April 2018
The first instalment of a three-part series on the turbulent history of the providential encyclical that re-stated the truth about human life. The author is a highly qualified, vastly experienced medical doctor and world-renowned champion of the pro-life cause. The series will conclude in June: the anniversary month of the encyclical's publication.
Humanae Vitae at 50
Catholicism and the intrinsic evil of contraception
In 1968 Pope Paul VI published Humanae Vitae (HV). Therein, to the utter horror and fury of the modern world, including that of many Catholic bishops, periti, theologians, priests and laity, he dared to re-affirm the traditional teaching of the Church concerning the beauty and goodness of the marital embrace, while re-stating its unwavering condemnation of the intrinsic evil of all contraception in all circumstances and situations.
Apart from prophesying what grave evils contraception would inevitably cause to morality, women, families and society, there was really nothing new in what the Pope had to say. He simply confirmed Catholic teaching on contraception that went right back to the apostolic age, as in the Didache: namely, that nature itself and the natural law of reason irrefutably affirm that contraception is profoundly harmful; unnatural; damages marriages; hurts families; and gives rise to great social injuries of other varieties. Teaching, in other words, that confirms the stark reality that Sin has social consequences!
The Catholic Church has always held that the use of contraception is evil. Humanae Vitae specifically identifies it as “intrinsically evil”. The use of contraception is inescapably evil in and of itself, irrespective of the various situations and circumstances surrounding its use.
Contraception frustrates and perverts the essential reality of the biological, identity and purpose of the reproductive organs. Amongst contraception’s many evil effects — some of which are considered later in this series — is that contraception destroys the biological and spiritual unity of marital love and the marital embrace. It opposes and frustrates the inescapable essence, identity, purpose and function of the external and internal genitalia, namely their design and existence as reproductive organs.
Contraception seduces its practitioners and devotees into believing that the use of the genitalia is primarily for pleasure and leads them to ignore, deny and disregard the biological reality and truth that the external and internal genitalia are reproductive organs.
A contraceptive mentality holds that pregnancy is an unwelcome accident that must be prevented in the pursuit of sexual pleasure, unless and until the couple deliberately choose to want a child. A tragic and common outcome of this exclusively hedonistic way of thinking about sexual union and its pleasures is the readiness of a contracepting couple to resort to abortion should they accidentally, unintentionally conceive a child.
Contraception destroys the interdependence and reciprocity of men and women and their co-operation with God in conceiving a child. In frustrating and destroying the reproductive purpose and meaning and the natural outcome of sexual union, contraception and sterilisation also essentially destroys gender identity.
Contraception is used to prevent the conception and birth of children who intrinsically in and of themselves are of infinite and eternal value, having been made in the image and likeness of God and endowed by Him with an immortal soul. The parents, through the means of their reproductive organs co-operate with God in the bringing into existence a child. Contraception excludes God the Creator, author of all life and love from the marital act. Or as Paul VI simply taught in Humanae Vitae: contraception separates the unitive and procreative aspects of the marital embrace.
To summarise: Contraception and the mentality that motivates it, opposes and frustrates the intrinsic reproductive nature of human sexuality. This procreative identity, urge and meaning is obvious in the anatomy, physiology, psychology and instincts of males and females, and in their relationship of love and responsibility towards each other, their children and their extended families. The essence of contraception is contrary to reason in separating the pleasure of sex from its procreative purpose. In so doing, it excludes the Creator Himself.
The Catholic Church ‘Contra Mundum’
In publishing HV, Pope Paul VI, besides contradicting the world, directly contradicted the opinion of a Pontifical Commission. Established by Pope John XXIII, this Commission, most of whose members enthusiastically supported contraception, had been expanded by Paul following the death of John.
Pope Paul’s encyclical acted against deep and strongly running streams of hedonism and sexual libertarianism. He infuriated the devoted disciples of Malthus. He contradicted and dismayed an ‘enlightened’ West: a world that virtually en masse had apostatised from Christianity and its redemptive culture and morality, preferring instead two new ‘religions’ — secular humanism and moral relativism — the predominant features of which are denial of truth, moral absolutes and moral authority; particularly morality applicable to human sexuality.
Celebrating pagan sexual depravity
Having, consigned Christ and Christian morality to the garbage disposal sites of history, the prospect of a neo-pagan society primed to pour copious libations to Eros, Dionysus, Kronos and Bacchus was simply exquisite.
The world was outraged by the sheer arrogance of Catholicism daring to tell it, once again, that contraception was intrinsically evil. Then, to heap insult upon injury, Paul VI presumed to concoct laughably insane ‘prophesies’ about so many evils that contraception would bring in its wake. Such as: contraception causing damage to the dignity and role of women; to marriage; children; young people; families; and society. Subsequently, all of Pope Paul’s Prophesies made in the bitterly reviled Chapter 17 of HV, have been amply and terrifyingly fulfilled.
