July 15, 2012 / MariaNews.com

Pope Paul VI and The Prophetic Witness of Humanae Vitae

By Catholic Online

GLADE PARK, CO (Catholic Online) — Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, promulgated three years after the close of the Second Vatican Council, rapidly became at the time of its release the most intensely mocked and reviled Church document in centuries, perhaps amassing more derision than any other solemn teaching of the Church in the entire history of Christendom. To this day, many Catholic proponents of Pope Paul’s teaching hesitate to mention Humanae Vitae to those who grew up in the 60s and 70s for fear of the averse reactions which not infrequently follow.

On the other hand, Catholics who broach the subject of Humanae Vitae with those whose birthdate allowed them to be spared the brunt of the 60s sexual revolution and acute-suspicion-of-authority influence, experience a different reaction: Paul VI’s encyclical is often not part of their vocabulary because they have never heard of it. So the first step is to invite them to read it.

The situation with these Catholics, especially those who are approximately thirty years of age and younger, is both interesting and encouraging: once they are properly catechized on the theology of the human body and the spiritual language it speaks, along with the consequences of making a lie of one’s body during the marital act through the use of artificial birth control, treating fertility as if it is a disease, objectifying one’s spouse and refusing to be open to life, they very quickly recognize the profound worth of Pope Paul’s teaching. And not only that; as a result they often develop a deep and lasting appreciation for the Church. They begin to see that the Church is our mother who desires to take us into her womb and, by nourishing her children with the words of truth and the sacraments of life, raise us to new and eternal life in Christ.

These Catholics, then, come to recognize that the teaching of the Church is about eternal salvation; it’s about realizing the gift of unending, perfect happiness; it’s about concern for the whole and complete truth of the human person and the relationships which follow; It’s about building a better world; it’s about understanding and actualizing true human freedom — just as is Humanae Vitae.

Once the light about the Church’s true nature penetrates the soul, which is a gift of the Spirit, a refreshing vision of the Bride of Christ is unveiled before one’s eyes with astonishing clarity. No longer is the Church viewed through an hermeneutic of suspicion, but rather she becomes a “holy temple” and “dwelling place of God among men” (LG 6 § 4; Rev. 21:3), who is the “kingdom of Christ now present in mystery” (LG 3). Transformed by the Spirit, who reveals Christ and his Church in full and penetrating light, the eyes of the soul are opened to the true nature of the Church as the “spotless spouse of the spotless Lamb” (LG 6 § 5; Rev. 19:7; 21:2, 9; 22:17). Praise God!

But if Humanae Vitae’s release had occurred a mere fifty years earlier, when the American populace’s views on sexuality, marriage and children were net yet so tainted, things would have been different. The dissenting cry of the 60s and 70s would likely have been replaced with approbation, since both Catholics and Protestants frowned on the use of mechanical devises and dangerous chemicals before, during and after sex in an attempt to frustrate procreation.

The fact is, Christendom was in general agreement on the sinfulness of contraceptives up until the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in 1930. While the conference strongly condemned the use “of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience,” emphasizing abstinence as the primary method to avoid parenthood, “in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid” the generation of children, the Anglican bishops deemed that “other methods may be used.” That of course opened the door. Once the birth control pill was legalized in 1960, it became the “other method.” Obviously, it was not only Protestants who began to embrace the use of hormonal contraceptives, but many Catholics as well — although the Church has never approved of man’s attempts at driving an artificial wedge between the marital act and procreation.

It is, then, no surprise that in 1968 Humanae Vitae met up with blatant outrage, since “methods of conception control” had long stemmed not only from selfish motives of “luxury” and “mere convenience” but from the mistaken conviction that men and women had a “right” to enjoy unrestrained sex without being “burdened” by the potential for an unwanted pregnancy. Fertility had come to be viewed as an hindrance rather than a blessing. “How dare the Church insert itself into our bedrooms!” cried the voices of dissent. It would have been more honest if those same voices would have simply admitted their intolerance for any advocates of self-discipline in the area of sexual pleasure.

Today, however, things are changing. Catholics and other Christians in growing number are recognizing the perennial and prophetic witness of Humanae Vitae. What was before despised is now in many cases revered. The whole encyclical is overflowing with profound and wise teaching on the crucial importance of cooperating with the Creator in free and loving obedience, the natural moral law, Catholic anthropology, the transmission of human life, marriage, human fertility, and so forth. It is a must read for anyone who wants to know how to live a fully human life of happiness.

When we read the encyclical, it is in a way difficult to imagine it as a source of previous scorn. For instance, in the opening paragraphs we read of Pope Paul’s sincere love and concern for married couples, including the lives and happiness of all human beings:

“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.

“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.”

In section II, titled “Doctrinal Principles,” Pope Paul taught that when considering the question of human procreation and the use of artificial birth control, since it is a question which touches on human life itself, 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” (HV 7). Stated another way, the human person is a moral agent who possesses the capacity to shape his character and father his own being by his choices, actions or inactions, and thus seal his eternal destiny by either collaborating with God’s plan of wise goodness or attempting to frustrate and undermine it. There are consequences for heedlessly ignoring or rejecting the natural moral law.

