News Item: : Humanae Vitae at 50!
(Category: Torch of The Faith News)
Posted by admin
Saturday 02 June 2018 - 09:12:44

panthermedia_00835813.jpg

A Welcome Celebration

As the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae approaches next month, it is most consoling to us as a contemporary married couple to witness Fr. Tim Finigan, Fr. Marcus Holden, Fr. Francis Marsden, Fr. John Saward, Canon Luiz Ruscillo and many other faithful English Catholic clergy, signing up to support a public letter affirming the wise and prophetic nature of Humanae Vitae.

We were similarly encouraged last month, when Bishop Athanasius Schneider and other Bishops of Kazakhstan released a pastoral letter expressing the same theme.

In recent years, we have come to realize that Humanae Vitae is not perfect: as a means of communicating the Church's Traditional teaching, it would do to more clearly express the ends of holy matrimony in their proper order. That is to say, the generation of new life should be clearly established first, and the perfection of spouses more clearly defined as second.

Nevertheless, Humanae Vitae's re-affirmation of the Catholic Church's perennial teaching on the illegitimacy of artifical birth control remains true, beautiful and good.

In that sense, and in terms of the clear warnings it gave about the future evils which would unfold - and indeed have since unfolded! - if its authentic teaching were to be ignored, then the encyclical was both timely and prophetic.

Yes, there it was, promulgated right in the middle of the crazy summer of '68; a clear sign of God's Providence and protection!

The Contraceptive Mentality is Divisive and Sterile

The tragic resistance to Humanae Vitae which ravaged and hindered the Church's mission back then, and which continues to do so today, was always a sterile, divisive and degrading phenomenon.

But then, that sounds like a perfect description of contraception itself: being that contraception is sterile, divisive and degrading in its very nature.
cc515040ae89c411ecb80cb7ce90f4c5.jpg
The truth of the matter is that no one who has received the grace to think the issues through, and who really loved God, spouse, family and neighbour, would ever desire to resort to contraception.

All contraceptive methods force a barrier between God and each of the spouses; as well as between both of the spouses amongst themselves. That is the very nature of the thing.

Banishing God and the totality of one's spouse from marital intimacy is no way to achieve peace; much less is it a way to create and maintain unified marital harmony.

All methods of contraception have at their core the tragic assertion of selfish will to power above the involvement of God, the natural means of fertility and the genuine care of one's beloved.

Of themselves, these facts should be sufficient grounds to reject contraception.

But to them must also be added the fact that all barrier methods of contraception constitute a form of mutual abuse; one which isolates and idolizes sexual pleasure. When one stops to think about it, the seeking of this one dimension of sexuality as an end in itself is the very hallmark of the grave sinner, the narcissist, the uninformed and the immature.

Worse still is the resort to methods like the IUD-Coil, Pill, Mini Pill and the so-called Morning After Pill. Not only do these include the sinfulness of barrier methods, but they also compound it; for in various degrees, each of these interventions includes an abortifacient component, which can destroy newly conceived human life, as well as having potential long-term risks to fertility and even health.

And tell me, what man in his right mind and heart would want to poison his wife's body, or endanger his offspring, with powerful chemicals deliberately taken? And what woman, who was operating without being coerced, and who really understood, respected and upheld her own dignity, would ever want to take such things?

No, these are not the ways of true love.

True Love Ways

Love worthy of the name is always both self-giving and self-sacrificing in its very essence. It seeks the wholeness and good of the other, even to the point of desiring and working toward their eternal well-being. Real married love is natural, limitlessly expressive, pro-creative and unitive. It wants to go beyond the finite, beyond artificial limitations, to give, to build up and to unify. The notion of taking, holding back, destroying, or sundering is not natural to that kind of love.
220px-cristo_crucificado.jpg
Ultimately, Our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross is the ultimate and definitive model of true love. It is a love which cannot abide holding back anything that is good, virtuous or whole. 

But Out Lord on the Cross is not only a model for us. In addition, He is the very source of the graces that we, as limited and fallen creatures, need in order to live true love in this world. This is another reason why we must pray constantly and have recourse to the sacraments for spiritual nourishment and strength.

Give the Kids a Break!

Back when I used to go around giving pro-life presentations in high schools, I discovered a tragic consequence of the dominant acceptance of contraception in the culture.

I speak of the fact that so many teenagers had learned all about contraception, before they had been given the chance to really dwell on the wonders of conception.

The real con in all of the contraception education, through which they had all been pushed by the age of 14, (it'll be much younger by now), was evidenced in the fact that so many of them struggled to say the word conception. So deeply ingrained in their minds was the ideology of the contraceptive mentality, that when they tried to say ''conception'' they regularly stuttered, ''con...con..contra... contra...ception... I mean conception.''

