sex once and for all, turned out to have huge consequences of its own. There is the way that so many Catholics, embarrassed by accusations of archaism and driven by their own desires to be as free for sex as everyone around them, went racing for the theological exit signs after Humanae Vitae -- all this just as the world with its wicked old ways began stockpiling more evidence for the Church’s doctrine than anyone living in previous centuries could have imagined, and while still other people were actually being brought closer to the Church because she stood exactly as that “sign of contradiction” when so many in the world wanted otherwise.
Yet instead of vindication for the Church, there is demoralization; instead of clarity, mass confusion; instead of more obedience, ever less. Really, the perversity is, well, perverse. In what other area does humanity operate at this level of extreme, daily, constant contradiction? Where is the Boccaccio for this post-Pill Decameron? It really is all very funny, when you stop to think about it. So why isn’t everybody down here laughing?
Mary Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, author of Home-Alone America, and editor of Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys.
The amount of hostility directed at Humanae Vitae has been so great that most people are astonished when they first learn that contraception has not been a hotly debated issue since the very beginnings of the Church. All Christian churches were united in their opposition to contraception until as recently as the early decades of this century. It was not until 1930 that the Anglican Church went on record as saying that contraception was permissible, for grave reasons, within marriage. It was also at this time, however, that Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Casti Connubii, generally translated as "On Christian Marriage," in which he reiterated what has been the constant teaching of the Catholic Church: contraception is intrinsically wrong.
One might assume that there has been a continuing dispute since the 1930s, but there has not been. Surveys of this period indicate that as many as 65% of Catholics in the US were living in accord with the Church's teaching, as late as the early sixties. A book entitled Contraception, written by John Noonan, provides a comprehensive history of the Church's teaching against contraception. It clearly documents that the Church has been "clear and constant" in its position on contraception, throughout the whole history of the Church.
The first clamoring for change appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the widespread availability of the birth control pill. Some Catholic theologians began to think that the pill might be a legitimate form of birth control for Catholics because, unlike other kinds of birth control, it did not break the integrity of the sexual act. This was the very first attempt within the Church to argue that contraception might be morally permissible. Meanwhile, in the political and social realms, there were perceptions of a population problem and growing sentiments that it would be inhumane for the Church to continue with a "policy" that promoted large families. Feminism had also begun to make itself felt with its demand that women be given full and equal access to employment and the political process. Feminists argued that having children had been a hindrance to such opportunities in the past, and that contraception -- not having children -- would enhance access to careers and thus be a great boon for women. These were the developing pressures on the Church to reconsider its teaching regarding contraception.
Pope John XXIII set up a commission of six theologians to advise him on these issues. Pope Paul VI took over the commission when John XXIII died and began adding new members with expertise from different fields, including married couples. The majority of the commission voted that the Church should change its teaching. A minority on the commission argued that the Church not only should not but could not change its teaching regarding contraception because this was a matter of God's law and not man's law, and there was no way that the Church or anyone else could declare it morally permissible.
The report of this vote and its recommendation, as well as all of the other records of the commission were, of course, to be kept strictly confidential, intended for the eyes of Pope Paul VI alone. They were meant to advise and assist him in the writing of a formal document. The commission finished its work in 1966. In 1967, the commission's records, including the report on its recommendation, were leaked to both The Tablet in London and to The National Catholic Reporter in the United States.
Interested parties had known about the commission and had been waiting for several years for the Church to make a decision. There had been an incredible proliferation of articles on the subject of contraception between 1963 and 1967, most of them favoring it. For instance, there was a book written by an Archbishop during these years under the title Contraception and Holiness, a text consisting of articles by married couples and others promoting the practice of contraception. The commission reports were undoubtedly leaked to fan these fires and they did, in fact, heighten the expectations of those desiring a change.
When Humanae Vitae was released in July, 1968, it went off like a bomb. Though there was much support for the encyclical, no document ever met with as much dissent, led to a great extent by Fr. Charles Curran and Fr. Bernard Haering.
