Special LifeZine Edition to Mark 40th Anniversary of Humanae Vitae: 25th Jul 08
Humanae Vitae is an Affirmation and a Challenge
“The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator.” With these opening words of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the basic and unchanging nature of human sexuality. Its purpose is the “procreation and education of children”, its context is the marriage of a man and a woman, and its exercise is a truly human expression of mutual love. Because artificial contraception, of whatever form, contradicts these three essential features of married love, the Pope defined it unacceptable and intrinsically disordered. The encyclical was also a call for Catholics to challenge the emerging cultural revolution that disconnected sex from marriage and children, and treated traditional sexual morality as an unhealthy repression of a biological instinct. Details: CLICK TO READ MORE.....
A New Form of Political Abuse and Colonial Imperialism
Humanae Vitae (§ 17) warned that the acceptance of the technology of contraception would lead to governments extending their control to the hitherto private area of married life including a couple’s decision on the number of their children. Western governments, led by the United States, made population control, especially in the Third World, a top priority. Restricting one’s family to one or two children through contraception became almost a civic duty in the West while developing countries were threatened with economic sanctions or bribed with foreign aid to persuade them to enforce birth control by every and any means. The reduction of the national birthrate almost became synonymous with economic development. Details: CLICK TO READ MORE.....
The Dehumanisation of Human Sexuality
In 1968 Humanae Vitae predicted that the severance of the connection between the sexual act and the procreation of a child would lead too easily to “a general lowering of moral standards” in the area of sexuality (§ 17). It also predicted that the disappearance of “incentives to keep the moral law” would have an immediate effect on young people. Today, with the encouragement of public authorities, school children as young as five years old are invited “to explore their sexuality” in so-called sex education courses, and later are instructed in great detail in the art of “safe sex”. These courses presume sexuality is nothing more than a “natural instinct or emotional drive” that should be satisfied in the name of “sexual health”. They have little or nothing to say about marriage or children, the true social good necessary for the survival of society. Details: CLICK TO READ MORE.....
Humanae Vitae and the Emergence of a Culture of Dissent in the Church
Despite the fact that so many Catholics have never read it (many indeed have never heard of it) the publication of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae, and its aftermath marked a seismic change in the attitudes of Catholics, both clergy and laity, to the teaching authority of the Church. The number of highly regarded priests and theologians who felt free to criticise the Pope’s teaching, indeed bluntly to declare it wrong, seemed to give permission to many others to do the same. The striking thing about the reaction to Humanae Vitae was that those who dissented from the teaching of this document, an exercise of the ordinary magisterium, did so while continuing to regard themselves as good Catholics. Details: CLICK TO READ MORE.....
The Contraceptive Mentality and the ‘gay’ Movement
Part, of course, of the connection between the Humanae Vitae dissenters and their successors is the logical connection that exists between their pet issues. One such issue is the approval of homosexual acts and relationships. Some years before his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams identified the acceptance of homosexual relationships as the logical conclusion of accepting contraception. (The Anglican Communion decided to permit contraception to married couples at the Lambeth Conference of 1930. At the end of the same year Pope Pius XI reaffirmed traditional Catholic teaching in the encyclical Casti Connubii.). The conclusion that Dr. Williams went on to draw was mistaken, but his premise was correct. Details: CLICK TO READ MORE.....
Procreation Without Sex: The New Reproductive Technologies
Ten years, to the month, after Humanae Vitae was issued Louise Brown, the first ‘test tube baby,’ was born. Last week, to mark her 30th birthday, leading scientists in the field of reproductive technology outlined their vision of how this will develop in the coming years. Babies born to 100-year-old and 1-year-old mothers and gestated in artificial wombs were just the most eye-catching of the possibilities presented. The technology of assisted reproduction is not dependent on the technology of contraception but the mindset which considers it acceptable that a child should be made in a laboratory and subjected to all the industrial criteria of ‘quality control’ that go with that, could only emerge once contraception had become entrenched in people’s understanding of sex. Details: CLICK TO READ MORE.....