Christ responds to our verbal professions of love: “If you love me, you will keep my
commandments. And I will ask the Father,
and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of
truth, which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows it. But
you know it, because it remains with you, and will be in you. I will not leave
you orphans; I will come to you….Whoever has my commandments and observes them
is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I
will love him and reveal myself to him” (John 14: 15 – 17, 21). Through His Church, Christ has been abundantly
clear in what He teaches about marriage, family, and human sexuality.
In 1968, Pope Paul VI provided the world
with his beautiful and prophetic encyclical on human life:
- “The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator…. [Quoting Vatican II:] ‘Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents' welfare’….
- “With regard to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised by those who prudently & generously decide to have more children, and by those who, for serious reasons and with due respect to moral precepts, decide not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time….
- “If…there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles….
- “Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control.
- “Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards….
- “Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and …reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires….
- “Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? ….Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone”
Pope Paul VI rightly anticipated resistance to his
restatement of the Church’s constant teaching: “it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her
divine Founder, is destined to be a ‘sign of contradiction’ …. It could never
be right for her to declare lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its
very nature, is always opposed to the true good of man.” Do we still need to be convinced that
there has been “a general lowering of
moral standards,” as well as a growing disrespect for women, in the past
four decades? Since 1996, there have
even been provisions in U.S. law to provide refugee status to “individuals who
have been persecuted or have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of
resistance to a coercive population control (CPC) program”!!![i]
Pope Paul VI also feared legislative efforts to
intrude on the sanctity of marriage and the family:“The family is the primary unit in the state; do not tolerate any
legislation which would introduce into the family those practices which are
opposed to the natural law of God”
Pope John Paul II quotes and pays homage to Humanae
Vitae, reminding us of the great blessings following adherence to its teachings,
including profound respect for the sacredness of human life (cf 9/5/84):
- “‘The Church…teaches that each and every marriage act (quilibet matrimonii usus) must remain open to the transmission of life. That teaching, often set forth by the magisterium, is founded upon the inseparable connection, willed by God & unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning’(HV 11-12)” (7/11/84).
- “Pastoral concern means seeing the true good of man….the one and only true good of the human person consists in putting this divine plan into practice” (7/25/84).
- “the moral aspects of any procedure do not depend solely on sincere intentions or on an evaluation of motives, but must be determined by objective standards….The relevant principle of conjugal morality is thus faithfulness to the divine plan” (8/1/84)
- “self-mastery – corresponds in fact to the fundamental constitution of the person: it is a perfectly ‘natural’ method,,,,’artificial means,’ by contrast breaks the constitutive dimension of the person, deprives man of the subjectivity proper to him, and turns him into an object of manipulation….The human body is not only the field of reactions of a sexual character, but it is at the same time the means of the expression of man as an integral whole, of the person, which reveals itself through the ‘language of the body’ ….the ‘language of the body’ should express, at a determinate level, the truth of the sacrament. By participating in the eternal plan of love,…the ‘language of the body’ becomes in fact a ‘prophetism of the body,’ as it were….when the conjugal act is deprived of its inner truth because it is deprived artificially of it procreative capacity, it also ceases to be an act of love….in the case of an artificial separation of these two meanings in the conjugal act, a real bodily union is brought about, but it does not correspond to the inner truth & dignity of personal communion….[which] demands, in fact, that the ‘language of the body’ be expressed reciprocally in the integral truth of its meaning….Such a violation of the inner order of conjugal communion, a communion that plunges its roots into the very order of the person, constitutes the essential evil of the contraceptive act” (8/22/84).
- “the virtuous character of the attitude expressing itself in the ‘natural’ regulation of fertility is determined, not so much by faithfulness to an impersonal ‘natural law,’ but to the personal Creator, the source and Lord of the order that is shown in this law” (8/29/84).
- “The use of ‘infertile periods’ in conjugal shared life can become a source of abuses if the couple thereby attempt to evade procreation without just reasons” (9/5/84)
- “This, then, is the essential and fundamental ‘power’: the love planted in the heart…by the Holy Spirit….spouses must implore [God] for such ‘power’ and for every other ‘divine help’ in prayer…they must draw grace and love from the ever-living fountain of the Eucharist….they must overcome their own faults and sins in the sacrament of Penance. These are the means – infallible and indispensable – to form the Christian spirituality of conjugal and familial life ” (10/3/84).
- “One can say that Humanae Vitae constitutes precislely the development of the biblical truth about Christian conjugal and familial spirituality” (10/10/84).
- “In order to reach mastery over this drive and arousal, the personal subject must devote himself or herself to a progressive education in self-control of the will, of sentiments, of emotions, which must be developed from the simplest gestures, in which it is relatively easy to put the inner decision into practice….Precisely by reason of this ‘difficulty,’ the true order of conjugal life, with a view to which the spouses are ‘strengthened and as it were consecrated’ (HV 25) by the sacrament of Marriage, is assigned to their interior and ascetical commitment” (10/24/84).
- “It is often thought that continence causes inner tensions from which men and women should free themselves. In the light of the analyses offered earlier, continence, integrally understood, is, on the contrary, the one and only way to free oneself from such tensions” (10/31/84).
- “the inner order of conjugal life, which allows the ‘affective manifestation’ to develop according to their right extent and meaning, is a fruit not only of the virtue in which the spouses exercise themselves, but also of the gifts of the Holy Spirit with which they collaborate” (11/14/84).
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