It was a historic and pivotal moment in Church history. Dissent became the coin of the day. This had not been true prior to Humanae Vitae. Dissenting theologians had never before made such a public display of their opposition on any given issue. The open dissent to Humanae Vitae is a real watershed in the history of the Church. One can view the phenomenon as either a crystallization of something that had been bubbling under the surface for some time, or as catalyst for everything that was yet to come. Soon theologians and eventually lay people were dissenting not only about contraception but also about homosexuality, masturbation, adultery, divorce and many other issues.
In spite of the dissent and in spite of widespread use of contraception among Catholics, the Church continually reiterates its opposition to contraception as a great moral wrong; Pope John Paul II has made opposition to contraception one of the cornerstones of his pontificate and has written and spoken extensively on the topic.
I think the experience of the last many decades has revealed that the Church has been very wise in its continual affirmation of this teaching for we have begun to see that contraception leads to many vicious wrongs in society; it facilitates the sexual revolution which leads to much unwanted pregnancy and abortion. It has made women much more open to sexual exploitation by men. In fact, Humanae Vitae predicted a general lowering of morality should contraception become widely available and I think it is manifest that ours is a period of very low morality -- much of it in the sexual realm. There is little need here to provide a full set of statistics to demonstrate the consequences of the sexual revolution, for who is not familiar with the epidemic in teenage pregnancies, venereal diseases, divorces, AIDS, etc.?
Western society has undergone a rapid transformation in terms of sexual behavior and few would argue that it is for the better. For instance, only ten years ago the divorce rate was one out of three marriages; now one out of two marriages end in divorce. Only ten years ago four out of ten teenagers were sexually active; now it is six out of ten. Twenty-two percent of white babies are born out of wedlock; sixty-seven percent of African-American babies are born out of wedlock. The millions of abortions over the last decade and the phenomenal spread of AIDS alone indicate that we have serious problems with sexuality. The statistics of ten years ago were bad enough; many thought things could hardly get worse -- as did many twenty years ago, and thirty years ago. In the last generation the incidence of sexual activity outside of marriage and all the attendant problems have doubled and tripled -- or worse. We have no particular reason to believe that we have seen the peak of the growth in sexually related problems.
Statistics do not really capture the pervasive ills attendant upon sexual immorality. Premature and promiscuous sexuality prevent many from establishing good marriages and a good family life. Few deny that a healthy sexuality and a strong family life are among the most necessary elements for human happiness and well-being. It is well attested that strong and secure families are less likely to have problems with alcohol, sex, and drugs; they produce individuals more likely to be free from crippling neuroses and psychoses. Since healthy individuals are not preoccupied with their own problems, they are able to be strong leaders; they are prepared to tackle the problems of society. While many single parents do a worthy and valiant job of raising their children, it remains sadly true that children from broken homes grow up to be adults with a greater propensity for crime, with a greater tendency to engage in alcohol and drug abuse, with a greater susceptibility to psychological disorders.
The Church, however, does not condemn the use of contraception because it is an act that has bad consequences. Rather, it teaches that since contraception is an intrinsically evil action, it is predictable that it will have bad consequences. The Church teaches that contraception is evil because it violates the very purpose and nature of the human sexual act, and therefore violates the dignity of the human person. The experience of the last several decades has simply served to reinforce the wisdom of the Church's teaching. But it is not only on a practical level that we have a better understanding of the Church's teaching; our theoretical understanding has also been much advanced. Often if happens that the Church does not know very fully the reasons for what it teaches until it is challenged. The Church's condemnation of contraception went unchallenged for centuries. In attempting to explain its condemnation, the Church has deepened its understanding of marriage and the meaning of the sexual act. Again, John Paul II, with his claim that the sexual act signifies total self-giving and his insight that contraception diminishes that self-giving, has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of the evil of contraception.
As we consider the reasons why contraception is evil, let us first consult a few Church statements that suggest the strength of its constant teaching against contraception. Casti Connubii states:
No reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good. Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose, sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.
It continues:
Any use whatsoever of matrimony, exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.
Humanae Vitae puts it this way (§ 11):
But the Church, which interprets natural law through its unchanging doctrine, reminds men and women that the teachings based on natural law must be obeyed, and teaches that it is necessary that each and every conjugal act remain ordained to the procreating of human life.