Pundits and soothsayers were supremely confident that contraception would most certainly be approved by the Church. The neo-pagan ‘civilised world’ anticipated with a growing sense of glee that satyrs, nymphs and fauns would soon, figuratively speaking, be seen gambolling and frolicking about in the Vatican Gardens.
Deadly sins, false prophets, and traitors
This delusional confidence was reinforced by many factors, including multitudes of shocking sins of commission and omission committed by very long lists of Catholic notables. These included bishops, priests and theologians such as Archbishop Dennis Hurley, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng, Bernhard Häring, Charles Curran, Richard McCormick, Gregory Baum, Richard McBrien, Cardinal Franz Koenig, et al.. Also many laity, such as John Rock and Jack Dominian, who gloried in the public adulation as vogue cheerleaders for contraception and trendy sexuality. Innumerable gravely wrong opinions about contraception and ‘the great need for it,’ were broadcast by ‘Catholic’ publications such as The Tablet.
Many prophesied that the Church would finally and inevitably come to her senses and realise the error of her sadly superannuated ways. Accordingly, they believed she would — nay, she must do the obvious and only sensible and proper thing by endorsing and embracing contraception. It was inevitable, they believed, that Liberalism would be fully vindicated. Two thousand years on, common sense would finally prevail in Rome! A happy nuptial union of Modernism and Moral Relativism would issue forth to the world sure guidance and knowledge about how things should really be done. Mankind — still groaning under the insufferable yoke of Catholic morality — would then, and only then, be lead to sunny uplands of unrestricted sexual joy and abandon.
This reflected the demand in the Swinging Sixties to ‘Get the Pope out of the bedroom’ — as if any residual semblances of morality are only to be found lurking, along with the slippers, under beds. Moderns had come to believe so strongly that if indeed, once-upon-a-time — in the world of primitive legends, in the mists of antiquity concerning noble and chivalrous men and ladies of stunning spiritual virtue and beauty — there might once have been concepts such as sexual purity, the time for such quaint ideas had now happily expired.
These views, in synergy with many other factors not considered in this series, strengthened expectations that the Church would be compelled to jettison its dogmas, moral codes, teachings and beliefs: to lift, finally and decisively, its despised embargo of a sexual free-for-all in society.
Typical of this confidence among dissidents prior to HV — that the Church would inevitably renounce its divine role as “a sign of contradiction” [Lk 2:34] and run up the white flag of secular convergence — was the behaviour of the world-famous Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston. Superstar of the American hierarchy, and close friend of the Kennedy’s, Cushing openly supported and protected from all Catholic criticism, Dr. John Rock, the ‘Catholic’ Father of the Pill. The irony of Rock’s development of something specifically designed to prevent fatherhood by pharmacologically sanctifying the sins of Cain, Onan, Sodom and Herod, was somehow overlooked!
Fortunately for the modern idolators of Baal, Eros and Priapus, the Old Testament measures for dealing with false prophets were waved away; deemed excessive in these ‘civilised’ times. And besides, such tried and tested remedies had been “mislaid”: both in Secret Vatican Archives and a papal writing desk called “Barbarigo,” where so many other secrets remain hidden — including one of ultimate importance for the Church and humanity, given to us in sorrow and love by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917.
Catastrophic failure to dowse raging fires of dissent
The flaming delusions of libertines, inside and outside the Church, that Catholic truth concerning contraception would most certainly change, was fanned still further by the lengthy delay between the Majority Recommendations of the Papal Commission being made known — its members leaking their report to the press in 1966 — and Paul VI eventually, some three years too late, publishing Humanae Vitae.
Those inordinately long years of vacillation and procrastination did great harm, allowing advocates of sexual license to run amok within and without the Church.
Paul's God-given duty was to stabilise the Barque of Peter and navigate it safely through the raging storms of Modernism, relativism and dissent that threatened to engulf and sink it. He had to act against continuous savage sabotage of the ship by senior and junior crew alike, and by sizeable numbers of lay passengers. The dissidents opened seacocks; damaged the compass; hindered, bullied and partially incapacitated the captain. They burnt navigational charts, logbooks and training manuals containing the wisdom of the previous 261 master mariners who had steered and captained the ship.
Although he finally responded to the unavoidable moral responsibility that rested fairly and squarely on his shoulders, Paul was not equal to the challenge. By neglecting to act promptly and with authority against bold and arrogant dissidents, he allowed the ship to drift ever closer towards shipwreck. Largely imitated by ensuing pontificates, this papal weakness and negligence has given rise to the perfect storm of resurgent Modernism and Apostasy which now threatens the Church. For, the current, well documented papal policy of promoting dissident, heretical and immoral prelates to key positions in the Church can only lead to terrifying and unprecedented disaster; capsizing the Barque of Peter.
