June-July 2018
In this anniversary month of the encyclical's publication, the esteemed author concludes his
hard-hitting series; pondering once again the real and frightening prospect of a papal sell out.
Humanae Vitae at 50
Is Humane Vitae destined for the scrapheap?
There are ever more increasingly strong indications that Pope Francis will some way or another permit contraception.
Among these is his rehabilitation of dissident moral theologian Bernhard Häring — who against all indisputable scientific evidence that a new human individual comes into being at conception, proclaimed that "before the twenty-fifth to fortieth day, the embryo cannot be considered a human person."
If Häring’s absurd ideas are adopted, then it becomes possible that contraception will be allowed. Also, Häring’s ideas could be used to allow abortion up to the 25th day after conception! In addition, apart from his advocacy of contraception and sterilisation, there is also Häring's self-contradictory endorsement of artificial insemination.
Recently, two magnificent articles about the moral theology of Bernhard Häring have been published and both are available on the web: Bernard Häring and his Medical Ethics, by Dr Pravin Thevathasan; and Pope Francis and Bernard Häring: The literally infernal cheek of dissent, by Dr Jeff Mirus. Both authors provide insights into Häring’s theology, and some understanding of how far Häring’s ideas have been incorporated into this pontificate.
Could it be possible that this Pope, who relied on some very questionable scientific opinions in writing Laudato Si (while excluding opinions from scientists who held contrary views), will seek the opinions of those who might uphold Häring’s views?
The Catholic Herald of 12 February 2018 reported that Rabbi Fishel Szlajen, appointed by Pope Fancis to the newly constituted Pontifical Academy for Life, supports abortion in certain circumstances. Another member, Rabbi Avraham Steinberg said the unborn child has "no human status" before 40 days. After 40 days, it has "a certain status of a human being, not full status." Another newly appointed member, Professor Nigel Biggar said abortion was permissible before 18 weeks, adding: "It’s not clear that a human foetus is the same kind of thing as an adult."
The idea of "personhood" and the lack thereof was the one that led Jews Gypsies, Poles, Russians, the mentally and physically handicapped, Catholic priests, as well as everyone else the Nazis wished to include in the category of ‘lacking personhood’ — untermenschen —to be exterminated in the Holocaust.
When theologians are deadly
If Häring had been more precise in deciding when a human embryo becomes a human person, it would have very much facilitated life or death decisions about abortive contraceptives and surgical abortions among his ardent devotees. Clearly, the age of the human embryo would have to very carefully measured, to allow killing only up until a specifically exact time — when "personhood" suddenly arrives.
A worrying detail for Häring’s devoted disciples would be the vagueness of his astonishing dogma of "personhood" at "between 25 and 40 days." His grossly unscientific ideas surrounding this gradual development of human "personhood" are seemingly based on the work of Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist.
Haeckel committed crude scientific frauds in attempting to show that — in the development of human embryos and foetuses — they pass through all the evolutionary stages of lower forms of life. He drew pictures of developing embryos of various species, deleting and suppressing the totally unique human aspects of growing human embryos. Additionally, he deleted in drawings he had obtained from other biologists, the clear differences in embryological development between different species. His fraud was aimed at substantiating his Darwinian religion.
Being able to justify abortion before the sudden appearance of "personhood" might explain Häring choosing to suck this number out of his theological thumb. In any event, he obviously discounted from his moral theology of "non-personhood before the 25th day", those revelations about the beginning of life found in Psalm 139 and in Jeremiah 1:5.
Moreover, he would have needed to ignore John the Baptist leaping in his mother’s womb as he perceived the presence of Jesus, some few days after His conception, possibly not yet even implanted in the womb of His Most Holy Mother. For, the Gospel tells us that Mary went in haste to visit her cousin, almost certainly arriving at Elizabeth's home in Ain Karem before Häring's arbitrary cut-off point of 25 days (Lk 1:39-56).
Häring's delusions can be used to justify the pernicious idea that in our growth we progressively gain value as ‘persons’ after the onset of "personhood", and that as we suddenly or progressively lose personality, as in strokes and dementia, we also become less human. Whether or not he came to hold such wildly dangerous views via Haeckel, it is astonishing that he developed them in an age of incredible advances in embryological and scientific knowledge about human development before birth.
If "self-awareness" in some degree or other holds the key to Häring’s idea of "personhood", then it would leave those who lack self-awareness, or have it only in lesser ways — as in brain damage, coma or advanced Alzheimer’s — liable to be classified as ‘non-persons’; or, to put this concept in Häring’s native German, to be classified as untermenschen.
