John Allen of the Globe has opined today that there are two key words
that capture why many church officials believe it’s so important to avoid what
they regard as false expectations of swift change to the church’s ban on
divorced and remarried Catholics receiving communion and the other sacraments:
Humanae Vitae, Paul VI's 1968 document reasserting the church’s traditional ban on birth control. It
rocked the world, Allen writes, "in part because the reforming energies of
the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) had led people to suspect change was just
around the corner, in part because the pope himself had created a commission to
study the issue." The outcome of the Pope’s evential reassertion
of the ban “soured public opinion on Pope Paul, in some ways inflicting a blow
from which his papacy never really recovered.”
On matters related to marriage and the family, the Church has always seen the fertility of the husband and wife as a gift from God and the end (telos) of marriage where children are
the fruit of the conjugal love, the total giving of self of husband and wife.
In this, husband and wife procreate; it is God who creates a new and immortal
soul at each conception, a reality of which Vatican II sought to remind the
faithful:
All should be persuaded that human life
and the task of transmitting it are not realities bound up with this world
alone. Hence they cannot be measured or perceived only in terms of it, but
always have a bearing on the eternal destiny of men. (Gaudium et Spes, No. 51)
Those disagreeing with Paul VI in Humanae Vitae are strangely silent on this conciliar teaching.
Contraception is evil because what it prevents; conception is an act of God.
St. Paul warned that the Christian should not hope for the Church’s wisdom to
see eye to eye with “the wisdom of the world,” (1 Cor 1:20) for her moral
teaching comes not from man but from God; Humanae
Vitae teaches that artificial contraception obstructs the will of God,
“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.” The language
of contraceptive intercourse says, so to speak, “I will give you all of myself,
my person except my God-given ability to make a new life.”
The other and, I
think, principal reason Catholics persist in ignoring what Our Lord wished to teach us about the proper use of our sexuality
is that contraception is a sin, and in speaking of it as an intrinsic evil the Catechism
reminds us that it, as does all sin,
separates us from God:
Sin
is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in
genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain
goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. It has been
defined as "an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal
law."
Sin
is an offense against God: "Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and
done that which is evil in your sight." Sin sets itself against God's love
for us and turns our hearts away from it. Like
the first sin, it is disobedience, a revolt against God through the will to
become "like gods," knowing and determining good and evil.
Sin is thus "love
of oneself even to contempt of God." In this proud self-exaltation, sin is
diametrically opposed to the obedience of Jesus, which achieves our salvation.
The end results of the contraceptive revolution that so
frightened Pope Paul were promiscuity, the disintegration of the family, crime,
and bitter relations between men and women, the poor among us paying the more
dear. I believe Paul VI would have been greatly saddened had he lived to
see all that developed in the final decades of the third millennium
in spite of his prophetic warnings in his encyclical, "from which
his papacy never really recovered.” I would only add that we too have as yet not recovered from the evils bestowed upon us by the contraceptive mentality.
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