The effect of the treacherous leak of the Majority Report of the Papal Commission, and Pope Paul's sluggish reaction to the crisis, was to convince the advocates and practitioners of lascivious sexuality, as well as uninformed Catholic laity, that contraception was not in the least evil. They reasoned that if it was sinful, or “intrinsically evil,” then surely the Pope, or their local bishop, or parish priest would have said so emphatically and clearly.
The almost universal failure of the Pope and local bishops to discipline dissidents, or even to gently correct or reprimand them, further encouraged and amplified revolt and rebellion against HV, Catholic authority, and the Faith itself. Accordingly, many clergy and laity came to believe that contraception was wholly acceptable; that Catholics must be free to decide for themselves, without any qualms of conscience or guilt-trips whatsoever, about their use of ‘hugely beneficial’ contraceptives.
Deadly Ignorance of Catholics
And so it came to pass. Fifty years after HV, Catholics rarely bother to seek counsel in the matter of contraception. Those who do are simply told to follow their conscience like everyone else. This false and dangerous advice is dispensed by clerics with no understanding of their priestly obligation to form and inform the Catholic conscience; a spiritual and intellectual lacuna which owes much to a very poor formation during their seminary years, when they were indoctrinated by the teaching and publications of dissenting Modernist theologians. Throughout the 40+ years of my pro-life vocation, I frequently encountered this astonishing ignorance of most priests about what the Church held and taught. Indeed, many of them had never even bothered to read Humanae Vitae. Nor, during the years of their theological studies had HV ever been recommended, never mind mandated reading.
Another tragic experience was that parish priests very rarely bothered to attend pro-life talks in their own parish halls: talks that always included orthodox Catholic teaching on contraception, abortion and human sexuality. On the rare occasions when priests did attend, a significant number of them disputed and undermined — subtly or, on a few more memorable occasions, openly — Catholic teaching on these vital matters.
This clerical ignorance and hostility has inevitably shaped an equally ignorant and aggressive laity. In the first place, most Catholics have never heard of Humanae Vitae. (Just as they have never heard of Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pius X, 1907; Casti Connubii, Pius XI, 1930; or John Paul II's Familiaris Consortio, 1981; Veritatis Splendor 1993; and Evangelium Vitae,1995.) And as regards aggression, one of the very greatest disappointments in giving pro-life talks in schools, both public and Catholic, was the resistance to the pro-life message that we frequently encountered among students and their teachers in so many Catholic schools and colleges. At times, such resistance was fierce to the point of violence.
Catholicism vs Monstrous False Religions
Ever since the Church of England’s tragic acceptance of contraception at Lambeth in 1930, all other Protestant sects, as well as Jews, Buddhists, Moslems and Hindus, have incrementally advanced from approval of contraception to approval of murder by abortion. Some Bishops of the Church of England, sitting in the House of Lords, voted for the UKs 1967 Abortion Act. A monstrous evil, signed into Law by Queen Elizabeth herself, Head of the Church of England. Since then, at least 8.7 million children have been aborted in the UK alone.
In the USA, since the legalisation of abortion in the appalling Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973, more than 60 million children have been aborted.
World-wide estimates hold that at least 80 million children are murdered by medical practitioners in surgical abortions each year, thus easily surpassing the estimated 60 million who were killed during the total duration of the Second World War. Yet this number does not take into reckoning abortions by means of various so-called contraceptives. Pharmacists for Life estimate that there are about five times as many abortions produced by ‘contraceptives’ than by surgical means.
In Humanae Vitae, the Catholic Church, not for the first time in its long history, stood arrayed in sheer spiritual magnificence against the Protestant sects and all other religions. Institutions which, without exception, had rushed headlong, and still to this day continue to rush with Gadarene urgency to incense the temples and altars of Moloch and Baal. Thus, they turn their religions and places of worship into actual ante-chambers of Hell — filled with the morally deluded, perverted and spiritually dead, and with the debris of destroyed ideals of truth, moral authority, marital love and responsibility. Their complicity cannot be overstated. For, in their synods and temples, they have steadily accommodated and acclimatised themselves to the overpowering stench of sexual depravity — all the while casting their moribund eyes away from the mountainous piles of aborted children that their terminally-ill religions condone and augment. None more so than the Church of England.
Lambeth : Abomination of Desolation
Thirty years before the introduction of “The Pill”, the decision of the 1930 Lambeth Conference to permit contraception had exponentially propelled the ‘sexual revolution’ onwards. It was against this Anglican sell out that Pius XI — fully realising the peril to humanity — reacted immediately: publishing, on the very last day of 1930, Casti Connubii;a superb defence of morality, marriage, life and love. It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast between the sluggish response by Paul VI to the threat to civilisation revolving around reproduction, sexuality and the Pill in the ‘swinging sixties,’ and the instant response by Pius XI to the Lambeth catastrophe: a conference which ignited the work of demons and their human agents, surrogates, enablers and fellow travellers in the realm of human sexuality.
