Then Pope Paul VI was warning us of the dire consequences that a “contraceptive mentality” would have on society.
But, of course, the pope wasn’t right. We all know that. Humanae Vitae was treated as a joke because it was a joke, wasn’t it? Vatican roulette, rhythm-method babies: The official Catholic view of sex was a gift to stand-up comedians around the world. A gift to politicians and public figures, for that matter. Want an easy stick with which to whack around, say, the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion? Point out that those nutty Catholics are against birth control, too. Whenever public Catholics need a quick way to ingratiate themselves with non-Catholics, they announce their dissent on the Church’s teaching about birth control. And why not? It costs nothing, and it lets them pose themselves as rebels and independent thinkers, under no one’s ecclesial thumb. Full Article
Pope John Paul II persuasive Theology of the Body
It’s hard to remember all the joys we were told that contraception would bring, back in the day. For generations, from Victoria Woodhull all the way down to Margaret Sanger, birth-control activists had insisted that abortion would cease if we allowed access to contraception. In the 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut , the U.S. Supreme Court placed decisions about birth control at the center of the marriage bond. The smutty theaters, the back-room racks of pornography, the venereal diseases, the crushing down of young women into a life of timidity, the out-of-wedlock births, the masturbatory shame all the sicknesses of a repressed culture would be swept away in the free love that contraception allows.
Free love forty years on, the phrase has a marvelously musty sound to it, like the fragile violets of a Victorian spinster’s girlhood, pressed in the fading pages of her remembrance book. Things didn’t work out quite the way we were promised. In fact, the results were pretty much what the pope had said they would be. A funny thing happened on the way to the orgy, and as Mary Eberstadt notes in her superb essay in the current issue of First Things if there’s a joke buried in Humanae Vitae , the joke is on us.
A careful rereading of Humanae vitae – especially in the light of the “sexual revolution” unleashed in society over the past 40 years –can help us appreciate how prescient the Pope was in his warnings of the dire consequences that a “contraceptive mentality” would have on society. The numbers of unwanted pregnancies and abortions did not decrease with the widespread acceptance of contraception – they increased. And the “pill” far from freeing women from male domination made them more likely to be victims of sexual exploitation by men. The break up of families and the epidemic of divorce in our culture, the increasingly high incidence of women bearing children out of wedlock, the flight from adult responsibility and the extended “adolescence” of men, all point to – in hindsight –the rightness of Paul VI’s and the Church’s teaching on human sexuality.