The Truth That Sets Love Free

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - July 18, 2008

The love of man and woman in marriage was meant from the beginning to be a "sacrament" of the love within the heart of the Blessed Trinity. God created man in his image… "male and female he created them" (1 John 4:16; Gen 1:27-28). He who is love created the human person to love as he loves (1 John 4:16, Jn 15:13). As a Trinitarian communion of persons, in which the overflowing love of Father and Son eternally generates the Holy Spirit, God created the human person male and female according to that image, so that man and woman could exist in a communion of persons in love so strong that their love, too, could generate a third person, who would both be a fruit of their loving union and a means by which it can be nourished and grow. Through procreation, in other words, husband and wife participate in God's continual creation, reflect the image of the divine Giver, and grow into greater communion with each other and with God.

Since human persons' greatest identity, dignity and vocation are found in their being made in God's image and called to grow into God's likeness; since they do that by living out the nuptial meaning of their personality, entering into a loving communion of persons through a mutual exchange of self-gifts; and since the way most human beings achieve this is through entering into the one-flesh union of a man and a woman in marriage; anything that corrupts the essential meaning of marital love has enormous consequences.

This is why Pope Paul VI's prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae, the 40th anniversary of which the Church celebrates next week, is so important. The teaching of this encyclical does not concern something peripheral to Christian life that Catholics and others can discard or ignore without consequence. It involves something indeed central to a person's walk with the Lord and to genuine human fulfillment. For if the real meaning of human love is falsified, then not only will the institutions of marriage and family be weakened, but all interactions with God and others, which are supposed to be based on self-giving love, will be affected.

In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the Church's perennial teaching that the use of contraception in marriage is always immoral. The immediate occasion for the encyclical was the invention of the birth control pill, which some theologians posited would not fall under the Church's traditional prohibition of contraception since it worked chemically to prevent ovulation within a woman and, unlike male or female prophylactics, did not prevent the physical completion of the marital act. Pope John XXIII had commissioned a panel in 1963 to investigate the question and Paul VI continued the group's work. At the end of their study, a majority of members thought that the modality of the pill made it morally different from other forms of birth control; a minority, which included the future John Paul II, maintained that the same defect was present in both: the choice to do something to render the marital act unfruitful and intentionally separate the unitive from the procreative meaning of the act. Paul VI prayed, studied both reports and received other counsel. At the end of the process of discernment, he concluded that the use of the pill was morally similar to the use of other contraceptives and reaffirmed the Church's perennial teaching that the use of contraception to render the marital act intentionally unfruitful is always immoral.

The document couldn't have been released at a worse time, at the height of the sexual revolution, when there was so much instability in the world and within the Church. Many Catholic married couples and clergy immediately dissented from the teaching, outraged that Paul VI would reject the findings of the majority of the experts. But one of the items in the encyclical's favor is the fact that Paul VI, a man very much open to consultation and forming consensus, rejected the findings of the majority report. He knew well that truth isn't determined by vote and that he had a duty, in charity, to give witness to the truth, even if many would reject it.

Within the encyclical, the Holy Father acknowledged that married couples could indeed have serious and morally valid reasons — medical, psychological, economic and social — to desire to avoid becoming pregnant, but he stressed that they needed to use morally-valid means, like natural family planning. The essential difference between contraception and NFP has nothing to do with one's being artificial and the other natural. Rather, in contraception the spouses' reject the built-in procreative meaning of each other's sexuality in the very act made by God for it to be expressed, whereas in natural family planning, the couples accept each other in their totality, which involves God's creating woman with a cyclical pattern to her fertility. In contraception, the couple seeks to come into one-flesh union willing against their one-flesh union in a child; in NFP, the couple puts no obstacle but simply accepts the woman's God-given temporary infertility. In contraception, God and his will are essentially "evicted" from the bedroom; in the use of NFP, God's will is embraced and a couple learns to learn how to express their love in deeper ways outside of the bedroom. In the use of contraception, since the reproductive meaning of the reproductive act is rejected, pleasure, rather than being by a fruit of the act, often becomes the purpose of the act, and spouses can begin consensually to use each other for pleasure; using the other, however, is the opposite of loving the other, and once pleasure becomes the goal of the marital act, rather than "making love," the act actually begins to corrode whatever love that's there. In the use of NFP, rather than using each other for sexual pleasure, the couple begins to grow in chastity and husbands in particular grow in tenderness toward the woman's natural rhythms. There are huge and indisputable consequences that flow from these essential differences between contraception and NFP. In various studies it has been demonstrated that the use of contraception within marriage increases the divorce rate, which already is about 50 percent; the divorce rate for those who use NFP is less than two percent.

Paul VI also predicted that as the use of contraception expanded, there would be a general lowering of moral standards throughout society, a rise in infidelity, a lessening of respect for women by men and the coercive use of contraceptives by governments. Since 1968, all of these prophecies have proven true. Moral standards have plummeted as condoms are passed out like candy and many adolescents treat sexual hook-ups like casual events. Marital infidelity and divorce have skyrocketed to proportions that few would have thought possible 40 years ago. Through contraception, men have begun to look at sexual activity without the responsibly to support any child conceived and his mother; when a child is conceived, it often is looked at as the mother's problem, since she could have prevented it by contraception. It's unsurprising that widespread contraceptive use has made the number of his sexual partners surge as well. In terms of coercion by governments, we can look not only toward the repressive one-child policy in China that imposes contraception, sterilizations and abortions, but also to all the development assistance from first-world countries that is tied to third-world countries' acceptance of these same evil practices. If all of Paul VI's predictions have proven valid, then it is a very good indication, even to secularists, that his analysis of the causes of those practices was also valid.

For Catholics, Humanae Vitae is not just about the beauty of God's plan for marital love and life and the evil of contraception, but about faith. Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit guides the Church to all truth and prevents her from ever making a mistake once about something relevant to what we need to believe or do to please God and enter into his life. If a Catholic thinks that the Church does not have the authority to teach on the essential meaning of love and of marriage, and specifically how contraception violates Christ-like love, then the Church would logically have no authority to teach on faith and morals at all. The crisis of Humanae Vitae exposed a crisis of faith. The 40th anniversary of this encyclical is an occasion for the whole Church to grow in faith and, through accepting and following the teachings of the encyclical, grow in the type of human love that will help to redeem marriages, families and society as a whole.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.