Further on it states (§ 12):
The doctrine which the Magisterium of the Church has often explicated in this: There is an unbreakable connection between the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning of the conjugal act, and both are inherent in the conjugal act. This connection was established by God and cannot be broken by man through his own volition.
The Church condemns contraception since it violates both the procreative and unitive meanings of the human sexual act. It diminishes an act that by its very nature is full of weighty meaning, meaning that is unique to the sexual act. To engage in an act of contracepted sexual intercourse is to engage in an act that has the potential for creating new life and an act that has the potential for creating tremendous emotional bonds between male and female and simultaneously to undercut those potentials. Sex is for babies and for bonding; if people are not ready for babies or bonding they ought not to be engaging in acts of sexual intercourse.
Our age is quick to express appreciation for the unitive meaning of the sexual act but has little understanding of the goodness of the procreative meaning of the sexual act. The modern age tends to treat babies as burdens and not as gifts. It tends to treat fertility as some dreadful condition that we need to guard against. We often speak of the "fear of pregnancy" -- a very curious phrase. A fear of poverty or nuclear holocaust or tyranny is understandable, but why a fear of pregnancy? We speak about "accidental pregnancies" as if getting pregnant were like getting hit by a car -- some terrible accident has happened to us. But the truth is that if a pregnancy results from an act of sexual intercourse, this means that something has gone right with an act of sexual intercourse, not that something has gone wrong.
In our society we have lost sight of the fundamental truth that if you are not ready for babies, you are not ready for sexual intercourse. We have lost sight of the fact that sexual intercourse, making love, and making babies are inherently connected and for good reason. In our times, sexual relations are treated casually; no great commitment is implied in having sexual intercourse with another; babies are treated as an unwelcome intrusion on the sexual act. The Church opposes this attitude and insists that sexual intercourse and having children are intimately connected; that sexual intercourse implies a great commitment, that children are an inherent part of that commitment, and that both commitment and children are wonderful gifts.
It is good to keep in mind that fertility is a great good: to be fertile is a state of health for an adult person. It is those among us who are not fertile who need to be helped and who seek treatment for infertility. Women now take a "pill" to thwart their fertility, as if fertility were a disease against which we need a cure. Contraception treats the woman's body as if there were something wrong with it. The use of contraception suggests that God made a mistake in the way that He designed the body and that we must correct His error. In an age where we have become very wary of dumping pollutants into the environment it is ironic that we are so willing to dump pollutants into our bodies. The health risks of contraception to women are considerable -- take a look at the insert pages in any package of the pill. The IUD is currently off the market because of so many lawsuits against manufacturers. Why do women expose themselves to such risks when natural methods of family planning are both safe and effective?
Let us not fail to mention that many forms of contraception are abortifacients; they work by causing an early term abortion. Rather than inhibiting ovulation, they work by preventing the fertilized egg, the tiny new human being, from implanting in the wall of the uterus. The IUD works in this fashion as do most forms of the pill (on occasion) and Norplant. So those who are opposed to abortion and those interested in protecting the well-being of women would certainly not want to be using these forms of contraception. The other forms have aesthetic drawbacks or are low on reliability.
Contraception, then, enters a note of tremendous negation into the act of sexual intercourse. But lovemaking should be a most wonderful act of affirmation, a tremendous "yes" to another person, a way of conveying to another that he or she is wonderful, and completely accepted; this is conveyed by making a total gift of one's self to another. The contracepting lover says I want to give myself to you but not to the extent of sharing my fertility with you; I want you but not your sperm (or your egg)!
Just think of the words for contraception. Contraception means "against the beginning" -- here against the beginning of a new life. So a contracepting couple is participating in an act that is designed to bring about new life and they are acting against that new life. Or they put their barrier methods in place -- for "protection": as if they were making war, not love. Or they use a spermicide -- to kill the sperm. This is an act of love?
