The 50th anniversary Humanae Vitae was marked on July 25th. As a Lutheran pastor, I don’t make a habit of reading papal documents, but this one deserves some attention and comment.
It was issued in the middle of one of the most turbulent times in our history. We were at the start of the Sexual Revolution. It was the beginning of a war on marriage, the most fundamental building block of society. It is still raging.
Under the slogan of “Free Love,” true love was attacked. The love that bound husband and wife in a permanent union to care for the children who were conceived by their love was replaced by an “anything goes” attitude that was enslaved to feelings and urges run amok.
The hot-button issue of the day was “birth control.” The Pill had come out in 1960 and Griswold v. Connecticut had recently been decided in favor of granting the right of married couples to use it. In this context, it was easy to dismiss Humanae Vitae as a weird “Catholic thing.”
Most protestants did just that. Even Catholics, in alarming numbers, privately dismissed it as the opinion of an out-of-touch pope. Secularists made fun of it and used it as one more reason to marginalize religion in the public square.
But Humanae Vitae was never just about “birth control.” It is about the very nature of human life. It is about the relationship between male and female. It is about marriage and family, children and the true nature of love. If you are interested in these things—and who isn’t?—you should at least familiarize yourself with this thoughtful encyclical.
In it you will find some remarkable predictions. For one, it foresaw increased “marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards.” At the time of its writing, the divorce rate in America had been pretty steady for years. In little more than a decade it doubled. Now we live in a culture pervaded by pornography were fewer children than ever live with their mother and father.
Another prediction was that men would “forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires.” Listen to most hip-hop artists, or consult the #MeToo movement to see how that prediction was right on the money.
Third, the Pope Paul VI predicted that unscrupulous government authorities would be tempted to use the levers of power to impose birth control on the unwilling. Unknown to most, this prediction was already being fulfilled. Already in the mid-sixties USAID began forcing foreign governments to implement birth control and sterilization policies as a condition of receiving food and medicine.
Foreign governments hungry for American money, but unbridled by Christian ethics, did horrible things to their citizens as a result. The resulting pain and injustice inflicted on foreign women from India to Africa should make America blush.
Finally, the encyclical foresaw that separating the begetting of children from marriage would lead to unlimited attempts to suppress and alter the human body. As predicted, today we see both medicine and science driving a wedge between the human body and the human mind.
When you treat people as if they were nothing but a mind carried around in a meaningless body the temptation to use drugs and scalpel to alter the body knows no bounds.
How could Pope Paul VI so accurately predict the future? Was he some sort of prophet? No. He was simply right about human nature. His predictions were based on simple facts. At the heart of Humanae Vitae are two basic facts. First, marriage is about the total gift of yourself—body and soul—to the other. Second, that total self-giving is intrinsically related to children.
You can observe these truths for yourself. They are at work in your own life and in the lives of your friends and family. You can see them in world history by noting which societies flourished and which societies floundered.
You can observe these principles through the lens of the social sciences. Hundreds of research studies have demonstrated the principles of Humanae Vitae. You can also observe these principles taught in the Christian Scriptures.
Humanae Vitae’s predictions were not based on some secret prophecy. They were based on the simple truth that marriage and children belong together. There is only one relationship that can lead to the procreation of children. Because it can, and often does, God has placed a wall of protection around marriage.
It is the responsibility of society to honor and support it. When we fail to do that, people are hurt. It is as simple as that. That wall of protection is for all three persons involved. The father, the mother, and the child all have unique vulnerabilities in a family. The institution of marriage protects all three.
Humanae Vitae remains a remarkable document. It’s not what you think it is. Fifty years later, it still speaks the wisdom of the ages. Even a Lutheran can admit that.
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