Today, nearly 90 years after Lambeth lit the fuse, the efforts of that wicked coalition are now clearly evident in: rampant sexual promiscuity; ‘shack-up and hook-up’ cultures; divorce; abandoned women and
pandemics of venereal diseases; poverty of single mothers; physical and sexual abuse of women and children; rape; homosexuality; prurient sex-education; pornography; a holocaust of surgical abortions as well as untold numbers of abortions caused by “contraceptives”.
Catholicism: Mother and Protector of the Culture of Life
Post-Lambeth, Catholicism alone stood loyal to Almighty God, and in sole guardianship of Christian civilisation to which the Church, in faithfully following and spreading the teaching of Our Most Holy Redeemer, had given birth.
The Catholic Church developed the Culture of Life, and immunised it against virulent moral diseases and insanities, protecting, nourishing and defending it against all the foul miasmas and detritus of the long ages that have elapsed since its foundation by Our Divine Saviour Himself.
In Humanae Vitae Pope Paul VI tardily, but eventually and with clarity re-affirmed the holiness, dignity and beauty of married love and reproduction. Characteristics, then as now, so powerfully and universally under attack in prevalent pandemics of sexual depravity.
Despite fierce and wildly ominous tremors shaking its foundations in Rome, the Church still stands against the torrential flood of sexual license and moral anarchy; the sheer speed and volume of which is damaging and eroding walls of moral constraint, sweeping all before it in a seemingly final headlong fall into the abyss.
New generation of rebels
Far from standing firmly and defiantly with the Church, however, the Church-quakes of rebellion and dissent provoked by Humanae Vitae continue on. Banshee wails of anger and insults continue to be directed against those faithful to HV and orthodox Catholic teaching. Some Catholic theologians mockingly refer to HV as “Paul’s Epistle to the Fallopians.” In other words, we are faced with the same diabolic spirit that led cardinals, individual bishops and even whole hierarchies in various countries to apostatise over HV.
The traitorous “Winnipeg Statement” of the Canadian Bishops springs immediately to mind. While the scandalous “Land o’ Lakes Statement” saw the most famous Catholic Universities in the USA, mainly in response to Humanae Vitae, declare their independence from the Catholic Magisterium. At the same time, in the encyclical's aftermath, Catholic schools, colleges, universities, and many Catholic hospitals employed, harboured and honoured those who revolted against HV, and who openly taught, inculcated, and organised disobedience to it.
The same kinds of dissolute individuals and rebellious institutions continue to euphemise their betrayal of God, His Church and mankind by calling their rebellion and apostasy, “dissent” — even shamelessly depicting such as “loyal and conscientious dissent”.
Many individual Catholic bishops, priests, laity and educational institutions — together with international organisations such as the UN, The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, USAID, British Overseas Development and other institutions whose names are legion — actively continue to oppose HV. Just as many Catholic educational institutions, under the cloak of “academic freedom” continue to revolt against Catholic principles of education in defiance of John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990).
Now, however, most of the original old-guard of anti-HV cadres — so greatly intent on demolishing the opposition of the Catholic Church to “contraception” in the immediate aftermath of HV's publication — are dead. But, their malignant spectres still roam around and about, initiating and encouraging new generations of apostate clergy and laity that have sprung up to replace them.
True goodness soon to be undone?
As noted above, down the half-century since its publication, the truth of the prophesies of Pope Paul VI concerning the frightful harm that contraception would inflict on society, are everywhere apparent. Nonetheless, although submerged by this evidence, modern-day dissidents still refuse to acknowledge the evil of “contraception” and their own appalling roles in facilitating and encouraging this utter disaster. Here, Psalm 113 is apposite: “They have mouths, and yet are silent; eyes they have, and yet are sightless; ears they have, and want all hearing; noses, and no smell can reach them; hands unfeeling, feet unstirring; never a sound their throats may utter.”
On the contrary, by the grace of God, those involved in the pro-life movement are not deaf, dumb and blind to "the signs of the times" [Matt. 16:3]. They are deeply grateful for Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, as well as its magnificent 1930 antecedent Casti Connubii, and its powerful 1999 reinforcement Evangelium Vitae. And yet, while realising and appreciating the importance and significance of these documents, they are acutely aware that opponents of HV, inside and outside the Church, are once again chortling with delight at the prospect of a forthcoming approval of “contraception” — as the outcome of Pope Francis ordering, in June 2017, a Commission to re-examine and re-evaluate Humanae Vitae.