But we forget what a marvelous thing it is to be able to bring forth a new human being. God chooses to bring forth new human life through the love of spouses. The entire world was created for us and for others like us. God wishes to share His creation with new human souls, and brings new souls into the world through the love of men and women for each other. God created the world as an act of love, and the bringing forth of new human life is, quite appropriately, the product of another kind of loving act. When a man and women have a child together, it's an act that changes the cosmos: something has come into existence that will never pass out of existence; each soul is immortal and is destined for immortal life.
And whenever a new human life comes into existence, God performs an entirely new act of creation, for only God can create an immortal soul. In sexual intercourse, spouses provide God with an opportunity to perform His creative act. As the first line of Humanae Vitae states, God gives spouses the mission (munus) of transmitting human life to spouses. Contraception says no to God; it says those using it want to have the wonderful physical pleasure of sex but do not want to allow God to perform His creative act.
But contraception is wrong not only because it violates the procreative meaning of the sexual act but also because it violates the unitive meaning of the sexual act. Pope John Paul II has been most energetic in explaining how couples do not achieve true spousal union in sexual intercourse when they use contraception. He explains that the sexual act is meant to be an act of total self-giving and that in withholding their fertility from one another spouses are not giving totally of themselves. He has developed an interesting line of argument where he speaks of the "language of the body." He claims bodily actions have meanings much as words do and that unless we intend those meanings with our actions we should not perform them any more than we should speak words we don't mean. In both cases, lies are being "spoken."
Sexual union has a well-recognized meaning; it means "I find you attractive"; "I care for you"; " I will try to work for your happiness"; "I wish to have a deep bond with you." Some who engage in sexual intercourse do not mean these things with their actions; they wish simply to use another for their own sexual pleasure. They have lied with their bodies in the same way as someone lies who says "I love you" to another simply for the purposes of obtaining some favor from him or her.
It is easy for us to want to have sexual intercourse with lots of people; but we generally want to have babies with only one person. One is saying something entirely different with one's body when one says "I want only to have sexual pleasure with you" and when one says "I am willing to be a parent with you." In fact, one of the most certain ways to distinguish simple sexual attraction from love is to think about whether all you want from another person is sexual pleasure, or whether you would like to have a baby with him or her. We generally are truly in love with those with whom we want to have babies; we do want our lives totally tied up with theirs. We want to become one with them in the way in which having a baby makes us one with another -- our whole lives are intertwined with theirs; we buy diapers with them, and give birthday parties, and pay for college and plan weddings. A noncontracepted act of sexual intercourse says again just what our marriage vows say "I am yours for better or worse, in sickness and health, till death do us part." Having babies with another is to share a lifetime endeavor with another.
A sexual act open to the possibility of procreation ideally represents the kind of bond to which spouses have committed themselves. Contraceptives, however, convey the message that while sexual intercourse is desired, there is no desire for a permanent bond with the other person. The possibility of an everlasting bond has been willfully removed from the very act designed to best express the desire for such a relationship. It reduces the sexual act to a lie.
Contraception, then, is an offense against one's body, against one's God, and against one's relationship with one's spouse.
But must spouses have as many children as is physically possible? This has never been the teaching of the Church. Spouses are expected to be responsible about their child-bearing, to bring forth children that they can raise well. But the means used to limit family size must be moral. Methods of Natural Family Planning are very effective means and moral means for planning one's family; for helping spouses to get pregnant when they want to have a child and for helping them to avoid having a child when it would not be responsible to have a child. NFP allows couples to respect their bodies, obey their God, and fully respect their spouses.
Natural Family Planning is not the outmoded rhythm method, a method which was based on the calendar. Rather, NFP is a highly scientific way of determining when a woman is fertile based on observing various bodily signs. The couple who want to avoid a pregnancy, abstain from sexual intercourse during the fertile period. The statistics on the reliability of NFP rival the most effective forms of the Pill. And NFP is without the health risks and it is moral.
Couples using NFP find that it has positive results for their marital relationships and their relationship with God. When couples are abstaining during the fertile period they are not thwarting the act of sexual intercourse since they are not engaging in sexual intercourse. When they are engaging in sexual intercourse during the infertile period they are not withholding their fertility since they do not have it to give at that time. They learn to live in accord with the natural rhythms of their body. In a word, use of NFP may involve non-procreative acts, but never, as with contraception, antiprocreative acts.