In fact, it is not at all possible to measure or quantify "personhood" — particularly in the womb. A lack of "personhood" is a contrivance to justify abortion and infanticide, as we find in the ‘ethics’ of philosopher Peter Singer. While doctors who promote euthanasia refer to patients who for all intents and purposes, lack self-awareness or "personhood", as "vegetables", "human cabbages" and "organ donors."
And so we return once again to the abhorrent Nazi notion of untermenschen, even as we proceed once more towards re-commissioning Auschwitz. (In this respect, there is an uncanny similarity in the familial histories of Peter Singer and Henry Kissinger; both of whose Jewish parents and families escaped death in Nazi extermination camps.)
The banners of darkness boldly unfurl
On 8 January 2018, LifeSiteNews.com reported the following: "New Academy for Life Italian moral theologian Fr. Maurizio Chiodi said at a December 14 [2017] public lecture entitled Re-reading Humanae Vitae (1968) in the light of Amoris Laetitia (2016) at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome that there are “circumstances — I refer to Amoris Laetitia, Chapter 8 — that precisely for the sake of responsibility, require contraception.”
In such circumstances, he said,
"an artificial method for the regulation of births could be recognised as an act of responsibility that is carried out, not in order to radically reject the gift of a child, but because in those situations responsibility calls the couple and the family to other forms of welcome and hospitality."
Despite Catholic morality holding that "the ends do not justify the means" and "circumstances don’t change the morality of a human act", Fr. Chiodi believes that an individual or a couple jointly, can commit the mortal sin of contraception as an act of "responsibility", and may even be compelled to do so, depending on the circumstances. Here he takes his cues from the reasoning of Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia.
Can it be remotely possible that Fr. Chiodi is so ignorant about the many varieties and the various mechanisms of actions of contraceptives, that he dares to speak of contraception without differentiating between real contraceptives — such as condoms, diaphragms, spermicides and coitus interruptus — and the other varieties with their dreadful abortive effects such as IUDs, hormonal pills and injections?
His behaviour in so speaking — before an audience in the renowned Gregorian University — can only be described as culpable homicidal ignorance. But his and similar opinions, tragically false and whacky as they are, may well result in the Pope approving of generic ‘contraception’, with unknown numbers of abortions being caused as a result.
There is so much more that is profoundly objectionable in Fr. Chiodi’s attempted demolition of morality. But once again, while talking about ‘contraception’, a moral theologian — and in this case a key member of the "Commission to re-evaluate and re-examine Humanae Vitae" — avoids the brutal reality that most commonly used methods of contraception are abortive.
Therefore, Chiodi, in promoting generic ‘contraception’ which alone, of itself is intrinsically evil, is also promoting the possible indiscriminate murder of human embryos. Then to augment this utter catastrophe, he holds, quite incredibly, that the use of contraceptives is “responsible and even compulsory at times”.
Truly, some statements coming from the Vatican’s highly favoured sons are both bizarre and anarchically immoral.
On the OnePeterFive website (9/1/18), Professor Josef Seifert provides a superb dissection, analysis and rebuttal of Fr. Chiodi’s morally destructive and dangerous ideas.
Whoever has heard of sexual abstinence?
In the growing expectation that the Church will soon abandon its bi-millennial proscription of contraception, recent published articles display a shocking failure to consider the possibility that a husband and wife are able, by God’s grace and the graces that the Sacrament of Marriage confers on them, to totally and permanently abstain from sexual intercourse, especially when there are serious reasons for them to do so. When, for example, there is a risk of death of a wife during pregnancy; or of her husband transmitting a serious disease to her such as AIDS.
Naturally, arising from this specific theological blindness, many presently fashionable theologians express doubt about the perpetual Holy Virginity of The Most Blessed Virgin Mother of God and of St. Joseph her most chaste spouse. In short, they doubt God’s grace and heroic virtue!
The failure of so many moral theologians, most of whom are priests, even to consider the idea that lay Catholics might be able to observe total abstinence for vital and noble reasons, seems to indicate something profoundly defective in their own ideas of grace, love, virtue and their own priestly vows of chastity.
Periodic abstinence — by way of Natural Fertility Regulation; aka Natural Family Planning (NFP) — may be resorted to for other less compelling reasons: when, for example, should pregnancy occur, the pregnancy would not hold life-threatening risks for the mother nor harm for the child.
