Richard A. Sokerka
This year, the Church is marking the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae.”
On July 25, 1968 Pope Paul VI promulgated his prophetic encyclical letter courageously reaffirming the Church’s constant teaching about the joyful duty of married couples to collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator in the creation of new human life.
It was courageous because it was promulgated during the time when the sexual revolution was in full bloom and prophetic because its message has become a reality in today’s even more secularized society.
Author Mary Eberstadt made that point when she recently addressed students at the University of Notre Dame, telling them that the encyclical is critical to understanding the state of contemporary culture.
“Contraceptive technology, as Paul VI foresaw, opens a Pandora’s box of mischief in which the stronger have the advantage,” she said. “It’s having massive repercussions across the world — microcosmic, macrocosmic, moral, religious, political, and otherwise.”
Fifty years ago, Eberstadt said, supporters of contraception argued that abortions and births to unmarried parents would diminish as a result of reliable birth control. Rather, she said, they have increased. “Far from preventing abortion and unplanned pregnancies, contraception’s effects after the invention of the pill ran quite the other way: Rates of contraception usage, abortion, and out-of-wedlock births all exploded simultaneously.”
She said that the legalization of contraception and abortion joined at the hip. “Legal reasoning justifying freedom to contracept has been used to justify freedom to abort. You can’t have one without the other.”
To this day, many continue to oppose the Church’s stance on contraception, but the truth of ‘Humanae Vitae’ will not stop pointing toward the destruction of the sexual revolution, she said. “To discern the record of the last half-century is to see that the Catholic Church was right to stand as a sign of contradiction to the devastation the sexual revolution would wreak.”
This year’s golden anniversary of “Humanae Vitae,” indeed both courageous and prophetic, will allow many to see that its teachings are a great blessing to society as a whole.