Many find it odd that periodic abstinence should be beneficial rather than harmful to a marriage. But abstinence can be another way of expressing love, as it is between those who are not married, or between those for whom engaging in sexual intercourse involves a significant risk. Certainly most who begin to use NFP, especially those who were not chaste before marriage and who have used contraception, generally find the abstinence required to be a source of some strain and irritability. Abstinence, of course, like dieting or any form of self-restraint, brings its hardships; but like dieting and other forms of self-denial, it also brings its benefits. And after all, spouses abstain for all sorts of reasons -- because one or the other is out of town or ill, for instance.
Spouses using NFP find that the method helps them learn to communicate better with each other -- and abstinence gives them the opportunity to do so. As they learn to communicate their affection in non-genital ways and as they learn to master their sexual desires, they find a new liberation in the ability to abstain from sexual intercourse. Many find that an element of romance reenters the relationship during the times of abstinence and an element of excitement accompanies the reuniting. They have gained the virtue of self-mastery since now they can control their sexual desires rather than being in control of their sexual desires. Women using NFP generally feel revered by their husbands since their husbands do not make them use unhealthy and unpleasant contraceptives. Men using NFP generally have greater self-respect since they have gained control over their sexual desires and can now engage in sexual intercourse as an act of love not as an act of mere sexual urgency. A proof that NFP is good for a marriage is that whereas in the U.S. over fifty percent of marriages end in divorce (and it is safe to assume that most of these couples are contracepting), very, very few couples who use NFP ever divorce; they seem to bond in a deeper way than those who are contracepting.
The Church condemns contraception not because it wants to deny spouses sexual pleasure but because it wants to help them find marital happiness and to help them have happy homes, for without these our well being as individuals and as a society is greatly endangered. Section 18 of Humanae Vitae states:
[I]t is not surprising that the Church finds herself a sign of contradiction -- just as was Christ, her Founder. But this is not reason for the Church to abandon the duty entrusted to her of preaching the moral law firmly and humbly, both the natural law and the law of the Gospel.
Since the Church did not make either of these laws, she cannot change them. She can only be their guardian and interpreter; thus it would never be right for her to declare as morally permissible that which is truly not so. For what is immoral is by its very nature always opposed to the true good of Man.
By preserving the whole moral law of marriage, the Church knows that she is supporting the growth of a true civilization among men.
In teaching that contraception is intrinsically immoral, the Church is not imposing a disciplinary law on Catholics; she is preaching only what nature and the gospel preach. By now we should have learned -- the hard way -- that to defy and overindulge our sexual nature, to go against the laws of nature and God, is to inflict terrible damage on ourselves as individuals and our society as a whole.
Janet Smith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dallas.
Copyright © 2000 Janet Smith. All rights reserved.
Humanae Vitae is Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical on the regulation of birth. It is perhaps the most controversial and misunderstood document ever released from the Roman Catholic Church.
In order to understand Humanae Vitae and today's environment in regards to the encyclical and artificial contraception, it is first necessary to briefly review some historical context and events.
Contraception, or "birth control" as it has been often called, apparently seeking to connote "responsibility," reaches back in human history to ancient times. Some studies in anthropology indicate that as far back as 2700 B.C. contraception existed, as evidenced by discovered remnants of papyri, an ancient Egyptian precursor to paper. A Greek physician, Soranos (98-139 A.D.) also described several methods of contraception. During this time, it is noted that abortion and even infanticide were common within the Roman Empire.
Genesis 38: 1-11 describes what is often called the story of Onan, noting that "…he spilled his semen on the ground, lest he should give offspring to his brother."
We can readily see that contraception is neither new nor a result of modern development.
Throughout history, until the twentieth century, Christian teaching has uniformly condemned artificial contraception. The story of Onan states, "And what he did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord, and he slew him also." In this case, Onan's sinful method of birth control warranted the death penalty.
St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) was the first to actually teach within the Church on sexual morality, noting that the procreation of children was the primary purpose of marriage and sex.