On the very rare occasions that NFP is ever mentioned at all, its use is generally, uncritically and enthusiastically advocated as an unconditionally approved variety of Catholic Contraceptive. Indeed, it is wrongly presented as the preferred Catholic nostrum in avoiding pregnancy and as “The Catholic answer to The Pill.”
Ominous portents
Bernhard Häring worked closely with one of his protegés, the notorious Charles Curran, to foment, organise and spread "dissent" against HV in the USA, Canada and Western Europe. Francis extolled Häring and his ideologies when speaking during the 2016 meeting in Rome of Jesuit leaders from around the world. The wicked endorsement is typical of numerous other indications that this Pope intends to normalise contraception.
To begin, the mere fact that Francis has set up a "Commission to re-evaluate and re-examine Humane Vitae" is alarming. Despite assurances that "the four theologians specialising in marriage and family life are studying Vatican archival material with a view of telling the whole story of how and why Blessed Paul VI wrote his encyclical Humanae Vitae on married love", many Catholics fear that great evil is afoot.
Mgr. Marengo a member of the Commission, told Vatican Radio, that "he and three other Italian professors are conducting their research with the goal of showing the encyclical’s place among 'all of the very important and fruitful things the Church has said on marriage and family in the past 50 years'." Also, he went on to say, "from a historical point of view, it is important that theologians formally examine and document the process that led to the encyclical’s publication."
Out of these statements very worrying questions arise.
1. Why, if the aim is only to do as they claim, are theologians involved and not Church historians?
2. Does re-interpreting Humanae Vitae in the light of Amoris Laetitia mean devaluing and contradicting HV, as the aforementioned Fr. Chiodi is already busy doing?
Further flagging a papal intention to widely and generally permit contraception is the fact that he has already approved of the use of contraceptives to prevent pregnancy in areas where the Zika Virus is prevalent. It is not difficult to see that the same moral rationale used to justify the use of contraceptives in preventing Zika’s transmission can now be applied to preventing other ills, including: genetically transmitted diseases and defects; sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS and syphilis; and to prevent many other diseases and social conditions.
Also, it has been widely reported that Pope Francis has advised a nun in the Argentine that contraception is permissible in some cases and that he has pointed to Pope Paul VI allegedly allowing contraception for nuns in danger of rape during the Civil War in Belgian Congo. However,
Aline Kalbian, a professor of religion at Florida State University and author of Sex, Violence & Justice: Contraception and the Catholic Church, also looked into the Belgian nun story and came up empty. “I didn’t find any evidence of Paul VI saying anything about Congo and nuns,” Kalbian said. “And John XXIII didn’t say anything either.” “And all of it was happening under John XXIII, so it’s weird [Francis] invoked Pope Paul VI.”
In addition to all these ominous portents — especially, I repeat, the massive red flag raised by his constituting a new commission to "re-interpret" Humanæ Vitae in the light of Amoris Laetitia (an early ‘fruit’ of which being Father Chiodi’s astonishing nonsense) — we find many other instances of the Pope's erosion of Catholic teaching on contraception, to include:
- His appalling admonition against "Catholics breeding like rabbits", which statement continues to ricochet around the world with deadly effect on Catholic morality.
- His shocking humiliation, castigation and betrayal of confidence in telling the world about a heroic Catholic mother who had borne 8 children by caesarean section, whom he labelled as being irresponsible and accused her of "tempting God".
- His dismissal of all members of both the solidly orthodox and pro-life Pontifical Academy for Life, and the Pope John Paul II Institute on Life and Family.
- His establishment of a new Pontifical Academy for Life packed with progressives.
- His affiliation of the Church with the UN’s "Sustainable Development Program" which has as its core, "universal access to sexual and reproductive health" — a newspeak term for something specifically designed not only to control human populations by contraception and abortion, but also to indoctrinate and corrupt children, via sex education, into full acceptance of these abominations.
Will Pope Francis soon endorse early abortions?
In previous crises in the Church, Rome strove to quench and stamp out fire-storms of dissent, apostasy and heresy that blazed somewhere out on the "peripheries." Presently, as local clerical fire-departments passively look on, wild infernos of rebellion against God and His Church leap and rage in society and in the Church itself, consuming the Faith and ruining humanity.