In schools representing many social backgrounds across the country, I was astounded to find so consistently that the word contraception was more natural to the thinking of so many young students, than was the more natural and fundamental word and fact of conception.
fig17.jpg
What a tragedy that is for them and for the future!

Love - The Truth

All young people have the right to receive the meaning of true love and life.

Married love is a beautiful gift. It is so incredible that it should not ever be thwarted or hindered by the disintegrating impacts of contraception.

The Church's True Teachings Keep Love Fresh

About eight years ago, back in the days when we were still able to go out and give catechetical presentations, Angie and I hosted a weekend of marriage catechesis in a parish near to the south coast in Cornwall. It was an awesome weekend; after which the priest let us stay on in his presbytery for a kind of ''busman's holiday'' for another 5 days near to the roaring sea and rolling surf.   
cornwall_060_-_copy.jpg
On the Sunday evening of the marriage catechesis weekend, we gave an evening for students from the local university. There were young people in their twenties and a couple of mature students in their middle-years. All of them were unmarried. It was a more informal, and less didactic, session than we had hosted on the Friday for teenagers and parents, or on the Saturday for engaged and married couples.

Instead, we gathered together in a comfy lounge with the parish priest and the students, with a healthy supply of coffee, fruit juice and nibbles, to take questions and discuss themes relating to Catholic sexual ethics.

During the evening, a young man in his early 20's asked us when we got married. He expressed great surprise when we told him that, at that point, we had just recently celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary.

He said he did not believe us and suggested a couple of times that we had only just got married. When we asked him why he was so insistent on this point, he asserted that he had never met anyone who had been married ''that long'' and who were so obviously still in love, so close and so happy together.

I was a little taken aback and initially laughed that he was a little young to be so cynical! However, as I began to think about it, I realized and responded that it was my belief that God's graces and gifts in matrimony and, by exension to these, the living out of the teachings expressed in Humanae Vitae, keep marriage relationships fresh, devoted and peaceful.

Avoiding contraception is a fundamental part of keeping communication open, whilst at once protecting one's spouse from being objectified or used; problems which are so common in today's society as to be almost normative. So many women today feel themselves to be unloved and used through contraception, which does not ever bring out what is best and most noble in men. Other women have become hardened through this sense of being used and, when they have not turned away from natural male-female relations, have frequently transformed themselves into the hard-drinking, boorish ''ladette'' culture, which destroys feminity and apes male selfishness and lust. None of this brings happiness to anyone.  

It is only in keeping God in the centre of marriage, a daily task and gift, as well as remaining open to Him, to potential life and to one's spouse, that real married love can find fruition.

And in doing so, again by God's grace, this provides an icon of God's Love as an eternal communion of Divine Persons, and of His love for mankind.

To the extent that, please God, we may have received and lived those mysteries by God's grace, we give thanks to Him and express our indebtedness to the Magisterial teachings found in Humanae Vitae.

Not forgetting, of course, the writings of St. Paul, Casti Connubii, Familiaris Consortio, or the Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality either!
cana_17.jpg

The Wine of True Marriage

Had Humanae Vitae received the welcome and implementation with the vigour it deserved, the Church and world would have looked very different than they do today.

The Church would have been stronger; numerically, qualitatively and spiritually.

There would have been a great many more marriages, and a larger proportion of those marriages would have survived.

There would have been a great deal less discord, division and selfishness in the Church, in families and in society.

Women and their female dignity would have been held in much higher esteem than they now are; whilst men would have been less selfish, more mature and, fundamentally, more masculine than they are.

There would have been much less acceptance of homosexualization: the contraceptive sundering of sexual pleasure from its procreative and unitive purposes has led to the general acceptance of homosexual acts and relationships.

Importantly, given last weekend's awful abortion referendum in Ireland, there would have been much less acceptance of abortion, and thus many less abortions. The sheer scale of the ongoing abortion holocaust means that one really can speak in terms of a ''lost generation''. 

Perhaps, too, if Humanae Vitae had been accepted, Europe might now have been looking at a future that was Christian, instead of one that is Islamic.

In light of all this, there can be few things as distorted or disedifying as the spectacle of Catholic priests who have made dissent from Humanae Vitae a distinguishing characteristic of their priesthood. After all, that was always a hippys' battle anyway. And now, it is the tragic redoubt of the aging hippy.

On the other hand, it is marvellous to see priests like those mentioned in our introduction - many of whom have decades of experience in helping young families, pro-life doctors and pro-life counsellors - signing up so publicly to affirm and celebrate Humanae Vitae as the 50th anniversary approaches this summer.

We pray that, by the help of the Holy Family, their good initiative will help many other people to also discover the perennial freshness of Christ's true teachings through the Catholic Church.

After all, Humanae Vitae is all about giving life!



This news item is from Torch of The Faith
( http://www.torchofthefaith.com/news.php?extend.1703 )