Thomas Aquinas taught as a scholastic that sexual pleasure was good, but must not be separated from reason. Again, the primary purpose of marriage and sex was procreation. During the Renaissance, St. Alphonsus Liguori once again affirmed procreation as the primary end of marriage and sexuality.
Our separated brethren in the Protestant traditions often quoted the story of Onan in order to condemn contraception. Martin Luther called Onan's action a "sin greater than adultery or incest." Calvin called it, "a monstrous thing." Both condemned practices which destroyed procreation as a part of the marital act.
God obviously favors both the unitive and procreative elements of marriage. Among His blessings was His promise than none should be barren.
And because you hearken to these ordinances and keep and do them, the Lord your God will keep with you the covenant and the steadfast love which he swore to your fathers to keep; he will love you, bless you, and multiply you; he will also bless the fruit of your body and the fruit of your ground, our grain and your wine and your oil, the increase of your cattle and the young of your flock in the land which he swore to your father to give you. You shall be blessed above all peoples; there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle. [Dt 7]
It was not until 1930 during the Anglican Bishops' Lambeth Conference that any Christian denomination or tradition broke ranks with this historically universal position. In Resolution 15, plenty of room was given to those who chose to use contraceptive methods as a means of controlling pregnancy and birth. It states:
Where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles. The primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles. The Conference records its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.
In continuing Christian teaching and in response to the Anglican Lambeth Conference's implied approval of contraception, Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical in December 1930, entitled, Casti Connubii." In it, after describing the holiness and origins of marriage as being from the Creator, he wrote:
And now, Venerable Brethren, we shall explain in detail the evils opposed to each of the benefits of matrimony. First, consideration is due to the offspring, which many have the boldness to call the disagreeable burden of matrimony and which they say is to be carefully avoided by married people not through virtuous continence (which Christian law permits in matrimony when both parties consent) but by frustrating the marriage act. Some justify this criminal abuse on the ground that they are weary of children and wish to gratify their desires without their consequent burden. Others say that they cannot on the one hand remain continent nor on the other can they have children because of the difficulties whether on the part of the mother or on the part of family circumstances.
But no reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything intrinsically against the nature may become conformable to nature and morally good. Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.
He goes on to call contraception a "foul stain" and says that those who exercise it are "branded with the guilt of a grave sin."
Again in 1951, Pope Pius XII condemned the use of contraceptives in his Address to Midwives. A slight "stall" of sorts occurred in 1965 during the Second Vatican Council when Pope Paul VI determined that no teachings on sexuality be formed until he received results from a commission on birth control previously established by Pope John XXIII in 1963.
Gaudium et spes, Pope Paul VI's 1965 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, addresses problems related to artificial contraception by saying,
But where the intimacy of married life is broken off, its faithfulness can sometimes be imperiled and its quality of fruitfulness ruined, for then the upbringing of the children and the courage to accept new ones are both endangered.
In 1966, the commission presented its findings to the Pope. However, the commission members had agreed that there would be no majority or minority report. The commission had essentially determined that the previous teaching forbidding contraception had not been infallible and that contraception was not intrinsically evil, paving the way for married couples to determine for themselves whether to use contraception. Some members, outside that agreement, wrote what is known as a "minority report" and disagreed with the findings of the commission. They asked Pope Paul VI to continue to uphold the traditional teachings of the Church.
Humanae Vitae was Pope Paul VI's 1968 response to the commission and to the issue itself. He reaffirmed the Church's traditional teaching, and affirmed equal status and inseparability of both the procreative and unitive aspects of marital sex. He went on to emphasize the teaching authority of the Church, based on natural law and illuminated by divine Revelation. Regarding marital union and procreation, he states:
The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life -- and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called.
In his writing on the consequences of artificial contraception, Pope Paul VI offers us warnings. These warnings, in light of our present social circumstances, seem prophetic. He warns us that the consequences include a general lowering of moral standards; a reduction of women to the status of mere instruments for the satisfaction of one's own desires, and a general lowering of standards of the affection and partnership of marriage. Further, he warns that public authorities may impose contraception on its populace without regard to moral law.