The pagan Nero, having started the fires in the first place, is reported to have denied his involvement, blamed the Christians and fiddled while Rome burnt. Today, new varieties of Catholic Neros openly start infernos, dismiss faithful fire-marshals, disable and disband fire-departments, cut the few remaining fire-hoses, and simultaneously protect and reward the pyromaniacs, all the while recruiting and advancing more of them — with papal blessing.
If it does happen that Pope Francis permits "contraception" by means of "The Pill" or by other agents of similar actions, these raging infernos will cause even more colossal updrafts of superheated heresy and dissent to flow out of Rome to the "peripheries." For, as the Vicar of Christ, he will thereby discard and contradict Catholic teaching ever since the Didache; contradict previous Popes such as Pius XI, Paul VI and John Paul II; and stain his hands with the blood of the innocents who are aborted by means of these contraceptives. The spilling of innocent blood is one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance!
As an accomplice in the wholesale murder of abortion, he would thereby lose all moral authority. This is an almost unthinkable situation, yet it will certainly come about if he permits "contraception" by means of the present commonly used means.
Ideas and acts have eternal consequences!
Out of love for the Church, love for a Christian Civilisation that only the Church can restore and sustain, and love for the institution of the Papacy, Catholics must strive mightily to prevent such an utter catastrophe for the Church, for mankind, and for Pope Francis himself.
Increasingly of late, many Catholics have come to believe that Pope Francis has already forfeited his personal moral authority. Primarily by way of Amoris Laetitia,which supports sacrilegious Holy Communions for those living in adultery, which simultaneously devalues the sacraments of The Holy Eucharist, Matrimony and Confession.
Michel Matt, redoubtable editor of The Remnant — like Fr. Paul Marx, Malcolm Muggeridge and others before him — believes that a fundamental motive behind the frantic push towards contraception, and the devaluation of marriage and sexual morality, is aimed at the normalisation of homosexuality.
This statement takes on much greater credibility given the demolition of marriage and the whitewashing of adultery and fornication in Amoris Laetitia, and the prevalent homophilia in the Vatican. Given the following factors it is now highly probable that Mr. Matt, as so often in his appraisals of previous disasters in the Church, is once again absolutely ‘spot on.’
1. Steady promotion of homosexuality coming from the Vatican and the prevalence of the mortal vice of sodomy among clergy in the Eternal City.
2. The inevitable progression from recreational sex via contraception to recreational sex by any other means whatsoever, among which sodomy is a current favourite.
At Fatima, one hundred years ago, Our Lady told the three children that more souls go to hell because of the sins of the flesh than by any other route. She then let them see lost souls undergoing hellish torments. Yet so many moderns in the Catholic Church simply do not believe in the existence of Hell. Or, if it might just happen to exist, then they believe that surely it must, because of God’s infinite mercy, be empty!
This convenient self-delusion — that false ideas leading to evil actions have no eternal consequences — explains the current inversion of truth and reason by those who revolted against Pope Paul VI and Catholic morality as laid down in Humanae Vitae. Then, the revolutionaries called themselves "dissenters." Now, they label as "dissenters" those who oppose the destruction of Catholic morality as laid down by the Pope in Amoris Laetitia.
Anaesthetised Catholics and the religion of papolatry
Most Catholics, deeply anaesthetised by their new religion of papolatry, are either ignorant of, or unconcerned about the vast chasm that Pope Francis has progressively opened up: between bi-millennial authentic Catholic morality on the one side — including the teachings and encyclicals of previous popes and previous Councils of the Church — and on the other, the new "FrancisChurch." An enormous Great Rift Valley of fundamental differences now exists between the two sides. And let us note in passing that the Great Rift Valley of Africa — after a journey of 6000 km, all the way from Southern Africa, up the length of Africa, across the Red Sea, and through the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee — terminates in the Valley of Armageddon.
Final food for thought
Finally, in light of the apocalyptic contraceptive territory into which Francis is leading the Church, those Catholics wedded to papolatry should reflect carefully on the following statements, and reconsider their dogged adherence to such a wrong-headed and damaging conception of the papacy.
1. On 23 December 2016, Der Spiegel reported:
In a very small circle, Pope Francis is said to have self-critically further explained himself as follows:
“It is not to be excluded that I will enter history as the one who split the Catholic Church.”
2. In 1966, the "Minority Report" of Paul VI's Commission on Population, Family, and Birth-rate upheld Church teaching with precision, truth and clarity:
If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 [when Casti Connubii was promulgated] and in 1951.
It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which Popes and Bishops have either condemned, or at least not approved.