In article 12, Paul VI notes that the conjugal act is ordered toward both the union of the spouses and human procreation, which constitutes an inseparable, fundamental connection inherent in the marriage act. This fundamental connection between an intimate union of the spouses and openness to new life is ordained by the will of God according to eternal law. Simply stated, in creating man and woman, God has wisely written laws into their nature for their own good. It is no accident or mere coincidence of evolution that the human sexual faculties are what they are and do what they do. God has a purpose for human sexuality. When that purpose is thwarted or circumvented by the use of artificial birth control, the will of God, who is the Author of Life, is contradicted (HV 13).

Again, Pope Paul is concerned for the eternal well being of the human person and his or her happiness: 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.”

The natural moral law reveals that man does not have unlimited dominion over his body or his sexual faculties (HV 13), for both of these must be used within the limits of the order of reality established by God (HV 16). When these limits are ignored, rejected or exceeded, horrifying consequences result. Here we are brought to Pope Paul’s prophetic words in article 17:

“Let [responsible men] first consider how easily [artificial birth control] 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 . . . 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.

“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” (HV 17).

Many of these predictions have come to pass in one form or other: the grave moral decline of contemporary society; the promotion of false notions of freedom which are detached from the moral law; the wildly out-of-control transmission and use of pornography; the devaluation of the institution of marriage; skyrocketing divorce rates; the “friends with benefits” (FWB) phenomenon in which friendships are arranged to include sexual activity without commitment to emotional or any other bonds.

Just a few years after Humanae Vitae the wedge of artificial birth control was driven so deeply between the marital act and human procreation that it spawned the unspeakable evil of legalized abortion in the U.S. under the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. The logical extension of the contraceptive mentality is the abortion mentality.

Further, we are now confronted with the HHS mandate, the attacks on the right to exercise freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, and a President who adamantly insists that it isn’t fair for the Catholic Church to refuse to provide abortion inducing drugs, contraceptives and sterilizations to insurance recipients. We have to wonder, what is next?

Not until men and women begin to understand that they are bodily and spiritual beings, moral agents whose bodies must always be used to speak the language of truth, will we see the terrifyingly steep moral descent of America begin to flatten out. The more people who embrace the Church as the city of truth in Christ, a holy womb of love in which men are taught how to live and how to die, the more will society become aligned with the will of our loving God, who “works for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).

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F. K. Bartels is a Catholic writer who believes the Catholic faith is the greatest gift he could have ever received. He is also a contributing writer to Catholic Online. Visit him also at joyintruth.com

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June 23, 2012 /MariaNews.com

By Catholic Online

CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) – “Theology of the Body” is the name given to Pope John Paul II’s integrated vision of the human person, a person composed of spiritual soul and material body, and incomplete without both.  For John Paul II–and indeed for all Christians who refuse to succumb to what Jacques Maritain called the Cartesian “sin of angelism,” the error of seeing a human person as a “ghost in a machine”–the human body is as equal a partner to the human person as is the spiritual soul.  Our soma, our body, has a “theology,” a word to tell us about God, just as much as does our psyche, our soul.

There is something about our end (in Greek, our telos), our design and God’s purpose, that is to be learned from our body, from its acts, even from what the theologian Steven A. Long calls the “close-in teleogies” of human acts.  There are “close-in theologies” that are found in the “close-in teleogies” of the human body, especially in such inter-personal matters as the conjugal act or the marital act.

To be sure, pure bodily activity is to be understood within the context of the whole human person, and not separated from it.  Yet it is also sure that the body talks to us.  We have to have an internal ear to hear what our body is saying.  The loud din of our culture, our presuppositions, our ignorance, our lusts can often deafen us to the witness of the body.  There are many sources of static.

Sometimes even some moral theologians try to plug their ears with respect to the music found in the “close-in teleologies” and “close-in theologies” by crying biologism, biologism, biologism!

But it is a fact that the natural moral law often speaks to us in the language of the body, in the meaning of its acts, and in what moral theologians have called our inclinations.  Unquestionably, our inclinations can frequently go awry, especially after the disorder caused our nature from Adam’s Fall.  So not all felt inclinations can be assumed to be legitimate.

Importantly, in understanding these inclinations, it is also wrong to think of the inclinations as bodily urges.  Far from being disordered primitive urges, the inclinations are in fact expressions of a kind of reason, an Ur-reason, a fundamental, non-conceptual, non-discursive reason.  This is why I like to think of these inclinations as a sort of intellectual feltness.  The natural law is (contrary to Kant and the natural law theorists of the Enlightenment) not based upon conceptual or discursive reason alone, but is fundamentally built upon these inclinations.

The notion of the natural law as something built upon these fundamental inclinations fits in better with the Biblical notion of the natural law as a law of reason written not on one’s brain, but in one’s heart.  (Rom. 2:15)  The Biblical notion of the heart refers or signifies the very center, the most intimate core, of the human person.  The heart is something much more basic than one’s brain.  And it is here–in the central core of the human being, the heart–where the intellectual feltness, theinclinations of the natural moral law, are found.