Familiaris Consortio, by Pope John Paul II, in 1981 stressed that contraception is contradictory to total and reciprocal self-giving love. He says that those who use it are not really capable of giving themselves fully to one another.
Pope John Paul II's Veritatis Spendor in 1993 stresses moral absolutes and that even when attempting to choose artificial contraception as a "lesser evil," it remains intrinsically evil and sinful.
The 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church addresses the regulation of procreation and warns that spouses must act "in conformity with the objective criteria of morality," and continuing on to address periodic continence. Today, we learn proper methods of this in the Natural Family Planning program.
Many have disagreed with the tenets of Humanae Vitae, most often quoting "following one's conscience" as justification for disagreeing with this Church teaching. The Catechism however, admonishes us to remember that our conscience can make erroneous judgments and that it is our duty to properly form our conscience if it is to be of use to us.
In 1968, a group of Catholic theologians headed by Fr. Charles Curran of Catholic University, met to discuss Humanae Vitae. The result was that 87 theologians signed a statement disagreeing with the encyclical. This occurred only five days after the official release of the document. Later, over 600 additional theologians signed the statement. Some of these theologians were later sanctioned and no longer allowed to officially teach Catholic theology. Some, after much review and study, recanted, withdrawing from the dissenting statement. Dr. William E. May, a professor at Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College, was one of these. In a statement in 1988, twenty years after Humanae Vitae was written, he said,
I was beginning to see that if contraception is justifiable, then perhaps artificial insemination, test-tube reproduction, and similar modes of generating life outside the marital embrace are morally justifiable too. I began to realize that the moral theology invented to justify contraception could be used to justify any kind of deed. I saw that it was a consequentialist, utilitarian kind of argument, that it was a theory which repudiated the notion of intrinsically evil acts. I began to realize how truly prophetic the Pope had been, and how providential it was that he had bee given the strength to resist tremendous pressures brought to bear on him.
Meanwhile, the 1960's and the sociological movements of the so-called "sexual revolution" were in full bloom. "Freedom" was nearly idolized as a human's most precious right. Freedom in this sense however, meant to do as one chose, without regard to morality, tradition, or other "restrictions."
Dissent from the teachings of the Church seemed to take on a new meaning, and grew in scope and social acceptance. This trend continues in many ways today, as evidenced by statements made during the recent Presidential campaign. Again, "following one's conscience" was noted as the reason justifying dissent from the holy and traditional teachings of the Church. Dissidents rarely seem to include the word "informed" when discussing conscience. Scripture tells us that the law of God is written on our hearts and that even our conscience may accuse us before God's judgment. This is reiterated by the Church, telling us that conscience is not one's feelings or emotional impulses, but rather a sense of the voice of God's Law, which tells us to, "do this, shun that." Conscience instead is, "a reflective moral judgment that serves to bring to a conclusion a process of moral deliberation." Simply deciding for ourselves based on how we "feel" is not sufficient.
Today's environment is truly a realization of Pope Paul VI's warnings, and more. As he indicated, marriage is disintegrating, with nearly fifty percent ending in divorce. Marital infidelity is almost expected. Sex, no longer a symbol of marital love, is now used to promote products and as "entertainment." It has become a selfish, self-centered pleasure overwhelming God's intent that it be an integral and inseparable part of the sacrament of marriage. The unitive and procreative elements of marriage have been separated -- forced apart by many. His warning that man would lose respect for woman has been realized in more ways than he could likely have imagined, with women becoming mere instruments of personal, sexual enjoyment. His admonishment to be concerned about the use of contraception by public authorities, imposing it on their populations, has been evidenced in many developing nations, and most notably in China. Abortion has grown to be viewed by many as a "right to choose," or as a "reproductive health" issue. Even marriage itself is under attack by many, and in the courts of our nation and of many others. Homosexual "marriage" is now increasingly viewed as a right and as a legitimate lifestyle choice. Our society today is permeated with immorality including promiscuity, pornography, abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, Internet-based pornography and other illicit activities just a mouse-click away. Nor are the results solely based on sex. Along with these so-called "choices" have come actions varying from widespread violent crime and a growth of glorified violence, to dishonesty in business, other immoral behaviors, and even the growth of simple rudeness with the view that one can do what he likes instead of what he ought. "Road rage" is an example of this rudeness carried to a dangerous extreme. Abortion on demand has grown not only in scope, but also acceptance to the point where many view it as a "right." It is called by many euphemisms, "reproductive rights," "reproductive health," "personal choice," and others. One can hope that this is an indicator that at least some are still uncomfortable with the bare facts and that there might be hope in working to change the situation towards God's divine will.
