Why Humanae Vitae Will Always Matter

Humanly speaking, Pope Paul VI could not have known when he was writing the encyclical Humanae Vitae that the predictions he made would come to pass as they have.

In no. 17, the now-Blessed Pope warned that infidelity would rise, moral standards would fall, respect for women would wane, and government intrusion into peoples’ sexual and familial lives would wax. How he has been vindicated as prophetic.

In fact, the teachings of that encyclical are today in the cross hairs of the culture of death. The world simply cannot abide the insistence that sex and babies have an inherent, organic connection and that we sever this at our peril.

The word culture itself comes from the Latin cultus, meaning to till or cultivate, but also to worship. Culture is the ethos of “us.” And what does our current culture worship? Start the list with money, sex, and power. And what does the Church offer? She offers the antidote in the form of the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience – each of which providentially corrects the excesses of the false gods of the culture of death.

I argue that the culture war is primordially a war about sex: whether it has any objective purpose or meaning, and, if so, what that might be.

One side holds that sexual bonding has something objectively and ineluctably connected to babies. The other, that this bonding means whatever the participants want it to mean.

But principled rejection of contraception is not a Catholic thing per se any more than that psychoanalysis is a Jewish thing because Sigmund Freud developed it or that non-violent resistance is a Hindu thing because Mahatma Gandhi made it famous. In fact, both Freud and Gandhi publicly diagnosed birth control as sexually perverse and a fuel for male lust, respectively.

The history of birth control hides in plain sight. All the Protestant Reformers despised the practice, a unanimous position all the way up to 1930 when the Anglican Lambeth Conference permitted it “only in marriage, only under extraordinary circumstances.”

Most people are unaware that the laws forbidding the ownership, sale, and distribution of contraception were enacted by the Protestant lawmaker Anthony Comstock, who got the anti-birth control Comstock Act passed by Congress in 1873. This law forbade the delivery by U.S. mail, or by other modes of transportation, of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material, and anything related to abortion or contraceptives. This was the uncontroversial attitude of a mostly Protestant America for over a hundred years. One hundred years, from then (1873) to Roe V. Wade (1973), to be exact.

In the Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) decision, the Justices administered the coup de grâce of the Comstock era by accomplishing two things: they invented a mystical “right to privacy” in the Constitution by declaring that this right “emanated” from the Constitution as a “penumbra.”You know, like the soft glow around the moon during a solar eclipse. The defendant in the case, Estelle Griswold, was the local Planned Parenthood director of New Haven, CT. Can you guess the original name for Planned Parenthood until 1942?

The American Birth Control League.

But the culture of death is far more ambitious than establishing the right to order a condom or get an abortion. If it’s morally permissible to render sterile what is ordinarily fertile, then condemnation of things like same-sex behavior becomes a fool’s errand. Once the organic connection is severed between sexual intercourse and its natural end—the coming to be of new human beings—how can one argue persuasively against other forms of sexual perversion? Freud had the answer: you can’t.

Look what has happened since Humanae Vitae was widely rejected:

• Pornography became mainstream entertainment, as the late Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt became First Amendment heroes.

• The divorce rate skyrocketed thanks to the perception that adultery is immune from consequences (no-fault divorce laws helped the process).• Homosexuality became widely seen as no different than left-handedness, with some in the Church even suggesting that homosexuals bring some kind of special gifts.

• Gender dysphoria and the obsession with the biological impossibility of “changing one’s gender.” • The 2015 Obergefel v Hodges decision redefining marriage for the first time in US history in all 50 states is the terminus, the end game, of the mentality fostered by contraception. The logic of Humanae Vitae is inexorable, as are the consequences of kicking it to the curb.

At the level of logic, contraception is the theory, abortion the practice. As St. John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (1995), “despite their differences of nature and moral gravity, contraception and abortion are often closely connected, as fruits of the same tree” (n. 13)

Today, “green” is trendy. Everything has to be organic and uber-healthy. The environment is the new object of devotion that must be protected. Perhaps, and hopefully soon, this pro-naturalness outlook will translate into a basic respect for the environment known as a woman’s body.

Until then, the multi-billion dollar contraceptive industry continues to target women with a chemical concoction that produces side effects (to mention the least harmful ones) such as depression, decreased libido, bloating, and severe headaches. You know, the things women have fought patriarchy hard to get.

Notice that men have never been the medical guinea pigs in the campaign for sexual liberation. But they sure have reaped the benefits.