Now I say all this as an introduction because it helps explain a life-changing experience I had about 28 years ago.  And here to understand the context, I need to give a few biographical details.

Though raised Catholic, I had left the Church–indeed Christianity altogether–by the time I entered college.  I remember my inchoate rebellion at age 13, but by the time I reached 17, this attitude had blossomed into full-scale rejection of God and of His Church.

As I approached college graduation, I happened to attend a Bill Gothard seminar with the young woman who would eventually become my wife, and experienced a conversion.  I realized how much I had sinned or strayed from childhood innocence, how I needed forgiveness, and I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior.

To make a long story short, after my conversion I read the Scriptures, but as I bounced from Baptist Church to Charismatic Church, I soon became aware that the Scriptures were not as perspicuous-that is, as plain to the understanding–as the Protestants claimed them to be.

So I decided the best evidence of the meanings of the Scriptures would be the so-called Apostolic Fathers, those persons who were the immediate successors to the Apostles.  I was soon convinced, upon reading St. Ignatius of Antioch, that a Scriptural Church had to have at least three requisites: (1) it had to be Liturgical, (2) it had to be Eucharistic, and (3) it had to be Episcopal, which is to say governed by bishops.

So I looked for such a church.  The Episcopal Church was convenient, had (or at least appeared to have) these three signs, and so my wife and I joined that Church.  Eventually, we were married before a Methodist minister and an Episcopalian priest.

The point is that for my entire adult religious life up until the time that I was married I was Protestant.  I had not been introduced to the Church’s teaching on marriage, the conjugal life, or contraception.  I had no understanding of it.  I certainly did not give it any assent at the time.

Following the Protestant mores, my wife and I went on our honeymoon loaded with prophylactics, without the least scruple of any sort.  But by the second day of the honeymoon, it was apparent to both my wife and me that there was something terribly wrong here.  There was an awareness, a sort of gnawing reality, a sort of existential hunch that whatever marriage was, whatever the conjugal act was, it was inconsistent with the use of prophylactics.  Something important, crucial was being held back through the contraceptive sex, and the language of our bodies was wrapped up in a lie because of it.  Each act of sex was an act of hypocrisy.

If asked at the time, I could not have explained it.  In fact, I was surprised by this experience.  As I’ve looked back at this experience, I believe that what I encountered was the witness of my body, the law of the heart, an inclination orintellectual feltness which is at the heart of the natural law, even a voice of God.  Without the aid of any Church doctrine, by just listening to the “close-in teleology” of the conjugal act, I had encountered the truth that to engage in contraceptive sex would be to live a lie.  I had an inclination I could not have then put into words that to separate the unitive and the procreative aspects of the conjugal act was wrong, and not only wrong but horribly wrong.  For me it was clearly something despicable, something for which I would have to answer to God were I to continue the practice.

From that point, my wife and I threw the contraceptive technology away, and never looked back.

Over the next several months after this experience, I devoted some time to exploring the traditional Christian teaching on contraception.  Much to my surprise, I learned that the Protestant Churches were at one time entirely in unison in their condemnation of artificial contraception.  In fact, this was entirely consistent with the constant teaching of the Church virtually from its beginning.  (See, e.g., Gal. 5:19-20 and the 1st or 2nd century Didache)

But in a whole collapse of moral fortitude, the Protestant Churches had one-by-one capitulated, sort of like dominoes, beginning with the Anglican Church at the Seventh Lambeth Conference in 1930.  I learned that the so-called Comstock laws against contraception on the books of the several States and declared unconstitutional by the U. S. Supreme Court inGriswold v. Connecticut were named after the Protestant minister Anthony Comstock and were passed by legislatures composed of largely Protestant legislators.  But all this Protestant consensus had clearly unraveled by the 1960s.

It may be that the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception is foolishness to the secularist liberals, and a stumbling block to our Protestant brothers and Catholic dissenters.  But the witness of my body tells me they are all wrong, and the Catholic Church is right.

The natural law has been called the “first grace,” and my sensitivity to the inclination that I had offended more than 28 years ago was a “first grace” to me.  I am deeply thankful to God for it.

Eventually, it lead me back to the Catholic Church.  I realized that what was written by the anonymous author of theDidache in the late 1st or early 2nd century, what Pope Pius XI had written in his encyclical Casti conubii in 1930, what Pope Paul VI had written in his encyclical Humanae vitae in 1968, what the Roman Catholic Church teaches today and will teach forever about artificial contraception is not a law imposed from the outside.

No, it is nothing but a confirmation of the truth which is already within us, which we will hear, if we but listen to the witness of our body.  The Church’s teaching on artificial contraception is not true because it is stated in Humanae vitae.  The Church’s teaching against artificial contraception is stated in Humane vitae because it is true.

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Andrew M. Greenwell is an attorney licensed to practice law in Texas, practicing in Corpus Christi, Texas.  He is married with three children.  He maintains a blog entirely devoted to the natural law called Lex Christianorum.  You can contact Andrew at agreenwell@harris-greenwell.com.

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