The Church's teachings on contraception are as true and infallible today as they have historically been. We are reaping the results of dissent and immorality in the disintegration of moral norms "across the board." Our "culture of death" no longer fosters respect for life or for each other as human beings. Families and marriages are collapsing before our eyes.
We, as Catholic lay people must maintain our discipline and strive to adhere to Truth if we are to lead the way for others to find and rekindle a desire to do God's will and to fulfill His divine and loving plan for humanity.
1 Fr. William P. Saunders, former president, Notre Dame Institute and pastor of Queen of Apostles parish, Alexandria, Va. From an article entitled The History of Contraception Teachings, a six-part series, first appearing in The Arlington Catholic Herald, Nov. 2, 1995
2 Holy Bible, Revised Standard Edition, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, Ca., 1966
3 Ibid
4 A Short History of Catholic Teaching on Birth Control http://members.aol.com/revising/history.html
5 Commentary on Genesis, Latin ed. 1554, First English ed. 1578. Edited and Translated by John King, M.D. This edition reprinted from Calvin Translation Society edition of 1847, 1965; http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/ipb-e/epl-cvgenesis.html
6 Saunders, Para 5-6
7 Deuteronomy 7: 12-14, RSV
8 Archive of Resolutions from 1930 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops, http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/archive/1930/in1930.htm
9 Casti Connubii, Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on Christian Marriage, Dec. 31, 1930, Nos. 53-54
10 Ibid, No. 56
11 Gaudium et Spes, Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, Pope Paul VI, Dec. 7, 1965
12 Humanae Vitae, Encyclical of Pope Paul VI on the Regulation of Birth, July 25, 1968, No. 12
13 Ibid, No. 16
14 Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, English Translation copyright 1994 by United States Catholic Conference, Inc., No. 2370
15 Ibid, Nos. 1790-94
16 Saunders, Part 6, Contraceptives Show Grave Consequences
17 Romans 2:15-16, RSV
18 Gaudium et Spes, No. 16
19 An Introduction to Moral Theology, 2nd Ed., Dr. William E. May, pp. 58
Hartman, Megan, Humanae Vitae: Thirty Years of Discord and Dissent, Conscience Magazine, Autumn 1998 issue.
Curran, Charles E., Hunt, Robert E., et al, Dissent in and for the Church, New York, Sheed & Ward, 1969
Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, I-II
Smith, Janet, Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1993
Contraception: Why Not? http://www.sjy.org/church/teachings.asp
Designed for Desire, RBC Ministries,, Grand Rapids, Mich. Copyright 2003, http://discoveryserieis.org/cb932
Duffner, Fr. Paul A., O.P., Humanae Vitae After 25 Years, The Rosary Light & Life -- Vol. 47, No.1, Jan.-Feb. 1994, http://www.rosary-center.org/1147n1.htm
Smith, Janet, Humanae Vitae: A Challenge to Love, New Hope, Kentucky: New Hope Publications
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, English Translation copyright 1994 by United States Catholic Conference, Inc.
Code of Canon Law, Latin-English Edition, New English Translation, Canon Law Society of America, Washington, DC, 1999
May, William E., An Introduction to Moral Theology, Second Edition, Our Sunday Visitor, Huntington, IN, 2003
Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, Libereria Editrice Vatican, 1981
Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 1995
Pope Paul VI, Gaudium et Spes, 1965
Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, 1968
Pope Paul VI, Dignitatis Humanae, 1965
Wojtyla, Karol, Love & Responsibility, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1981
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